Aperture's Blog, page 25

Ari Marcopoulos on the Essential Art of Zines

Ari Marcopoulos is an inveterate maker of zines. Often self-published or created in collaboration with independent publishers, his DIY-aesthetic creations function as sketchbooks, diaries, installation spaces, and means of processing daily life. Marcopoulos’s latest volume, Zines, is the first overview of his publications. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically by year, the book features key zines—including previously unpublished works and some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen to make PDF zines. Marcopoulos recently spoke with Hamza Walker about the role of zines as an essential part of his artistic practice.

Hamza Walker: Could you speak about the difference between the printed zine and the PDFs? What’s their relationship? Don’t the PDFs go through the same process of making them, whether they’re printed or not?

Ari Marcopoulos: Yes. The PDFs really started because of thinking about the vertical or landscape book. Usually when you make a zine, you have an 8.5-by-11-inch paper, and you fold it in half, and then you have 8.5-by-5.5-inch. It’s a vertical format. I wanted to work against that. I started by creating the container for the images, and that container was a 9-by-11-inch landscape format, sideways. So, I made a PDF, which I thought I could print myself, but the 9-by-11-inch format was too big to print at home. And the copy shops were all closed. After I made the first one on my computer, which was too big to print, I was like, Okay, so, what do I do with it now? I decided to email it to a few friends, because everything had ended once the pandemic began. You weren’t seeing other people anymore. I figured, Well, instead of writing a letter, why don’t I just send them these images, this PDF that I put together? I got really beautiful responses. I sent some to Pierre Huyghe, who had moved to Chile. He had been living in Brooklyn, and they moved right before the pandemic, he and his wife and child. He replied, “Oh, I really miss Brooklyn. Thank you for sending this. It makes me think about my walks in town.” Actually, a lot of the zines featured in this book are made as a gift, like the ones I sent to Pierre. Usually, it’s people around the neighborhood that I photograph, like at the barber shop, or my neighbors, and then I give them a print. One weekend, there were two men that I didn’t recognize sitting on the steps down the street, but they looked related.

My neighbor Gary had told me it was his brother’s birthday party. I asked, “Are you guys here for the birthday party?” And they said yeah. I asked, “Do you mind if I take your picture? I’m a friend of Gary’s.” And they’re like, Yeah, take our picture. I took it, and then went on my way. When I came back, there was a third guy, so I stopped again and said, Oh, there’s another person, I should take another picture. All through the weekend, as I passed by, there were different people, different characters. I photographed them whenever I saw someone different. When I got the film back, I looked at the faces, and there were fourteen different people. So, I put together a zine. I printed something like twenty copies, and slipped fourteen of them into the mailbox for Gary. When I went to the barbershop next to get my hair cut—this is pre-pandemic—they said, “Gary brought in the book that you made for him.” He had brought it in to show to them. Now all the guys, when I see them, they’re like, Oh, you made that book for us! That exchange is part of my practice.

Walker: Which is a very beautiful ethos, to think of the relationship to the sitter, however casual. The sitter as recipient—the sitter as the audience for the work. It completes a full circuit. If you take the picture and put it on the wall of a gallery, it’s a very different means of distribution or circulation.

Marcopoulos: You make the work, you have your ideas about it, and it can live like that, but it’s really only finished if it’s circulating outside of yourself and there’s a viewer involved. Because the viewer finishes the work. Just recently, I bumped into Gary, and I hadn’t seen him for a while. I said hi to him, and I took his photograph, because whenever I bump into him, I take his photograph. Then he told me, “Oh, I have to go to the funeral of my brother.” I said, “Oh, your brother? I’m sorry. I’m glad I took his picture.” And he says, “Yeah, I am too.” Every relative that was on the stoop that day has a copy of that zine.

I always believe that the images that I work with are shared experiences, where the viewer might recognize something in their own life.

Walker: It’s a zine, but …

Marcopoulos: It is a book. And it can be a very beautiful book.

Walker: The nature in which a zine is a book, in terms of how it is handled and its reception and how it is held, formally, is interesting. Photography’s always had this promise of being able to make multiple prints and then distribute them. It seems like you’re fulfilling that process through the zine rather than the print itself. You could give somebody a photographic print, which perhaps goes in an album or could be framed and put on a wall. But that’s something different. The book or a zine is cinematic, is in sequence. It’s another kind of intimacy. The wall is public, the book is private.

Marcopoulos: Oh, it’s definitely a private experience. A book is basically just held at arm’s length. It’s why I often believe some books are too big. To have a photobook that holds and reads like a novel is really quite intimate, you know? Of course, I do exhibitions. I put things on the wall—large things on the wall. Although most of the installations that I’ve done in the last ten years or so have been often lots of photographs, quite small and also sequenced quite tightly together. But it’s still very different. When you have a sequence of photographs on the wall, you have an overview right away. With a book, you can look at it backwards, start in the middle, anywhere. But still, you’re always dealing with the page—where the page is open, that’s what you’re dealing with.

Walker: Right, one spread at a time.

Marcopoulos: And to share it with someone, you actually have to sit quite close together. So often in photography, one thinks about the single image. I started to think more cinematically, about how a sequence of images becomes a more layered way of looking at something.

Walker: I guess the bigger question is, how much does the zine structure inform your photographic output? In other words, when you work and you’re taking pictures, are zines the logical destination for your work?

Marcopoulos: I believe that any image I make can potentially end up in a zine. There are certain images in this book which might not have ever made it into print otherwise. The content might be a bit more personal, but I always believe that the images that I work with are shared experiences, where the viewer might recognize something in their own life. And then maybe, in the zines, there are things that might shed new light on something that is very particular. I have very particular interests that weave through. For forty years, these things come back through the work. When am I going to stop photographing ’70s muscle cars? Probably never. Or when am I going to stop photographing trees? When am I going to stop photographing people? Those are my recurring themes. And then there’s also the struggle to get away from that. Opening up new roads for yourself. I’m just saying, Look, here. Not because every photograph I’ve published is a masterwork. They’re just things that I saw.

Walker: I like what you were saying about how your interests are woven throughout. At any given instant, a muscle car could appear. You’re always making pictures. That’s a given. So, you wouldn’t make a zine of ’70s muscle cars. But they will recur.

Marcopoulos: I would have to go through my archive and look for every muscle car picture and then start putting them all in a row. That’s just not how I work. The way I work is more about, if I go for a walk today, am I going to see a muscle car? Possibly not. Now, what I might do is maybe I would go now and photograph the car and I would make a zine of that. There’s a zine in the book called September/October/November, and it’s just pictures I took in that period of time. And it happens to be that in those months, I went to Paris and to Beirut. And I was in New York in between. I don’t take a lot of pictures every day, so all of those cities might be on one roll. That is kind of how zines are. I don’t very often work chronologically. But the zines are marked by a start date and an end date. I started using a camera that has a date stamp that you see in a lot of these photos.

Ari Marcopoulos: Zines (“Closed” zine/launch edition) 65.00

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Ari Marcopoulos: Zines (“Closed” zine/launch edition)

Photographs by Ari Marcopoulos. Text by Maggie Nelson. Interviewer Hamza Walker.

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To celebrate the launch of Ari Marcopoulos: Zines, the first 250 copies ordered will include a limited edition zine.

Ari Marcopoulos is an inveterate maker of zines. This project collects in one volume for the first time a selection of zines by Marcopoulos, many never before released, providing a unique insight and overview into an essential part of this influential artist’s daily practice. Often self-published or created in collaboration with boutique and independent publishers like ROMA, Dashwood Books, and PPP Editions, these informal, DIY-aesthetic creations function as sketchbook, diary, installation space, and a means of processing Marcopoulos’s daily practice of photographing his life, his family, his neighborhood, and the rarified cultural milieu in which he operates.

This collection showcases an impressive array of printed zines, exploring each as an artistic object through an engaging layout. Beginning in 2015 and presented chronologically per year, key zines are featured—including some made during the pandemic, when Marcopoulos worked primarily on the screen, making PDF zines—and punctuated by individual images presented full scale. An interview with Hamza Walker underscores the role of zines as an essential part of Marcopoulos’s artistic practice, emphasizing the personal, diaristic element within the work, while an essay from Maggie Nelson meditates on the work’s position within a wider social and cultural context. Ari Marcopoulos: Zines is a must-have for anyone interested in this prolific artist’s personal practice and zine culture.

This publication was made possible, in part, by the generous support of Gucci. Additional support for the publication was made possible by Philip and Shelley Aarons; Galerie Frank Elbaz, and Supreme.

 

Details

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 336
Number of images: 385
Publication date: 2023-06-13
Measurements: 8.7 x 8.7 x 1.25 inches
ISBN: 9781683952558

Contributors

Ari Marcopoulos (born in Amsterdam, 1957) is a photographer and filmmaker known for documenting the American subculture scenes of skateboarding and hip-hop. In 1980, he emigrated from the Netherlands to the US, settling in New York and working as an assistant to Andy Warhol. Marcopoulos is a prolific author and creator of photobooks, zines, and other printed matter, such as posters. In 2020, Polaroids 92–95 (CA) and Polaroids 92–95 (NY) were published. He has shown his work in solo exhibitions at Foam, Amsterdam; Berkeley Art Museum, California; and MoMA PS1, New York, and his work has been included twice in the Whitney Biennial.
Maggie Nelson is the author of the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). She writes frequently on art, and in 2016 received a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Hamza Walker is the director of LAXART, an independent nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Previously, he served as the director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.

Walker: What’s beautiful is that the few thematic zines that are very discrete do not feel anomalous. They feel like, Oh, yeah, it’s a possibility. But they’re not the drive. I like that you brought up the issue of the personal. It’s personal but it’s not personal. There needs to be something to which the viewer can relate. The viewer can relate to a picture, not necessarily because of what it discloses, but because of their own experiences. There are also some individuals in the photographs that are recurring. And those pictures come out of friendship and love.

I’m also curious about the role of Robert Frank and June Leaf, for you. Could you talk a little bit, maybe, about that relationship and those pictures?

Marcopoulos: I met Robert a long time ago, but I always felt that going up to ring the doorbell or hanging out wasn’t something I could do, because he’s this icon, of course. But one day a friend of mine went over to drop a sandwich off for them. And said, “Come with me.” And I said, “No, it’s okay. I’m not coming.” He said, “No, Robert knows you.” That was in 2018 or something.

Walker: So, you struck up a friendship with Robert Frank rather late.

Marcopoulos: Well, I’d met him before, but didn’t really hang out. I went to his opening at the National Gallery in Washington, but the reconnection happened much later. I took a picture of June’s arm and showed it to her. She loved it. And then Kara came up, and June said she admired Kara’s work. And so I told Kara, “Come by and meet June and Robert.” And Kara was a little bit [sighs] “Okay.” But June and Kara hit it off pretty well, as you can imagine. Both are unique, out-there thinkers. So, we started seeing them more often. We had a ritual that we would go every Sunday evening and we would have dinner. Sometimes I’d talk to Robert about photography, but more about his life. His memory was somewhat fading. I would ask him questions about his youth. He would tell me some good stories. Robert and I both moved to New York around the same age. That was something that we had in common that we sometimes talked about, leaving the comfort of a country where you know everything, to a place where you’re new and that is distinctly more exciting than where you came from [laughs]. New York City, you know.

Walker: When you first came to New York, you spent two years printing for Andy Warhol. How did you get that job?

Marcopoulos: I moved to New York in 1980. I thought that in order to make money with photography you had to be a fashion photographer. I had to find a job as an assistant or something. I did some freelance assisting, but the first job I landed was printing 8-by- 10-inch photographs for Warhol, black-and-white prints. I worked in a darkroom off-site, not at the Factory. I printed, on average, seventy 8-by-10-inch pictures a day, 350 prints a week of his pictures. He was incessantly taking pictures. He would mark the contact sheets, and I would print those. Thousands of them. I did that for almost two years. I saw all the pictures that he took. I saw all that he saw when he was traveling. I would see pictures of Joseph Beuys, of Berlin, of Beijing, of whatever. Wherever the fuck he went, I saw pictures of it. You know, he would go to some rich person’s house and he would photograph the table with the family photos on there. It was like a diary. He just photographed everything. He loved celebrities and got to hang with them. Signs, people, people’s houses. Before I moved to New York, I had worked at a camera store, where people would bring their film to be developed. So, I also had the experience of seeing everybody’s pictures from the town I grew up in every morning when they came in. And that was kind of like Warhol’s pictures. I saw all the pictures.

Walker: What influence do you think that had on you?

Marcopoulos: Andy Warhol had an influence on me even before that, via his films and his artwork. But yes, working and printing Warhol’s pictures had a profound influence on me, although my camera shop job was maybe equally profound. I learned that everything is worth photographing. I learned that you should never say, Why would I take a picture of this? After I stopped working for Warhol, I worked for Irving Penn for two years. Then, I worked for the most restricted, anal-retentive photographer that you can imagine. Everything was controlled.

There’s no spontaneity in Irving Penn’s photographs. It was very technical. The influence of working with Penn was that I started to understand how light works, what you can do with light—what you can do with artificial light, but also what you can do with daylight. I started understanding how composition can emphasize a shape or can steer the eye. When I look at my work, I can see that even when I take a quick image of something, I’ve placed myself so that the subject stands out; it’s well delineated. It’s not blending into the background. But it’s all very intuitive.

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Walker: But with Warhol, it wasn’t just the experience of printing his photos that impacted you, right? It was an entrée to the art world.

Marcopoulos: Oh yeah. It plugged me in. Warhol’s painting assistant became one of my best friends. He and I would go see all these rap and hip-hop shows that started coming downtown. I knew I wanted to do something. I wanted to also make work. I just started taking pictures in the street, walking around. I started taking portraits of artists, because I had a certain amount of access. I photographed Andy. I photographed Richard Serra. You know, different artists from that time. Ashley Bickerton. And the way I photographed them is very casual. I was working Monday to Friday, nine to six, you know? Every day. But I found time to go take these pictures. At that time, you had people like Annie Leibovitz putting Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk and I was like, What the fuck? That’s the photography you would see in the magazines, so that’s how you start to think you have to shoot to make money, because for sure, I wasn’t going to make money in the art world with my prints on the wall.

But I could never do that. I would go meet Poor Righteous Teachers to take a picture, and I just took them just standing in the street somewhere. When I got the pictures back, I always thought, God, these are so boring. But now when I look at them, I think, Wow, these pictures are incredible because it’s just them and me, and we’re not trying to be anything other than that. I’m not lying on my knees. I’m not climbing on a ladder. My camera is up in my eye, and I click the shutter, and that’s it. And that’s the picture.

All photographs from Ari Marcopoulos: Zines(Aperture, 2023)
Courtesy the artist

Walker: You have a healthy bibliography of traditional, offset books, but obviously it doesn’t compare to zines. How do you think people know your work, primarily? Is there a singular way that people get to know the work? What place do the zines hold in getting your work out in the world?

Marcopoulos: The zines have been a huge aspect of getting it out into the world. The funny thing about zines is that when you make 150 zines with Nieves—Nieves might sell ten, five, eight copies to a bookstore in Berlin; a bookstore in Frankfurt, in Amsterdam, in London, in Tokyo, in Rio, in LA. So maybe five people in Berlin have this Nieves zine. But because there’s only five people that have it, they go to their friends and say, Check it out, I got this Ari Marcopoulos zine. And they go, Oh yeah. I think that’s how people have come to know me.

Walker: So are zines an integral aspect of your identity as a photographer?

Marcopoulos: Oh, yeah. I think they are, for sure.

Walker: I like that you’re making a distinction between the five people in Berlin who bought the zine, who are different than the five people who buy your book, don’t you think?

Marcopoulos: Yeah. Well, yeah, for sure. Because I think the zine is cheaper, one, and they’re also—

Walker: It’s more accessible, but at the same time, rarer.

Marcopoulos: Yeah. You have to be a bit more of a connoisseur, in a weird way. You’ve got to want to chase down all the zines; and you gotta be on top of it. You’ve got to have your finger on the pulse to know that it’s coming, and that you’re getting it.

Walker: So that appeals to you, in terms of the notion of the zine being more for the fans only.

Marcopoulos: The fact that it’s rarefied doesn’t really appeal to me. What appeals to me mostly is that the zine will find its way into the hands of somebody that will never buy a book. Maybe because it’s too expensive, or maybe because they’re really not into books.

But what happened, I think, through zines—and not just my own—is that some kids became book collectors. It’s like how the Printed Matter Art Book Fair has become like the hippest thing to go to for kids? I’m like, who are all these people? [laughs] I worked at the table at Roma Publications, because the publisher, Roger, is my friend, and people come up to the table, and they talk to you, and while they talk to you, they flip through a book, and they don’t even look up. It’s like a scene. It’s like a club. They have the whole zine section. When I go there, people come up to me and say, I want you to have my zine, my book, my records, my this, my that.

Walker: And that’s very nice in terms of the ethos of distribution, accessibility, and sharing.

Marcopoulos: A zine you can give away very easily. You make it, you give it.

This interview is an excerpt from Ari Marcopoulos: Zines (Aperture, 2023).

The Photographers Who Captured Love and Longing

The logical way into Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, is to turn right at the doors from the building’s dramatic stairwell (left from the elevator) and wind your way counterclockwise through the space. Thematically, the exhibition moves around Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1973–86) and the pairing of Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey (1971) and Winter Journey (1989–90), which are judiciously placed at even intervals within the sequence of works by twelve artists on ICP’s second floor (an additional four bodies of work are arranged on the third). Turn the other way, however, and you’ll find yourself in the middle of the messy set of relationships that constitute the setup of Leigh Ledare’s incredible Double Bind (2010).

Leigh Ledare, Diptych from the series Double Bind, 2010
Courtesy the artist

Five years after Ledare and his wife Meghan divorced, he asked her to accompany him to a remote cabin in upstate New York, where he wanted to photograph her over the course of four days. Meghan agreed, but in the time between Ledare’s invitation and their departure, she remarried. To complicate things further, her new husband is also a photographer, Adam Fedderly. Still, Ledare and Meghan stuck to their itinerary. They traveled together but slept in separate beds. Ledare took five hundred pictures of Meghan smiling, glowering, strutting through morning shadows and wildflowers. Then he arranged for Meghan and Fedderly to repeat the trip two months later, going to the same cabin for the same duration and taking the same number of pictures, returning them to Ledare as unprocessed rolls of film. 

Double Bind takes shape as a room-size installation. The images by Ledare are placed on black backgrounds; the images by Fedderly are placed on white backgrounds. Smaller prints are stacked in a glass vitrine. The installation features beguiling collages, another vitrine filled with pictures cut from magazines, and a framed piece of paper on which the artist has scrawled the “conceptual script” of the piece. Does Meghan Ledare-Fedderly appear happier, more hopeful, more seductive in one set of images? Is she angry, resentful, rueful in the other? Where does her love run deepest? The genius of Ledare’s installation is that he scrambles expectations and gives no easy answers. Intimacy is, above all, complicated. 

Rong Rong&inri, from Personal Letters, 2000
Courtesy the artists

Love Songs has arrived at ICP from Paris, where it was originally organized by Simon Baker and exhibited last summer at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) under the title Love Songs: Photographies de l’intime. Goldin’s Ballad, presented here as a series of nine prints rather than a slideshow, as originally shown, captures a wholly interior world thick with lust, loss, and longing. Atmospheric and diaristic, Goldin’s images are as much about the intensity of friendships as a bulwark against trauma as they are about sex or drugs. By contrast, the two series by Araki delve into the photographer’s marriage to Yoko Aoki—from their wedding and honeymoon in 1971 to her illness and death in 1990—and follow a narrative line that is tender, episodic, and tragic, with none (or little) of the abjection and domination that make much of Araki’s other work so dubious today. 

Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery

The series by Goldin and Araki are landmarks in the late twentieth-century history of photography. With an emotional rawness that was unprecedented in their day, they turn the outward gaze of traditional documentary photography inside out. Their influence reverberates throughout the New York iteration of Love Songs, particularly in projects such as Fouad Elkoury’s On War and Love (2006), a literal diary about a relationship falling apart against a backdrop of Beirut being bombed and besieged; Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s Silent Glide (2008), a highly scripted three-screen video installation about lovers calling it quits amid the industrial devastation of an old Ottoman town east of Istanbul; Collier Schorr’s extended rumination on gendered looking, titled Angel Z (2020–21); and the delicate structure of annotation and exchange defining RongRong & inri’s Personal Letters (2000).

Sheree Hovsepian, Euclidean space, 2022
Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery

Love Songs has undergone a radical transformation in the move to New York. The ICP iteration, organized by the perspicacious and resourceful independent curator Sara Raza, has dispensed with the works of Emmet Gowin, Hideka Tonomura, and Larry Clark, whose grittiness is excessive in combination with Goldin and Araki. Gone, too, is the pretense of using intimacy to reconfigure the history of photography. Instead, Love Songs offers a subtler, more expansive take on how photography can be used to create, sustain, and destroy intimacy in its many forms. 

Love isn’t synonymous with intimacy. Each can exist without the other, and intimacy is just as often fraught, messy, and conflicted.

Raza’s additions are stellar. Of the sixteen artists who span seven decades and three continents, five are completely new to the show. Raza splices old and new together. The flirtatiousness of René Groebli’s high-contrast black-and-white photographs of his wife on their Parisian honeymoon creates a fascinating dialogue with the blended-family chaos in Motoyuki Daifu’s Lovesody (2008), chronicling the photographer’s infatuation with a single mother about to give birth to her second child, and the explosion of laundry, dishes, trash, breast milk, and snot that follows. 

Karla Hiraldo Voleau, from the series Another Love Story, 2022
© the artist

Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s immersive account of her discovery of a lover’s double lives and infidelities (Another Love Story, 2022) is expertly installed, replete with a maze of hanging ribbons and flowers, and utterly engrossing. Sheree Hovsepian’s mesmeric constructions made from ceramics, nails, string, photograms, and wood combined with images of her sister’s body add a necessary element of abstraction to the show.

The real highlight of the exhibition, however, is the lush and dramatic portraiture of Clifford Prince King, whose work is featured on the cover of the catalog and best embodies the idea of intimacy as a form of complexity. In Conditions (2018), a young man’s face is half hidden by the bloom of a pink peony and a paring knife. In Poster Boys (2019), two sets of Black men’s limbs, a tangle of soft feet and denim, stretch beneath a benevolent portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., tilted just so. It’s an image that pulls together all the exhibition’s strands of atmosphere, narrative, and entanglement, and adds threads of glinting beauty and vulnerability. 

Clifford Prince King, Conditions, 2018
Courtesy STARS, Los Angeles

King’s portraits, like Ledare’s installation, create a compelling framework for Love Songs based on knots and entanglements rather than strict binaries. In his text for the new Love Songs catalog, David E. Little, ICP’s executive director since 2021, asks whether pictures of love aren’t a greater, more complex challenge than those showing conflict and struggle. But love isn’t synonymous with intimacy. Each can exist without the other, and intimacy is just as often fraught, messy, and conflicted. Love and war partake of the same tools. Photography is one of them. 

Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy is on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through September 11, 2023.

5 New and Notable Photobooks

Spread from Jamel Shabazz: Albums (Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, 2022)

Jamel Shabazz

If you want to understand the look of life on the streets of New York City in the 1980s, turn to Jamel Shabazz and his singular record of Black joy and sartorial flair. After a stint in the US Army, stationed in Germany, Shabazz returned to his home of New York. He worked on Wards Island and as a corrections officer on Rikers Island, the city’s notorious jail, at the height of the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs,” which devastated communities of color. On the weekends, he traversed the city, making portraits of individuals and collective portraits of friends and families in collaboratively choreographed poses. In an era of take-and-run street photography, Shabazz worked slowly. He spoke with people. “When I look at you, I see greatness,” he’d say when approaching a potential subject. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a photograph of you and your crew.” The sidewalks and subway platforms of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx were his studio.

The long-anticipated book Jamel Shabazz: Albums (Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, 2022; 320 pages, $50) is not simply a record of how he archived his prints. Rather, it is a journey into his process. When he photographed, he carried an album of photographs, to earn the trust of those he wanted to picture by showing them the style, generosity, and care he brought to making a portrait. This smartly designed book reproduces these albums—conduits of human connection—at scale, in facsimile form, in their original arrangements. Spread by spread, we see couples embracing on graffiti-covered subway cars, friends posing in Kangol hats and fresh Cazal eyewear, loving fathers and mothers, children pausing from play to strike a pose. The cumulative effect is something between a yearbook, a lookbook, and a family album—it is a reminder that no one transmits the vitality of Black life and community in New York quite like Jamel Shabazz. —Michael Famighetti

Spread from Bharat Sikka, The Sapper (Fw:Books, 2022) 

Bharat Sikka

Bharat Sikka’s long-term project about his father in The Sapper (Fw:Books, 2022; 192 pages, €40) is composed of fragments: a still life of his father’s tools glinting in the sun; a portrait of his desk left unattended. Other images depict the impression of the elastic of his socks on his calves and shins, the constellation of age spots on his back. These oblique but telling observations leaven a series of studies of his father’s face, of his figure in the landscape or caught up close in the burst of an off-camera flash. In The Sapper, Sikka’s approach to portraiture resonates with The Great Unreal (Patrick Frey, 2015), the Swiss photographers Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs’s American road-trip book.

Sikka was born in New Delhi and studied photography at Parsons School of Design in New York. He has frequently focused on the subject of masculinity, and his intervention with the artifacts of his father’s career as a member of the Indian Army Corps of Engineers pays tribute to a man’s life outside of traditional familial roles—in the book’s evocative presentation of sharply observed elements there is a puzzle to be worked out. His construction and deconstruction of photographs as a means of teasing answers out of these otherwise mute details is effectively underwritten by the book’s deft pairing and sequencing of images—patterns emerge and subside, only to return again. We remember, or think we do, but each moment of recall has been slightly altered from the last.

One segment in particular—an eight-page suite of full-bleed, black-and-white images reproduced to emulate cheap, Xerox-style copies—creates an enigmatic rupture in the otherwise gentle flow of images, confirming that something has been knocked asunder. An easy summation of Sikka’s subject of consideration lies tantalizingly just beyond reach. Instead, The Sapper offers an affecting negotiation of meaning and understanding of a father by his son, and a bittersweet confirmation of the fragility of memory. —Lesley A. Martin

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Spread from Steve Lawrence, Peter Hujar, Andrew Ullrick, Newspaper (Primary Information, 2023) 

Newspaper

In 1968, Peter Hujar, Steve Lawrence, and Andrew Ullrick began printing and distributing Newspaper, a short-form, image-only, black-and-white newsprint publication. Over its brief three-year lifespan, Newspaper compiled a star-studded list of contributors—Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Andy Warhol, among many others—and provided a platform for artists to exhibit different kinds of work from what was shown at galleries at the time. Unfortunately, scholarship about and recognition of Newspaper has been limited; the ephemeral nature of newsprint (which resists archiving) and the original publication’s limited distribution and print run meant that after its end in 1971 it quickly faded into obscurity.

More than fifty years later, the Brooklyn-based publisher Primary Information has compiled the complete fourteen-issue set of Newspaper for the first time. While, for practical considerations, Primary Information’s publication doesn’t replicate the original’s format and material, the issues are presented in their entirety, giving light to the boundary-pushing publication that Hujar, Lawrence, and Ullrick smartly edited. The content of Newspaper (Primary Information, 2023; 416 pages, $40), edited by Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, is kaleidoscopic. The book forces the reader to consider connections between and create meaning across multiple visual registers. Photographs, drawings, collages, imagery from high and low culture—all chaotically coexist within the pages. The effect is befuddling, cerebral, and provocative. Reproduced in Primary Information’s volume, the content of Newspaper can at times feel dense and indecipherable.

However, once primed to imagine the work within its earlier form and context, one can sense the underlying dynamism between the riotous arrangement of imagery, the casual and disposable form of the original tabloid, and the larger ecosystem of artist publications and queer periodicals of the late 1960s and early ’70s. In his preface to a detailed timeline of Newspaper’s history included in the back of the book, Yáñez clearly states his intentions: “to make the periodical accessible as a document. My hope is that by doing so, further information and scholarship about Steve Lawrence and Newspaper will arise.” —Noa Lin

Giulia Parlato, Lizard, 2019 Giulia Parlato, Gap, 2020

Giulia Parlato

Giulia Parlato is drawn to false accounts and fictional retellings, to the tension between museums and cultural objects—particularly how each endows the other with historical meaning. The Italian photographer conceived of her debut photobook, Diachronicles (Witty Books, 2023; 120 pages, €35), while researching forgeries and counterfeits at the Warburg Institute in London, and she argues that this meaning is first and foremost a construct, unstable and often the result of numerous interventions. Photographs play a split role in this equation, sometimes as displayed object and other times as document. For Parlato, they also offer a clever form of investigation and play as she appropriates the visual language of archaeological excavations, forensics, dioramas, and museum archives and displays to stage her own constructions, which are somewhere between evidence and fiction. Parlato’s photographs—which she made between her London studio, Sicily, and several European museums—appear stark and direct, almost instructional. A gap in the painted ceiling of an eighteenth-century palace in Palermo reveals innards of wood, stone, and rubber piping. Gloved hands confer archaeological meaning to an object concealed in tarp, seemingly exhumed from a dig. “Indeed, it is almost as if the more straightforward the imagery seems, the less straightforward it really is,” writes David Campany in his introduction. A curious reader might equally wonder whether the lack of context, and the book’s rather austere layout, limits its overall effect. One must invariably work backward and reconstruct the story; must look, and look again. By developing fictional histories from fragments and fakes, Diachronicles is both about what is said and what is withheld, positioning the photographer as both chronicler and unreliable narrator. —Varun Nayar

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Spread from Roe Ethridge, American Polychronic (MACK, 2022) 

Roe Ethridge

A refrigerator, a black eye, a tennis player, a highway. Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe, Weebleville, and then—wait, an ad? For Hermès? Oh, this is a Roe Ethridge book! Ethridge being the American photographer who has unlocked that little velvet rope between art and commerce to delirious and delightful effect, who has compiled four hundred “and something” images into a massive book, American Polychronic (MACK, 2022; 480 pages, $70), “some of which were for art exhibitions and some which were made for magazines and advertising,” as he notes in an addendum. “A healthy portion are both and a lesser portion neither.” So, anything goes, from a babe in a bikini to Telfar Clemens naked on a sofa to a screenshot of a conversation about a twenty-year-old Lexus. It all feels like a decadent European magazine (there’s even a French-fold dust jacket protecting the paperback covers), the kind you buy when you’re hungover and dreaming of a life in fashion. You certainly wouldn’t throw American Polychronic in the recycling bin, but is it a masterpiece for the bookshelf? Maybe! Jamieson Webster compares Ethridge’s photography to psychoanalysis—“symptom and repression are attacked through evoking an assemblage of fantasy, memory, and reality that shakes the frame”—in an essay printed in small type at the end of our photographer’s elliptical journey through his archive, from 1999 to 2022. (At first glance, the text appears quite literally like an afterthought.) Still, you didn’t come to American Polychronic, a production of staggering charm and shrewd editing, a monument to one of the most successful image makers of our era, to learn something new about fugue states or “hysterical flowers.” You came for the Chanel tennis balls, the beach umbrellas, the winsome smiles, the paper towels. You came for Anna, Karl, Hans Ulrich, Thanksgiving, laughter, tears, birds, sunsets, and “pure beauty” (as one chic cannabis brand would have it), beauty so pure and sweet you might need to take an aspirin and turn on Cat Power’s Moon Pix. —Brendan Embser

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

A Look Inside the Book Launch for Awol Erizku’s Long-Awaited First Monograph

On Tuesday, June 27, at the Gucci Wooster Bookstore in SoHo, Aperture and Gucci celebrated the launch of Mystic Parallax, the long-awaited first major monograph dedicated to artist Awol Erizku’s expansive vision.

The intimate evening offered lively conversation and celebratory cocktails, including an Ethiopian honey wine as a tribute to Erizku’s heritage. Guests had the opportunity to have their copy of Mystic Parallax signed by the artist, who graciously autographed books throughout the evening.

Ashley James, Awol Erizku, Antwaun Sargent

Published by Aperture, Mystic Parallax showcases over ten years of Erizku’s multivalent practice that critically engages art history, personal experience, and Pan-African thought and symbolism. Working across photography, film, video, painting, and installation, his work references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, from hip-hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism.

Joining to toast Awol Erizku and Aperture were many of the project’s contributors and supporters, including curator and book contributor Antwaun Sargent, curator Ashley James, Aperture Executive Director Sarah Meister, Aperture Editor Michael Famighetti, Aperture Trustees Lyle Ashton Harris, Deb Willis, and Cathy Caplan, as well as Adam Eli, ASAP Ferg, Chase Hall, Hank Willis Thomas, Isolde Brielmaier, Jane Holzer, Kathleen Lynch, Kathy Paciello, Lisa Sutcliffe, Quil Lemons, Rachel Tashjian, Ryan McGinley, Whitney Mallett, Willa Bennett, and many more.

Awol Erizku Hank Willis Thomas, Sanford Biggers, Awol Erizku, Lyle Ashton Harris Awol Erizku, ASAP Ferg Book Launch in partnership with Gucci Janine Cirincione, Awol Erizku, Cecile Panzieri, Jeffrey Grove Michael Famighetti, Awol Erizku Cathy Kaplan, Awol Erizku Sarah Meister, Darla Vaughn Ghetto Gastro, Quil Lemons Steven Chaiken, Whitney Mallett Feruz Erizku, Awol Erizku Lovia Gyarkye, Brendan Embser, Lesley Martin, Nicole Acheampong Gabriella Karefa-Johnson Terry Ferguson, ASAP Ferg Lauren Kelly, ASAP Ferg, Elphin Murren, Adrian PhillipsCameron Welch, Chase Hall, Ashley James, Antwaun Sargent, Antoine Gregory, Awol Erizku
All photographs by Ben Rosser for BFA.com, June 27, 2023

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Book launch made possible by Gucci.

This project was made possible, in part, with generous support from the Momentary and the Aperture Artist Book Committee, including Founding Members Peter Barbur and Tim Doody, Jeff Gutterman and Russet Lederman, and Frank Arisman, Joe Baio and Anne Griffin, Frédérique Destribats, Michael Hoeh, Loring and Diana Knoblauch, Andrew and Marina Lewin, David Solo, and Alice Sachs Zimet. Special thanks to Sean Kelly Gallery and Ben Brown Fine Arts.

An Artist’s Collages about Memory and Migration

When she was four or five years old, Priya Suresh Kambli watched her mother cut out her own face from family photographs. Kambli’s mother left the pictures of her daughters, Priya and her elder sister, Sona, intact. This act of simultaneous erasure and preservation fascinated Kambli. Decades later, she brings the same dialectic into play when creating her own artworks drawn from family photo-albums.

Kambli was born in 1975, in the Indian city of Mumbai, then called Bombay, and came to the United States at the age of eighteen. A few years earlier, Kambli’s mother had died from cancer, and just six months later, her father had suffered a fatal heart attack. In the period that followed, Kambli was adrift. One of her aunts, a pediatrician in Louisiana, sponsored Kambli’s move. Art hadn’t, so far, been a part of her repertoire, and photography was even less attractive to her. Kambli’s father, however, a trained pastry chef, had been an avid amateur photographer. As a child, her father’s fussiness over his pictures, and the time he took arranging his family’s poses, felt like punishment. But, as an undergrad, Kambli enjoyed her photography class. She didn’t have her father’s Minolta, so she borrowed a camera from her aunt’s husband.

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By graduate school she had discovered the excitement of creating art. She was learning from the work of artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, who were interested in issues of identity, but she also experienced a sense of dissatisfaction with Western image making. In 2003, Kambli traveled to New York to see an exhibition from the Alkazi Collection of Photography. The pictures were mostly taken in India, and Kambli remembers being “blown away” by the hand-painted portraits showing some parts of the figure in black and white while other parts, particularly clothing and jewelry, were rendered in glittering color. These vernacular images in the pristine white gallery space, Kambli says, were very much like those in the two albums of family photographs she had brought in her suitcase from India. She began to work with those familial pictures, embellishing them in different ways, making connections between her present and her past.

Priya Suresh Kambli, Mama and Muma, 2019 Priya Suresh Kambli, Mami, 2016

As Kambli was telling me all this over Zoom from her home in Kirksville, Missouri, I was thinking about her images in which faces are obscured—in one depicting her maternal aunt, Mami (2016), the face is left only partially visible under a decorative arrangement of flour. Flour was always at hand in the home of a pastry chef, and the patterns are borrowed from the traditional Indian practice of rangoli drawings, which are used during festivals or seen printed on textiles. It is difficult not to think of Kambli’s practice as therapeutic: the artist returns to a disquieting memory of her mother disfiguring photographs and then produces a transformed object that bears traces of its past but is altogether new and beautiful.

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In his book Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), a classic study of the role of portraiture in India, Christopher Pinney describes a photography studio as a “chamber of dreams.” Pinney observes that in the small town in India where he was conducting his anthropological study, the creativity of the studio photographer as well as his subjects lay in their envisioning fluid selves that defied any narrow, realistic self-representation. In Kambli’s images, we are no longer in small-town India, but the impulse is the same. There is imaginative storytelling about possible selves, among them a cosmopolitan iteration stretching across continents. What we see over and over again, in collagelike constructions, are numerous selves tied to different temporalities and identities.

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Many years ago, Kambli was watching Sesame Street with her child. On the show, the characters were demonstrating how to make a rainbow. That idea stuck in her head. Photography plays with light, and Kambli wanted to explore light’s mercurial nature. For her fortieth birthday, Kambli asked her husband for a prism. For the longest time, she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. The prism sat in her studio for two years until, one day, she picked it up and, as if by magic, the colors appeared.

Priya Suresh Kambli, Dada Aajooba and Dadi Aaji, 2012 Priya Suresh Kambli, Baba (Dodging Tools), 2017
All works courtesy the artist

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

Coco Capitán’s Vision of Youth Culture in Japan

The Spanish artist Coco Capitán has found inspiration in the sea and the color blue, out on the open landscapes of the American West, among a team of synchronized swimmers, and by revisiting a childhood vision of connecting Spain with China via a tunnel. The forms of her projects are equally multifarious, encompassing still photography, painting, and video, as well as aphoristic texts posing questions or fragments of thought, realized in what is now her signature scribbly handwriting. Capitán was recently a resident at Kyotographie, the annual photography festival in Kyoto. While there she created a series called Ookini (2022), Kansai for “thank you,” which considers young people in the city—the son of a kyōgen theater performer, Zen monk students, skaters, the daughters of a doll maker, a son from a family who for centuries has made tea kettles—who balance tradition, social expectations, and contemporary culture.

Michael Famighetti: How did you begin your new series, Ookini, which is made in Kyoto?

Coco Capitán: I had been traveling to Japan many times. For the longest time, I just dreamed of spending more time in Kyoto, working with young people there. But the city is kind of hard to access, in the sense that you cannot really photograph the people you want to photograph unless you have some sort of credential. It doesn’t need to be something so formal, but it’s more like you need to work with someone who lives in the city full time.

Famighetti: So, the local festival helped open some doors for you?

Capitán: The city is attached to tradition. I wanted to see how this is felt among the younger generations. In some ways, Kyoto can feel like it’s stuck in the past. There are these very strict customs and I was curious how they were felt by younger people—monks, skater kids, or high school students. The goal was to see very different characters in very different contexts, and to get a more general idea of how all these different teenagers with very different lives live in the same context, in a way.

Famighetti: With the young people who are studying to become monks, or with the young person from a family of tea kettle makers, are the kids involved in these traditions? Are they expected to carry them forward?

Capitán: I think there is a mix. There are teenagers who are more excited about it and others that jump into it because it’s a family obligation. In the case of the monks, almost all of the young monks I photographed have parents who are also monks. They are expected to become the same. There are actually more temples in Kyoto than there are monks. That’s one of the reasons why most sects are trying to recruit as many monks as possible. Each monk, once they finish their apprenticeship, is assigned a temple or shrine to care for.

Famighetti: Your project was split up amongst three spaces in Kyoto: a Zen temple, a museum, and a gallery space. How did you approach each presentation?

Capitán: My favorite was the installation in a temple, which included all of the monks’ photographs. We also had one day when the young monks came to see the show. There was also a video piece showing them doing their meditation and ceremonies. It was interesting to watch them watching themselves perform; in a way, being a monk is a performance. The master, or teacher, was there too, saying: “Oh, look at yourself. This is how . . . Guys, you’re making a mistake here. Or you could do it better there.” But they were really happy as well. They weren’t so obsessed with perfection. And it was really good.

All of the spaces in the temple open onto one rock garden. So we built these boxes to be placed on the tatami. Each box had a portrait of a monk meditating, and we placed them so they were all facing the garden, almost as if the monks themselves were looking at the garden, creating a dialogue between the outside and the inside. Of course, if you go into a traditional space, you might miss those elements. The monk running the temple introduced me to the student monks. The students would go to the temple sometimes, and when they came to see the show, they stayed there meditating during the evening session.

Installation view of Coco Capitán, Ookini, at ASPHODEL, Kyoto, 2023. Photograph by Takeshi AsanoInstallation view of Coco Capitán, Ookini, at Komyo-in Zen Temple, Kyoto, 2023. Photograph by Kenryou Gu

Famighetti: There is a sense of performance across the project, especially with the specific ways that people are dressed. It’s not a costume, but it’s often a uniform that comes with a set of codes or associations related to a role or social designation.

Capitán: I didn’t really ask for them to dress in a specific way, but I guess on many occasions it reflects the context of where the picture was made. The skater kids go skating after school, so that’s why they are all wearing school uniforms. When I was photographing the teens in the classrooms, they were at school, so they were also wearing school uniforms. And the monks, every day they have to wear these clothes when they are doing their rituals. In general, they were just dressed as they normally would. But in Japan, more than in many other places, uniforms are often used.

Famighetti: You’ve made a few projects in which you’re working outside of the culture that you come from. You did a project on the American West, another body of work was made in China. How do you negotiate your position as an outsider?

Capitán: It has its challenges, because you never want to be culturally appropriating anything or run into assumptions, just because you are external to that context. So that is something that is always pressing on my mind, and I try to look with a clear eye and not fall into stereotypes. There is always a difference when you go to a foreign space. First, there is the risk of idealizing the place. You create an idea based on the culture that you have consumed—films, literature. You create a version in your mind that is just a projection. The first time I was thinking a lot about this was actually with my project made in the United States.

Famighetti: Highway to ­Disappearance (2017)?

Capitán: Yes.

Famighetti: Many people only know the American West from cinema or literature. This mythology can be difficult to get away from. Photographers have to contend with an image bank of ingrained references.

Capitán: Totally. I was thinking a lot about Richard Prince and Marlboro advertising, and this idea, this mythology of the American Cowboy. I mean, it doesn’t exist now, and I don’t imagine it really ever existed in the way it has been portrayed in movies and advertising, or other forms of culture. I think when you look at something with the eyes of an outsider, you can observe many things that wouldn’t be so obvious to the people who belong to that culture. I’ve been considering photographing in Spain and Spanish traditions, and I think I will do it at some point. But the reason why it’s less attractive to me is because it’s so close. But it’s a very delicate arena.

Famighetti: I’m curious about your relationship with text and image. You also have a practice as a writer, and you’ve made books of short handwritten phrases, questions, and statements. How does that connect to your thinking on photography?

Capitán: Well, I feel that writing has always been my primary form of art. Everything I photograph, everything I paint is normally a reflection on something I have written about beforehand. Writing just comes very naturally to me. It’s something I do for myself—I never really thought of making an art form out of my writing. It was almost an accident. People started to pay attention to what I was writing. My friends always saw me walking around with my notebooks. I started to share some of these writings, but I never thought, Oh, this is going to be the art, or that this would be a statement on its own.

In relation to writing and photography, it goes two ways. There may be something that images have captured, and I feel the need to add some writing; and then there’s the other way around, sometimes writing is not enough to capture a specific feeling. I also enjoy giving titles to my photographs. You can name a photograph in two different ways, and it will have two completely different meanings.

Famighetti: You mentioned notebooks, but you’ve also made a few publications of your work. How do you view the book format?

Capitán: The book is the most important form. And I do very much enjoy exhibitions and installations. When it comes to actually producing a picture for a gallery space, what I enjoy about it is, of course, the photograph as an object. I print everything in the darkroom. We are used to seeing everything on our screens nowadays, and I think a lot is lost from photography as an object and all the choices of presentation—paper, printing process, framing, glass, no glass.

But books allow for story building. It’s where you can really control your narrative, because there is a beginning and an end. The way you tell a story in photography is all about sequencing. I feel like I’m writing with my photographs. 

Famighetti: Did you find any good books while working in Kyoto? There are excellent bookshops there.

Capitán: Yeah. But I have a book dealer in Tokyo who gets me most of my books. One of my favorites is Chewing Gum and Chocolate (Aperture, 2014) by Shōmei Tōmatsu.

Famighetti: In Japan, the history of photography is so much a history of book publications, more than an exhibition history.

Capitán: I think for me the most important part is the book, because documentation and archiving in photography are so important. It’s fifty percent of the piece itself. Of course, you take installation photographs of exhibitions, but it is something that disappears. After the pictures of Kyoto are taken down, especially the ones in the beautiful spaces, you won’t be able to experience it ever again. But if I am making a book, anyone who is willing to open the book in the future will see exactly what I created in the way it was meant to be seen.

All photographs from the series Ookini, 2022
© the artist

Famighetti: In addition to working across media, you also work across photographic contexts and have collaborated with a number of brands. How do you balance your artistic practice with work for fashion brands, like Gucci?

Capitán: I’m very open about my practice in all senses. The art world creates a difference between fine art and commercial art, and perhaps sees one of lesser value. I don’t agree with such divisions. I think that in the past, when you think of the Renaissance, for example, all the art that was being made then, now considered to be the highest form of art, was commissioned.

I moved to London when I was eighteen, and I was broke. If I hadn’t worked commercially, I couldn’t possibly have worked for small magazines and had other opportunities. The important thing is to not get completely lost doing commercial assignments, and really balance them with your other work. Think, Is there any value in doing this project? Can I learn something? Can I offer something in return? I work a lot with Gucci, and made many text works with them, and a series of murals. For me, that was an amazing opportunity to have a voice in a more mainstream context. You’re part of pop culture.

Famighetti: The platform there is gigantic.

Capitán: I went to the Royal College of Art, London, which is a more traditional institution, to do my master’s, and I was sometimes, not necessarily criticized, but questioned for my commercial art. And the reality was if I didn’t work commercially, I wouldn’t even be able to be studying at this very posh and expensive school. That’s the reality that is ignored many times.

There are certain brands I will not collaborate with in certain contexts because it doesn’t seem aligned with my own philosophy and way of seeing the work. But as far as I am able to be honest with myself about it, I think it’s a good thing to do. I think it’s very boring to simply limit yourself and only think of “fine art” in a gallery as the highest form of art. It’s a little bit snobbish. I don’t know. I just think that making and considering and creating is always good versus not doing things. Maybe sometimes it’s about being able to look at it from a different point of view—or to play with the system and learn from it as well.

Coco Capitán’s work was displayed as a part of Kyotographie 2023, which was on view at multiple locations in Kyoto, Japan, from April 15 to May 14, 2023.

What Is the Relationship between Literature and Photography?

The title of a recent exhibition at Musée des beaux-arts in the Swiss town of Le Locle (MBAL), The Pleasure of Text, is borrowed from Roland Barthes’s famous 1973 essay. A quote from that text stands out in the center of the room displaying paintings from the MBAL collection, depicting women engrossed in the act of reading: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body will follow its own ideas—for my body has different ideas than me.” This physical dimension of reading pleasure is exemplified in an installation by the Swiss duo Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg, who have created a new space in the museum’s former library, blending sculpture and automatic painting. The installation features a selection of their Bibliothèque Imaginaire (1999–2020), consisting of hundreds of wooden books that viewers are encouraged to explore. While the volumes cannot be read, the tactile experience of reading remains, and the text within them becomes a product of the viewer’s imagination.

Melissa Catanese, Montage with eyes, from the series Voyagers, 2023
© the artist

The Pleasure of Text is Federica Chiocchetti’s inaugural exhibition as the director of MBAL and holds a few surprises for those familiar with her academic and curatorial work. Especially with The Photocaptionist, the editorial and curatorial platform she founded and directs—Chiocchetti was also guest editor of Aperture’s 2019 issue of The PhotoBook Review on “photo-text-books”—she has focused on the relationship between text and images in literature and photography. This exhibition features the works of approximately thirty international artists in dialogue with pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. Instead of an exhibition solely dedicated to the theme of text-images in the context of photobooks, The Pleasure of Text takes a broader approach to the experience of reading by exploring the intersection between photography, photobook publishing, and other art forms that combine text and image making.

Luca Massaro, Bellezza Infinita, from izionario Vol. 1, Milano, 2023
© the artist

In a project titled Lady Readers, Sara Knelman presents a series of photographs featuring women reading. It remains unknown what these women are reading. One striking image depicts a girl, somewhere between childhood and adolescence, sitting on a bench while reading a magazine, with her face concealed by cascading light blond hair. Melissa Catanese contributes to the same theme with her video piece Voyagers, based on her book of the same name published in 2018 by The Ice Plant. The video presents a selection of images of people reading from Peter J. Cohen’s collection, utilizing the book’s pages to offer the viewer a subjective sensory experience with the text.

Jo Spence in collaboration with Terry Dennett, Remodelling Photo History: Revisualisation, 1981–82
© Estate of Jo Spence and courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London/Rome

The idea of reading (whether text or image) as a space of freedom and emancipation, particularly for women, is a prevalent theme throughout the exhibition. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?,” “Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.” A photograph by Jo Spence captures this sentiment. The image portrays the artist, disguised as a domestic worker, reading Sigmund Freud’s On Sexuality, wearing googly eye glasses with a comically bewildered expression. It serves as a visual metaphor for the feminist response to the accusations against Freud, who was accused of shifting the blame for sexual abuse from men to women and their imaginations.

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Other notable examples of a relationship between text and writing include the works of Brazilian artist Lenora de Barros and Italian artist Ketty La Rocca. De Barros portrays herself in a photographic sequence from 1979 titled Poema, where she wedges her tongue between the gears of a typewriter. La Rocca, on the other hand, presents a series called Photograph with Js (1969–1970), in which she interacts with a sculpture shaped like the letter J, from the French word je, meaning I. As La Rocca explains, “The ‘you’ has already begun at the border of my ‘I’.”

Chloe Dewe Mathews, In Search of Frankenstein, 2016
© the artist

The exhibition concludes with works that directly relate to the curator’s passion for the text-image theme. Nelis Franken’s Perfect Forests (2020–23) is a leporello featuring black-and-white images of locations associated with technology companies, interspersed with texts generated using artificial intelligence. Luca Massaro showcases ten large canvas prints from his book Dizionario Vol.1 (Dictionary, 2023), capturing various words and letters in juxtaposed settings. Chloe Dewe Mathews, as part of the overlapping festival Alt+1000, explores the landscapes of Swiss mountains and the network of anti-atomic bunkers constructed within them in the 1960s, juxtaposing them with passages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel conceived during her stay at Lake Geneva. The path design by Chioccetti also includes a series of photographs by Anne Turyn titled Lessons & Notes (1982), displayed in the room dedicated to children’s activities. The photographs depict a primary school classroom where children learn to read and write, featuring questions written on the blackboard against a backdrop of blurred figures.

Ketty La Rocca, Con inquietudine (With concern), 1971
© Estate of Ketty La Rocca/Michelangelo Vasta

Throughout Chioccetti’s and Dewe Mathews’s exhibitions, the continuous interplay between image and text highlights that concepts of the two can overlap. Pictures possess a lexicon, grammar, and syntax of their own, just as words, sentences, speeches, and stories can create mental images. In both cases, the resulting knowledge is most valuable and enduring when it stems from a pleasurable experience of exploration and understanding.

The Pleasure of Text is on view at Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, through September 18, 2023.

The Possibility of Home

A panel of solid black is interrupted by fragments of human form: an elderly woman stepping halfway into the frame, her expression animated by something in the dark. Down by her side, a sliver of a child’s face peeks out with one curious eye. In front of them, a floral-patterned bandana levitates in midair, as though to suggest the presence of some phantom we can’t see. In Passing, taken in 1969 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, reflects the intuitive gaze of a longtime local. It is a mode of looking that is at once attuned to the intricate sociality of one’s own community and unconcerned with accommodating the needs of an outside viewer, registering instead rich stretches of ordinary life as darkness.

The artist, Irene Poon, spent many years photographing the neighborhood of her youth, weaving dreamy images out of the fleeting faces and encounters of everyday life. As her contemporaries Charles Wong and Benjamen Chinn had begun to do a decade earlier, and previous generations of Chinatown photographers, such as Mary Tape, had done as early as the nineteenth century, Poon used her camera to replace the distant, exoticizing gaze of the tourist with that of an intimate insider caught up in the same quotidian rhythms as her subjects. But her work also goes further: Poon’s most striking compositions feature dense black areas that shroud and fragment her subjects, like blind spots made visible.

Left: Irene Poon, In Passing, 1969; right: Irene Poon, Memories of the Universal Café, 1965
© the artist and courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

In Memories of the Universal Café (1965), a forearm hovers, disembodied, over a table of food. In Fire Crackers Await (1969), a woman in apron and slippers floats in negative space at the bottom of a staircase. Often, the enveloping blackness shows up as background while figures linger at thresholds—doorways, balconies, windows—a recurring motif, marking the unseen interiors from which they emerge and into which they can retreat. Poon usually lets in just enough details to suggest that the negative spaces aren’t empty but rather full of presences we can’t see. Curiously, Poon honed this aesthetic of visible invisibility just as the political awakening of the Asian American movement swept through the campuses of the Bay Area and beyond, including Poon’s own alma mater of San Francisco State College.

What does it mean at this historic moment to turn one’s camera toward the banal details of ordinary life, to center the familial figures of children and grandparents, and, what’s more, to cast them on the edge of spatial indeterminacy, to allow them to go dark? If the Asian American movement sought to forge a clear political identity for Asians in the United States—as multiethnic, oppositional, anti-assimilative—then Poon’s work opens onto the obverse: the messy, exploratory, unfinished private spaces and relations that sustain such acts of public self-definition. If Asian America is built on generations of activism, Poon’s shrouded compositions remind us that it is also built on generations of what the performance scholar Summer Kim Lee calls “staying in.”

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Staying in, writes Lee, “critiques the compulsory sociability and relatability demanded of minoritarian subjects to go out, come out, and be out.” To stay in isn’t to cut off relations with others but only to refuse to be relatable—that is, to act in ways that conform to the standards and values of an outside public. For Asian Americans, to stay in means to slip out of our assigned roles within a visibility predicated on binaries of injury and protest, trauma and resilience—as entrenched as ever in our era of anti-Asian hate. Staying in opens up other registers of sociality: of rest, pleasure, play. It encapsulates the banal, domestic, familial spaces and relations that make up the substance of our lives but leave little trace in history.

As one of the few places to register this history of “staying in,” Asian American photography before and since Poon has found inventive ways to engage with such interior spaces and relations, often against the demands of public visibility, sociability, even legality. Take, for example, the phenomenon of the composite family portrait, which emerged in the early twentieth century to create what the art historian Thy Phu calls a “counterarchive” of familial intimacy in the era of Chinese exclusion. In the 1920s and ’30s, a time when Asians were effectively banned from entering the United States, Chinese American photography studios used collage techniques to piece together portraits taken thousands of miles apart, visually reuniting family members separated, sometimes for a lifetime, by racist immigration policies.

May’s Studio, Untitled, San Francisco, ca. 1920
© and courtesy Wylie Wong Collection of May’s Studio Photographs and Special Collections, Stanford University Ricardo Ocreto Alvarado, Dancing Couples, California, ca. 1950
© and courtesy Janet M. Alvarado, San Francisco

May’s Photo Studio, which was opened in 1923 in San Francisco’s Chinatown by the husband and wife Leo Chan Lee and Isabelle May Lee, made such portraits for those in their community. One example shows a family of six posing against the backdrop of an ornate interior. The wife and husband sit at the center, on either side of a table, a set of teacups between them, as though they will momentarily turn toward each other to take a sip. But the illusion of togetherness is broken by the flatness and unnatural glow of the husband, the only one in Western attire. A closer examination reveals the rough outline that snakes along his head and shoulders like stitches, a sign that he has been cropped from another photo, a place an ocean away. At a moment when studio portraiture had become a government tool to track Asian bodies via the introduction of photograph identification documents, Chinese American studios found a different use for photography: to weave together dream interiors of familial wholeness and imagine a utopian space without borders.

Ricardo Ocreto Alvarado provides another vision of “staying in” through his photographs of house parties in the 1940s and ’50s. Alvarado, who had no formal photography training and worked as an army hospital cook by day, brought his Speed Graphic camera to countless gatherings of friends, family, and relatives within San Francisco’s growing Filipino American community. Taken in an era when segregation kept people of color out of many restaurants, clubs, and other mainstream social settings, Alvarado’s photographs center the private home as a precious site for nourishing an otherwise impossible social world.

What does Asian America look like from the inside? What does it mean to live in the blind spots of American history?

In one photograph, a sparsely furnished room is offset by its buoyant inhabitants spilling out from the top of the frame. Handsomely dressed parents, children, and relatives gather in loose rows as though for a group shot, but only half look at the camera; the others are engrossed in their own micro-dramas—eating, crying, daydreaming—creating a rich tapestry of crisscrossed gazes. Near the center of the group, the beaming host turns away from the camera to offer up a heaping plate of lechón (roast pig) to her guests, further derailing any attempt at a standard pose.

Alvarado’s interior scenes often include other minority friends and coworkers, from the same area in San Francisco, whose communities overlapped and merged with Alvarado’s own. A live band of Filipino, Black, and Latino musicians play at a house party; interracial couples dance, hands loosely interlaced, in a living room draped with streamers. These figures, open and carefree before the camera, owe their casual radiance perhaps to a sense of safety in the presence of the photographer. Like Poon, Alvarado inhabited the spaces he photographed, resulting in images that tend not toward public display but shared interiority, the pleasure of enclosure, the relief of “staying in.”

Julie Quon, Amanda, from the series Nine to Thirteen, 2011
Courtesy the artist Julie Quon, Nolan, from the series Nine to Thirteen, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Like their fleeting subjects, photographs of Asian American interior life—real and imagined—occupy a tenuous place in American art history. Both the work of Alvarado and May’s Photo Studio were buried away for decades and rediscovered only by chance. Alvarado’s daughter stumbled upon some three thousand negatives in the basement of their home after her father’s death in 1976. A young art student on a walk encountered and rescued from a Chinatown dumpster the archive of May’s Photo Studio in 1978, after its owners had passed away. Still, home spaces, familial relations, the vast terrains of quotidian time: these remain abiding interests in Asian American photography. In recent years, a younger generation of artists has waded into the interior world of “staying in,” finding new strategies to contemplate the secret histories it enfolds, the legibility it withholds.

Often, these photographers begin with the site of their own home, using the camera to perform an excavation of the everyday, to see anew the banal details that usually fade into the background. In the series Of Light, Dust and Passing (2011), Julie Quon photographs her family home in New York’s Chinatown, where her parents have lived since 1980. Still living with them at the time, Quon lingered over ordinary objects bathed in early morning light, seeking out the incidental traces that index her parents’ particular presence, without needing to show their faces: her mother’s slippers under the chair, her father’s cigarettes hidden behind the radio, the makeshift dust covering over the washing machine. These still lifes reflect Quon’s architecture training with their clean lines and geometric compositions, but they are also portraits, years in the making, that patiently tease out the inner lives of their elusive subjects through a visual vernacular of the quotidian.

Miraj Patel, Sunday Morning, 2020
Courtesy the artist Tommy Kha, Stations (Kitchen God), Whitehaven, 2015
© and courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures Generation, New York

Miraj Patel takes the portrayal of the family home in a different direction, using elements of performance and self-portraiture to create playful, moody meditations on immigrant life in American suburbia. He began the series Do you see what I see, when I look at me? (2020–present) while cloistered at home with his parents during the first year of the pandemic. In one image, Sunday Morning (2020), Patel snuggles in bed with his parents and dog, reenacting a childhood ritual; this unusual arrangement of bodies contrasts humorously with the generic, symmetrical furnishings of the room. Other photographs show Patel creatively misusing various corners of their home. These performative interventions heighten a sense of incongruity between the Southern California house, a symbol of assimilation and upward mobility, and its Indian American inhabitants. “In trying to fit into the cookie-cutter formula,” Patel pondered, “what is this third thing we exist as?”

Likewise, Tommy Kha, whose family was part of the Chinese diaspora in Vietnam before immigrating to the United States, recalled noticing as a child that his house was “set up differently” from those of his friends: “every room had different walls and textures.” In his series Shrines (2013–ongoing), Kha explores this distinctive heterogeneity by tracing the presence and placement of religious and ancestral shrines, first in his own home, then in the homes and businesses of others across Memphis and New York. Kha calls the mismatched assemblage of incense holder and offerings in Stations (Kitchen God) (2015) “my mom’s curation”; set amidst other details bearing her touch over the years—a large burn mark on the counter, aluminum foil lining the stove tops and range hood—it forms a palimpsest of immigrant life. “It was a part of my childhood,” Kha said of the shrine, “but no one ever explained the ritual to me.” The project thus began with a reconfiguration of Kha’s own vision, a shuffling of the background into the foreground. For the past seven years, Kha has photographed more shrines—in restaurants, stores, and multigenerational homes—in an effort to locate and survey a shared, everyday Asian American iconography.

Jarod Lew, Please Take Off Your Shoes, 2021
Courtesy the artist

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Jarod Lew similarly tries to find a shared language of the home in his series Please Take Off Your Shoes (2016–ongoing), which took him to the houses of relatives, friends, and strangers around Michigan and San Francisco. Lew, whose work is featured in a portfolio in this issue, began the series as much to seek community as to make pictures, an interest reflected in the deeply collaborative nature of his process. “A lot of these photographs stem from conversations I have with the person I’m photographing, building trust, coming up with ideas of portraying them in a way they’re comfortable with,” Lew told me. Like Quon, Lew looks to still life as the key to portraiture. In his unwavering attention to some of the most mundane sights of domestic life—furniture covered with sheets, a plate of cut fruit, shoes by the entrance—there is an argument about the home itself as performative, a rich sensory world that wordlessly conveys entire histories of intimacy, relation, and feeling.

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What does Asian America look like from the inside? What does it mean to live in the blind spots of American history? For over a century, Asian American photographers have explored these questions by crafting ways of seeing that paradoxically protect from the trap of visibility, the trap of being defined by external policies and historical flashpoints. By treasuring the least remarkable recesses of everyday life, these photographs enact radical shifts in vision. To see ourselves in the shared spaces of staying in, unburdened by legibility or relatability—this, they suggest, is the only kind of seeing that will free us.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.” Xueli Wang’s research was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Aperture Appoints Esther McGowan as Director of Development

Aperture announces the recent appointment of Esther McGowan as Director of Development. In this position, McGowan will lead fundraising initiatives and build philanthropic support for Aperture’s celebrated photography program, including Aperture magazine, an extensive catalog of photobooks, traveling exhibitions, limited-edition prints, the annual Portfolio Prize, and the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, as well as partnerships and public events.

As a key member of senior staff, McGowan will collaborate on a new strategic plan, helping set the future direction of Aperture and grow funding in support of it. She will lead the development team and work closely with the Executive Director and Board of Trustees to advance Aperture’s capital campaign, supporting the transition to a new, permanent home on 380 Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2024.

“Along with our Board of Trustees and colleagues, we warmly welcome Esther McGowan to Aperture,” stated Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture. “With an accomplished record of building engagement and support for artists and mission-driven arts organizations, Esther joins us at a pivotal moment in Aperture’s history. She will play a vital role in advancing fundraising to activate our capital campaign as we prepare for our new home and continue to broaden and nurture our growing community around photography.”

“I have long been a fan of Aperture’s publications and exhibitions, and have been inspired by photography from a young age,” added McGowan. “Aperture’s role in the field is essential, and I am thrilled to contribute to this important work and help expand its reach.”

Before joining Aperture, McGowan had served as Executive Director for Visual AIDS since 2017, and as Associate Director since 2012, where she developed strategic partnerships, initiated Board growth, increased staff, expanded programming and archival practice, and created diversified revenue for the HIV/AIDS arts organization. She has held positions as Development Director and worked as a freelance fundraiser for multiple nonprofit cultural groups, including the Center for Fiction, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Arts International, and the Alliance for the Arts.

The Quest to Protect the Father of Ivorian Photography

Paul Kodjo’s work was headed for the dustbin of history—not the proverbial trash can but the actual garbage. The 2022 documentary Je reste photographe (I remain a photographer) shows a scene with the Ivorian photographer, his daughter Esther Kodjo, and the film’s director, Ananias Léki Dago, in a wooden cabin that the elder Kodjo built in a forest in Elubo, Ghana, where he retired. The trio are sifting through a dusty iron trunk filled with deteriorating papers and negatives, along with dirt, leaves, dead spiders, and cockroaches. “Ananias, this is what’s left of my work. I’m giving it to you. Do whatever you can with it,” Kodjo says. “Or else, I’m throwing it away.”

Léki, who is also a photographer, has been working to restore, archive, research, and promote Kodjo’s work internationally since they met in 2002. Kodjo’s photography from the 1960s and 1970s features fresh, emotive, black-and-white portraits of young people in the streets of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and in gleaming domestic settings. Kodjo, who died in 2021, began his career in 1959, on the eve of Ivory Coast’s national independence, following French colonial rule, and his images capture a mood of aspiration during a postindependence economic boom. Look what Kodjo could do with angles, as in his electric 1970 photograph of a Black model in front of a boxy building. It strikes me as a visual chiasmus, a moment of reversal caught on camera. The tall building is clearly bigger but the model seems to rival its grandeur.

Paul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970s Paul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970s

“I want his story to be known around the world,” Léki told me over Zoom last winter. Most of us would have never known of Kodjo’s photography without Léki. But this is not a savior story, not a rescue narrative, not the artistic neocolonialism that often governs records of African art. It’s a political commitment involving an Ivorian artist protecting and fighting for the legacy of another living Ivorian artist. Léki has opened new vistas onto Kodjo’s cultural, historical, and aesthetic impact on photography in Ivory Coast and around the world.

“People thought that he was already dead—dead physically and also photographically or artistically,” Léki said. “From what I know from the history of photography, I’ve never heard of another African who saved another African’s archives.” He continued: “For me the message of that is also political. It’s unique: an African photographer who helped another old African photographer, who restored negatives without any validation from the West until they bite. It’s a victory. I’m not in the big system. Paul Kodjo is not a product of the Western. Malick Sidibé is a product of the Western. Seydou Keïta is a product of the Western.”

Paul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970sPaul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970sPaul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970s

You Look Beautiful Like That: Studio Photography in West and Central Africa, an exhibition recently presented by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, includes only two images by Kodjo, but these stand out among the very well-known work of Malian photographers Sidibé and Keïta, as well as Cameroonian photographer Michel Kameni, among others. Kodjo’s images are photoromans, an innovation that boomed in the mid-twentieth century and features textual narrative paired with photography. Kodjo, who was born in 1939, began using this kinesthetic format in the late 1960s and early 1970s for work published in the magazine Ivoire Dimanche. With its use of scripts, castings, settings, and amateur and professional actors, this cinematic approach to still photography is no surprise given that he studied film in the 1960s in Paris and once wanted to be a filmmaker.

Kodjo’s story is part of an intergenerational narrative about the difficulties of keeping Black archives alive in an oftentimes exploitative art industry.

“Kodjo wasn’t necessarily a studio photographer. He creates these beautiful cinematic mise-en-scènes,” says Julie Crooks, the AGO’s curator of arts of global Africa and the diaspora who organized the show. “It’s very filmic. It blurs the line between reality and fiction and lands somewhere in between.”

Paul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970s

The exhibition’s main title is translated from the Malian phrase “I kany¨ tan.” It was popularized by Keïta and was previously used as a title for an exhibition, traveling from 2001 to 2003, of works by him and Sidibé. The words stress, as Crooks tells me, “the idea of collaboration between client and photographer, which is different than the kind of ethnographic images that we associate at that time through the lens of European photographers that create these damaging stereotypes of African peoples.”

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Self-presentation, modernity, aspiration, self-propulsion, confession, and the politics of respectability are at the heart of studio-photography practices. Studio photography limns the line between self-determination and conformism, intimate and public life, performance and the mundane. By contrast, Kodjo’s photos of nightlife and youth culture especially are edgy, resisting cultural norms of the time. “Crazy, unbridled, carefree, and cheerful,” says Léki in the documentary, narrating over a slideshow of Ivorians dancing, partying, flirting, touching, swaying, smoking, self-fashioning, hugging, and posing. Kodjo also worked for the press, photographing the political elite, and he was the only Black African photographer to cover the May 1968 revolution in France, assigned by a government news agency created by then President Félix Houphouët Boigny.

Paul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970sPaul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970sPaul Kodjo, Untitled, 1970s
All photographs © Estate of Paul Kodjo and courtesy Les Rencontres du Sud

Often referred to as the “father of Ivorian photography,” Kodjo rocketed to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with his photoromans. But after much popularity, he disappeared from public view. “He was born in the period that people didn’t understand what he was doing,” Léki told me. “He was faster than his contemporary people.” He seeks to put Kodjo back on the map. The restoration process, which was carried out in France, has been long—and many negatives were lost. But the 3,120 photographs that remain tell a powerful story about Ivorian history and aesthetics. Kodjo’s story is part of an intergenerational narrative about the difficulties of keeping Black archives alive in an oftentimes exploitative art industry. “I know some institutions in the West are not happy because they’re like, What is this Black young man doing? Is he challenging us? I want to control the narrative,” Léki insisted. “I don’t want anyone to take that from me—or from us.”

You Look Beautiful Like That: Studio Photography in West and Central Africa is on view at the Art Galley of Ontario, Toronto, through June 11, 2023.