Aperture's Blog, page 33

6 New and Notable Photobooks

From The PhotoBook Review in Aperture magazine’s fall issue, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” six writers consider a selection of recent photobooks.

Covers of Mame-Diarra Niang, The Citadel: a trilogy (MACK, 2022)

The Citadel: a trilogy by Mame-Diarra Niang

Grief estranges the bereaved from the mourned and clarifies that certain emotional distances are unbridgeable. When the French artist Mame-Diarra Niang first returned to Dakar, Senegal, in 2007, it was to bury her father. Niang’s book The Citadel: a trilogy (MACK, 2022) combines these facts of loss and image making to propose an idea larger than the sum of biography and composition. This is perhaps best represented by the spectral presence of Anchises from Virgil’s Aeneid—a figure moving through epochs, outside time and place, who points his son Aeneas to the world as it will yet become. As Niang has said, it doesn’t matter that her photographs were made in Africa: “I want to express a simple idea that my body is always somewhere else; it is always connected to somewhere else in the world.”

The Citadel constitutes a three-part examination of place. It begins with Sahel Gris, an assortment of ocher-toned images that show construction sites, stray beasts of burden, and a jumble of bricks on weedy earth. At the Wall is a closer look at what is formed on the surface: buildings incomplete yet inhabited, unattended to, or hastily finished; walls weathered by time and neglect; the occasional presence of pedestrians or laborers, who flit into view as though the city were made mostly of concrete. In Metropolis, the conclusion, no building is under construction; the photographs are glimpses of a panorama, views of a city at once grand and impossible to behold.

Portions of the Aeneid are interspersed throughout Metropolis, as though establishing the mythological parameters of Niang’s work. In the final excerpt, the following is said of Anchises and Aeneas: “So they wander here and there through the whole region, over the wide city plain, and gaze at everything.” Wandering, the wide city, a gaze at everything: this is the triangular basis of The Citadel. The vision belongs to a wanderer, whose sights, as in Sahel Gris, are lone and hurried. Yet it is a hurry that doesn’t dispense with compressed attention, in which walls of a storied city can seem like meditations on how much a surface can hold, and how much is kept from view.

The trilogy, collected in an embossed slipcase, is serialized in the order of conceptualization: a movement across three volumes, from the wide-angled imagery of Dakar and Abidjan to a further tightening of the frame in Johannesburg. Each book is treated to its own idiosyncratic format and papers—accordion fold, hardcover, and Japanese fold—making The Citadel throb with melancholy and conscientiousness.

Niang grew up between France and West Africa, “in a state of constant metamorphosis,” as she describes her childhood. She incorporates that experience into her artistic journey, formulating the fragmentary as an ethos. Her photographs are never about what is whole or total or fully seen but, rather, what is angular, oblique, halved, seen sideways, and knowable only in part—a vision of tensions that occur on the exterior, as though to present the viewer with a background fit for introspection. —Emmanuel Iduma

Spread from Jeff Weber, Serial Grey (Roma Publications, 2021)

Serial Grey by Jeff Weber

In recent years, a small but growing cohort of information-obsessed knowledge workers have tried to build “second brains.” By this, they mean the organization of their thoughts with digital archives and note files that will, they hope, help them to find connections between their ideas and “unlock [their] creative potential.” One patron saint of this group is the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose own repository involved thousands of intricately annotated index cards housed in cabinets.

The fifteen-year practice of the Belgian artist Jeff Weber is characterized, in part, by a search for tools and methods of “unlocking creative potential”—to devise systems that produce photographic images and films. Early in his career, Weber established his own Luhmann-style archive, which he sardonically termed An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology with the Help of a Cardfile as Generative Mechanism (2009–10). “It was meant to form an interactive tool that could mirror the self and that I could work with—or, rather, rely on to create art,” he says. The frustrations of that project put Weber on the path he has followed since. Serial Grey (Roma Publications, 2021), his new book, documents both an exhibition at Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, and the evolution of his art.

The book is initially forbidding in its seeming austerity: the cover depicts an unprepossessing grid of small squares in varying shades of gray, an image seen in six more variations before you arrive at the table of contents. But persistence is rewarded with the slow disclosure of an idiosyncratic and all-too-human search for connection (it’s a “personal” epistemology, after all).

The heart of Serial Grey is a collection of casual-seeming snapshots in a rich range of moody grays. In them, some figures recur, such as a young woman with short dark hair, alternately posed and unposed as she interacts with others, travels through sunny landscapes, and visits museums. Those galleries provide another theme: snapshots of artworks and objects from ancient cultures, mute testaments to human creativity. Yet other pictures focus on doorways and portals, or render a city roofscape, suggesting untold stories.

Weber made many of these photographs in relation to Kunsthalle Leipzig, an institution-as-artwork he ran out of an apartment from 2014 to 2017. By entering into extended creative dialogue with those he invited to exhibit at the space, Weber made images that are simultaneously records of his subjective experience, of creative processes (his and theirs), and of fulfilling relationships.

After Kunsthalle Leipzig closed, Weber returned to impersonal generative technologies: the patterned grids in the early pages of this book are, in fact, recent photograms resulting from a hacked-together combination of artificial neural networks, torn-open LCD displays, and a traditional photographic enlarger. Such oblique strategies require explanation for their impact to be fully felt. But, as hermetic and aloof as the book can seem, it is both intellectually fertile and, surprisingly, emotional. Serial Grey makes plain that Weber derives meaning from reciprocity, whether the relationship in question is with another person, with a tool, or, above all, with art. —Brian Sholis

Spread from Arko Datto, Snake Fire (L’Artiere Edizioni, 2021)

Snake Fire by Arko Datto

Although Arko Datto’s journalistic photographs are firmly grounded in the lived encounters in his native India and other countries across Southeast Asia, his artistic practice is not solely tethered to a truthful representation of his subjects. Reimagined in filters and tints that infuse the frames with striking, saturated hues, Datto’s portraits and landscapes verge on dreamscapes, where illusory, chimerical combinations of light and color come into tangible focus.

In his new book, Snake Fire (L’Artiere Edizioni, 2021), Datto, who is based in Kolkata, continues to expand his constructed world, where reality is reconfigured to generate a trance vision. A compilation of arresting, and at times unsettling, photographs that portray anonymous creatures of the night, derelict urban landscapes of Southeast Asia, and inadvertent collisions between nature and human civilization, the publication features a hundred or so images, taken in Malaysia and Indonesia, printed in full bleed from one page to the next. Here, we see an old man treading along a deserted road with a cadaver of a pig cut in half; a crocodile floating in muddied water; a riverbank inundated with heaps of trash and rubber tires where a dilapidated boat is parked; and a pair of godlike figures carved in stone, on which pieces of fabric and other paraphernalia are attached.

Resisting the grammar of photobooks built around the narrative potential created by the pacing of images with empty spaces in between, Snake Fire opts to submerge the reader in a succession of frames with such acute, rich colors that the images are rendered ethereal. A coat of silver and fluorescent ink sprayed atop numerous pages heightens the surreal aesthetics of Datto’s photographs, allowing each scene to appear differently according to the amount of light on the spread. Perhaps counterintuitively, these postproduction effects dissociate the images from the palette one typically associates with the region, despite the iconography of snake and moth that firmly root the frames in the natural environments of Southeast Asia. Instead, they invoke a fantastical parallel world produced by the layering of a colored filter onto a reality in which Datto’s eerie images could be conjoined to create an ecosystem.

Datto’s documentary work, featured by Time and National Geographic, seeks to inform the spectator of such pressing issues as migration and urbanization as they unfold in South and Southeast Asia. But Snake Fire takes a psychedelic direction, as if in opposition to reportage. Instead of flattening its images into an orderly assortment of discrete moments, Snake Fire offers a collection of hypnotic encounters that simultaneously activate the reader’s sense of sight and touch. In doing so, it disputes the status of photobooks as incomplete, albeit decent, alternatives to prints. As a satisfying counterexample of the genre, Snake Fire lets itself drift as a site of handheld dreams. —Harry C. H. Choi

Spread from Nigel Shafran, The Well (Loose Joints, 2022)

The Well by Nigel Shafran

The British historian Raphael Samuel once noted that consumer society sees the world as a shop window display. Nigel Shafran is a photographer who has lingered long around high street plate glass. It’s easy to call him a fashion photographer, but his engagement with the urban vernacular and his disinterestedness in seeking commercial jobs placed him for many years on the margins of the industry. Yet The Well (Loose Joints, 2022), a newly published survey of Shafran’s work to date, notes the quiet revolution his photography has ushered in. Threaded through a chronological selection of published editorials, portfolio pieces, and outtakes is a conversation—like a series of interconnected captions—between the photographer and his collaborators, including stylists, models, editors, and art directors, recounting projects across a more than thirty-year period.

In one exchange, the stylist Anna Cockburn tells Shafran, “Your work has always celebrated the banal, the things that we don’t clock anymore,” to which he replies, “I like how you use the word clock, it’s like time.” Shafran hones details that become emblematic of a time period and, in turn, of time passed. The changing window displays he’s drawn to are, in their perpetual state of flux, no different from the young people he portrays in their moment of becoming. The subjects of his Teenage Precinct Shoppers (named after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) appear like buds before they open, while their early 1990s tracksuits today appear set in amber.

The Well, edited and designed by Linda van Deursen, charts time as a form of loss: from working in the ’90s for British style magazines such as i-D and The Face, where there was more time, more freedom, but more film to process, to working for international titles in the first decade of the twenty-first century, where the budgets got bigger and the credits got longer, but the possibilities contracted. Shafran’s later images articulate something found, a staging and reenactment of the joyful forms of lived experience, but with models and celebrities now. Bella Hadid appears daredevil cycling, her feet on the saddle, her hands gripping the handlebars, but Shafran shows her posed in the studio with three assistants holding the bike upright. It’s an absurdist play about the everyday, what Samuel described as “theatres of memory.”

In a photograph taken on Baker Street in 1992, a young window cleaner, squeegee in hand, stands on the street looking directly at the lens, his baggy black outfit and slicked-back hair fresh from a night out. It’s only when you notice the streaks running down the right of the frame that you realize Shafran must have been inside the shop to take the image, internalizing his view of the world as a shop window—the boy in that moment the best fashion plate he could ever be. Shafran’s work describes a discontinuous world, but its manufactured heart beats steadily: hopes and desires just as shallow in depth, just as temporary, just as glorious as what lies out for sale. —Alistair O’Neill

Spread from LaToya Ruby Frazier, Flint Is Family in Three Acts (Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, 2022)

Flint Is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family in Three Acts (Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, 2022) chronicles how artists and activists—family by blood, choice, and common cause—came together to bring fresh water back to Flint, Michigan, after the city’s catastrophic decision in April 2014 to switch its water supply from a treatment facility to a toxic river. Residents were forced to consume contaminated water that made them sick, with some developing chronic medical conditions as a result. Throughout all of this, Flint’s citizens—predominately Black and economically poor—were still required to pay their water bills. Frazier was initially commissioned by Elle magazine to photograph the man-made crisis, and her project grew from there, culminating in a book coauthored by the Flint activists Shea S. Cobb and Amber N. Hasan; Shea’s father, Douglas R. Smiley; and Flint community members.

Expansive and elegant, with an inviting, textured cover, Flint Is Family is at once monumental and intimate. As with her earlier book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2016), it involved many participants and a concern for social justice. Frazier described in a panel discussion organized this spring by the Gordon Parks Foundation how relationships and dialogue were essential to the Flint project, including to its editorial process: Frazier and Cobb laid these photographs out on a kitchen table and talked about every detail as if poring over a family album.

The three acts in the title are an organizing principle based on the Bible: Act I begins with a poem by Cobb titled “No Filter,” accompanied by an aerial photograph of Cobb at the center of a bridge over these troubled waters. Act II brings Cobb and her daughter, Zion, to Newton, Mississippi, back to their family land with its fresh springs and horses. Act III pivots to Hasan, who moves to Puerto Rico and meets a man named Moses West who has a solution. With help from Frazier, Hasan and West find the financial support to bring an atmospheric water generator to Flint, providing free and fresh water to all who need it. Frazier and the book’s editor, Michal Raz-Russo, who also contributes an essay, remain thoughtful about the divinity of these intertwining lives and events, down to the typeface used throughout, which comes from the Amplified Holy Bible.

In addition to its Judeo-Christian elements, we can see Flint Is Family through another tradition: the spirit of African American photography. The book crescendos from primarily black-and-white images into colorful, jubilant portraits of residents drawing fresh water from the generator in Flint’s Black business district. The green generator with blue solar panels becomes an open-air studio for Frazier, recalling James VanDerZee’s and Dawoud Bey’s Harlem; Richard Samuel Roberts’s Columbia, South Carolina; and the Black portrait studios that peppered the United States throughout the twentieth century. Her respect for portraiture converges with the rich documentary tradition of Gordon Parks, who himself moved between black- and-white photo-essays and the color portraits seen in Segregation Story to evoke changes in time and tone over the course of a life.

By the end of Flint Is Family, we certainly feel the change. —Jovonna Jones

Spread from Rafał Milach, Strajk / Strike (Jednostka Gallery, 2021)

Strajk / Strike by Rafał Milach

Strajk / Strike (Jednostka Gallery, 2021) presents many photographs the Polish artist-activist Rafał Milach took of people standing on balconies or looking out the windows of Warsaw apartment blocks. These images of figures framed within the gridded structure of residential facades are also a framing device for this record of the Strajk Kobiet (Women’s Strike), the popular uprising in Poland in the last months of 2020 in response to a near-total abortion ban. Spurred by the ruling of a conservative Constitutional Tribunal, the wave of mass protests that continued into early 2021 stood in opposition to the overwhelmingly Catholic country’s right-wing government, which in recent years has rendered the position of women, LGBTQIA, and minorities increasingly perilous.

The protests were a pressing subject for Milach—a member of Magnum Photos whose work is primarily concerned with systemic structures of power and state control—who has since covered the war in Ukraine. Bolstered by essays printed in English and Polish by Aleksandra Bockowska, Karolina Gembara, and Iwona Kurz, the book considers the function images played in the months-long Women’s Strike. What did it mean to photograph the protest, and why does it matter? While the movement’s demands were not met, Strajk / Strike’s tone is vaguely hopeful regarding the way photographs can constitute a call to action and visualize enduring forms of solidarity. Nearly square in format and printed on newsprint, the deep-red, light- weight book bears on its back cover the lightning bolt that became the symbol for the movement. You can almost imagine the bolt itself being brandished as a protest sign, clutched in a hand extending into the air.

And, indeed, Strajk / Strike suggests that images hold a power that can be wielded. In Kurz’s essay, “Snapshots from a Protest: A Coalitional Image,” she broaches the sense of “us” versus “them” that structures much protest photography, in which the contrast between opposing sides of a conflict is often amplified aesthetically by the photojournalist. Milach supplants this binary with a dialogue between photographs of protesters—mostly close-up headshots of young women, many with bright-red eye shadow or face masks embellished with lightning bolts—and photographs of people looking down on the street from their homes. In line with Kurz’s claim that these demonstrations stemmed less from polarization than from an effort to envision a society that made space for multiplicity, Milach’s photographs of the onlookers underscore a sense of ambiguous plurality. Some waved, pasted lightning bolts to their windowpanes, or recorded the procession below with their phones; others peered down ambivalently, perhaps signaling support with their presence. The protests took place as COVID-19 surged in Poland, keeping many people home as they quarantined or avoided risk of infection.

In her text, “Gaze,” Gembara analyzes the posture of these onlookers in terms of the scholar Ariella Azoulay’s theory of photography as a civil contract, dismissing the passivity that can be associated with the medium and situating the act of taking or observing a photograph as something inherently active. Her concluding sentence pithily encapsulates the book’s motivating thrust: “Our seeing, a mutual responsibility.” —Camila McHugh

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These reviews originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” in The PhotoBook Review.

Ashish Shah’s Languorous Portrait of the Indian Countryside

Uttarakhand is haunted by the ghost of migration. The north Indian state, which borders Nepal, harbors the source of the Ganga River, which is worshipped as a goddess. As the legend goes, Ganga migrated from the heavens to bring salvation to the accursed ancestors of Bhagiratha, the Ikshvaku king after whom she is also named Bhagirathi. Then there are the annual winter migrations of deities to their temporary shelters downhill, which residents mark with music and fanfare.

Lately, however, the state has been grappling with migrations of a different nature that have left vast swaths in districts such as Pauri Garhwal, Tehri Garhwal, and Almora abandoned. According to a 2018 report by the state’s Rural Development and Migration Commission, 734 villages became depopulated between 2011 and 2018, raising the total number of “ghost villages” in Uttarakhand to 1,768. Lack of employment opportunities, road connectivity, and education and health infrastructure are the primary reasons behind the exodus. Unlike the seasonal influx of wage laborers from the neighboring states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the outgoing migrants from Uttarakhand can secure more permanent tenures by virtue of being better educated. Not surprisingly, Pauri Garhwal, the district with the highest literacy rate, is also the most deserted.

Ashish Shah, Waiting for local transport, 2022 Ashish Shah, A traditional, three-story house that has been shut for decades, Amaldu Village, 2022

In 2022, Ashish Shah, a migrant from Uttarakhand’s capital, Dehradun, who has carved himself a niche in Indian fashion photography, returned to his home state to capture life in the ghost villages in Pauri Garhwal. “I was born and grew up in these territories until my early twenties,” Shah said recently. “I am very much a part of the same shift.”

A sense of dereliction and waiting consumes his new series The Last Inhabitants of Pauri (2022). It lingers in doors long-locked, in unused charpoys and buckets, in overgrown houses, and, most of all, in the attitudes adopted by the remnant inhabitants. A sari-clad woman looks on morosely in the wake of her son’s departure for a job somewhere in the plains; the moment seems frozen beyond photographic time. Two women appear amid the drawn-out sigh punctuating a habitual conversation that breaks the routine of chores. Fingers twined and hunched slightly, the woman in pink conveys resignation, while the gaze of her companion interrogates the unexpected presence of the photographer-stranger. Framing her henna-dyed and braided profile is the creeping halo of bottle gourds, which will end up as precious weights in the jholas (cloth bags) of husband, brothers, and sons reporting back from holiday.

Ashish Shah, Women chatting, Sheela Village, 2022

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The infrequency of buses and other modes of public transport in Uttarakhand has made anticipation and rest part and parcel of the quotidian choreographies in these remote villages. Shah’s subjects can be seen squatting on their haunches waiting for a bus, as people sometimes do for hours, or catching a breath before resuming their bundling of firewood and roving, or simply loitering on a bench in anticipation of an arrival. Notably, it is his observant exhuming of the repertoire of attitudes and gestures through which the Indian body reposes, coupled with his attention to local complexions, styles, and settings, that has distinguished Shah’s fashion photography.

Related Stories FeaturedThe Radiant Intimacy of Jarod Lew’s Family Portraits FeaturedThe Anti–Road Trip of an Indian American Photographer FeaturedAt Beaches around the World, a Photographer Finds Hope and Home Ashish Shah, A mother watching her son leaving to resume his job in the city , 2022 Ashish Shah, Still life around a demolished house, 2022

“Often fashion imagery in India is very alienated from the world it represents,” he says. Commissioned by brands such as Alexander McQueen, Byredo, and Raw Mango, Shah has managed to successfully challenge the prevailing Western conventions that pertain not only to casting but also the choice of setting, framing, and bodily comportment.

While investigating the demographic shifts bedeviling these villages, Shah remains wary of the trap of victimizing narratives. He is conscious about not letting his representations of Garhwali country life and its challenges slide into value judgements about this lifestyle. Occupying the yonder side of migration, Shah recognizes the luxury of playing gully cricket in the middle of the day and indulging in unhurried conversation, to say nothing of the health benefits of daily exercise as well as the consumption of unadulterated food and air. His depictions of backbreaking labor are unfailingly relieved by moments of languor. 

Ashish Shah, A man walking to Baluni Village with a gas gylinder, 2022 Ashish Shah, After work, a lady basks in the sun, Amaldu Village, 2022

There is an image of a man hauling a gas cylinder, and one of an apple farmer who returned to the village, where he started a polyhouse, a type of greenhouse for sustainable horticulture. “While I came across many villages where the young ones have moved out in search of a different life, Lakhpati Prasad, my local guide, moved back to his village to take care of the ancestral land, striving for a balance in the ecosystem, against the will of his wife and kids who still live in the city,” Shah explains. Elsewhere, one witnesses a house being rebuilt, one of the many to get a new lease on life during the pandemic, which drove migrants out of work and back to their villages. A few have stayed to set up small businesses and are reinventing their former lives with insights gained in cities. In this way, Shah’s series presents two sides of the migrant coin as it settles in the state of Uttarakhand.

Ashish Shah’s photographs were created using a FUJIFILM GFX50SII camera.

Ashish Shah, Anoop walks approximately five kilometers to school every day, Pokhri village, 2022 Ashish Shah, Lakhpati Prasad left his job in the city and moved to his village to look after his ancestral land, 2022 Ashish Shah, Redevelopment site on the way to Pauri, 2022 Ashish Shah, Motorbike parked outside a temple, 2022 Ashish Shah, A house being demolished, Amaldu Village, 2022 Ashish Shah, Devkali blooming in the backyard of an abandoned house, Kothar Village, 2022 Ashish Shah, A local from Shiela village taking care of his cattle, 2022 Ashish Shah, Sumit and his friend after exams, 2022 Ashish Shah, Signage of the Prime Minister Road planning on the way to Kothar, 2022 Ashish Shah, Kids playing cricket in the courtyard that used to be the village council of Kothar, 2022 Ashish Shah, View of Amaldu and other ghost villages, 2022
All photographs from the series The Last Inhabitants of Pauri, 2022, for Aperture

Aperture’s 2022 Holiday Gift Guide

From best-selling photobooks The New Black Vanguard and Photo No-Nos; to monographs by Wendy Red Star, Tom Sandberg, and Deana Lawson; to essay and activity books for all ages—we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.

Must-Haves for Photo Lovers

Aperture magazine subscription

Leading the conversation on contemporary photography with thought-provoking commentary and visually immersive portfolios, Aperture is required reading for everyone seriously interested in photography. With thematic issues like “Vision & Justice,” “Latinx,” and “New York,” and guest edited editions by Alec Soth, Wendy Red Star, Wolfgang Tillmans, and more, Aperture has been the essential guide to photography since 1952.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion

In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in art and fashion today, highlighting the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

Diane Arbus Revelations

Diane Arbus’s frank treatment of her subjects and faith in the intrinsic power of the medium have produced photographs that are often shocking in their purity and steadfast celebration of things as they are. This year, Aperture released Diane Arbus Revelations on the fiftieth anniversary of Arbus’s posthumous 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the simultaneous publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph. Revelations explores the origins, scope, and aspirations of Arbus’s wholly original vision. Featuring two hundred full-page duotones of Arbus’s photographs spanning her entire career, the volume presents many of her lesser-known or previously unpublished photographs in the context of the iconic images—revealing a subtle yet persistent view of the world.

Give the Gift of Inspiration

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

What is a “photo no-no”? Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary. Edited by Jason Fulford, this volume brings together ideas, stories, and anecdotes from over two hundred photographers and photography professionals. Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on “bad” pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility—offering a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present

What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between esteemed photographers and artists, critics, curators, and editors since 1985.

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice

How does a photographic project or series evolve? How important are “style” and “genre”? What comes first—the photographs or a concept? PhotoWork is a collection of interviews by forty photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained a body of work. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, editor Sasha Wolf’s interviews provide essential insights and advice from both emerging and established photographers—including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Todd Hido, Rinko Kawauchi, Alec Soth, and more—while also revealing that there is no single path in photography.

Contemporary Classics

Philip Montgomery: American Mirror

Through his intimate, powerful reporting and signature black-and-white style, Philip Montgomery reveals the fault lines of American society—from police violence and the opioid addiction crisis, to the COVID-19 pandemic and demonstrations in support of Black lives. American Mirror is the first monograph by the award-winning photographer, distilling his vision through seventy-one iconic images. Like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans before him, Montgomery has made an unforgettable testament to a nation at a crossroads.

Wendy Red Star: Delegation

In her dynamic photographs, Wendy Red Star recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow), centering Native American life and material culture through the artist’s 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. 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.

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

Ten years after its original publication, Aperture republishes Rinko Kawauchi’s beloved volume Illuminance. Through her images of keenly observed gestures and details, Kawauchi reveals the mysterious and beautiful realm at the edge of the everyday world. 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.” This new edition of Illuminance retains the photographer’s original sequence, alongside texts by David Chandler, Lesley A. Martin, and Masatake Shinohara.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has portrayed the personal and the powerful in her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa. One of the most compelling photographers working today, Lawson’s Aperture Monograph is the long-awaited first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in the book’s essay. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Visions in Black & White

Tom Sandberg: Photographs

In a signature, modulating gray scale, the late Norwegian photographer Tom Sandberg spent decades rendering the shapes and forms of everyday life in his exacting vision. From dark abstractions of asphalt and sea, to the hard edges of an automobile or curved tunnel, to anonymous figures cast in shadow, Sandberg creates subtle yet transformative studies of stillness that radiate mystery. A perfectionist in the darkroom, Sandberg was acutely sensitive to the rich spectrum of black and white, and his handmade prints project a powerful physical presence. Tom Sandberg: Photographs is the first major publication dedicated to one of Norway’s most important photographers.

Graciela Iturbide on Dreams, Symbols, and Imagination

Known for her portraits and landscapes imbued with poetic ambiguity, Graciela Iturbide’s photographs employ a deeply personal vision, all while reflecting her subjects’ rich cultural backgrounds. In the latest volume of Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, Iturbide shares insights into her creative process and inspirations—discussing a wide range of issues from the importance of surprise, to recognizing what speaks to you as an artist, to capturing symbolism and meaning in the everyday.

American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams

For fifty years, Robert Adams has made compelling, provocative, and highly influential photographs that show us the wonder and fragility of the American landscape, its inherent beauty, and the inadequacy of our response to it. American Silence features over 175 works from Adams’s career photographing throughout Colorado, California, and Oregon—capturing suburban sprawl, strip malls, highways, homes, and the land. By examining the artist’s act of looking at the world around him, this volume showcases the almost palpable silence of his photographs.

Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015

The work of Judith Joy Ross marks a watershed in the lineage of the photographic portrait. Her pictures—unpretentious, quietly penetrating, startling in their transparency—consistently achieve the capacity to glimpse the past, present, and perhaps even the future of the individuals who stand before her lens. Adolescents swim at a local municipal park, ordinary people work and play—all are incisively rendered with equal tenderness in Ross’s black-and-white, large-format portraits. Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 is an illuminating retrospective that explores the life and career of a revered American photographer, illustrated by two hundred of her images, many never before seen or published.

Pioneering Visions

Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation

In June 2020, activists Qween Jean and Joela Rivera returned to the historic Stonewall Inn—site of the 1969 riots that launched the modern gay rights movement—where they initiated weekly actions known thereafter as the Stonewall Protests. Over the following year, the protests brought together thousands of people across communities and social movements to gather in solidarity, resistance, and communion. A powerful and celebratory visual record of New York City’s contemporary activist movement, Revolution Is Love gathers work by twenty-four photographers alongside texts by Qween Jean, Joela Rivera, Mikelle Street, and Raquel Willis—creating a moving testament to the enduring power of photography in activism, advocacy, and community.

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the ’50s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been underrecognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.

We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference

We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference offers an unparalleled firsthand account of the influential photographer and curator Sunil Gupta’s writing and critical inquiry since the 1970s. From writings on homosexuality in Indian cities, to the Black Arts Movement, to key figures such as Joy Gregory and Robert Mapplethorpe, Gupta foregrounds the power of cultural activism in the politically fraught contexts of London and Delhi—and illuminates the essential connections between queer migration and self-discovery. Continually questioning given forms of identity, Gupta offers artists and curators multiple strategies of resistance, carving out space for new ways of imagining what it might mean to live, love, and create.

Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill

In his striking studio portraits, multimedia artist Shikeith envisions his Black male subjects as they inhabit various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. Brought together in the artist’s first monograph, Notes towards Becoming a Spill features seventy photographs alongside texts by Ashon T. Crawley. In this revelatory volume, Shikeith redefines the idea of sacred space and positions a queer ethic identified by its investment in vulnerability, tenderness, and joy.

Zora J Murff: True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)

Zora J Murff’s photographs construct an incisive, autobiographic retelling of the struggles and epiphanies of a young Black artist working to make space for himself and his community. Often contextualizing his own photographs with found or appropriated images alongside texts, Murff examines the act of remembering and politics of self. Nuanced, challenging, and inspiring, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) is a must-have monograph by a rising and standout artist.

For the Design Lover

Bettina

Bettina Grossman’s wildly interdisciplinary practice spanned photography, sculpture, textile, cinema, drawing, and more—and pushed the photographic medium to and beyond its limits. An eccentric personality fully dedicated to her art, Bettina lived in the famous Chelsea Hotel from 1968 until her death in late 2021. In her tiny studio, she produced and accumulated a considerable body of work, incorporating strategies of chance and the abstraction of everyday form through repetition and seriality. Until now, her work has remained largely unseen and unpublished—Bettina is the first monograph to showcase the work of his unsung artist.

Viviane Sassen: Venus & Mercury

In 2018, Viviane Sassen was invited by Versailles to make a series of photographs throughout its vast grounds. For six months, she was given free rein, often after official hours when the buildings were empty, to wander and photograph the palace’s extravagant gardens, gilded baroque interiors, and even Marie Antoinette’s private correspondence. Drawn to the bodies represented in the palace’s many marble statues, Sassen created hybrid forms that play with notions of sexuality and gender, calling to mind traditions of Surrealist art and the work of figures such as Hans Bellmer. Brought together in a new limited-edition book crafted by the iconic designer Irma Boom, Venus & Mercury offers a fresh vision of the storied palace—and all its beauty, melancholy, and intrigue.

David Benjamin Sherry: Pink Genesis

With his mesmerizing analog photograms, David Benjamin Sherry melds queer history, abstraction, and darkroom magic. Born out of what Sherry has called the “transformative potential of the darkroom,” each of his large-scale, cameraless color photograms are laboriously made by hand in the darkroom. Using cardboard masks to create geometric forms and incorporating his own body into the images, Sherry actively references histories of photography—while also thinking through the intersections of identity, form, and the hypnotic power of extreme color. Pink Genesis collects twenty-nine one-of-a-kind works that delight in the pleasures of form and color.

Children’s Activity and Educational Books

The Colors We Share by Angélica Dass

Inspired by her family tree, Angélica Dass—a Brazilian artist of African, European, and Native American descent—began creating portraits of people from all over the world against backgrounds that match their skin tones. Brought together in a book made for young readers, The Colors We Share celebrates the diverse beauty of human skin, while also considering concepts of race and the limited categories we use to describe each other.

Eyes Open: 23 Photography Projects for Curious Kids

Compiled by Susan Meiselas, Eyes Open is a sourcebook of photography ideas for kids to engage with the world through the camera. Broken into chapters ranging from “Alphabetography” to “Light,” “Movement,” “Neighborhood,” and more, each idea starts with a prompt, illustrated with pictures by students from around the world, and followed by the words and images of artists who share their ways of seeing. Playful and meaningful, this book is for young would-be photographers and those interested in expressing themselves creatively.

Seeing Things by Joel Meyerowitz

Seeing Things is a wonderful introduction to photography that asks how photographers transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Joel Meyerowitz introduces young readers to the power and magic of photography, exploring key concepts in the medium—from light and gesture to composition—through the work of famous photographers such as William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, and Martin Parr.

For the Collector

August Sander: People of the 20th Century

A landmark in the history of modern art, People of the 20th Century presents the fullest expression of August Sander’s lifelong work: a monumental endeavor to amass an archive of twentieth-century humanity through a cross-section of German culture. In the 1920s, Sander began to photograph subjects from all walks of life—documenting bankers and boxers, soldiers and circus performers, farmers and families. Sander’s photographs, remarkable for their unflinching realism, provide a powerful social mirror of Germany between the world wars. People of the 20th Century brings together this long out-of-print compendium in an all-in-one volume featuring over six hundred photographs in the more comprehensive iteration of Sander’s still-essential vision.

Aperture “70th Anniversary” Limited Editions: Iñaki Bonillas

For Aperture’s “70th Anniversary” issue, seven photographers were invited to consider a single issue, article, idea, or even omission, from a decade of the magazine’s history to create an original commission. Diving deep into Aperture’s first decade of publishing—the 1950s, an era before photography had cemented its status as an art form—Iñaki Bonillas was struck by how the magazine endeavored to make the case for the richness, complexity, and expressive possibilities of the medium. Bringing together iconic images and texts from the era, Bonillas created a series of narrative collages. This limited edition brings to life Bonilla’s “70th Anniversary” portfolio in a special accordion book format.

Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (Limited-Edition Box Set)

Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases in visually complex photographs 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 special limited-edition box set features a differentiated version of Cwynar’s debut monograph, Glass Life, accompanied by a signed print from the artist.

Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale for 30% off photobooks, magazines, and prints.

Are the Women Photographers of Magnum Getting “Close Enough”?

A girl stands grinning down at the camera, her lilac hijab lifted by the wind like a sail. There is a playful, daring expression on her out-of-focus face, both knowing and open to all that is not known. Faces framed by windows look out from the building behind her: expectant, joyous, watchful, solidary. In this fantasy of an all-girl world—not segregated, but sought out—one might be as free as the foregrounded girl looks, blurred with her own becoming.

Sabiha Çimen, A student who left school mid-term waits for her father to pick her up, Istanbul, Turkey, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Sabiha Çimen’s 2018 image of a girl after her midterm exams appears in Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum at the International Center for Photography (ICP), and it stayed with me long after leaving the exhibition, which opened in September of this year, the photography cooperative’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Magnum was cofounded in 1947 by photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger, and Robert Capa, who famously said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Three quarters of a century later, the collective is still often associated with the masculine milieu of its origins.

As early as 1999, efforts to complicate this perception launched with Magna Brava: Magnum’s Women Photographers, a catalog and exhibition organized by Eve Arnold, the first woman to become a full Magnum member in 1957. It also included the work of Martine Franck, Susan Meiselas, Inge Morath, and Marilyn Silverstone. In 2018, Meiselas organized the group exhibition Magna Brava Ongoing to showcase the photography of a new generation of Magnum women.

Alessandra Sanguinetti, The Necklace, from The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, 1999
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Others have recently called for institutional accountability against sexual harassment and abuse of power, or engaged critically with the collective’s history. Nadya Bair’s The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (2020) makes a case for the collaborative network of women—sales agents, writers, editors, publishers, and spouses—essential to the success and impact of the predominantly male collective. Two lesser-known cofounders of Magnum were, in fact, women: Rita Vandivert, the first president and head of the New York office, and Maria Eisner, head of the Paris office.

“I wish for a time when we no longer need to have this conversation,” Bieke Depoorter has said; her work is featured in both Close Enough and Ongoing. The ongoingness of the issue can indeed madden, and there is much to be seen beyond the binary. We are not yet at Depoorter’s wished-for time—certainly not in the US, as celebrities tell us “time’s up” just before abortion protections are lifted, and we are left to self-manage our own human rights.

Installation view of Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum, International Center for Photography, New York, 2022, with works by Myriam Boulos. Photograph by Scott Rudd Events

The twelve photographers “move and challenge the photography collective’s boundaries,” curator Charlotte Cotton writes in Close Enough’s introductory wall text, “deepening Magnum’s anchoring of the photographic quest to take account of human experience and survival. In uniquely personal ways, the contributing photographers negotiate gaining access, holding their bearings, and moving deeper in relation to human subjects and experiences.” Access, bearing, relation, and humanity being the language of reproductive rights as much as the photographic quest, I noted as I entered the show how my view might be colored by our particular national horrors, though the majority of images were taken outside the US. Close Enough manages to keep in focus a complex contemporary global web while individual works pulse with intimacy; that the photographers are women is both palpable and insignificant.

In the first room, scenes of girlhood stir. Çimen’s series Hafız (2017–20), the title meaning someone who has memorized the Koran, grows out of the artist’s drive to seek her younger self at a Turkish Koran school like the one she once attended. “I was struck by the girls who didn’t seem to care about how they looked in comparison to the so-called beauty standards set by social media,” Çimen writes, remarking on their “agency” and “resolute rebelliousness” in first person wall text (which accompanies each photographer’s work). Electric-pink smoke plumes before three girls all in black, powerful and partially obscured, like sorcerers. One girl with disarming eyes and cheeks pocked with acne scars brings fingers with chipped nail polish delicately to her forehead; another, flipping her eyelids inside-out with curled fingers, is vampiric in chiaroscuro.  

Newsha Tavakolian, Still from For the Sake of Calmness, 2020
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Nearby is Newsha Tavakolian’s film For the Sake of Calmness (2020), a strange and wonderful meditation on premenstrual syndrome and Iran’s highest volcanic peak. Tavakolian explains the analogy between the discomfiting porousness PMS creates between one’s body and the world, and the state of a country and a volcano—inactive, but always with the potential to erupt. Alessandra Sanguinetti’s images of her “long-term collaborators” Guille and Belinda, whom she’s photographed from ages nine to thirty-three, in rural Argentina, are time capsules full of personality, together a study in time’s passage.

Olivia Arthur’s installation of black-and-white photographs from 2016 to 2022 shows a world where gender can be fluid or queer, where sexuality, technology, intimacy or a lack thereof, and all the strangeness of having a body is taken head-on in a sculptural hodge-podge—what the artist calls a “mind map.” Myriam Boulos’s photographs taken between 2012 and 2022, including around Lebanon’s 2019 revolution, are a vivid punk-rock tapestry, a reclamation of “our streets and our bodies … and stories,” as Boulos puts it, where tongues meet in close-up, tattoos mingle with blood, and queer intimacy is luminous.

Carolyn Drake, Jackie and Leah, from Knit Club, 2018

© the artist/Magnum Photos Olivia Arthur, Thea’s Double Tooth, 2022

© the artist/Magnum Photos

Carolyn Drake’s Knit Club (2012–20), a collaboration with Mississippi women to explore questions of “womanhood and motherhood” and possibility beyond “the control of the patriarchal system,” calls for close inspection. A wood-framed arrangement of images resembling a religious mantel hangs across from Arthur’s installation. It is a beautiful world these women create, but not one without darkness. A woman with a papier-mâché face holds a turned-away child; a haunting figure in a pink nightie and eagle head brings to mind a Hafız girl wearing a gorilla mask, grasping a friend’s chin, playing with threat.

Hannah Price trains her lens on the men of Philadelphia in her series The City of Brotherly Love (2009–12). “As I commuted to and from work, up to five times a day I’d be thrown off guard by a man catcalling in my direction,” Price writes. “The fact that I responded at all was a surprise to them, and I’d turn the conversation away from attraction and ask if I could photograph them.” Perhaps it is surprise that renders the faces of these men notably open. Some seem shy or defensive, others humorous or inquisitive, as if trying to assert something but aware of a shifted dynamic; now they are seen. And to some, perhaps, it is an interesting proposition.

Hannah Price, Everyday After Work, West Philly, from City of Brotherly Love, 2010
© the artist

As I moved upstairs, I considered what subtle play with power and the lens can reveal. Over the last near decade, ICP has largely worked with curators in residence rather than staffing curators. The prolific writer and curator Charlotte Cotton is one such resident, as is Cynthia Young, who curated the other show now on view: a detailed account of Robert Capa’s 1938 Spanish Civil War photobook, Death in the Making. (ICP was originally founded by Capa’s brother, Magnum member Cornell Capa, in 1974; Mark Lubell, formerly the New York head of Magnum, was director from 2013–21.)

Close Enough manages to keep in focus a complex contemporary global web while individual works pulse with intimacy; that the photographers are women is both palpable and insignificant.

As Magnum has opened itself over the years to a wider range of photography, the number of women in its roster has increased. Yet, today, of the ninety-eight members, only sixteen are women—to say nothing of race. (Two former women members have resigned; others have not proceeded through the stages of what the collective calls a “rigorous process” to attain full membership.) Price, whose Brotherly Love series is on view at ICP, is in fact no longer with Magnum. That Close Enough includes the work of exciting, young, international photographers may seem a return to ICP’s tradition of innovative and globally diverse triennials. Or, yet another Magnum show may signal a lack of vision, or a bid for positive PR for the collective.

Gender inequality is particularly notorious in photography; it also pervades the world. The premise of Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum and the title’s accidental implication—here, Capa’s challenge that photographers get “close enough” sounds more like shrugged-off defeat—tells of how far not only Magnum but many storied institutions are from practicing what they preach in support of “new perspectives.”

Cristina de Middel, Adeshina, 25 years, Lagos, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Upstairs, in a darkly lit space, Bieke Depoorter and Cristina de Middel share a wall, their images, which both deal with sex work, displayed back-to-back. Depoorter’s photos, videos, and letters document her multiyear collaboration with Agata Kay, whose presence is captivating. Depoorter’s moving images—of Kay dancing, alone and with a client; of the two women singing together on a roadside—hold heat. In a 2019 missive to her collaborator, Depoorter interrogates the boundaries of their relationship, noting her confusion and admitting, in another letter, to not selecting the images “where I seem drunk . . . where we kissed . . . I performed too.” Agata writes, “Maybe you look for yourself while looking for me.”

The ninety-nine photographs and testimonials of men and one woman who responded to de Middel’s open call for clients of sex workers—from Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Mexico City, Paris, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Lagos, Kabul, Amsterdam, and Mumbai, between 2015 and 2022—overwhelm the wall with their sheer volume and the power of their exposure. In her own text, de Middel describes her aims as a witness, but also her experience as a woman and survivor of sexual abuse.

Nanna Heitmann, Police man at a pro-Novalny Protest, 2022
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Displayed on either hallway, stretching out like balconies over the main exhibition floor, are photos by Nanna Heitmann and Lua Ribeira. Heitmann traces the escalating Russian invasion of Ukraine, centering Russian television propaganda and witnessing the last public protests in Moscow in February 2022; the vacant blue eye of one Russian policeman pierces, visible through a hole in his protective head gear. Ribeira’s stark, sun-soaked portraits picture young people in the trap and drill music scene “across the Spanish territory,” which she herself is close to and believes is “resonating globally for a reason.”

Lua Ribeira, Almeria, Spain, from Agony in the Garden, 2021
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Finally, Meiselas’s A Room of Their Own (2015–16) fills ICP’s two-story wall near windows overlooking Essex Street. It is a collaborative work comprised of photographs and video from shelters, as well as testimonies and artwork by survivors of domestic abuse in the UK. The odd, inventive arrangement of images throughout the show—some on folding screens or accordions, some displayed architecturally, and including that two-story wall—must speak to the particular ways the artists want their work seen. However, it could feel a bit needlessly slick, even obscuring, to have to angle for a view; perhaps that is in part the point.

What clearly unites Close Enough is a sense of intimacy between photographer and subject so strong that the distinction doesn’t hold. There is an investment in understanding the other—imperfectly, messily—through the act of seeing, and a thrust to know the self through this same process. It is exhilarating to behold this bravery and purpose work themselves through very different lenses.

Installation view of Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum, International Centre for Photography, New York, 2022, with works by Susan Meiselas. Photograph by Scott Rudd Events

While institutions have learned what to say, how to champion diversity for their own public image without undertaking the actual demands of structural change, there are also real people working for real change from within and beyond these same institutions—often enough women, gender nonconforming people, and people of color. And despite the structural issues, many who are celebrated as examples of institutional progress do produce work that deserves recognition. How we may wish to no longer have these same conversations!

“I feel that the focus should be the links between our work, more than us being women,” Depoorter said of Ongoing. “I think it’s obvious that it’s about much more than that in the show.” I left Close Enough thinking the same. Like in Çimen’s photographs, an all-girl world might be sought—not to prove a point for someone else’s benefit or because that is all there is to see, but because of what we may discover there.

Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum is on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through January 9, 2023.

Barry McGee’s Anarchic Snapshot Vision

Spontaneous, raw, intimate, and anarchic, the photographs of Barry McGee are as fundamental to his artistic vision as the graphic paintings, drawings, zines, and installations for which he is so well known. Until now, the focus has typically been on the relationship of McGee’s art to graffiti, but here we acknowledge the significance of his photographed world: his family, the communities he engages with in the daytime, as well as the makers of marks often left at night. This presentation of the artist’s decades-long photography practice concerns the whole artist. It also considers more formal concerns, inviting us to see this iconic artist’s vision from a different, and arguably more complete, perspective.

Born in 1966, McGee was raised in San Francisco. Coming of age in the 1980s, during the Reagan years, he was interested in surfing and cars. He was also drawn to radical politics and inspired by the constantly vibrant subcultures of the city. He followed activists who expressed outrage at the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America and opposed corporate advertising targeted at the poor and disadvantaged. Venturing out each night to write, he blanketed bus stops, billboards, walls, and trains with his graffiti. After completing his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, he expanded his practice, finding an audience in the institutional spaces of galleries and, soon after, museums. While he is acknowledged as a key figure of the Mission School in San Francisco, McGee has always insisted on the broader social relevance of his artwork.

McGee makes photographs to remember; these are snapshots for private delectation. His cameras are nothing fancy—just point-and-shoots—first film, then digital. Now, he mostly uses his cell phone. While the pictures can, at a glance, seem arbitrary and generic, that is in fact their appeal. In the context of McGee’s whole practice, they assume a particular authority.

These images share his story. They show us his family, his friends, his art, and his realm. Some of the pictures early in the sequence were made by others—mostly family members and friends—and appropriated by McGee. It starts with his family on the California beach, his mother, friends in the car world, surfer pals, and fellow taggers. One central, early photograph shows him as a child on an imposing three-wheeler, which he constructed with his dad and brother. It’s a one-of-a-kind instrument that fashioned a special relationship between him and his father, a high-end mechanic who customized and repaired old cars.

Beyond the intermittent appearances of cars in McGee’s images, a montage of early black-and-white photos of cars from the late 1950s—wherein McGee focuses as much on the vehicles’ exaggerated tail fins as on the people inside and around them—suggests that car culture, though peripheral to his best- known work, has been central to McGee. Along with the cars, there is McGee’s commitment to surfing, which, for many practitioners, is often a solitary endeavor. But here as well he’s part of a group, their surfboards hauled in a trailer, stacked in the back of a van, and displayed upside down in full sunlight so we can see their wonderfully maimed and deformed scars.

Before all else, tagging—monikers thrown up on a wall for all to see—is what McGee is excited about, and what he is known for. We see taggers in the street, scaling fences, bending saplings out of their way, and variously contorting to reach walls. There are pictures that preserve their effort, showing them posing with their handiwork, or out in the city wielding a spray can in each hand. A picture of someone working inside of what may be a deserted bunker gives us brief access to one of the many ingenious places they manage to break, climb, or crawl into. From spontaneous tags to highly ambitious, enormous pieces, each of these photographs marks a memory and preserves a moment for later reference or appropriation into McGee’s installations.

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Some pictures describe a community, yet we see mostly solitary individuals. The photographs record conspiratorial energy and daring acts: spraying a truck, climbing over each other to mark a wall, working on a mural in a remote space. There is a delicacy to these exchanges, and a bravery that is exciting and important to McGee.

Tags are an assertion of a community not usually acknowledged, and rarely seen. And the marks are amazing. A cluster of McGee’s familiar drawn heads appears opposite a watchful face, crowned with a starry hat. There is a huge head, a masterwork drawn in black spray, eyes alert and brow furrowed, neither startled nor fearful but amazingly alive. What gradually emerges are recurrent, straight-on pictures of decay and of things painted out—messages, drawings, other graffiti—or of detritus so transformed that we can barely read them. Some are signed “Twist,” McGee’s nom de plume. In others, there is a beauty so ravishing as to resemble Agnes Martin’s Minimalist paintings or the abstract geometries of Ad Reinhardt.

These pictures urge the imperative of looking at and accepting what the street reveals. There is plenty of humor, yet also pathos, even tragedy, and a sympathy for the thrown-away, the cast-off, the junked. A heap of scraps is captured bathed in vigorous, beautiful sunlight. Potent messages sprayed on fences and walls preach: “Living well may be the best revenge but just surviving sure pisses some people off…” Others, in their anonymity and simplicity, can terrify: “BLOOD,” and elsewhere, “DEATH.” McGee has an eye for the resonance of anonymously made art. Even in pictures of obliterated tags and painted-out walls, he recognizes and celebrates their role as minimalist, elegant cancellations.

All photographs Barry McGee, untitled, from Barry McGee: Reproduction (Aperture, 2022)
Courtesy the artist

Trash is noticeable everywhere in McGee’s world, growing and accumulating, and finally, in the last pages of Reproduction eliding with the hulking objects that he has created for museum presentation. The “boils,” as he has named these strange forms, seem to grow from the walls they are attached to. They are shown to be fragile, awkward, and vulnerable, patched together with sheets of the artist’s geometric abstractions, his drawings, and found objects. While they acknowledge the rot that gave birth to their strange, singular form, they are refined and personal concretions imbued with the inimitable hand of this unique craftsman. The bulbous objects lean into our space, each a completely unique and alluring growth representing McGee’s particular take on the meeting of art and life.

This essay originally appeared in Barry McGee: Reproduction (Aperture, 2022)

Announcing the Winners of the 2022 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture are pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards on the tenth anniversary of the awards. From the thirty-five shortlisted titles, a final jury in Paris selected this year’s winners in three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year. The jury included Sunil Gupta, photographer and author; Anne Lacoste, director of the Institut pour la Photographie, Lille, France; Alain Quemin, professor of sociology of art at Université Paris-8 / Institut d’Etudes Européennes; Holly Roussell, independent curator and art historian; and Pauline Vermare, independent curator, writer, and historian.

All shortlisted and winning titles will be profiled in a printed catalogue, to be released and distributed for free during Paris Photo, along with the Winter 2022 issue of Aperture magazine. As well, an exhibition of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2022 PhotoBook Awards is currently on view at Paris Photo and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City this January 2023.

Below, read about this year’s winning titles.

Photography Catalogue of the Year

Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970
Makeda Best
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The reconsideration of photographic landscape traditions has been a major area of scholarship in the last few years. In Devour the Land, Harvard Art Museums curator Makeda Best continues this vital effort by bringing together sixty contemporary artists who explore the intersection of environmental degradation, environmental activism, and the military-industrial complex as a cornerstone of their work. In-depth analyses by Best and a host of other essayists introduce each of the six thematic chapters, offering context for the following suites of work, each by a wide-ranging, intergenerational set of artists. The book also includes insightful interviews with key photographers that appear on short-trimmed and multicolor pages, further helping to guide the reader through each section. “Devour the Land is designed like a manual: a spiral-bound paperback that comes off initially as a somewhat provisional form,” observes juror Lesley Martin, “but that feeling is quickly allayed by the depth and criticality of the content—it’s a brilliant, loose form that gives the reader easy access to the complex and compelling layers of information within.”

Per Brandin, Brookhaven National Lab, Control Room, Nuclear Reactor, from Long Island Project, 1979
Sim Chi Yin, Mountain range surrounding the Nevada Test Site, November 2017

First PhotoBook

Sabiha Çimen
HAFIZ
Red Hook Editions, New York

Sabiha Çimen’s HAFIZ (named for a term of respect for a Muslim who knows the Koran by heart) offers a rare glimpse into the world of Turkish schools for girls that focus on the study of the Koran. This playfully inviting book is beautifully bound in a unique pastel-pink case inscribed with a decorative motif that features tiny, lyrical illustrations of young girls in hijabs. The design, which is meant to echo that of a Koran, is a nod to the content at hand. Thoughtful touches like the exposed-spine binding and marbleized endpapers made by Turkish artists lend this book an almost magical quality and complement the moving array of square-format photographs inside. The images are quiet yet graphically arresting, including keenly observed details of birthday parties, girls at play, and dreamy color-saturated portraits of the students. Miwa Susuda notes that the overall impact of the book, which includes the photographer’s personal narrative of her experiences of attending a Koran school, is to “make this rarely depicted community feel very contemporary.” As she observes, “Çimen documents this world with fresh eyes and challenges our expectations about this community.”

Sabiha Çimen, A classroom decorated for graduating students, Istanbul, 2017, HAFIZ Sabiha Çimen, A plane flies low over students at an amusement park, Istanbul, 2018, from HAFIZ

PhotoBook of the Year

Mohamed Bourouissa
Périphérique
Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Périphérique presents the entirety of Mohamed Bourouissa’s long-term series of the same name, in which he staged photographs set in the Parisian suburbs that have increasingly become home to large immigrant communities. The book uses multiple paper stocks to denote different aspects of Bourouissa’s creative process: numerous preparatory images at the beginning and end are printed on lighter stock, while heftier gatefolds cleverly expand the narrative of more complex images in the middle. These design choices expertly steer the reader to look more carefully at the intercepting gazes and carefully considered body language of his subjects. Juror Miwa Susuda notes the effective seriality that results from how the images have been arranged: “As a book, this work becomes one unified chapter—a coherent story from beginning to end. Bourouissa is a great storyteller, using staged photography to question the larger issues around the media representation of immigrants.” Périphérique leaves readers questioning the potential fallacies of a photograph and the complexity of how the image can shape and influence perceptions.

Mohamed Bourouissa, Le téléphone, 2006 Mohamed Bourouissa, La butte, 2007

Jurors’ Special Mention

Tokuko Ushioda
My Husband
torch press, Tokyo

For many Western readers, this two-volume set will be an overdue introduction to this important Japanese artist’s work. The two books, bound together lightly by a Japanese-style bellyband, are simply but delicately designed, and beautifully reproduced in lush duotone. One of the volumes is encased in a powder-pink cloth and features Ushioda’s black-and-white photographs of her husband, the photographer Shinzo Shimao; their son; and the interior of their densely packed apartment. The second softcover book includes the same subjects, with occasional forays outside, and contains work made with a 35mm camera. The artist’s gaze is both tender and unsparing, coolly inventorying the domestic space. Towels hang over lamps to dry, and stacks of newspapers pile behind an open umbrella; tea kettles and tiny socks fill in as critical details that richly describe this shared space and the lives within. The work is introduced and contextualized by two thoroughly engaging essays, one by historian Yuri Mitsuda, and the other by author and artist Yurie Nagashima. “It’s such an enticing book,” notes Martin, “an invaluable and compelling contribution to a greater understanding of Ushioda’s work.”

Tokuko Ushioda from My Husband (torch press, 2022)

An exhibition of the 2022 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist will be on view at Paris Photo through November 13, and then on view at Printed Matter, New York, in January 2023.

Tom Sandberg’s Elusive Photographs Show Mysteries in Plain Sight

In Japan, where I’ve made my home for thirty-three years, I often see people bowing to a telephone as they speak into the receiver. Ceremonies are held in temples every year for sewing needles that have given themselves up to make a kimono. My Japanese wife, while growing up in Kyoto, was taught to apologize to a table if she kicked it in a fit of six-year-old pique. Nothing, in short, is unworthy of the humbled reverence we call attention. Objects have lives, and the divisions we draw between animate and inanimate are a human-made creation; that’s one reason why the moon in Japan is offered the same honorific suffix as the emperor.

Much of that spirit comes back to me whenever I spend time with the work of Tom Sandberg. The Norwegian who pioneered photography in Scandinavia was always, it seems, training his lens on the objects that we overlook: Not the people enjoying lunch, but the paper bag beside them, so vivid we can almost hear it crinkle. Not a jet cutting through the heavens, but the emptiness that surrounds it. There are vehicles—cars, planes, and buses—in much of his work, and yet the images are about movement of a subtler kind: misty and precise as smoke rising from a stick of incense, they focus not on the cars outside but on the way a wind stirs a filmy curtain and, maybe in so doing, stirs us.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2007Tom Sandberg, Untitled, ca. 1994

This mix of specificity and absence is deepened by the fact that, though he was granted the honor of a solo show at New York’s MoMA PS1 in 2007, Sandberg liked to call his younger self a “small gangster from Norway.” In video interviews, I see a grizzled, watchful figure, contained and serene in the snow as he waits to find images with his predigital Pentax.

He organized happenings on the Oslo music scene and, in his youth, chose to sustain himself on donations of food from friends who worked in restaurants. In the early 1970s, he earned money as an assistant dogcatcher and loading frozen pig carcasses onto trucks. At that same time—photography not being regarded as much of an art in Norway—he began studying the craft at Trent Polytechnic in England, where he encountered an old master who produced large-scale black-and-white analog evocations of light, Minor White.

Much like his mentor, Sandberg grew fluent in the art of suggestion. His pieces are mostly untitled. They sit calmly in the midst of all they do not disclose. Thus, very often, they take us beyond the eye to somewhere deeper inside. I don’t know what to make of the reflections of all those faces in a bus, and when I look at his clouds swirling against blackness, smoke gets in my eyes. As with classic pen-and-ink drawings, these images invite us to complete the picture ourselves—or perhaps they simply ask us to live uncomplainingly with what we cannot hope to fathom. Everywhere in the world we take for granted, Sandberg might be pointing out, are enigmas as open as that paper bag. “I photograph just about everything,” he told the BBC in 2006. He even took his camera with him when he went shopping.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2006Tom Sandberg, Untitled, ca. 1999

Photography, he also said, is “a complex dialogue between shades of gray.” He labored long and hard, or more than forty years, to find a thousand shades of “gray and matte,” working with the same type of film and developer throughout. In the process, he often gave us a universe in which there seems to be no color at all.

Or, phrased more precisely, he appeared to be listening, with all his being, to a universe that at moments offers us the silent treatment and at other moments speaks in whispers, in spectral trails of smoke, or murmurs through faces barely discernible in the rain. Some of his blacks are so inky they seem as if they were shouts—“Keep out!” Elsewhere, we lose all orientation in fields of silver and a whiter shade of pale.

Sandberg offers us attention so scorched of excess—and of explanation—that it comes to us as a secular prayer.

This dogged, undeviating artist—the son of a photojournalist—might, in fact, be trying to release us not just from the simplicities of black and white but from the black-and-white way in which we too readily strive to tame the universe. His work is about emotion, but the kind that cannot be pushed into any pigeonhole (or reduced to words). Sandberg was the first photographer to buy a house in the artists’ colony set up on Edvard Munch’s old estate outside Oslo. When he bought his first medium-format camera, he told a visitor there, “I started dreaming in six-by-seven.” That same visitor described the studio as “a white forest of rolls of large prints from the Picto lab in Paris.”

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2006Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2004

There’s something of an alien’s gaze in much of the work; this is how a brother from another planet might apprehend a hand, a child’s pigtails, a pair of sunglasses. When we do see figures in a landscape, they’re nearly always alone, small, against a backdrop of machines and high buildings: a classic vision of alienation. You don’t have to observe Sandberg’s work for long before noticing how still lifes, through his eye, are gnarly with texture and rhyming patterns. Yet the human body—in his nudes or portraits of babies—comes to seem just a shape, a cluster of tubes. Naked bodies are the opposite of erotic here.

What all this means is that he moves us to respond to photographs differently from how we usually might, which is why I write of listening as much as seeing: when I look at his airplane on an icy day, I can feel the slippery ground under my feet and the hard flakes of snow in my face more than I can make out anything visually. With his persistent images of clouds and smoke, it is the same: they’re not something just to be seen but rather to be reflected on. Sandberg can find what looks to be a giant lizard in the harsh terrain of a mountainside; he can give us pure canvases of light akin to a Mark Rothko work or a James Turrell Skyspace. In one of my favorite images here, we get not just the heavenly geometry of an illuminated tunnel, but a question: how much is this Nature’s work, and how much humans’?

Tom Sandberg, John Cage, 1985

There’s something close to religious about this ghostly work, even though the clouds he presents are seldom celestial or shot through with heavenly rays. At heart, he’s giving us not just the world but all that cannot be shown and can never be seen. We hover between the earthly and something else. In that regard, it is surely no surprise that one of his great portraits is of a haunted, visionary John Cage, the man who wrote the book on silence and reminded us, in works such as 4’33”, that what the artist offers us is not the whole picture; his collaborator is circumstance.

Cage was a great believer in randomness and in the way that everything around us can, if seen or heard in the right way, be taken as a work of art. We don’t need to rely on simple distinctions between what is interesting or beautiful or important and what is not. It is the eye—of audience as much as artist—that makes a picture and, in so doing, makes the world.

Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2010Tom Sandberg, Untitled, 2007
All photographs from Tom Sandberg: Photographs (Aperture, 2022). Courtesy Tom Sandberg Foundation

Of another caretaker of mysteries, Cage once told an interviewer, “As the words become shorter, Thoreau’s own experiences become more and more transparent. They are no longer his experiences. It is experience. And his work improves to the extent that he disappears. He no longer speaks, he no longer writes; he lets things speak and write as they are.” That chimes beautifully with what I find in Sandberg’s disappearances. Nothing comes between us and what we’re seeing. We’re getting reality—or mystery—unmediated. Or so, at least, he makes me feel.

The more I look at Sandberg’s work, in fact, the more I find myself disappearing, too, into the resistant images he shares with us, lost amid those cityscapes where humans seem tiny to the point of insignificance. And the longer I inhabit his eerily alive abstracts, the more I come back to some of Cage’s meticulously inexplicit koans: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” And “Is there such a thing as silence?”

“Beauty is now underfoot,” Cage also wrote, of his friend Robert Rauschenberg, “wherever we take the trouble to look.” That could be the perfect epigraph for this book. Sandberg himself once quoted Rauschenberg: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I’ll get there on time.” Some of Sandberg’s images are so distinct, we can’t look away from them; others are so elusive, we look and look and still don’t know what we’re seeing. In all his work, Sandberg, who died at sixty, fourteen years into the new millennium, offers us attention so scorched of excess—and of explanation—that it comes to us as a secular prayer.

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This essay originally appeared in Tom Sandberg: Photographs (Aperture, 2022).

August Sander and the Disquieting Facts of Modern Life

New Objectivity—in German Neue Sachlichkeit, a word which also connotes “fact”—was used by the curator G. F. Hartlaub in a 1925 exhibition at the Mannheim Kunsthalle to define a generation of painters who came after Expressionism. It described artists who shared a keen interest in realist representations of modern life, which at times resembled a form of reportage. These artists produced portraits of urban bohemians and professionals, like Otto Dix’s Portrait of Writer Max Hermann-Neiße (1925), still life paintings, such as Rudolph Dischinger’s Grammaphone (1930), or political or social satires. A recent exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, entitled Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, attempted to explore how artists produced new forms of culture that reflected the massive changes of an unstable era. These artists, however, did not necessarily share ideology or politics. Some veered left, others right. “Objectivity,” it seems, had more than one side.

August Sander, Workmen in the Ruhr Region, ca. 1928, from August Sander: People of the 20th Century (Aperture, 2022)

Curated by Angela Lampe and Florian Ebner, this compelling exhibition placed New Objectivity within larger aesthetic and social contexts of 1920s Germany. There were standard examples of neue sachlichkeit paintings, like those from Hartlaud’s exhibition of Georg Grosz, Dix, Max Beckmann, and Alexander Kanoldt, as well as other artists who later became associated with the term like Walter Schulz-Matan, whose fascinating painting The Faience Collector (1927) portrays a seated man obscured by his own earthenware. Organized into eleven thematic groupings (Rationality, Utility, Montage, and Standardization, for instance), the exhibition opens up to a variety of other aesthetic trends in Germany that have some relationship to New Objectivity. What, for example, is its relationship to Bauhaus design? Or how does the political and economic chaos of the twenties, as expressed in New Objectivity, tumble into the well-known horrors of the 1930s and 1940s? Facts, it turns out, are never simple.

August Sander, Usherettes, 1926–1932, from August Sander: People of the 20th Century (Aperture, 2022)
All Sander photographs © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne—August Sander Archiv, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

The exhibition title, with its slashes, is further telling of the curatorial method and aims, as it implies that the exhibition is split in a variety of different concerns that relate to one another. Those slashes also perhaps represent the shutter of a camera opening and closing: each a different perspective on the same reality, a series of snapshots of a chaotic period. That is particularly evident in the only name singled out in the title: although not in Hartlaub’s original exhibition—no photographers were—August Sander is often associated with New Objectivity, particularly through social connections to artists like Otto Dix (whom Sander photographed).

Installation view of Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2022, with works by Otto Dix
Photograph by Bertrand Prevost

A massive presentation of Sander’s prints cuts through the exhibition, a sort of exhibition-within-an-exhibition. Around 1920, Sander started a project titled People of the Twentieth Century, a compendium of all types, kinds, and classes of people from the areas in and surrounding the Germany city of Cologne (a new edition of the compendium has recently been reissued by Schirmer/Mosel and Aperture). He organized it into seven main categories: Farmers, Skilled Tradesmen, Women, Classes and Professions, Artists, the City, and a final category the Last People, which included the transient populations, and even corpses. Sander’s pictures are blank, factual. They straddle a line between art and artlessness, between depiction and documentation. He captures his subjects—from bourgeois children to the homeless—with little room for ambiguity, or even aesthetic contemplation, either in situ or against neutral backdrops. They include disabled miners, the wives of architects, street musicians, unemployed men, bakers, and mixed-race circus performers. He is best known for portraits of labourers and of men in suits.

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“Work like Sander’s could overnight assume unlooked-for topicality,” writes Walter Benjamin. “Whether one is of the Left or the Right,” he continues, “one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance . . . Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.” Sander’s first publication, The Face of Our Time (1929), which was a selection from his larger ongoing project, was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1936. After being interrupted by the Third Reich, he continued his project for another twenty years.  

It is within the context of Sander’s work—its documentation of modernisation and urbanisation, its sociological aim of classifying people of all walks of life in a dignifying way—that the exhibition attempts to present the facts of German art in the 1920s. It does so by also including other artists, photographers, and designers. There are, for example, photographs by Albert Renger-Patz of industrial objects, often aestheticizing their formal qualities, including his canonical Glasses (1926–27), which is juxtaposed with a still life painting of the same subject (and year) by Hannah Höch. There is a section devoted to the industrial design and architecture of the era, from architectural photographs by Werne Mantz to a complete reconstruction of Maragrete Schütte-Lihotzky’s “Frankfurt Kitchen” (1926). Further images of Walter Gropius’s architecture, as well as Marcel Breuer chairs, are also displayed, filling out the kind of radical experiments in modern life that are often associated with the Bauhaus. One of the final sections, “Transgressions,” focused on non-normative expressions of sexuality, from queer representations, such as the lesbian cabaret images of Jeanne Mammen, to Otto Dix’s violent and misogynistic sexual fantasies. These are presented as the social and aesthetic “facts” of the era, though the exhibition spends less time on the conservative elements, the painters Hartlaub called “classicists.”

Installation view of Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2022
Photograph by Bertrand PrevostInstallation view of Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2022
Photograph by Bertrand Prevost

The emphasis in “Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander”— on the facts—on that somewhat untranslatable word sachlichkeit—indicates something that many of the cultural producers of the era were considering: how to build a new way of living based on what they saw around them. The exhibition suggests that artists, architects, designers, and photographers attempted to take the facts of their circumstances and produce something new from them. The problem, as Walter Benjamin wrote in an unfinished critique of New Objectivity, is, “that the fashionable appeal to ‘facts’ is a two-edged sword.” While the exhibition focuses on the twenties instead of forecasting the end of a story that we all know too well, it hints that certain ideas, within the hotbed of their cultivation, sprout in untended ways. And, thus, it becomes, for us in our contemporary moment, another form of “training manual,” to use Benjamin’s term for Sander.

Germany / the 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander was on view at the Pompidou Center, Paris, from May 11 through September 5, 2022.

At a Photography Festival in Houston, History Confronts the Present

On September 4, 1949, shortly after closing a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress near the upstate New York town of Peekskill, the singer and activist Paul Robeson was hustled into a car and told to lie on the floor, to protect himself against an assassination attempt. Anti-Communist rioters and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers had ambushed the departing audience, hurling rocks the size of tennis balls. Pete Seeger, who opened for Robeson with a new protest song called “If I Had a Hammer,” was in a car with his wife and two small children. The police stood by as a riot engulfed the country roads; the windows of Seeger’s car were shattered, and more than one hundred and forty people were injured. At home, Seeger washed the glass out of his children’s hair. In the 1950s, Robeson and Seeger were accused of Communism and blacklisted. “I remember a high-up official in the Communist Party,” Seeger recalled of the Communist writer V. J. Jerome. “He said, ‘Pete, don’t you realize this is the beginning of Fascism taking over in America? You know they have concentration camps for people like us already set up?’”

Dorothea Lange, Hayward, California – Two children of the Mochida family who, with their parents, are awaiting forced evacuation, 1942 Courtesy the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Seeger and Lee Hays’s song “If I Had a Hammer,” the rousing folk standard once seen as taboo socialist agitprop, was on the mind of Steven Evans, the executive director of FotoFest in Houston, when he and the curators Amy Sadao and Max Fields put together the 2022 edition of the organization’s biennial. Spanning photography, video, and lens-based art, and subjects with overlapping themes of social justice and civil rights—including the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the 1954 US-backed coup in Guatemala, the enduring surveillance state in Washington, DC, and the extraordinary rise of photo-sharing platforms—If I Had a Hammer, titled after the song and installed in Houston’s Silver Street Studios, exemplifies the hand-wringing mode of numerous exhibitions mounted in the wake of the Trump presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic. “If I had a hammer,” the lyrics go, “I’d hammer out a warning.” At FotoFest, there’s both sound and fury, and an urgent sense that we must interrogate history if we are to survive the present. 

Installation view of If I Had a Hammer, Houston, Texas, 2022, with works by Bruce Yonemoto (left) and Dorothea Lange (right). Photograph by Ryan Hawk
Courtesy FotoFest

The history lessons are robust. If I Had a Hammer opens with an enormous, wallpaper-style print of a Dorothea Lange photograph. Taken in Oakland in March 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it portrays a shop owned by a Japanese American who would later be forcibly relocated by the US military to an incarceration camp. “I AM AN AMERICAN,” a sign reads in the shop’s windows. (The majority of incarcerated Japanese Americans were born in the US and therefore citizens by birth.) After working for the Farm Security Administration to photograph the crisis of migrant workers during the Depression—Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) being her emblem of the era—Lange took up another government assignment when the US entered World War II. She documented Japanese American families preparing to leave Oakland and San Francisco, and, with instructions from the US War Relocation Authority not to show barbed wire and other unsettling details, she made photographs inside Manzanar, a prison camp in the California desert.

At FotoFest, there’s both sound and fury, and an urgent sense that we must interrogate history if we are to survive the present. 

Unlike her images from the 1930s, which were published widely at the time, Lange’s work for the WRA was not made public during the war. In 1942, she was discharged by the agency. Her photographs were accessioned by the National Archives in 1946 and digitized fifty years later; today they’re available to download from the National Archives Catalog. “I went through an experience I’ll never forget when I was working on it and learned a lot,” she wrote in 1943, in a letter to Ansel Adams, who photographed at Manzanar after Lange’s departure, “even if I accomplished nothing.” Yet, as If I Had a Hammer illustrates, Lange’s accomplishment is vivid on its own—the exhibition includes a generous number of new prints made from Library of Congress scans—and accrues dimension when viewed in conversation with Toyo Miyatake’s contrasting account of Manzanar. 

Toyo Miyatake, The boys behind barbed-wire fence cut through the semi-arid land and eyes of the National Guardsmen gleamed from the towers along the fence. From left: Norito Takamoto, Albert Masaichi, Hisashi Sansui, 1944
Courtesy Toyo Miyatake Studio

Miyatake, who was born in Japan in 1895 and ran a flourishing portrait studio in Los Angeles before the war, cleverly slipped parts into the camp to build a camera, which was banned. He made clandestine photographs until he was found out. Ralph Merritt, the camp’s director, later permitted Miyatake to set up frames himself, but the shutter release had to be pulled by a white person. (Eventually, this rule was dropped.) Miyatake’s photographs are both sober and shocking. One of the most famous, from 1944, portrays three boys with tragic expressions alongside a barbed wire fence, their searching looks conveying their state of anguished captivity. In the background looms a guard tower and snowcapped mountains. Did this scene really occur in the United States, home of the “free”? Or is this the most American of scenes, a visual metaphor for the paradox that “freedom” is balanced atop the pillars of incarceration, forced labor, and terror against the unfree?

Mike Osborne, Security Perimeter / H St NW, 2019, from the series Federal Triangle, 2019
Courtesy the artistBruce Yonemoto, Untitled (NSEW 4), 2007, from the series Untitled (NSEW)
Courtesy the artist

Evans notes that the dialogue between Lange and Miyatake forms the “emotional center” of the Biennial. Certainly, in light of the devastating child-separation policies at the Southern US border and the recent construction of tent camps for migrants sent to New York, Lange and Miyatake’s images feel as frighteningly relevant as ever. Between the presentation of their works, on opposite ends of an immense hallway, are numerous photographic statements that spin out themes of freedom, resistance, and political determination at varying frequencies. Bruce Yonemoto’s stately portrait series Untitled (NSEW) (2007) reimagines soldiers who served in the Civil War, with models of Asian descent posing in the style of nineteenth-century cartes de visite and dressed in costume uniforms originally used in D. W. Griffith’s notorious film Birth of a Nation. Mike Osborne’s Federal Triangle (2019–ongoing) profiles government institutions and street scenes in Washington, DC, with the sinister eye of a film-noir auteur. Keisha Scarville installed fabric prints that float from the ceiling and summon the darkness of the American landscape from the perspective of a fleeting Black female presence, blurring, as she says, “the specificity between the body and the terrain.”

Keisha Scarville, Untitled (Door), 2016, from the series Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows)
Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures Generation, New YorkInstallation view of Ryan Patrick Krueger, Yearbooks, 1953–1964, 2022. Photograph by Ryan Hawk
Courtesy FotoFestDavid Kelley, China-East Asia, Inner Mongolia, Group of People, Society, Adult, Adults Only, Aspirations, Beautiful People, Business, Colleague, Dancer, Employee, Fashion Model, Armed Forces, Happiness, Inner Mongolia, Manual Labor, Military, Mongolian Culture, Teamwork, Success, Togetherness, Men, Military, Women, Working, Young Women, 2020, from the series Rare Earth Image Bank
Courtesy the artist

Several of the most intriguing projects in If I Had a Hammer concern archives and preexisting images as the raw material for introspection. Ryan Patrick Krueger scoured eBay using search terms such as gay interest and male affection to assemble large collages that interrogate the queer vernacular imagery in the decades before Stonewall. Working in Mongolia, a global capital of mining for elements essential to the production of digital devices, David Kelley hired local actors and posed them for portraits in the style of commercial stock photography, then uploaded the final versions to iStock, adding search keywords in an ironic gesture of recirculation.

Fred Schmidt-Arenales, an artist in residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, tells a story about the 1954 coup in Guatemala, a political disaster engineered in part by the CIA and the United Fruit Company. Schmidt-Arenales’s grandfather was a correspondent in Guatemala for the New York Times and later a State Department diplomat. For his project The New York Times on Guatemala (2022), Schmidt-Arenales scanned articles from the newspaper that covered the coup and redacted certain texts and images. The thirty-nine framed prints, organized chronologically according to the article datelines, become an homage to Sarah Charlesworth’s Modern History series from the late 1970s. Schmidt-Arenales also invited four other artists, David Ramírez Cotón, Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Camilla Juárez, and Jorge de Léon, to make their own responses to his grandfather’s 1950s-era photographs. Among these, de Léon’s two-screen video, Untitled (image 4 and 17) (2022), of nine people (including a wry young boy) on a steep city street, clapping endlessly, is a charming and absurd vision—and one of the highlights of the exhibition.

Jorge de Léon in collaboration with Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Video still from Untitled (image 4 and 17), 2022, from the series Coup transcription
Courtesy the artistsLiz Rodda, Video still from Turn Your Face Toward the Sun, 2016, from the series Heat Loss. Found video, found audio, 5 minutes, 42 seconds
Courtesy the artist

The FotoFest Biennial, which extends across Houston in numerous galleries and museums, also includes a reinstallation of the 2020 edition, African Cosmologies, which was on view for only a few weeks before the pandemic forced institutions to close. The opportunity to see both biennials simultaneously provides a rare and kaleidoscopic platform for contemporary photography. Contributing to this is the experience of encountering emerging talent in the exhibition Ten by Ten, featuring artists selected from FotoFest’s portfolio review; Alejandro González, Will Harris, and C. Rose Smith make especially strong impressions. 

The complex, finely calibrated messages of If I Had a Hammer provoke difficult questions about what art can actually do for society beyond illustration. Against the edifice of power and corruption, would an artwork alter the course of history? Would a biennial change the mind of a staunch partisan? Amid the noise of political anxiety, Liz Rodda’s cryptic piece Turn Your Face Toward the Sun (2016), assembled from found video and audio, offers a critique of willful optimism. As a camera pans across magazine images of stilettos, parquet floors, handsome furniture, and well-placed art books, a young woman whispers what she calls “positives affirmations.” The sound is muffled, yet the clichés resound as commands. “Move on, it’s just a chapter in the past,” she says. “Don’t close the book, just turn the page.”

If I Had a Hammer, the FotoFest Biennial 2022, is on view at the Silver Street Studios and Winter Street Studios in Houston through November 6, 2022.

A Biennial in Cincinnati Pictures the Earth in Crisis

Water coursed through the opening weekend of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati, Ohio—visually and metaphorically. Established in 2012 as “a month-long celebration of photography, film, and lens-based art,” with dozens of exhibitions and events in Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, this is its first iteration since the pandemic. My visit started with a water-themed exhibition by Tony Oursler at Michael Lowe Gallery titled Crossing Neptune, which features dozens of works from the artist’s archive: photos, videos, objects, and three of Oursler’s video sculptures that together express the complex mythic, religious, elemental, and ecological aspects of H2O. The display is as generously haunting and witty as the chattering, animated objects for which the artist is known. With half of it occupying a subterranean gallery bathed in a soft blue light, the experience is immersive.

Unknown artist, Gulf Coast Community Unknown artist, Service Association volunteers sell water-filled shoe inserts, June 30, 1985
Collection of Tony Oursler

FotoFocus takes place at various venues and touched off with a two-day symposium at the beginning of October. The latter concluded with a keynote lecture by the filmmaker Jeff Orlowski-Yang, who spoke about his documentary Chasing Ice (2012), which follows a group of photographers who use groundbreaking time-lapse cameras to capture the speed and extent of melting glaciers due to climate change. It was a chilling presentation, especially when Orlowski-Yang showed horrifying yet sublime clips of skyscraper-sized ice blocks collapsing into the sea. The talk generated an incisive audience question: “I’m an artist, but after seeing what you’ve captured on film, it seems like nothing else matters. How can we go on making art?”

Mary Mattingly, Pull, 2013
Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

Many of FotoFocus’ exhibitions, panels, and artist talks tiptoed around that question, with works located between aesthetics and activism. The Biennial’s title, World Record, encompasses the dynamic, suggesting the buoyant popularity of the Guinness Book of Records while alluding to that term we’ve heard so often the last few years: unprecedented. During the weekend of the opening, Hurricane Ian was pummeling the southwest coast of Florida. With wind speeds placing it just shy of a Category 5 storm, it was one of strongest to strike the US.  Meanwhile, California’s water year, used to measure hydrologic records, concluded on September 30, and the state’s Department of Water Resources declared the drought from 2020 to 2022 “the driest three-year period on record.” Few of us would be surprised if these records break before the next Biennial.

Installation view of On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, 2022, with works by Mauro Restiffe Photograph by Wes Battoclette

This backdrop might suggest the Biennial would comprise a series of dour exhibitions, but FotoFocus exudes visual verve and curatorial energy. The Oursler show was a heady, intoxicating brew of pop-culture references and mysticism: the artist’s archive includes anonymous vintage photographs of hydrotherapy, mermaids in makeshift costumes, the Loch Ness monster, wishing wells, beached-whale carcasses, and historic floods. There is a vitrine holding ornate bottles of holy water. Kitsch mingles with metaphysics in a balance necessary to survive contemporary crises.

Paulo Nazareth, Untitled, from the series Notícias de América, 2011–12
Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo/Brussels/New York

Land and sea both figure in FotoFocus’ centerpiece exhibition, On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith at the Contemporary Arts Center. Curated by Harvard Art Museums photography curator Makeda Best and FotoFocus artistic director Kevin Moore—who also organized the Oursler show—On the Line uses the line as a metaphor for something that might be crossed, inviting us to assess risks and rewards both personally and politically. This approach offers plenty of opportunity to include works related to borders, including by An-My Lê, Paulo Nazareth, and Jim Goldberg. Borders are often conceptually liquid, as Dara Friedman makes plain in Government Cut Freestyle (1998), a silent 16 mm film of young people gleefully jumping into the ocean from a pier in Miami Beach. The exact location, identified on the wall label, is South Pointe Park, a spot home to the “government cut”: a manmade shipping channel.

Dara Friedman, Stills from Government Cut Freestyle, 1998. 16mm silent film loop, transferred to DVD, 9 minutes, 20 seconds
Courtesy the artist

During his symposium conversation with Best at Memorial Hall, on October 1, Moore acknowledged Friedman’s piece as a curatorial catalyst for the exhibition and noted its emphasis on human play and sociopolitical complexity. A similar performative precociousness is conveyed in the first works we encounter in the show: images documenting David Hammons and Dawoud Bey’s infamous Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), in which Hammons sells snowballs on a street corner, and Francis Alÿs pushing a hefty ice block through Mexico City in his equally famous Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing) (1997). These performative acts of futility reminded me of Orlowski-Yang’s lecture, in which he noted that in the face of collapse, you cannot sit complacently: doing something is an expression of hope.

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing), Mexico City, 1997. Video documentation of an action, 5 minutes
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Action is very much the operative word in the exhibition Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s, a compelling look at historical activism by queer and trans image-makers also on view at the Contemporary Arts Center. Curator Ariel Goldberg features six artists and group projects that are as much about forging community and disseminating important information as they are about making art, and as such offer a counter to our view of social media as a political catalyst, albeit an illusory one. Diana Solís’s photos form an archive of Chicana feminism in the 1970s; Lola Flash’s vibrant, unearthly color studies are rooted in club culture and AIDS activism; and The Dyke Show (1979) by JEB (Joan E. Biren) is an astounding compendium of lesbian imagery and ideas that the artist presented in person as a slideshow, at venues across the United States. The human connection attached to such projects, among others in the gallery, is important to reconsider in the age of facemasks, quarantine, and rising queer- and transphobia.

JEB (Joan E. Biren), Zap Action Brigade at July 1981 Senate Hearing on an Abortion Ban Bill (protestors, left to right: Sarah Schulman, Stephanie Roth, and Karen Zimmerman), 1981. Still from JEB’s slideshow performance Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–1984
Courtesy the artist

FotoFocus exists in this spirit of bringing people together to discuss the implications of images. I, for one, would not have experienced Orlovsky-Yang’s frightening and vital work about climate change had I not traveled to Cincinnati. Nor would I have heard him say that despite the enormity of the crisis, he still holds hope for change—and the ability of artists to depict and inspire it. 

World Record, the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, continues at various venues in Cincinnati, Ohio, through 2023.