Aperture's Blog, page 29

March 28, 2023

Nick Waplington’s Histories from Below

In 1996, the British photographer Nick Waplington wrote out a handwritten slogan that states: “EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE IS HAPPENING NOW.” Published in Safety in Numbers (1997), his account of a year on the road in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Johannesburg, and London, it’s a line that might also describe Waplington’s methods, as he often makes photographic series without a sense of his final intention. “I keep work when I am not really sure why I am making it at the time. I build up an archive to use in the future, and then I’ll come back to it,” Waplington says. “For example, I took a lot of pictures from the age of fourteen to twenty that I only started publishing in 2014.”

Waplington is committed to the idea of entering communities in order to understand them and, in turn, himself. When I visited his East London studio last summer, he told me, “I have an ability to seek out weird, subcultural groups that I find interesting, and I kind of submerge myself. It becomes my world, and I make work about it. Then, I present the work to the world.”

Nick Waplington, Untitled, from the series New York Club, 1994 nw_17_01_13.tif

Nick Waplington, Untitled, from the series Surf Riot, 1996

With a career spanning more than thirty years, Waplington, who was born in 1965, has dedicated himself to extended periods of fieldwork in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and Japan. He has produced photobooks that deal with subjects as diverse as the inhabitants of a housing estate in the East Midlands of Britain, a beach riot in Southern California, Jewish settlers in the West Bank, river swimmers in East London, and club kids in New York. His is a wandering existence, connected to the level of the everyday in the community in which he is immersed, but not to a place he can necessarily call home.

It’s a way of working that the social sciences identify as participant observation. But Waplington’s photographs are not academic; they lack critical distance from their subjects, and their objectivity is not as detached as it could be. His time-consuming, personal involvement enables a pictorial command of how people function in such groups: his pictures hum as scenes of life.

Waplington is committed to the idea of entering communities in order to understand them and, in turn, himself.

The writer Joan Didion’s description (in 1979’s The White Album) of how she saw her life at the end of the 1960s in Los Angeles is evocative of what Waplington’s photography looks like: “I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.” Waplington takes a subjective viewpoint, like Didion’s, and turns it into an image the viewer can recognize through visual cues. In sequence his photographs might look like a set of snapshots, yet the flashes and fragments amass until meaning is strung across them. His work confirms that photography is no longer about the nonfictional single image, but neither is his work about the staged moment.

Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition: Nick Waplington Featuring a signed print by Nick Waplington, accompanied by a copy of Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live.”

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Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition: Nick Waplington

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View cart Description This print will be available for sale from March 28 through April 6 only. The number of prints acquired will be the number produced.

This Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition features a signed print by Nick Waplington, accompanied by a copy of Aperture 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live” for only $200.

This issue of the magazine explores the relationship between photography and storytelling across generations and geographies. Featuring stories that illuminate daily life, this issue evokes the late, celebrated writer Joan Didion, who declared, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and features a portfolio of Waplington’s work that includes this image. Aperture first published work from the Living Room project as a book in 1991. Spending years documenting the daily lives of two working-class families on a council estate in Nottingham, England, Waplington photographing in saturated color, weaved together a document of the lives of these families, capturing these often poignant intimate narratives, often with unexpected glimpses of humor.

“The Living Room project is one of my most well-known photographic works; the pictures were taken in Nottingham, England, roughly between 1986 and 1997, and two books from the project, Living Room and The Weddings were published in the 1990s by Aperture. The work deals with the daily existence of a group of families who lived in public housing in the city during the Thatcher years when the United Kingdom went through a series of radical social and political changes. Throughout this period, I would repeatedly return to the public housing projects where the families lived to stay with my grandfather, who had a house there. By 1992, when this picture was taken, some of my subjects had left the housing project and were living in Victorian housing near Nottingham city center. On a warm, sunny June afternoon, Dawn, the woman in the photograph, climbed on her boyfriend’s car roof and posed for me. Because it was so unique to the pictures I was making, I disregarded it at the time, but I came across it again recently as I reevaluated the work some thirty years later. Like the project as a whole, this image shows the fun and happy time we had back then, ‘mucking around in the street,’ as we say in England.”

—Nick Waplington

NOTE: Prints will begin to ship by April 26, 2023 Details

Radford, 1992
Pigment Print
Paper Size: 5 x 7 inches
Signed by the artist

Available for sale March 28—April 6

Waplington currently lives in New York and London. The pandemic’s ban on travel and social interaction arrested his embedded style of photography, but he made use of the time it granted him by taking stock of his archive in preparation for a survey publication, Comprehensive (to be published this fall). “I’ve had a trajectory where I make work all the time, and I don’t exhibit very much,” he says. “All I’ve done for the last thirty-five to forty years is make work, and then make books, and, very occasionally, do a show. This means that the amount of images is kind of crazy. Rather than use a bit of everything, what I am trying to do in Comprehensive is illustrate between five and eight projects in a bit more depth. When you open the book, you’ll see a lot of pictures that you’ve never seen before.”

March 24, 2023

Miguel Calderón Journeys into the Soul of Mexico

Miguel Calderón is a hunter of good stories. Once, he traveled by taxi from Mexico City to Tijuana—a journey of more than 1,700 miles—only to end up with one photograph, an image of a man whom we see from a distance, with his back to the camera, urinating. It’s a testament to an adventure that began when Calderón asked various taxi drivers if they would be willing, at that very moment, to take him to the Mexico-US border, a drive of more than thirty hours traversing extremely rough regions of the country—controlled by drug cartels—so that he could produce a piece for a festival on borderland art. After a few attempts, one brave driver decided to accompany him on the adventure, from which that extraordinary image emerged. This is Calderón: an artist whose work extends from a photo of himself vomiting upon leaving a party when he was twenty-something years old, to a complex video installation wherein a panther approaches the spectator in total darkness, revealing itself solely by the glint of a pair of alert eyes and some sounds.

Calderón works in video, installation, painting, and drawing, but his photography, in particular, is sui generis. It isn’t the image per se that matters, but the story behind it. I recently spoke with Calderón at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, where his exhibition Materia estética disponible (Aesthetic material available) was on view—a small but carefully curated survey that covers his trajectory from the 1990s to the present.

A color photograph of a man standing beside a green Volkswagen taxi

Miguel Calderón, Taxímetro, 2017

María Minera: What is your relationship to photography? Perhaps you wouldn’t define yourself as a photographer because you use so many different mediums, but it’s clear you have an important relationship to photography.

Miguel Calderón: Without a doubt. Throughout my career there’s been a lot of back and forth between considering myself a photographer or not. These days I consider myself a photographer, but one who has renounced technique and decided to grab a camera and take snapshots. Of course, there are cases in which I work with a professional team to achieve certain effects that are more difficult to attain, but that’s dependent on the work.

A multiple-exposure black and white photograph of a man against a black background

Miguel Calderón, Triple exposure #58, 1987–1991

My history with photography is strange. When my parents separated, my mother married a photographer who had a darkroom, various cameras, and all the photographic paraphernalia, and this really interested me. He also had an enormous collection of National Geographic. My parents’ separation was incredibly painful for me, but in the midst of distress, I found very valuable things, as much thanks to my mother’s husband as to my father’s wife, who was interested in art. My parents had no interest in art; they never took us to museums. So these new presences, with all their associated problems, were tremendously enriching. I remember my mother’s house was robbed and they took the better part of her husband’s photography equipment, including his favorite camera. This had a major impact on me, and to this day, when someone says Nikon, it’s like hearing Ferrari.

Miguel Calderón, <em>Triple exposure #24</em>, 1987–1991″> </div> <div class=

Miguel Calderón, Triple exposure #24, 1987–1991 Miguel Calderón, <em>Triple exposure #11</em>, 1987–1991″> </div> <div class=

Miguel Calderón, Triple exposure #11, 1987–1991

Because of the disillusionment of having lost everything in the robbery, my mother’s husband quit photography, but, interestingly enough, my father’s wife decided to buy the few things that remained off him—filters and light—and put up her own darkroom. She enrolled in the Escuela Activa de Fotografía (a photography school in Mexico City), and I remember her returning with her assignments for class and that making a significant impression on me. So when I had the opportunity, I decided to study photography. And of course, my early attempts were incredibly pretentious, they strove to imitate the work I admired: Nacho López, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Ansel Adams.

For this exhibit, we decided to show some of what I created during that period, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. They’re photographs that perhaps never had any intention of being works of art, but in which I nevertheless found a certain value for their attempts at imitating other photographers. I think they contain some salvageable moments while also being a way for me to see a different me: the Miguel at fifty looking at an enthusiastic teenager eager to document his surroundings, to immerse himself in situations that call his attention, and an obsessive thirst for life.

Miguel Calderón, Vómito posmoderno, 1998

Minera: We’re standing in front of two photographs from very different periods, and what seems incredible to me, in a certain sense, is that your work hasn’t changed that much over time. There are still many aspects of that initial spirit of searching that persist, of trying to understand the world that surrounds you, and trying to find yourself in that world. This is a constant in your work. I’m thinking, for example, of the piece from 1998 that’s called Vómito postmoderno (Postmodern vomit).

Calderón: For me, the nineties in Mexico City are like a cloud of memory and forgetting. We lived in tremendous chaos and amid a lot of uncertainty, because what we did wasn’t accepted. People would ask you: “What kind of protest is this? Are you an artist? What are you?” And being really young, that makes you question yourself.

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During that time, I lived in a warehouse and lots of people stayed in my house. I remember that the most fun wasn’t going to a party, because by the time you got there everyone had already left, there were plastic cups thrown all over, an empty bottle of Bacardi. What was most fun was the journey in search of the party, roaming all over the city with your friends. And it was pretty typical at that age to end up vomiting. So I started to compile an archive of photos of my friends vomiting. And one day, after developing material that I’d taken with a 35 mm Olympus, I found that there was a photo of me that of course I couldn’t have taken myself, but I also couldn’t remember who had taken it. But when I saw it, it immediately brought me back to Bruce Nauman and his Self-Portrait as a Fountain; this was my own uncomfortable version, my self-portrait as an adolescent fountain. I mounted it in a lightbox because that was the exact size of the illuminated images that they used to put up in bus stops.

Miguel Calderón, Espacio abierto 1, 2012

Minera: And alongside it, we see Espacio abierto (Open space), a more recent work, from 2013, a diptych, of two birds of prey.

Calderón: It’s a white hawk that was in a refuge for injured animals. The story comes from long before—when I moved with my mother and her husband to Balcones de la Herradura, a kind of American-type suburb. My mom’s husband had a dog, and one time when I went to pick him up from the veterinarian’s office, where they were bathing him, there was a hawk there and I fell madly in love with it. I wanted to connect with nature in a different way than what was taught in school, where you were just taught to repeat exactly what was in the book. At that time, I had bicycles that I built myself—maybe that was my first introduction to making art unconsciously, off the page. So I became friends with the veterinarian, Pedro, who lived in a nearby town. I would go to his house and we would talk. In reality, I wanted to buy his hawk, but I didn’t have enough money. But one day, he saw my bike and he said: “I’ll bet you the bike for the hawk if you do one hundred sit-ups while hanging from the van where I transport the dogs.” And so I did the hundred sit-ups and when I got to the ninety-ninth he shouted: “110! 110!”; and I cried and looked up at the sky while thinking: “The hawk, the hawk.” And I won it—I had it in my house and I learned to take care of it. That’s where my interest in them began. Now I’m making a documentary, not so much about the hawks, but about people like me, who find a kind of anxiolytic through their relationships with hawks.

The piece you see here has to do with the nictitating membrane that all hawks have. It isn’t an eyelid, it’s a layer that protects the eye, for example, when the blood of their prey splashes into it when they hunt. What’s incredible is that they don’t lose their field of vision. And what I wanted to do was put myself in the place of the prey; feel what they feel when they confront a bird like this one, right at the moment before being attacked.

A black and white photograph of a nude woman in a dark room

Miguel Calderón, Triple exposure #7, 1987–1991

Minera: I’m drawn to the fact that each photograph has a distinct size and quality. There is a myriad of photographic decisions involved.

Calderón: A fundamental shift occurred in my life when I saw one of Cindy Sherman’s photographs in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. It had a tremendous impact on me. For one thing, the scale. Second, her colors. Third, the question of the artist’s multiple personalities, of exploring the self by virtue of various physical manifestations. And it was something that I felt: I am many different selves in different situations and with different people. It made such an impression on me that I began taking large-format photographs. Time passed and I understood that not all photographs require that. It was something intuitive.

Color photograph of an exhibition with a photograph and a taxi meter

Miguel Calderón, Taxímetro, 2017. Installation view at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2023

Minera: We’re now standing in front of Taxímetro (Taximeter), a piece from 1997 comprised of a single image and a running taximeter. Tell me the story of this piece, which is the one you presented at InSite that same year.

Calderón: This story is a little long, it involves two trips to the border and a failed art piece. But in the end, the piece emerged from a trip that I made by taxi to Tijuana from Daniel Garza, the neighborhood where I was living in Mexico City. I stopped various taxi drivers and everyone told me: “No, you’re crazy, that’s terrifying.” Until one of them said: “Yes, come to my house with me.” We went to get his things and we left at sunrise. The trip took four days, and we went to bars, we drank, got drunk, and just saw everything. And, in the midst of all that, it was incredibly interesting to try to convince him of the validity of my work—which I never managed to do. We ended up striking up a deep, though passing, friendship, as I never saw him again. I took lots of photos—of cities, of him and I cohabitating in the hotel, drunk in our underwear. In the end I chose the image that most called my attention, where he’s seen urinating, completely out of his element, alongside the taxi, which was allegedly ecological, though the only remotely ecological thing about it was that it was painted green.

We were in La Rumorosa, an extremely dangerous highway. He wanted to stop, although it was a total risk, to urinate. After the trip, he gifted me the taximeter and I decided to show it alongside the image. I liked adding this element of running time and money. How do you do the accounting for something as endearing as this trip we undertook together? I felt the influence of an artist like Félix González-Torres here, whose work always interested me.

A color photograph of a group of people lying on the grass

Miguel Calderón, Chapultepec #11, 2003
All works courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City and New York

Minera: Your series Chapultepec (2003) also has an interesting backstory, right?

Calderón: The Daniel Garza neighborhood was a pretty dangerous place, and going out into the street was a whole adventure; there were always run-ins with people, lots of drinking, violence. The mere exercise of going to Chapultepec Park, which was right next to it, was like a border crossing, because of the cars and buses giving off tons of smoke, and the amount of trash to get through. This gave me a sense for human fragility. And then in the park I’d come across dead animals or see fish, and I had no idea how they survived in this filthy lake. I’ve always been interested in studying chaos. And unconsciously I started to make a connection with the disasters depicted by Goya in his series The Disasters of War. We often think of the disasters of war, but what about the disasters of peace—an incredibly precarious peace, like the kind here in Mexico—which also exist.

So, I started to go to the park without really knowing exactly what it was I wanted to do, and more as an exercise for calming my distress. As a child, I celebrated all my birthdays in this park with my family. It’s the quintessential place for celebrating whatever the occasion might be with elaborate picnics. And that’s where it occurred to me to ask these families to let me take a photo of them pretending that a disaster had just occurred. Of course, they refused. So, I asked a friend of mine who’s a curator to accompany me, and I imagine a female presence changed the dynamic because people started to agree and even invited us to eat with them. And so, I became obsessed and over the course of ten weekends in a row, I went to document these scenes. I thought a lot about La jetée, Chris Marker’s film, about something that could be but isn’t, but once you do it, it becomes a reality. Of course, there’s a lot of humor in this work, even though it also speaks to the fragility in which we can all collapse at any given moment. When COVID-19 emerged and I looked at these photos, I felt a tremendous resonance.

Translated from the Spanish by Elianna Kan.

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Published on March 24, 2023 14:14

March 23, 2023

A Visit to Kunié Sugiura’s New York Studio

This article originally appeared in Aperture’s spring 2022 issue, “Celebrations.”

In 1811, when the Commissioners’ Plan established the map that was to dictate Manhattan’s development north of Houston Street, city fathers settled on the gridiron as the ideal form not for its Euclidean elegance but for the sake of rank commerce: “Right angled houses are the most cheap to build,” they declared.

Meanwhile, in the city that already existed, streets slouched and coiled like vagabonds, their winding shapes defined by rivers, shorelines, swamps, and large rocks. Among these vintage arteries, Doyers Street, a narrow, two-hundred-foot dogleg angling between the Bowery and Pell Street, is unlike any other. The crime journalist Herbert Asbury, who covered downtown New York, once called it “a crazy street” and said “there has never been any excuse for it.” Turning onto it feels like stumbling into Venice or Kowloon and makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s sentiment in One-Way Street that as soon as we gain our bearings in a city, habit erodes our sense of wonder about it. Somehow, visiting Doyers never stops feeling like the first time because it never stops feeling like being lost.

Recently, I went to the old gray brick building at number 7 and rang the buzzer of Kunié Sugiura, who has lived and worked there in a rough, roomy, fourth- floor loft since 1974, making art that combines photography and painting in ways that confound conventions of both (often involving cameraless photographs and paintings that function more as sculptural objects than as canvases).

Sugiura, seventy-nine, born in Nagoya and raised in Tokyo, moved to the United States in 1963 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she fell under the sway of one of her professors, Kenneth Josephson, who was at work establishing the terms of what would come to be known as Conceptual photography.

In the early 1970s, Sugiura began layering photographic emulsion, exposed with her Minimalist images of the city.

Sitting at a long worktable in the front of her loft, framed by tall windows overlooking Doyers, Sugiura told me: “I liked photography because photography was not really what it looked like. It’s such a subconscious thing, and you can experiment. Of course, all the other art students at that time completely looked down on us.” She moved to New York in 1967, partly because she sensed it was on the verge of generational upheaval. “And I knew that great social change is when culture happens,” she says. “But mostly, I just thought New York City was a lot of fun. Even going to a deli here was entertainment.”

In the early 1970s, Sugiura began layering photographic emulsion, exposed with her Minimalist images of the city—a storefront, high-rise windows, approaching headlights, the hull of the Staten Island Ferry—on surfaces such as aluminum, wood, and ceramics, until settling on canvas, a nod to the influences of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, though her work had a quiet poise that resembled neither. As the process developed, she incorporated monochrome or striped painted canvases along with the emulsions, sometimes grouped in wooden armatures that suggested frames but seemed more like elegantly deconstructed Shaker furniture. (The critic Karen Rosenberg once said that Sugiura’s early pieces appeared as if “Walker Evans had teamed up with Anne Truitt.”) Over subsequent decades, she has continued to press restlessly at photography’s boundaries, experimenting with collage, painterly photogram techniques, and landscape-like pigment prints.

Sugiura was featured early on in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1972 Annual Exhibition, curated by James Monte, and her work has appeared in exhibitions over the years at OK Harris, White Columns, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many others.

In the early 1970s, after the breakup of a marriage, she met the pioneering dealer Richard Bellamy “who told me he would be my agent—whatever that meant—but he really began to help my career and introduced me to other downtown artists like Neil Jenney.” She began hunting downtown for a space to live and work and chanced on the Doyers Street building, which had once housed the city’s first Chinese-language theater and later became a flophouse before being virtually abandoned in the 1960s. In 1971, the sculptor John Duff claimed the building for artists, making a loft on the top floor, where he remains today, and Sugiura moved in with two artist friends three years later, sharing the building with a Buddhist temple and, for a while, a loft of rowdy Cajuns with connections to Philip Glass’s musical circle and the artist-run restaurant Food, founded by Gordon Matta-Clark.

“This was where I really was first able to have the life of an artist,” she says. “It has sometimes been crazy or hard, but Doyers still feels like a sort of hidden place in the city, even in Chinatown, and the light that comes in my windows is north-east light, which is always beautiful. It’s my home.”

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Published on March 23, 2023 15:14

March 22, 2023

Aperture Salutes Ming Smith and Zora J Murff on the Occasion of the International Center of Photography Annual Gala

On March 28, the International Center of Photography in New York will honor artists Ming Smith for Lifetime Achievement and Zora J Murff for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism at ICP’s annual Infinity Awards. Aperture is proud to have published first major monographs by Smith and Murff—and we join ICP in celebrating their extraordinary artistic visions and contributions to photography.

Ming Smith, <em>Jump, Harlem, New York</em>, 1976, from <em>Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph</em> (Aperture, 2020)<br>Courtesy the artist and Aperture”> </div> <div class=

Ming Smith, Jump, Harlem, New York, 1976, from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2020)
Courtesy the artist and Aperture Ming Smith, <em>Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York</em>, 1976, from <em>Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph</em> (Aperture, 2020)”> </div> <div class=

Ming Smith, <em>Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York</em>, 1976, from <em>Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph</em> (Aperture, 2020)”> </div> <div class=

Ming Smith, Amen Corner Sisters, Harlem, New York, 1976, from Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2020)

When Ming Smith was a young photographer and newly arrived in 1970s New York, she passed by the Museum of Modern Art and said to herself, “I’m going to be in there one day.” She was right. In 1979, Smith became the first Black woman whose photographs were collected by the museum. Over the next four decades, she made images of astonishing range: cover art for jazz albums, spectral silhouettes of city streets, iconic portraits of Sun Ra and Grace Jones, and a series made in response to the plays of August Wilson. Smith’s first major monograph was published by Aperture in fall 2020 and includes a range of essays and interviews from artists, curators, and writers such as Emmanuel Iduma, Arthur Jafa, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Namwali Serpell, and Greg Tate.

This season, Smith returns to MoMA for the exhibition Projects: Ming Smith, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents the career survey Ming Smith: Feeling the Future. With a technical mastery that underscores her improvisational energy, Smith has made an evocative, sometimes surreal chronicle of Black life and culture. Belated but timely, both exhibitions stand to reintroduce Smith as a major figure in American art who creates poetic images of rare distinction—a photographer who uses light to affirm self-determination and freedom.

Zora J Murff, Kenny at 19, 2013 from True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London

Zora J Murff constructs a manual for coming to terms with the historical and contemporary realities of America’s divisive structures of privilege and caste. Since leaving social work to pursue photography over a decade ago, Murff’s work has consistently grappled with the complicit entanglement of the medium in the histories of spectacle, commodification, and race, often contextualizing his own photographs with found and appropriated images and commissioned texts. Murff’s work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he was included in New Photography 2020: Companion Pieces.

True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis), published by Aperture in 2022, continues that work, expanding to address the act of remembering and the politics of self, which Murff identifies as “the duality of Black patriotism and the challenges of finding belonging in places not made for me—of creating an affirmation in a moment of crisis as I learn to remake myself in my own image.” Nuanced, challenging, and inspiring, True Colors is a must-have monograph by a rising and standout artist.

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Published on March 22, 2023 09:41

March 16, 2023

How Will AI Transform Photography?

Earlier this year, when I asked the photographer Laurie Simmons why she started using artificial intelligence as a creative tool, she said: “Because it exists!” Simmons’s initial interest in AI emerged as the COVID-19 pandemic limited excursions or gatherings for photo shoots, and she has recently used DALL-E, a popular text-to-image generator launched in 2021, to make new work. Amid debates about copyright and originality that AI sparked throughout 2022, she’s among a growing number of photographers exploring the potential and problems inherent in the technology.

Many concerns around AI and photography stem from the lack of structure or accountability for image-to-text generators, which scrape the internet for billions of images with associated text—captions, tags, and so on—to feed their databases. A group of artists recently filed a class-action suit against Stability AI for copyright infringement, as has the stock photography service Getty Images. Anxiety about the death of art seems to accompany contemporary art with every new development, even as artists adopt and adapt new tools in their practice. Simmons recently featured some of her new work in the online collection In and Around the House II, organized by the Web3 platform Fellowship.

Laurie Simmons, (In and Around The House II #32), 2022

Laurie Simmons, (In and Around The House II #13), 2022

In many ways, AI is too broad a term, encompassing everything from self-driving cars to email phrasing prompts to personalized medical recommendations. It’s supporting your Google searches as well as the object-selection tool in Photoshop. For many artists, AI has meant a radical expansion of possibilities, but the technology also foreshadows the automation of much creative labor. People worry about their jobs.

Artists were initially intrigued by an early form of AI known as GANs, or generative adversarial networks, which created composite visuals from existing data, including images. GANs allow artists to compile personalized data sets; for instance, photographers may use their own archive of images to create novel work. In contrast, text-to-image generators depend on massive data sets that no single artist can compile. Until recently, they also needed invitations from developers to access these generators. But, by 2022, with the proliferation of the technology, a growing number of artists began sharing their experiments, and people saw firsthand what these systems could create from a simple string of words.

Simmons compares the experience of using DALL-E to watching an analog photograph appear in the developer solution. Almost immediately, the artist was able to make images that reproduce the domestic and psychological interiority for which her work is known, including doll-like figures in familial settings, extending the feminist discourse pervasive in her practice. Even when her AI figures are outdoors—strolling in fields or sitting on patios—her compositions suggest vignettes, creating a sense of the figures being contained or constrained by objects and environments. One “self-portrait” depicts a woman walking a dog along a country lane, and bears a startling resemblance to Simmons, her own dog, and even the roads near her home.

Shortly after her early encounters with DALL-E, she became more deliberate about her process and began identifying features and attributes to carefully construct more accurate and effective text prompts. For Simmons, these prompts feel like secrets—at least for now—and also full of surprises. “Some days I feel like an AI whisperer, other days like a flop,” she says.

Our physical gestures are expressive of internal, psychological states, but AI struggles to process the aesthetic of emotions.

Due to the range of sources from which these image generators pull data—online images ranging from stock photography, news imagery, social media posts, and personal websites—the results can range from the real to the uncanny. New York–based photographer Charlie Engman believes that AI’s limited understanding of bodies stems from perceiving them through images, not lived experiences. Informed by a background in dance and performance, Engman’s work spans fashion imagery as well as collaborative portraits of his mother. His AI experiments push some of these ideas further, exploring how the technology is able and unable to articulate bodily movement.

Our physical gestures are expressive of internal, psychological states, but AI struggles to process the aesthetic of emotions. Grief or pleasure may appear on AI-generated faces but isn’t replicated in those figures’ postures or gestures. Engman has observed that the body language of performers includes subtle movement choices cultivated over time to express thoughts and feelings, but these are rarely read accurately across AI data sets. Tags associated with images don’t typically specify a relationship between affect and a particular gesture. For instance, an emotion might be determined as happy because many images with smiles are tagged “happy,” but the AI might not be prompted to discern other subtle postures or stances, such as relaxed shoulders. For Engman, this gap is a compelling reason to explore the technology.

Charlie Engman, Parking Lot I, 2023

Charlie Engman, Sweetcheeks, 2023

The works he’s made using Midjourney, another text-to-image generator, depict strange and impossible contortions, many that bend the laws of physics and physical proximity. He’s been able to use the tool to create situations that he would never request of a subject, for ethical reasons as well as physiological limitations. His images of bodies merged into chairs, for example, playfully satirize modern office life. Other experiments have yielded images that mimic the visual language of fashion spreads, with his version featuring elongated models that appear both familiar and unnatural. Anyone interested in making images “must be curious at the very least,” Engman says.

Charlie Engman, Fashion Design V, 2023

When DALL-E and Midjourney became widely available, many were also curious about how these data sets might interpret various identities and lifestyles. The interdisciplinary artist and researcher Minne Atairu developed an interest in AI in 2020, as part of her ongoing examination of creative technologies as a PhD student at Columbia University. Atairu’s work has primarily focused on the ways that technologies can reproduce or alter absences in cultural histories, particularly those of postcolonial Nigeria.

Initially, she trained a GAN data set to produce portraits based on images of Black models she downloaded from Instagram. When she turned to Midjourney, she discovered that the system’s ability to image Black identity produced recurring stereotypes, despite her efforts to push past them. Typing specific descriptions into the generator—such as a lime-green color for clothing—produced an image of a Black person in a cityscape with details she found remarkably similar to those of her neighborhood in Harlem. After some trial and error, Atairu inferred that Midjourney presumes a set of socioeconomic conditions by associating bright colors and Blackness.

Like the data sets that form them, these systems are not neutral. Midjourney’s limitations further spurred Atairu’s investigation into how text-to-image generators depict certain features on a Black person. Her series Blonde Braids (2023–ongoing) tackles this problem and the corrective work required. Requesting “blonde” hair as a part of her text prompt generated a suburban, middle-class environment, reproducing broad cultural stereotypes that reinforce racist imaginaries. The generators likely also struggled due to limited information in the data sets about people. Atairu explained how Melanesians—the Indigenous inhabitants of Fiji, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea—have naturally light hair, but the generator’s struggle to depict this suggested that it was unfamiliar with this identity. When she requested to prompt to generate an image of two people and specified melanin tones, the request for blonde hair would appear on both figures, but the generator seemed incapable of making them the same skin tone; one was always lighter than the other.

“Coded biases and stereotypes cannot be eradicated by tweaking text prompts and curated selections,” she says. “Instead, to address such inference problems, the developers need to review the underlying data structures used for training the model.” Atairu’s photographs may not represent actual people, but they reflect a significant and enduring information bias. “No matter how hyperrealistic,” she adds, “there will always be a glitch.”

Minne Atairu, Blonde Braids Study IV, 2023

Minne Atairu, Blonde Braids Study V, 2023

Minne Atairu, Blonde Braids Study II, 2023
All photographs courtesy the artists

These are still early days, and many feel this is a special, even fragile, time for AI-generated imagery. To discredit these representations based on image quality or veracity alone is to miss the larger point about the inequality of the culture from which they emerge—both in terms of social mores and online data. Experimenting with these systems is a first step toward demanding they be made better and more inclusive. While Engman and Simmons push their work in new aesthetic directions, Atairu alerts us of the assumptions and imbalances that underlie AI databases.

AI may have already begun radically altering how we think about photography, but it’s helpful to remember that such discussions have always been a part of the medium’s evolution. Older arguments around authorship and creativity will reappear in this new context, and artists who consider the aesthetics and ethics of images are right to demand more conscientiously collected data. As AI’s relationship to photography continues to be defined, it will nonetheless be shaped by the artists exploring the technology’s limits in playful, inventive, and critical ways.

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Published on March 16, 2023 09:19

March 14, 2023

The Afterimage of Joan Didion

“My mind veers inflexibly toward the particular,” Joan Didion writes in her 1965 essay “On Morality.” When it comes to the concrete and specific, you might say there’s a continuum among her cohort (now mostly gone) of great American essayists. At one end, Susan Sontag’s epigrammatic judgments, with their relative lack of empirical texture. In the middle, Janet Malcolm’s fine attention to peculiarities of person or place. Then there is Didion, out along her own axis, where the essay is almost all detail. Sontag and Malcolm wrote extensively about photography. Didion, very little. But such is her mix of vision, exactitude, and atmospheric effect that her work seems more suited than that of others to sit alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, with an eye toward making connections. In their introduction to the catalog of Joan Didion: What She Means—a recent exhibition at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles—the show’s curators, Hilton Als and Connie Butler, speak of Didion’s “acutely visual language.” What does that mean?

Juergen Teller, Joan Didion, for the Céline Spring–Summer 2015 campaign, New York, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Cover of Joan Didion, The White Album (Simon and Schuster, 1979)
Courtesy Left Bank Books

Als, a friend and literary peer of Didion’s, has previously put together exhibitions about James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, authors whose power and presence we may imagine we glimpse in photographs of them. But Didion is something else: a writer whose talismanic image—in life, and even more so since her death, in December 2021—is the object of feverish projection and surmise. No wonder, when we survey celebrated portraits of her. In 1996, she sat for Irving Penn, who seems to have noticed that in many photographs of Didion it’s her thin, bare arms that do the work of conveying brittle thought processes. Brigitte Lacombe photographed her in the same year as Penn: here, Didion vanishes into her turtleneck sweater but remains unmistakable thanks to hands and hair. A photographic ideal of the writer was already present in Julian Wasser’s 1968 studies of Didion leaning against her new Corvette Stingray. The ideal was still there in 2014 when Juergen Teller photographed her for a Céline advertising campaign: sunglasses, helmet of silver hair, birdlike (always this adjective) limbs inside simple clinging black.

Somehow, we have come to think of Didion as a writer whose photographic imago incarnates certain features of her prose, oversensitive but unsentimental, held together in the face of personal or cultural catastrophe—above all, cool. Since her death, there’s been an extraordinary poring over of period ephemera, including a Vogue photograph of her kitchen countertop in 1972, along with Didion’s stationery preferences and taste in glassware—these last thanks to online images from her estate sale. A curious way to commemorate a writer who, in 1979, while reviewing films by Woody Allen, despaired of a culture hooked on minor signifiers of self-image: “a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker.”

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A composer, on the page, of indelible pictures, she was also highly suspicious of image making as such. One of the few pieces in which she writes directly about photographs is “Some Women,” a 1989 essay on Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s an oddly evasive text—the artist “struggling with illness” rather than dying of AIDS, his sexuality euphemized in the phrase “Rimbaud of the baths.” But she begins the essay with a frank reflection on time spent around photographers and their celebrity subjects when she worked at Vogue in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It seemed to the young Didion, part of whose job was to write captions for the magazine’s photo spreads, that photography was a matter of power and lies: “Success was understood to depend on the extent to which the subject conspired, tacitly, to be not ‘herself ’ but whoever and whatever it was that the photographer wanted to see in the lens.”

Aside from photographs capturing her own nervy glamour, what images come to mind when we think of Didion’s writings? Some snapshots from the more celebrated essays: The early-morning drinker in a Wilmington, Delaware, hotel bar, wearing a dirty crepe de chine wrapper, who says: “That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.” A Volkswagen in flames on the freeway, and the murdering wife in her too-fancy courtroom outfit. A three-year-old on acid.

Brigette Lacombe, contact sheet of Joan Didion (detail), 2011
Courtesy the artist and Lacombe, Inc.

American mundanity, obscenity. “It so happens that if you’re a writer the extremes show up,” Didion tells us. In the Hammer Museum catalog, a Warhol electric chair occupies a left-hand page; on the right, photographs by William Eggleston of a Spanish-style veranda, an empty swimming pool in sunlight. The tensions in Didion’s writing are usually subtler than this juxtaposition suggests. As an analogue, consider a Garry Winogrand photograph, taken in Beverly Hills, of a young woman in a miniskirt decorated with hearts. Is the faceless man beside her a threat, in his leather jacket and knee-high boots? A species of overlit dread pervades much of Didion’s work of the 1960s, even more so the retrospective essays of the decade following. Another name for this feeling is California.

A composer, on the page, of indelible pictures, Didion was also highly suspicious of image making.

According to Als, an aspect of Didion’s genius was “to make language out of the landscape she knew.” There are photographs in the book and exhibition that stand somewhat literally for essays in which she draws on Californian history, fable, contemporary, or horror. In her 1970 essay about visiting the Hoover Dam, and again in “Holy Water” (1977), Didion conjures an arid land in which water is money, power, myth, and also metaphor for hope, movement, loss. A 1928 photograph of Mount Tamalpais by Alma Ruth Lavenson and Edward Weston’s Badwater, Death Valley from 1938 summon the geocultural bedrock of Didion’s early life and much of her work about the West. Also in the book and exhibition are snapshots of a heavily pregnant Sharon Tate in 1969, shortly before she was murdered. Mythic land, end-of-the-1960s nightmare: direct illustrations from these histories don’t quite capture the peculiar, drifting abstraction that can shadow Didion’s fidelity to fact.

Ed Ruscha, Santa Monica Boulevard, 1974: Roll 11: Overland headed west: Image 0105, 1974
Courtesy the artist and J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles

Garry Winogrand, Beverly Hills, California, 1978
Courtesy the Estate of Garry Winogrand and Fraenkel Gallery

Here, for instance, is a passage from The White Album on the mood in Los Angeles during the summer leading up to the Manson murders: “A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in.” What is the photographic correlative for the vortex, for the jitters? It’s not to be found in Californian landscapes, austere or picturesque, or in the glassy midday version of street photography that LA makes possible. It’s more visible, I think, in the streaked darkness of the book’s 1943 Jack Delano photograph of the city’s rail yard at night, or in the serial vacancies of Ed Ruscha’s conceptual noir: blurred cars on Santa Monica Boulevard, repeated-with-a-difference gas stations, low-rise apartments, palm trees. The auction of items from Didion’s estate reveals that she owned several of Ruscha’s books from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2005, for the catalog of his contribution to the Venice Biennale, she wrote a short essay in which she describes the peculiar atmosphere of approaching the city from LAX: “Which streets they were did not matter. What did matter were the hard industrial angles, the gas stations and the strip malls and the two-story apartment buildings with the outdoor stairways and the covered walkways upstairs, the very stuff that said Los Angeles to me, all swimming in the lurid light that comes there in the western sky for a few hours before the sun drops below the horizon and the known world goes dark.”

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There’s something inordinate in such passages, exceeding Didion’s attachment to the concrete or, as she sometimes put it, her strict inability to think in the abstract. (As a student at Berkeley, she recalled, she tried hard to consider the Hegelian dialectic but was apt to be distracted by petals from a flowering pear tree outside her window.) The quality I’m trying to catch here is not exactly abstract or conceptual in ways we might speak of those things in modern or contemporary art. But it belongs to a region of the mind, perhaps of the world, that won’t easily give itself up to word or image. An obscurity of scene, mood, or atmosphere that is maybe best captured, among the illustrations in Joan Didion: What She Means, by a Diane Arbus photograph, from 1960, of a New Jersey drive-in movie theater. Is that the sun or moon on screen, clouds scudding across? Points of light in the dark foreground, desires hidden in automobile interiors. (See also: the lowering sky, in three stills from Stagecoach [1939], behind John Wayne, whom the young Didion adored.)

In “Why I Write,” a lecture delivered in 1975 and published the following year in the New York Times, Didion states, “The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.” It’s easy to imagine that she simply intends the affixing of a tracery of style to observed or recalled reality. In fact, it’s not at all clear what Didion means by “the picture.” Despite its precision, the prose is not a type of documentary, analogous to photography. (No more, of course, is documentary photography only documentary.) Instead, she writes to diagnose and to divine—like the greatest photographers, straight or conceptual, she is also searching for something that cannot be seen.

Edward Weston, Badwater, Death Valley, 1938<br />Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

Edward Weston, Badwater, Death Valley, 1938

Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live.”

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Published on March 14, 2023 08:21

March 10, 2023

How Steven Meisel Defined Fashion in 1993

High-end fashion photography toward the end of the 1980s reveled in bravado. Think of the swagger of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, or the aristocratic eroticism of Helmut Newton. But by the early 1990s, young British photographers such as Glen Luchford, David Sims, Craig McDean, and Corinne Day arrived to rejuvenate the field, encouraged by a new community of magazines from the United Kingdom, especially iD and The Face. This renaissance disrupted the haute isolation of fashion photography, and cultural themes, street style, pop music, and club life became the fabric of new imagery. Fashion’s aspirational glamour was challenged by a personal narrative of the young.

As always, in this moment, the American photographer Steven Meisel assimilated shifts in both fashion and its photography to push the conversation. The year 1993—which saw the election of a young Bill Clinton, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, and the debut of television series like The X-Files and Beavis and Butt-Head—was also a year of prodigious output by Meisel. The exhibition Steven Meisel 1993: A Year in Photographs gathers images culled from that year alone, featuring twenty-eight international Vogue covers and more than one hundred editorial stories. This is the second exhibition of fashion photography staged at the MOP Foundation (an acronym for Marta Ortega Pérez, daughter of the founder of Zara) in A Coruña, Galicia, on the northwest coast of Spain, a remote location, far from the obvious hubs of international fashion.

Steven Meisel, Michele Hicks, Poppy Lloyd, Marlon Richards, Lucie de la Falaise, Miranda Brooks, and Bill Skinne, New York, for Vogue Italia, April 5, 1993

Steven Meisel, Linda Evangelista, Ian Hundley, and Marc Hundley, New York, for Vogue, March 5, 1993

In a career spanning forty years, Meisel has defined the creative potential of fashion photography and has been held in consistent esteem in a traditionally mercurial arena. He moves quickly, and has shuffled through inexhaustible references to performance, nineteenth-century painting, surveillance imagery, pornography, and narrative gesture to make work that is inventive and unpredictable, revitalizing fashion history and anticipating its future. For four decades, the work has been an act of daring and dazzle and shrewd connoisseurship. Together with Guy Bourdin, Tim Walker, Nick Knight, and Steven Klein, Meisel developed fashion photography as a complex narrative in conversation with cultural preoccupations.

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By isolating one pivotal year, the exhibition extracts a passage from a longer creative arc, and challenges the framework of a conventional career retrospective. Meisel emerges as a portrait photographer of great sensitivity. Fashion photography, like cinema, is a collaborative effort, and Meisel has been credited with cultivating a group of models in the eighties (Naomi! Linda! Christy! Amber!) whose presence and charisma elevated the profession. Although all fashion photography relies on the character and role-playing of those in front of the lens to suggest narrative and mood, Meisel’s work from 1993 goes further in its emphasis on the person as much as on the garments.

Steven Meisel, Linda Evangelista, New York, for <em>Vogue Italia</em>, February 11, 1993″> </div> <div class=

Steven Meisel, Linda Evangelista, New York, for Vogue Italia, February 11, 1993

Steven Meisel, Stella Tennant, Paris, for <em>Vogue Italia</em>, July 22, 1993″> </div> <div class=

Steven Meisel, Stella Tennant, Paris, for Vogue Italia, July 22, 1993

Here, the totemic Linda Evangelista poses for Vogue Italia in conventional portrait head-and-shoulders format, all the more appropriate to frame her merriment; later that year, we see Stella Tennant (Vogue Italia again) with no noticeable couture, but with an expression of guarded unkindness. Kristen McMenamy perches nude, with the exception of an elaborate headpiece, in the rosy opulence of the Ritz in Paris; a young Marlon Richards appears with a cluster of stylish companions (in a photo somewhat reminiscent of his father’s Rolling Stones Between the Buttons album cover); and a grungy Axel appears in a snapshot for Per Lui.

By isolating one pivotal year, the exhibition extracts a passage from a longer creative arc, and challenges the framework of a conventional career retrospective.

The dominance of black and white supports Meisel’s classicism, and an authenticity—not an idea often associated with fashion—that sidelines artifice. Here, glamour resides in the elegance of individual gesture and body language, the geometry of the frame containing the animation of the figures. Models huddle, stroll, and stride; they drape, their hands flutter unexpectedly, legs akimbo. In a time when men were idealized in fashion as chiseled and aggressive—Mark Wahlberg grabbing his crotch for the camera—the boys here are lithe and gangly, rattling constructions of gender, as in the photographs of Hamish Bowles clinched in lingerie. Much of the work feels improvisational, an impression of play, pleasure, and often mischief, deflating pretension and self-importance.

Steven Meisel, Justin Scott, Brookville, New York, for <em>L’Uomo Vogue</em>, November 11–12, 1993″> </div> <div class=

Steven Meisel, Justin Scott, Brookville, New York, for L’Uomo Vogue, November 11–12, 1993

Steven Meisel, Hamish Bowles, New York, for Per Lui, March 10, 1993<br/>All photographs courtesy Steven Meisel Studio<br />“> </div> <div class=

Steven Meisel, Hamish Bowles, New York, for Per Lui, March 10, 1993
All photographs courtesy Steven Meisel Studio

Meisel has at times aroused controversy. He has periodically touched upon social questions, racism, addiction, cultural narcissism, and often satirized fashion’s own mannerisms and exhibitionism. “Makeover Madness,” an editorial that occupied eighty pages of Vogue Italia in 2002, casts a narrative of models submitting themselves to all forms of body intervention, gowned in couture but swaddled in gauze. These excursions into social commentary showcased Meisel’s consummate engagement with what might be possible in a fashion photograph.

Meisel maintains the aura of someone who is so private as to be enigmatic. Despite his renown, he rarely gives interviews, and he has never published any of the expected survey books of his work. The news of an exhibition of Steven Meisel is, for the fashion and photography community, an occasion of celebration and curiosity. This selection from 1993 represents how he maintained autonomy from the bandwagon of the moment to reveal how the best fashion photography might honor our collective aspiration for connection and joy.

Steven Meisel 1993: A Year in Photographs is on view at the MOP Foundation in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, through May 1, 2023.

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Published on March 10, 2023 07:30

March 9, 2023

James Welling Recasts the Ancient World

In 2018, the artist James Welling became fascinated with an ancient bust he photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that depicted a Roman noblewoman of Syrian origin, Julia Mamaea. The next year, he traveled to Athens and further immersed himself in the architecture, sculpture, and fragmentary remains of the ancient Greek world. Welling photographed extensively, from the facades of temples to small glass game pieces, fragments of tile, and personal adornments. He focused on the gestures and expressiveness of hands carved in stone: a boy holding a luscious bunch of grapes, or Venus demurely covering her nude body.

James Welling, Hands, 2020

James Welling, Tile Fragment, 2020

Much of this work would become the series Cento (2019–21), whose title gestures toward Welling’s method and aims. Typically referring to a work of poetry or music, a cento is made from accumulated fragments of the work of other, earlier artists. Through its form, a cento pulls the past into the present and suggests an inherent curiosity about how those fragments might communicate over time, from one culture and place to another. From Cento, Welling extended his interest in human expressiveness to Personae, works from 2021 to 2022 that begin with sculptural busts of individuals of ancient Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Syrian, and North African origin. Throughout, Welling’s deeply experimental and unique color process incorporates elements of photography, printmaking, digital production, and hand painting.

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His most recent portraits of busts further the complexity of the cento: Welling began to add new eyes—eyes previously rendered by Renaissance and modern painters and that Welling photographed at museums—to the busts. To this unlikely pairing, Welling adds skin tone, hair color, jewelry, and other responses to the busts’ original hairstyles and fashions, sometimes updating them with contemporary looks. This depth and range of source material manages—seemingly against the odds—to coalesce into an animated moment of recognition, the sense of seeing another human, from another time, conjured before us.

James Welling, Portrait of Aphrodite, 2022 Kore from the Cheramyes group

James Welling, Kore from the Kheramyes Group, 2020

In one such portrait, a young woman looks out from behind the partial veil of a dark shadow cast across her face. Her brown eyes, illuminated with light captured by an unknown painter from an unknown time, show her to be lost in thought. A smudge of warm pink enlivens her lip, the edge of her eye, and a blush on her cheek, and a touch of purple at her shoulder, indicating her dress, carries through highlights in her styled hair. Logically, the image is incongruous, built over time by at least three artists (the sculptor of the bust, the painter of the eyes, and now Welling). But intuitively, it is seamless. As a viewer, I know this mood, this transitory and yet timeless feeling of being lost in thought. Aphrodite has never appeared more relatable, even as she is absorbed in her world, unconcerned with ours.

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In the year 2022, there is no shortage of means with which to construct apparently human images, many drawing on the machine learning of artificial intelligence to create unnervingly convincing forms. Faces can be generated endlessly from vast assortments of previously photographed ones, mined from image banks, and scraped from online sources in a feedback loop that easily drains a sense of earlier place, time, and context. Those constructed faces ask something about what it means to be, and to picture, a human. Welling’s images also ask this question, but very differently, with a process that points to their own conclusion about human individuality and its representation. But this conclusion is more of an offer: Welling’s renderings describe not just a world unto themselves but an invitation to connect with those worlds—to recognize them—from the ever-shifting vantage point of this one.

James Welling, Fragment of a Gold Leaf Wreath, 2020

James Welling, Grapes, 2021

James Welling, Portrait of Alexander Severus, 2022

James Welling, Acanthus Stalk, 2021 Glass astragals (knucklebones) 3rd–2nd century B.C.

James Welling, Glass Astragaloi (Knucklebones), 2020

James Welling, Athens. Western Facade of the Erechtheion, 2019

James Welling, Artemision Bronze, 2019
All photographs courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Marian Goodman Gallery, and David Zwirner

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 249, “Reference.”

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Published on March 09, 2023 12:14

March 8, 2023

9 Inspiring Photobooks by Contemporary Women Photographers

Sam Contis, <em>Overpass</em> (Aperture, 2022)<br>Courtesy the artist”> </div> <div class=

Sam Contis, Overpass (Aperture, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Sam Contis: Overpass (2022)

In Overpass, Sam Contis explores what it means to move through the landscape. Walking along a vast network of centuries-old footpaths through the English countryside, Contis focuses on stiles, the simple structures that offer a means of passage over walls and fences and allow public access through privately owned land. In immersive sequences of black-and-white photographs, they become repeating sculptural forms in the landscape, invitations to free movement on one hand and a reminder of the history of enclosure on the other.

In an age of rising nationalism and a renewed insistence on borders, Overpass invites us to reflect on how we cross boundaries, who owns space, and the ways we have shaped the natural environment and how we might shape it in the future.

Sara Cwynar, Sahara from SSENSE.com (As Young as You Feel), 2020
Courtesy the artist

Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (2021)

Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Cwynar’s work circles around a large range of ideas and interests, from the ways subjective notions of beauty form through images, to the fetishization of consumer objects and color, to informal image archives.

Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases into her visually complex tableaux that examine how images circulate online, as well as how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. This work is brought together in Glass Life, the first comprehensive monograph of this celebrated multidisciplinary artist.

Collect a limited-edition of Sara Cwynar: Glass Life featuring a special case and c-print.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, 2008, from The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2016)
Courtesy the artist

LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family , 2016 (First published 2014)

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s award-winning first photobook, The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacies of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Examining this impact throughout the community and her own family, Frazier intervenes in the histories and narratives of the region. Setting the story across three generations—her grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—Frazier’s statement becomes both personal and political.

In The Notion of Family, Frazier knowingly acknowledges and expands on the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, enlisting the participation of her family, her mother in particular. In the creation of these collaborative works, Frazier reinforces the idea of art- and image-making as transformative acts, means of resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives—both those of her family and of the community at large.

Rinko Kawauchi, <em>Untitled</em>, from <em>Illuminance</em> (Aperture, 2021)<br>Courtesy the artist”> </div> <div class=

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from Illuminance (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance , 2021 (First published 2011)

In her images of keenly observed gestures and details, Rinko Kawauchi reveals the mysterious and beautiful realm at the edge of the everyday world. For Kawauchi, the act of photographing is less a way of referring to the appearance of everyday reality than it is evoking the luminous openness that exists when the boundaries between things become blurred. As Kawauchi describes, “I want imagination in the photographs—a photograph is like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.”

Ten years after its original publication, Aperture published a new edition of Kawauchi’s beloved photobook, retaining the artist’s original sequence alongside new texts by David Chandler, Masatake Shinohara, and Lesley A. Martin that contribute new context to and perspective on Kawauchi’s influential work.

Collect a limited-edition print from Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance.

Justine Kurland, Orchard, 1998, from Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (2020)

The North American landscape is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth: cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland, known for her utopian images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series Girl Pictures. Taken between 1997 and 2002, Kurland’s photographs stage scenes of teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism.

Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, swim in sun-dappled watering holes. Kurland imagines a world at once lawless and utopian, an Eden in the wild. “I wanted to make the communion between girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls,” writes Kurland. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.”

Collect a limited-edition print from Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures.

Deana Lawson, Mama Goma, 2014, from Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture, 2018)
Courtesy the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018)

Over the last decade, Deana Lawson has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models throughout the US, Caribbean, and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes. Signature to Lawson’s work is an exquisite range of color and attention to detail—from the bedding and furniture in her domestic interiors, to the lush plants and Edenic gardens that serve as dramatic backdrops.

Aperture published the artist’s landmark first publication, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, in 2018. In 2020, Lawson became the first photographer to be awarded the Hugo Boss Prize. One of the most compelling photographers of her generation, Lawson portrays the personal and the powerful. “Outside a Deana Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Collect a limited-edition of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph featuring a special slipcase and custom tipped-in c-print.

An-My Lê, Night Operations VII, from the series 29 Palms, 2003–4
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain (2020)

Throughout her thirty-year career, An-My Lê has photographed sites of former battlefields—spaces reserved for training for or reenacting war—and the noncombatant roles of active service members. Lê is part of a lineage of photographers who have adapted the conventions of landscape photography to explore the structures of conflict that have long informed American history and identity. Yet she is one of the few who have experienced the sights and sounds associated with growing up in a war zone, having evacuated her home country of Vietnam as a teenager in 1975.

On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of Lê’s work, featuring formative early works, as well as her well-known series Small Wars, 29 Palms, and Events Ashore, and Lê’s most recent photographs from the US-Mexico border. “Lê’s photographs are balanced, quiet, and nuanced works of art that offer the viewer an opportunity for contemplation,” Dan Leers writes. “She invites us to examine our own perception of, and involvement in, war as something that is not straightforward or clear-cut.”

Collect a special book and print bundle of An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain.

Diana Markosian, A New Life, 2019, from Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara (2020)

In Santa Barbara, Diana Markosian recreates the story of her family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, moved to the US with her two young children. The family moved in with a man named Eli in Santa Barbara, California, a city made famous in Russia when the 1980s soap opera of that name became the first American television show broadcast there.

Weaving together reenactments by actors, archival images, and stills from the original Santa Barbara TV show, Markosian reconsiders her family’s story from her mother’s perspective, relating to her mother for the first time as a woman, and coming to terms with the profound sacrifices Svetlana made to become an American. Brought together in Markosian’s debut monograph, the series offers an innovative and compelling hybrid of personal and documentary storytelling.

Collect a limited-edition print portfolio from Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara.

Wendy Red Star, <em>Indian Woman Standing</em>, from the series <em>Indian Woman</em>, 2005, from <em>Wendy Red Star: Delegation</em> (Aperture, 2022)<br>Courtesy the artist”> </div> <div class=

Wendy Red Star, Indian Woman Standing, from the series Indian Woman, 2005, from Wendy Red Star: Delegation (Aperture, 2022)
Courtesy the artist Wendy Red Star, <em>Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven)</em>, from the series <em>1880 Crow Peace Delegation</em>, 2014, from <em>Wendy Red Star: Delegation</em> (Aperture, 2022)<br>Courtesy the artist”> </div> <div class=

Wendy Red Star, <em>Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven)</em>, from the series <em>1880 Crow Peace Delegation</em>, 2014, from <em>Wendy Red Star: Delegation</em> (Aperture, 2022)<br>Courtesy the artist”> </div> <div class=

Wendy Red Star, Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven), from the series 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, 2014, from Wendy Red Star: Delegation (Aperture, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Wendy Red Star: Delegation (2022)

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow) centers Native American life and material culture through her imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation.

The artists’ first major monograph, Delegation, is a spirited testament to the intricacy of Red Star’s influential practice, gleaning from elements of Native American culture to evoke a vision of today’s world and what the future might bring.

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Published on March 08, 2023 08:40

March 3, 2023

A Photographer’s Unsettling Experiments with “Cursed” Images

Picture an ’80s suburban, pastel bedroom with a life-size Elmo beckoning you to join him on the bed. One image shows two toddlers in a playpen lurching toward a medieval sword. In another, a raccoon, adorned in lilac frills, is dancing with its hands in the air while six snails drink milk together from a heart-shaped dog bowl. These are #cursedimages, and in 2016 social media was littered with them.

Defined by their lack of origin and mysterious content, #cursedimages intentionally create confusion. They juxtapose the aura of vernacular photography with uncanny and incongruent elements—in the same potent way nightmares scramble your deepest fears with daily events. The result is a toxic push-pull that leaves you disturbed by their chaos and soothed by their familiarity.

#cursedimages began as a visual shorthand for a bad day and transitioned into a viral phenomenon describing our collective psyche in a year of dramatic social and political upheaval. As they began to shift format—from images to memes, memes to TikToks—they became more feral. Eventually, #cursed took on greater cultural significance, emancipating itself from form and representing a moment in history. In the 2019 New Yorker article “How We Came to Live in ‘Cursed’ Times,” Jia Tolentino writes, “The idea of cursed energy does evoke a feeling that the simulation is breaking and that something terrible is emerging from the breach.”

Patricia Voulgaris, Found Mask, 2022

Patricia Voulgaris, Spiderweb, 2022

The psychological impact of #cursedimages is a source of much fascination for photographer Patricia Voulgaris, who examines how we put our faith in images and the consequences of this trust. “I’m interested in what makes an image cursed or thinking about myself as being cursed,” she tells me over the phone. “I tried to curse myself for my final, and it did not go over well. Some people don’t believe in the possibility of phenomena.” Voulgaris, an MFA student at the Yale School of Art, is drawn to the fringes of belief and doubt, giving as much credence to the ridiculous as the serious, which, in part, makes her work feel inherently more human.

Photography’s role in cultivating systems of belief is something Voulgaris has been meditating on for years. As a teenager growing up in Levittown, Long Island, she spent Saturday afternoons ghost-hunting with her father. He was an active member of Long Island Paranormal, a Facebook group that met regularly in local cemeteries and haunted houses, hoping to connect with the spirit world. Armed with cameras, sound recorders, and electronic-voice-phenomenon meters, the group would trawl a location, often walking for hours, seeking evidence to confirm their beliefs.

“It felt like a social experiment,” Voulgaris says. “Trying to find proof but profoundly insecure about what would happen if we did. How do you capture an event to debunk a theory? More importantly, how do we create a false narrative that is believable? I am interested in how photography can lead viewers to arrive at a sense of certainty within themselves. It’s ultimately about searching for something concrete in a world that makes no sense.”

Patricia Voulgaris, Lost Bear, 2022

Patricia Voulgaris, Spell, 2022

In her latest photographs Voulgaris employs the visual language of the supernatural, taking as her subject the tenuous line between belief and doubt. She collates constructed and caught moments, merging clichés and the mystical to express her ambivalence about both the spirit and the human realm. Voulgaris describes her process as a “response,” enabling her to move “through ideas and move more freely” in a continually iterative practice as opposed to focusing on a resolved body of work. Her intention is to create images as feelings, trading in the world of symbolism and the haptic rather than definitive narratives.

The notion of illusion and perception in a post-truth era has shaped much of Voulgaris’s recent work. In her previous series The Hunter (2020–ongoing), she grapples with the persistent threat of violence to which women are subjected every day, and how it is normalized in our culture. She enlists her partner and parents as protagnosists, crushing and contorting them in bizarre and haunting scenes that resist explanation. Similarly, Voulgaris’s new images fuse constructed moments and improvisation to elicit the same unsettling sensation, this time grounded in unexpected encounters with the natural world.

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While Voulgaris’s photography is rooted in a genuine fascination with the supernatural—nineteenth-century spirit photography, mediums, unexplained events, and projects like Mike Kelley’s Ectoplasm Photographs (1978/2009) are all vital touch points—it also functions as a crutch and a trick. It’s a way to capture the viewer’s attention and draw them into a conversation about something more complex.

At its core, Voulgaris’s work is about the stories we tell ourselves and our tendency to focus on what we want to see rather than what’s in plain sight. Photography has been an accomplice in self-deception, deliberate mistruths, and comforting lies throughout history. In a subversive gesture, Voulgaris illuminates our obsession with certainty while asserting how powerful it is to own the difficult complexities of our existence rather than deny them.

Patricia Voulgaris’s photographs were created using a FUJIFILM GFX50SII camera.