Aperture's Blog, page 35

How Photographers in the 1970s Redefined the Medium

I was born in 1958, and now, all these donkey’s years later, am more conscious than ever of how my consciousness was shaped by the world as it existed before I became a part of it: by the England of just-passed austerity, of rationing (which only came to a complete end in Britain in 1954), of World War II, and, going further back, of my parents’ experiences of growing up in the 1930s. So? What on earth has that got to do with Aperture and photography?

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1975
© Eggleston Artistic Trust and courtesy David Zwirner

I became interested in photography in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and looking at these old issues of Aperture, I see how much my sense of photography was a direct consequence of what was happening before then, in the 1970s. Photographers were busy taking photographs, making work, but interesting photographs are always being taken, great work is always being made, whatever the decade. In the ’70s, though, photography was being examined and defined in a way that harked back to Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering inquiries into—and tireless lobbying on behalf of—the “idea photography” at the beginning of the century.

Books by Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Roland Barthes (whose Camera Lucida was published in French in 1980) were intended for the intellectually curious general reader rather than the specialist, and certainly not for practicing photographers. As Tod Papageorge later remarked, “Garry Winogrand never read Roland Barthes, and found whatever he’d seen of [Janet] Malcolm’s and Sontag’s original articles about photography in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books grimly laughable.” (How about photography curators? Well, there weren’t many back then, a point we’ll return to shortly.) These back issues of Aperture show the cultural texture and grain of the times, the work being done at the coal face of photographic life. As revealed in discussions and portfolios of documentary photography, color photography (as exemplified by William Eggleston), snapshot aesthetics, and so on, what we see, close-up and from a distance (of forty to fifty years), is a landscape of awareness.

William Gedney, Cornett Girls, Kentucky, 1964, from Aperture, Spring 1978
Courtesy the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

The Spring 1978 issue features a review of Mirrors and Windows, an exhibition organized by John Szarkowski, head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography. It was not until I went to the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University to work on William Gedney, in the mid-’90s, that I began to understand who—and how influential a figure—Szarkowski was. But I had been unconsciously in thrall to him before then. I think of my idea of photography as having been shaped by Berger and Sontag, but behind the scenes, it was Szarkowski who promoted certain photographers (including Gedney, for a while), and certain kinds of photography, at the expense of others. While Berger and Sontag were writing about the act of looking, they were also passive recipients of prior choices, or, as Marx famously put it, they did not make their choices “under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past.” The kind of photographs they were looking at had, to a large extent, been actively determined by Szarkowski. It was Szarkowski, more than anyone else, who had assembled the material or evidence on which crucial parts of their cases would rest. (Barthes was less susceptible.)

There was, of course, a certain amount of “conceptual” photography around in the ’70s, a somewhat redundant formulation since photography is such an interesting concept in itself.

Broadly speaking, and at the risk of relying on an instructively unsustainable distinction, Szarkowski favored photographers who saw themselves as photographers rather than as artists using a camera (to employ the currently preferred job description). The paradox, embodied by Eugène Atget, is that if they were artists, that was because of their single-minded dedication to photography.

Spread from Aperture, Fall 1974, with photographs by Garry Winogrand

There was, of course, a certain amount of “conceptual” photography around in the ’70s, a somewhat redundant formulation since photography is such an interesting concept in itself. Winogrand, ostensibly the least conceptual of photographers, showed enough philosophical nous to keep any seminar room awake—the best one can hope for in such airless environs when he said that if you photograph in Texas a lot then your pictures are going to look a lot like Texas. It was in the ’70s, also, that prints started to become valuable, an unexpected source of revenue for photographers and another factor in the tilt—steeper now than it’s ever been away from journalism or documentary and toward art. In this way, the ’70s point to the future, when Enrique Metinides’s pictures of car crashes and other catastrophic mishaps, originally taken to satisfy the sensational hunger of mass-market Mexican tabloids, would be shown in galleries for the more refined, scarcely less rapacious market of collectors’ homes. But the decade of the ’70s was also a time when there was a concerted looking back in the other direction: a strongly felt, vigorously articulated, carefully navigated exploration of tradition, not as mausoleum but in the process of constant formation.

Covers of Aperture from Summer 1975, with photograph by Helen Levitt, and Summer 1974, a monographic issue on Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Viewed in this light, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the subject of Aperture’s Summer 1974 issue, is an entirely distinctive figure, simultaneously pivotal and enduringly marginal. An optician by trade, Meatyard conducted experiments in seeing that were consistently at odds with any ideal of twenty-twenty vision. The lenses he prescribed—and dispensed in the form of prints—had the unusual and pleasantly disturbing effect of articulating a form of spooky night vision in the broad daylight of Kentucky. To us now, his work seems, in equal measure, haunted by future ghosts (Francesca Woodman’s, most obviously) and blurrily indebted to the interior metaphysics of Walker Evans: “It’s as though there’s a wonderful secret in a certain place and I can capture it,” Evans said. “Only I, at this moment, can capture it, and only this moment and only me.”

While Meatyard insists on being seen, quite literally, as an eccentric, Evans’s centrality in any account of American photography is indisputable. On the occasion of the photographer’s 1971 retrospective at MoMA, Szarkowski wrote that “Evans’ work is rooted in the photography of the earlier past, and constitutes a reaffirmation of what had been photography’s central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.” This statement has the force of an archaeological discovery, a Rosetta stone that was never hidden or lost, merely taken for granted and, thereby, easily overlooked. It is also a yardstick by which to assess what is going on in photography now. A single axiom can never be relied on to determine value in any medium, but Szarkowski’s has proved more reliable than anything else written about photography. It could help us today, saving a lot of time, sparing our eyes unnecessary exposure to all manner of visual froth and nonsense.

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” under the title “The Idea of Photography.”

“To Show Our World Now”: The Midcentury Photographers Who Balanced Reportage with Artistry

If the eye has a focal distance for any particular scene, might it also have a focal period, a time span in which an image can be apprehended in perfect focus? The idea occurs to me because of a possibility floated in the last Aperture of the 1960s, a monograph dedicated to W. Eugene Smith that gathers together his sublime expressionist images of atrocity, deprivation, and ordinary pleasure, from the invasion of Iwo Jima to Charlie Chaplin, Haiti, and the KKK.

Cover and spread of Aperture, Winter 1969, with photographs by W. Eugene Smith

In an afterword on Smith’s work, subtitled “Success or Failure: Art or History,” the critic, collector, and all-around polymath Lincoln Kirstein chews over the contested status of the photograph, coolly disparaging both its elevation to fetishized art object and its capacity for intercession in the realm of realpolitik. Nope and nope. A photograph can’t stop a war. The notion that war causes injury and horror is news to no one, from Homer on. The evidence a photograph brings home has long since been preceded by maimed veterans and body bags unloaded from military vessels. But one thing Kirstein thinks a photograph might do is address the future, specifically the new world order of the twenty-first century: “They may have their small if solid use by that world then to show our world now.”

Wynn Bullock, Woman and Thistle, 1953, from Aperture, Fall 1961
© Bullock Family Photography LLC

In the same essay, Kirstein says of the photographer, “His greatest service is the seizure of the metaphorical moment.” That’s a great, if weirdly organized, sentence. You might more typically be inclined to write it as verb, not noun: “to seize,” as in snatch or secure, rather than “the seizure,” which carries with it simultaneous meanings of possessing and going into spasm. Seizure is not so dissimilar to Roland Barthes’s punctum, with its suggestion of an image that arrests the heart.

Wynn Bullock, Burnt Chair, 1954, from Aperture, Fall 1961
© Bullock Family Photography LLC

I want to take Kirstein at his word, to see what the world of the ’60s looks like from the platform of now, seen by way of a few seizures of the metaphorical moment that caught my eye. Let’s start in Fall 1961, with a sequence by Wynn Bullock that seems, at first glance, concerned with natural surface textures, especially where they offer stark contrasts. Redwoods, abandoned cabins, a collapsing bank. The standout picture is of a burned chair against a burned wooden wall. It’s an account of aesthetic process, a fascinated investigation into the sheeny, scaly properties of charcoal. But hasn’t something unpleasant happened here, to folk unknown? One of the costs of seizing the metaphorical moment is that it necessitates severing the threads of narrative.

Bullock’s burnt chair exemplifies a tension that runs right through the ’60s issues, made under the ardent stewardship of Minor White, between what a photograph can be and what a photograph can show, which is to say the artistic impulse versus that of documentary. Take Bad Trouble over the Weekend (1964) by Dorothea Lange, from the Fall 1969 issue. The down-home phrasing serves as an additional button of veracity on this portrait of devastation, testimony to a dire sociopolitical situation. Yet the surfaces are as finely recorded as Bullock’s: knitted collar, worn wedding band, thin hair, thin hands covering the face, the black stub of a cigarette. It’s a Raymond Carver story condensed to a single frame, a universal semaphore for distress. And the cause of the trouble? Long gone, along with the subject’s name.

Ray K. Metzker, 58 EM-33, Chicago – Loop, 1958, from Aperture, Summer 1961
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Ray K. Metzker, whose sequence “My Camera and I in the Loop” appears in the Summer 1961 issue, is particularly articulate about the slippage between image and record. A choreography of solid bodies—cuffed/shirted/skirted/shod in white—emerges from slabs of urban dark, as theatrical in their composition as anything by Edward Hopper or Fritz Lang. Hardly reportage, except it is. “I began shooting,” Metzker explains, “in accord with my socioliteral viewpoint. The resulting pictures could not stand alone; they needed the propping of verbal explanation to exist.” Gradually, over the course of a painful winter, he saw that a photograph wasn’t anything save a “composition of light.” What it communicated or recorded was not as important to Metzker as the encounter between camera and eye: “To photograph is to be involved with form in its primal state.”

Even the most fantastical image betrays something about the world, not to mention about the person making it.

But is pure form any more attainable than pure reportage? Even the most fantastical image betrays something about the world, not to mention about the person making it. The Summer 1965 issue includes a series of dream scenes constructed by Edmund Teske. They’re layered, pictorial, artificial, melancholic, wistful, fey. Toward the end of the run, there’s a portrait of a man painting, his cold hawk’s face in profile. The eye travels down a lovely ogee: nape, shoulder, buttock. Something unsaid here, a secret pulse.

Spreads from Aperture: Summer 1965, with photographs by Edmund Teske

This curve reminds me of another story Kirstein told. His essay on Smith culminates with a little epilogue, the story of an anonymous journalist friend he calls Jerry. It’s 1942, and Jerry doesn’t want to be drafted. Finally, one hard-drinking night, he admits he’ll say he’s queer rather than risk being shot up. Kirstein needs to use the bathroom; Jerry doesn’t want to let him. When Kirstein does finally enter, he discovers the room is pasted floor to ceiling with Smith’s photographs of the Pacific landings, stolen from the Time magazine offices. Dead boys in Eden. “Did Jerry sit there and amuse himself by shots of Tarawa?” Kirstein wonders cruelly. “Now you know,” Jerry says as Kirstein reemerges. “I can’t take it. I’m scared. Did you see those pictures?” When Kirstein comments mockingly on their beautiful composition, poor Jerry cries out: “They’re real.”

I wonder, was Jerry a good reader of photography or not? He refused to accept the photograph as a composition of light. For him, it was a memo from the future: watch out. Everything extraneous had been scraped away, until there was just the moment, a seizure that could stop the heart. Who knows what the boys were called, or even what they’d done. It was the pictures that were real now.

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This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue,” under the title “Did You See Those Pictures?”

When the Party Came to Lagos

Marilyn Nance can’t find Stokely Carmichael. She is compiling a bibliography for her forthcoming book, Last Day in Lagos, which documents her time as a photographer at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, or FESTAC ’77, as it is popularly known. Nance has a lingering, unshakeable, urge to include a book by Carmichael. His life’s work “sprung from being a young intellect to a civil rights worker to a Pan-Africanist,” she told me recently. “My life, while much more humble, follows a similar trajectory.” The Pan-African revolutionary, later known as Kwame Ture, attended the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Panther Party also held court. Combing through photographic archives, books, and his own writings, Nance believes that the radical lover of Black music and culture should have been at FESTAC ’77. But it has never been easy to tell who was actually there, especially among revolutionaries always on the move.

Nance’s and Ture’s paths had crossed a couple of times before. The first time, in the late 1960s, Nance was a member of the Black Cultural Society at the Bronx High School of Science and the group invited Ture, an alumnus, to speak. The second time, about a decade later, was in West Virginia at the John Henry Memorial Blues and Gospel Jubilee. Then, there was an All-African People’s Revolutionary Party event at Syracuse University, in the late 1980s. “If our paths crossed three times, then, why not at FESTAC?” she asks.

Marilyn Nance, FESTAC ’77, 1977

Over fifteen thousand artists, dancers, actors, musicians, scholars, activists, photographers, filmmakers, and other cultural workers from the extended Black family came together for a month in 1977 for FESTAC. Officially, it sought to “provide a forum for the focusing of attention on the enormous richness and diversity of African contributions to world culture.” What makes one look back at FESTAC ’77 with wonder is the sense that it was an extraordinary representation of arrival—a high point of exchanges, conversations, and overtures Black people had been making with and toward each other in response to the historic rupture of slavery. As early as 1859, Black abolitionists such as Martin Delany were scoping out possible sites on the African continent for free Blacks to return to. In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois closed the first Pan-African Conference, held in London, by declaring “the color line” as the problem of the twentieth century. At the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists in Paris, Richard Wright declared that African Americans were in “the technological vanguard” among Black people and “would prove of inestimable value to the developing African sovereignties.” These initiatives pulled together the creative and political energies of Black people all over the world to harmonize efforts in a collective liberation. Ten years later, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and Alvin Ailey joined Wole Soyinka and Nelson Mandela at the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal.

FESTAC ’77 was bigger. Nance, who attended and photographed this historic event, describes it as the Olympics, a biennial, and Woodstock combined. Ebony magazine declared that “for the first time in 500 years, the black family was together again.” This was possibly the largest group of African American artists, over four hundred of them, to have traveled to the African continent together. Those on this “symbolic reversal of the transatlantic slave trade,” as Nance has described the 1977 moment, included Stevie Wonder, Jayne Cortez, Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Paule Marshall, and Jeff Donaldson.

Marilyn Nance, Miriam Makeba performing in Tafawa Balewa Square (one of many wardrobe changes), 1977

A photographer for the U.S. contingent, Nance made images of the great diversity of people at FESTAC. Getting there hadn’t been easy. In 1974, she submitted her portfolio to the festival organizers to participate as an artist, sending, among other things, a photograph of her grandmother sitting at a lunch table in Alabama. In 1975, Nance heard back that her work was accepted. But the next year, she was informed that the number of attendants from the United States—herself included—had been cut. Discovering that there was a need for a photo-technician, she made a case to be chosen, especially since the photograph of her grandmother had been lost by the organizers. Nance called the offices of the festival’s North American headquarters, housed in Howard University’s art department, every day until they relented. There was no pay, or camera, or film. Just a ticket on Capitol International Airlines to Lagos and back.

With a similar spirit of persistence, Nance stayed for the full length of the festival rather than the two weeks she was allotted by the organizers, allowing her to see and document it in a comprehensive way. The resulting photographic archive remains one of the largest visual records of this monumental occasion, where the poet Audre Lorde “felt the earth move.” A selection from Nance’s approximately 1,500 FESTAC images will be collected in Last Day in Lagos.

Marilyn Nance, David Stephens, Oghenero Akpomuje, Frank Smith, and Valerie Maynard at U.S. Ambassador’s reception for FESTAC artists, 1977

At FESTAC, Nance was less interested in the contentious academic arguments around a definition of Blackness that had carried over from previous international gatherings. (The words Black and African in the festival’s name were used to allow for the inclusion of North Africans who might not consider themselves Black.) Instead, Nance was busy in the streets and arenas, at cafeterias and parties, interacting with people and collecting on-the-scene photographic representations of the joy of recognition among participants from around the globe, of spontaneous relations being formed through identified commonalities, and of the forging of communities and collaborations. This trip was Nance’s first time traveling outside of the United States, and, as the spirits of the ancestors would have it, all of Africa had come to meet her.

Seeing the faces of friendly folks from the other side of the world, Nance thought she recognized characteristics of her U.S. relatives and acquaintances—in the cadence of speech, in the pitch of laughter, in facial expressions. She had a desire to visually investigate Africanisms—the shared habits, tendencies, and proclivities observed wherever Blacks had been sprinkled. Nance had long thought of herself, although born in the United States, as African. Here, in Africa, she was seen as an American. She began to grapple with her place, and that of African Americans in general, in the larger Black diasporic family. “I got an understanding of the history of how we became African Americans,” she says. “I knew it. But at FESTAC, you could feel it.” Feeling complemented a political awareness of Blackness drawn equally from her African ancestry as from her political education and knowledge of history informed by the civil rights and the Black Arts movements. “I feel connected to other people,” she says, “and my photographs document that connection.”

Marilyn Nance, FESTAC ’77 Opening Day Ceremony onlookers, 1977

Nance was born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1953. Her father and mother had left Wadesboro, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama, respectively, as part of the Great Migration north. Her grandmother (who thought of herself as African and was most excited about Nance’s “return” to Africa) was born in 1886. “Her father would have been born in the time of enslavement,” Nance states, “meaning our family is only two generations removed from having been enslaved and one generation removed from sharecropping.” As a child, Nance came to know family members primarily through photographs. Her mother would point out people and tell her their stories. At age eight, she received her first camera, a gift from her cousin that is still in her possession. Nance would graduate from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, study graphic design at Pratt Institute, train in audio and film production at the Institute for New Cinema Artists, and earn a master of fine arts degree in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Nance’s archive remains one of the largest visual records of this monumental occasion, where the poet Audre Lorde “felt the earth move.”

Arriving at FESTAC, at age twenty-three, with a wide multimedia skill set was beneficial. But a more important foundation for her work, then and later, is the political education on which Nance’s craft is erected. Her mother’s father was a labor organizer and only in adulthood did she realize that never crossing a picket line isn’t a commandment everyone’s parents held them to. From middle-school days, she remembers conversations with her sister about demonstrations demanding summer jobs for Black teens. In 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, she attended her first Black Power rally while in high school. Her formative years were suffused with the political energies of the civil rights movement and the creative energies of the Black Arts movement, which encouraged art with the purpose of awakening consciousness, forming community, and striving for liberation. “I really believed in all African people,” she says, “because that had been my training, my political education.” Nance immersed herself in the recordings of the musician and activist Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the teachings of Malcolm X, participated in Black cultural rallies, and went to see plays by Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins, who served as the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party. “FESTAC was a triumph of the Black Arts movement,” Nance explains, “because in the Black Arts movement, there was always a reference to Africa.”

Marilyn Nance, The National Theater, Lagos, Nigeria, 1977

In Lagos, and in true Pan-African style, Nance roamed from one contingent to the next. Language could be a big barrier. Nance recalls a lot of smiling, staring, and dancing as ways of communicating. At the lunch table, you might find Indigenous Australians across from you, musicians from Burundi to your left, and North African intellectuals to your right. “‘Who are you?’ and ‘Oh, look at you!’ were the ethos,” she says; physical presence was the currency of exchange. Tagging along with Nance through her photographic archive is a wild ride. We see not just Lagos but journey also to Ile-Ife and Benin City. We feel the blistering afternoon sun; squeeze into a rehearsal of Sun Ra and his Arkestra; and dance with Stevie Wonder and Miriam Makeba at Fela Kuti’s nightclub the Shrine.

With either her Canonet point-and-shoot or Miranda Sensomat cameras ever present, Nance navigated this month of encounters by quite literally being in people’s faces. This immediate nearness and proximity, almost making her invisible to her subjects, gives the viewer a strong illusion of being present on the scene. In one image from the opening day ceremony, the frame includes no action from the festival but is zoned in on the crowd. Standing on the ground level is an eclectic collection of observers—women wrapped in their traditional cloths, beads draped gently around their necks; a fedora-wearing man with a tailored shirt and trousers; a young photographer with a pinkie ring, firmly holding his folding camera; above, on a staircase and landing, facing the photographer, are naval men in white shirts and sailor caps, assorted security men in their starched uniforms, and a group of general onlookers. The photograph is filled with people, yet there is a sense that you are interacting with each person on their own terms, sharing their perspective—wondering what has caught their attention as the rich and active atmosphere of the festival has drawn everyone’s gaze toward a different direction.

Marilyn Nance, FESTAC ’77 Opening Ceremony, Duro Ladipo flanked by two men holding talking drums, 1977

“While her images of FESTAC ’77 have left an indelible mark on how we understand the festival visually,” Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an associate curator in the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, says, “I feel FESTAC ’77 also left its own mark on her, as a formative experience in her life as a photographer and adult.” Onabanjo, who is the editor of Nance’s photobook on FESTAC, traces a special attention and interest in bodily expression in Nance’s later work—of the intimate, the sensual, the quiet—back to FESTAC. As Nance states, “It is what is in your heart and in your mind that makes the images.”

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An “undying love for the people,” a phrase Nance borrowed from Kwame Ture, is the spirit that inspires her photographs. Attending FESTAC intensified Nance’s commitments to the principles and values of the Black Arts movement. In her coverage of anti-apartheid activism in New York and the vulnerable, ecstatic scenes at the Oyotunji African village in South Carolina, there remains that interest in interchanges of ideas, people, and events found at FESTAC. As Onabanjo explains, Nance’s photography after 1977 “witnesses an amplified scope of vision as to the various transnational spiritual, cultural, and political experiences . . . while showing a finely attuned sensitivity of the place of African Americans within this global context.” She points to Nance’s 1980 images of the Black Indians in New Orleans; her work as a producer on the 1985 film Voices of the Gods, directed by her husband, Al Santana; her image Three Placards from 1986, with the faces of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Elijah Muhammad on placards at an anti-apartheid rally in Central Park; and the place of Yoruba culture in her installation Egungun Work (1994).

Nance is a self-described “digital elder” who seems to bring her archival practice to all her interactions. Perhaps this approach reflects back to her childhood of “meeting” family through photo- albums. In a wider sense, her focus on connecting people and histories corresponds to the African practices of festivals, where it is believed that all generations—the living and the dead—come together. Last Day in Lagos, then, is a festival of its own, a feast for the creative imagination that introduces today’s generation to their artistic ancestors.

Marilyn Nance, Stevie Wonder performing on the drums, 1977
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For Nance, the images are “visual medicine,” a reminder of mutual joy preserved for the future. The making of Last Day in Lagos led Nance to rediscover other FESTAC goers. In the process of creating the book, Nance found mementos—address books, cloths, notes, letters—that fueled her desire to bring together what she refers to as the FESTAC ’77 fellowship. Despite the event’s historic nature, on returning, participants found little interest in telling others about their time in Lagos. In March 1977, Kay Brown, of the Black women artists collective Where We At, organized an open house in Brooklyn for participants to share photographs and stories. The following month, the Studio Museum in Harlem hosted a reception honoring U.S. participants. But there was no organization or space created to hold FESTAC archival materials or oral histories. Until relatively recently, interest in the work and experiences of the Black artists who were there has been relegated to a handful of academic articles and discussions. Memories of the festival, outside of the participants and their personal archives, persist in some memoirs and biographies. In 2017, the curator Dominique Malaquais organized the panel “FESTAC ’77 and Other Pan-African Festivals” where participants, including Nance, spoke. Nance’s images are also found in the 2019 book Festac ’77: 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired twenty of Nance’s photographs. When I ask Nance why the sudden uptick in interest in FESTAC, she throws the question back to me. “I was ready in 1977 but there was no interest, so we had to go on living,” Nance says. “My job was to make the images. I did the work. I kept the work. I respected the work. I just had to live long enough and wait until the right time came around.”

These days, Nance is occupied with “deep sleuthing” online. She’s tracked down, connected with, and even spoken to some of the people she’s identified in the photographs. Whether or not she finds Kwame Ture in her archive, she is determined that the legacy of the Black Arts movement is not lost to history. U.S. participants at FESTAC spanned generations, from members of the Harlem Renaissance to their creative descendants. For Nance, this is American history, Black history, world history, and art history that she won’t allow to be forgotten. “I’m interested in making sure that someone knew that I was here,” she says. “To be a Black person in America is to always be disregarded, to never be thought of as an intellectual, or an artist, or a collector.” If FESTAC, in the shadow of a civil war, military coups, and political instability, and lacking the technology and degree of connectedness we have in the world today, could be planned and executed successfully in the 1970s, imagine—Nance’s archive seems to tell us what the future could hold.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 246, “Celebrations,” under the title “When the Party Came to Lagos.”

Announcing the Winners of Google’s 2022 Image Equity Fellowship

Today, in partnership with Google, For Freedoms, and FREE THE WORK, Aperture is pleased to announce the twenty recipients of the 2022 Image Equity Fellowship.

The winners of the 2022 Image Equity Fellowship are:

Jamil Baldwin, Miranda Barnes, McKayla Chandler, Maneesha Chaudhary, Nykelle DeVivo, Emanuel Hahn, Eric Hart Jr., Vikesh Kapoor, Adeline Lulo, Tiffany Luong, Maya June Mansour, Da’Shaunae Marisa, Xavier Scott Marshall, Ricardo Nagaoka, Nasrah Omar, David López Osuna, Walé Oyéjidé, Oluwatosin “Tosin” Popoola, C.T. Robert, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo

Google’s first-ever Image Equity Fellowship is a six-month, application-based Fellowship awarded to twenty early-career image-based creators of color in the US. This year’s selection involved the review of more than a thousand submissions by a jury comprised of Lebanese filmmaker and photographer Ahmed Klink; American artist and 2016 Guggenheim Fellow Lyle Ashton Harris; photographer and documentarian Bee Walker; multi-hyphenate creative Mahaneela; and Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Fellows will each receive $20,000 in unrestricted funds to create an image-based project that explores and uplifts communities of color. Throughout their six-month fellowships, they will be supported by Google and three industry-celebrated nonprofit partners—Aperture, For Freedoms, & FREE THE WORK—in the form of dedicated mentorship, workshops, funding, and publication of and press for their completed projects. 

Bee Walker, a mentor and reviewer, noted how much she is looking forward to working with the fellows, “Each of their portfolios personally moved, inspired, and challenged me, but more importantly, made me curious about what else they have to say visually… I’m certain that it will be a creatively enriching process for me as well.” Ahmed Klink also reflected on the review process, “I was thoroughly impressed by the quality and thoughtfulness of all the portfolios we got to look at. I cannot speak highly enough about the level of craft and the visual storytelling all the photographers brought to the table. It truly made an impact on me and it made the selection all the more difficult.”

Photograph by Jamil BaldwinPhotograph by Miranda BarnesPhotograph by McKayla ChandlerPhotograph by Maneesha ChaudharyPhotograph by Nykelle DeVivoPhotograph by Emanuel HahnPhotograph by Eric Hart Jr.Photograph by Vikesh KapoorPhotograph by Adeline LuloPhotograph by Tiffany LuongPhotograph by Maya June MansourPhotograph by Da’Shaunae MarisaPhotograph by Xavier Scott MarshallPhotograph by Ricardo NagaokaPhotograph by Nasrah OmarPhotograph by David López OsunaPhotograph by Walé OyéjidéPhotograph by Oluwatosin “Tosin” PopoolaPhotograph by C.T. RobertPhotograph by Giancarlo Montes Santangelo

Historic Building in New York’s Upper West Side to Become New Permanent Home for Aperture

Aperture’s Board of Trustees today announced plans for two floors of a historic building in the heart of New York’s Upper West Side to become the organization’s new permanent home. Located at 380 Columbus Avenue, the building situates Aperture at the nexus of a vibrant residential neighborhood and bustling tourist destination—across from the American Museum of Natural History and blocks from the New-York Historical Society and Central Park—providing access to a wider spectrum of local and international audiences than ever in the organization’s history.

Featuring a new ground floor entrance and expansive street presence, the building enables Aperture to expand its reach and strengthen the impact of its initiatives, which demonstrate the power of photography to spark curiosity and enhance understanding of the world and each other. Two floors, encompassing 10,000 square feet of the 1886 building, will be repurposed as a hub for collaboration and convening, and a site for public engagement with Aperture’s quarterly magazine, books, and prints.

Aperture has engaged award-winning architecture practice LEVENBETTS to design flexible spaces for public programming and small-scale installations, the Aperture bookstore, and re-imagined office and production spaces for Aperture’s robust publishing program, while retaining the building’s historic character. Visitors will be able to see directly into several of Aperture’s work spaces, fostering transparency and giving audiences a window into the organization’s activities.

380 Columbus Avenue c. 1930
Courtesy Landmark West

Marking its 70th anniversary this year, Aperture has been located for nearly two decades in a fourth-floor space in Chelsea, where the organization has mounted exhibitions and public programs; published Aperture magazine and countless acclaimed photobooks; and hosted its bookstore and limited-edition print program. The acquisition and design of its new ground floor home is funded in part through the early phase of a capital campaign which laid the groundwork for phase two of the campaign, set to launch in the coming months. The acquisition was spearheaded by Cathy Kaplan, Chair of Aperture’s Board, Helen Nitkin, Chair of the Board’s Real Estate Committee, and Sarah Meister, who was named Executive Director of Aperture in 2021.

The announcement comes on the eve of Aperture’s 70th anniversary celebration this fall, marked by the release of a special 70th anniversary issue of Aperture magazine; 70 different limited-edition photographs available to collectors by some of the most celebrated and influential photographers in the history of the medium, each with a special tie to Aperture; and Aperture’s fall gala on Monday, October 17, in New York, to be hosted by Board Chair Cathy Kaplan, Executive Director Sarah Meister, and Gala Co-chairs Helen Nitkin, Aperture Trustee, Yesim Philip, CEO & Creative Director at L’Etoile Sport, Kara Ross, award-winning jewelry designer, and Antwaun Sargent, independent writer, curator, and critic.

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“As we celebrate Aperture’s 70th anniversary, our new permanent home provides a rock-solid foundation for the next 70 years,” said Cathy Kaplan, Chair of Aperture’s Board of Trustees. “I am grateful to the leadership and vision of Helen Nitkin, our entire Board of Trustees, and Sarah Meister in cementing Aperture’s distinct position as a convenor, community builder, and publisher that has advanced the medium of photography for seven decades.”

Kwame S. Brathwaite, Aperture Trustee, adds: “Aperture has been absolutely pivotal over its long history in nurturing artists and creating visible platforms for their practices that broaden understanding of their work and of photography more broadly. I’ve seen this first hand through my father Kwame Brathwaite and his own practice. This new permanent home for Aperture strengthens its ability to advance this important work for many more decades.”

“Aperture has long been an anchor for the photography community, not just in New York but globally. Our permanent commitment to the Upper West Side and a highly visible ground floor space signals a renewed, long-term vision for Aperture’s future as we move into our eighth decade—one that recognizes Aperture’s critical role in fostering collaboration and bringing together the array of artists, writers, institutions, and enthusiasts that are transformed by photography every day,” said Sarah Meister, Aperture executive director. “In addition to serving as a hub for the photography community in New York, Aperture will continue to engage audiences around the world through collaborative programming outside of our space—an approach we see as key to the ongoing impact of the organization.”

In its new home, Aperture’s exhibition program will be comprised of focused presentations. Extending the organization’s reach beyond its New York space, Aperture will also continue its recent history of collaborations with major institutional partners to mount large-scale exhibitions and programming. Recent partnerships include the Aperture-organized exhibitions Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, currently on view at the New-York Historical Society; As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curated by Antwaun Sargent and on view at Fotografiska, Sweden; Prison Nation, curated by Nicole Fleetwood and Michael Famighetti, on view at the Albin O. Kuhn Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Orlando, curated by Tilda Swinton, expanding on her role as guest editor for an issue of Aperture magazine, opening at C/O Berlin on September 17.

Read more about Aperture’s new permanent home on the New York Times.

Historic Building in New York’s Upper West Side To Become New Permanent Home for Aperture

Aperture’s Board of Trustees today announced plans for two floors of a historic building in the heart of New York’s Upper West Side to become the organization’s new permanent home. Located at 380 Columbus Avenue, the building situates Aperture at the nexus of a vibrant residential neighborhood and bustling tourist destination—across from the American Museum of Natural History and blocks from the New-York Historical Society and Central Park—providing access to a wider spectrum of local and international audiences than ever in the organization’s history.

Featuring a new ground floor entrance and expansive street presence, the building enables Aperture to expand its reach and strengthen the impact of its initiatives, which demonstrate the power of photography to spark curiosity and enhance understanding of the world and each other. Two floors, encompassing 10,000 square feet of the 1886 building, will be repurposed as a hub for collaboration and convening, and a site for public engagement with Aperture’s quarterly magazine, books, and prints.

Aperture has engaged award-winning architecture practice LEVENBETTS to design flexible spaces for public programming and small-scale installations, the Aperture bookstore, and re-imagined office and production spaces for Aperture’s robust publishing program, while retaining the building’s historic character. Visitors will be able to see directly into several of Aperture’s work spaces, fostering transparency and giving audiences a window into the organization’s activities.

380 Columbus Avenue c. 1930
Courtesy Landmark West

Marking its 70th anniversary this year, Aperture has been located for nearly two decades in a fourth-floor space in Chelsea, where the organization has mounted exhibitions and public programs; published Aperture magazine and countless acclaimed photobooks; and hosted its bookstore and limited-edition print program. The acquisition and design of its new ground floor home is funded in part through the early phase of a capital campaign which laid the groundwork for phase two of the campaign, set to launch in the coming months. The acquisition was spearheaded by Cathy Kaplan, Chair of Aperture’s Board, Helen Nitkin, Chair of the Board’s Real Estate Committee, and Sarah Meister, who was named Executive Director of Aperture in 2021.

The announcement comes on the eve of Aperture’s 70th anniversary celebration this fall, marked by the release of a special 70th anniversary issue of Aperture magazine; 70 different limited-edition photographs available to collectors by some of the most celebrated and influential photographers in the history of the medium, each with a special tie to Aperture; and Aperture’s fall gala on Monday, October 17, in New York, to be hosted by Board Chair Cathy Kaplan, Executive Director Sarah Meister, and Gala Co-chairs Helen Nitkin, Aperture Trustee, Yesim Philip, CEO & Creative Director at L’Etoile Sport, Kara Ross, award-winning jewelry designer, and Antwaun Sargent, independent writer, curator, and critic.

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“As we celebrate Aperture’s 70th anniversary, our new permanent home provides a rock-solid foundation for the next 70 years,” said Cathy Kaplan, Chair of Aperture’s Board of Trustees. “I am grateful to the leadership and vision of Helen Nitkin, our entire Board of Trustees, and Sarah Meister in cementing Aperture’s distinct position as a convenor, community builder, and publisher that has advanced the medium of photography for seven decades.”

Kwame S. Brathwaite, Aperture Trustee, adds: “Aperture has been absolutely pivotal over its long history in nurturing artists and creating visible platforms for their practices that broaden understanding of their work and of photography more broadly. I’ve seen this first hand through my father Kwame Brathwaite and his own practice. This new permanent home for Aperture strengthens its ability to advance this important work for many more decades.”

“Aperture has long been an anchor for the photography community, not just in New York but globally. Our permanent commitment to the Upper West Side and a highly visible ground floor space signals a renewed, long-term vision for Aperture’s future as we move into our eighth decade—one that recognizes Aperture’s critical role in fostering collaboration and bringing together the array of artists, writers, institutions, and enthusiasts that are transformed by photography every day,” said Sarah Meister, Aperture executive director. “In addition to serving as a hub for the photography community in New York, Aperture will continue to engage audiences around the world through collaborative programming outside of our space—an approach we see as key to the ongoing impact of the organization.”

In its new home, Aperture’s exhibition program will be comprised of focused presentations. Extending the organization’s reach beyond its New York space, Aperture will also continue its recent history of collaborations with major institutional partners to mount large-scale exhibitions and programming. Recent partnerships include the Aperture-organized exhibitions Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, currently on view at the New-York Historical Society; As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curated by Antwaun Sargent and on view at Fotografiska, Sweden; Prison Nation, curated by Nicole Fleetwood and Michael Famighetti, on view at the Albin O. Kuhn Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Orlando, curated by Tilda Swinton, expanding on her role as guest editor for an issue of Aperture magazine, opening at C/O Berlin on September 17.

Read more about Aperture’s new permanent home on the New York Times.

A Long Overdue Look at James O. Mitchell’s Expressive and Evocative Portraits

When Diane di Prima, one of the only female poets of the Beat Generation, passed away in October 2020, countless obituaries detailed her distinctive literary voice and her unwavering, often eccentric, view of the world. Remembrances were often illustrated with an introspective and somber portrait of di Prima—the same image that adorned multiple editions of her celebrated book Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969). Similarly, several anthologies on the Beat movement (including the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1996 exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965) feature an image of Jack Kerouac smoking in a casually unbuttoned striped shirt on one of his more sober days. These portraits of di Prima and Kerouac appear to successfully capture the personalities of each writer at a pivotal era in their lives. What holds these two images of Beat icons in common? The inimitable person behind the camera: James Oliver Mitchell.

James O. Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, 1963

At times credited as “Jim” or “James O.,” Mitchell was best known as a chronicler of writers in New York and San Francisco. He was obsessive and prolific, working with the photographic medium from age ten to eighty-seven. Yet his name is relatively unknown. The photography world has largely ignored him: a Black photographer with a fairly abrasive personality and an oeuvre that resists easy categorization. Despite his early accolades and impressive resume, he never published a monograph nor had a large-scale exhibition. He died in January 2021 in relative obscurity, only a few months after his friend di Prima.

I first learned of Mitchell’s work in 2019, when Lawrence Rinder, the former director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, mentioned he was considering acquiring Mitchell’s photograph of Diane di Prima. I later visited Mitchell in early 2020 and was welcomed into his Oakland, California apartment, a cramped space that was a splendor of floor-to-ceiling stacks of photography books, magazines, negatives, and prints. It quickly became clear that photography sustained him; his passion for and knowledge of the medium was a marvel, and he told stories of his career and artistry with intense vigor. Through our discussions, I was able to piece together his early years: especially the decades between 1960 and 1980, during which he formally trained in art schools, intersected with various creatives, and experimented with his photographic vision and printing.

James O. Mitchell, Two Women, San Francisco, ca. 1982James O. Mitchell, Parking Garage, New York, 1967

Mitchell was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1933, but his family moved to New York when he was a child. His mother gifted him a camera for his tenth birthday, and he immediately took to photography. Mitchell’s aunt and uncle, who lived in Harlem, were photographed (though not named) by well-known Photo League photographer Aaron Siskind in 1940 for his portfolio Harlem Document. Mitchell later noted this connection with great pride, as a personal link to a momentous series in the history of photography and an informative study for documentary-style imagery of a people and a place.

While enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, Mitchell took a course with Lisette Model at the New School, where she began teaching in 1951. Model encouraged him to apply to the San Francisco Art Institute, but before doing so he left New York to serve in the military. Upon his return in the late 1950s, he mounted a small exhibition at Leica Gallery and was included in a group show at Limelight Gallery. Finally able to take Model’s advice, he applied to and enrolled in SFAI in 1960 on the GI Bill. There, he studied with Brett Weston and Ansel Adams and became close with Ralph Gibson.

James O. Mitchell, Woman with Bags, San Francisco, 1986James O. Mitchell, Fish & Chips, Harlem, New York, 1964

Mitchell’s evolving photographic sensibilities led him to photograph Harlem, a subject he captured from his high-school days into his mid-thirties. His archive is rife with street photography of his former neighborhood, scenes that move between the jubilance of children as they played outdoors, idiosyncrasies of Harlem buildings and signage, and a consistent expression of moments in the minutiae of daily life. Both taken in 1964, the untitled photographs of Sarah’s Beauty Salon and Fish & Chips restaurant are scenes of Harlem captured just after Mitchell graduated from SFAI. Here we see the slow unveiling of lives, suggesting Mitchell’s need to immerse himself in the familiarity of swells of Black folk pouring in and out of local businesses.

Mitchell seems particularly keen to capture the expressions of Black women, a responsive, nonverbal language most legible and cherished among fellow Black folk.

During this time, Mitchell was working for both Magnum Photos and the short-lived Suffolk Sun newspaper, trying to support himself, his wife, and children as a freelance photographer. In one image, the words Beauty Salon hover above a trio of Black women who seem disinterested or unaware of Mitchell. Framing them with the advertisements and signs of the storefronts, Mitchell captures the contrasting patterns of the three women’s dresses—the planes of their skirts fold atop one another linking their distinct styles: pinstripe, plain, and floral print. In this moment Mitchell cites his photographic influences—Siskind, Model, and Dorothea Lange (whom he briefly worked for in the Bay Area), but we can also see the impact of one of his earliest photography commissions as a cameraman for the famed Alvin Ailey dance group.

James O. Mitchell, Sarah’s Beauty Salon, Harlem, New York, 1964

Connecting Harlem residents to the sinewy bodies of the Black ballerinas, Mitchell is attuned to the silhouettes and shapes of fabric as it falls and accentuates curved Black bodies in motion. The facial expression of the leftmost woman was a carefully chosen moment, as evidenced by his contact sheet for the scene. Such attention to exaggerated faces is perhaps an echo of Model, but Mitchell seems particularly keen to capture the expressions of Black women, a responsive, nonverbal language most legible and cherished among fellow Black folk. (This is also a theme in works by contemporary Black artists including Martine Syms and Rashaad Newsome).

Learning to photograph expressive movement was a pivotal development in Mitchell’s career, but the process was not without disappointments. It was with much vehemence that he shared with me his experiences with photographer Garry Winogrand. In the early 1960s, he and Winogrand frequently shot at the same dance studios; once, Mitchell assisted the famous photographer on assignment. Mitchell described that in each circumstance Winogrand blatantly ignored him, making the young photographer feel painfully invisible. “He was a real racist,” Mitchell told me of his interactions with Winogrand.

James O. Mitchell, Women in Phone Booths, 1982James O. Mitchell, Untitled, San Francisco, ca. 1980

Mitchell permanently moved to the California Bay Area in the 1970s, and it was around this time that his street photography began to shift. While we see in photographs—such as in these two geometric street scenes—an outdated voyeurism of a man photographing women without their consent, we must also recognize the politics of a Black man wielding a camera in public. Mitchell optimized his invisibility while simultaneously making himself vulnerable to the hypervisibility of a loitering. In one image Mitchell offers a visual comment on beauty and race, capturing an incredible moment of separation and comparison created by the structure of a phone booth. In another instance, a shadow enters a brightly lit, angular frame to haunt disembodied, pale legs. Once again, the positionality of the “unseen” photographer holds much weight. Blackness is conceptualized as a mark upon United States history and experience and, as we know, Black men specifically have been articulated by white supremacist systems as a harrowing, shadowy threat that lurks in wait to harm white women.

In the early 1970s, Mitchell shifted from photographing Beat writers and aimed to immerse himself among talented Black cultural producers. Referencing Carl Van Vechten’s series Harlem Heroes, he set out to photograph what he identified as another wave of exceptional Black creativity based in the California Bay Area. In 1973 he received a small National Endowment for the Arts grant in support of this project, and he also submitted an unsuccessful application to the Guggenheim Fellowship for photography. The early stages of the series saw him photographing folks like the writer Ernest J. Gaines and the painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal. While the project was never realized, he took more than fifty portraits, some of which were reproduced in a sprinkling of local publications in the 1970s, such as the inaugural edition of Hambone, a literary journal initiated by the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. Included in the volume was the portrait of O’Neal as well as a spread of photographs by Mitchell that succinctly spoke to his career as a portraitist and street photographer of both coasts.

Mitchell’s self-portrait on the cover of Hambone, 1974 Mitchell’s self-portrait on the cover of J. Oliver Mitchell: An Exhibition of Recent Photographs (Lone Mountain College, 1973)

Hambone’s inception at Stanford—the journal was named and brought to fruition by the poet Nathaniel Mackey—coincided with Mitchell’s own time at the university. In 1973 Stanford hired Mitchell to teach photography, a period in which he believed the university was fulfilling diversity quotas. Unclear to him was why just a year later his contract was not renewed. He was left to contemplate the factors that led to this decision. It seemed to him that the lingering reason was racism, and he shared with me that at this stage in his life he felt depressed.

The cover of the 1974 issue of Hambone features a self-portrait of a dour Mitchell shrouded in enveloping black shadows. Here is the meeting point between black as a color and Blackness as a Black photographer attempted to see himself. Mitchell was a bit of an anomaly among his Black male photographer peers—figures like Kwame Braithwaite, the always appreciated Roy DeCarava, and the men of the Kamoinge Workshop and Black Photographers of California clubs are not particularly known for self-portraits. Mitchell, however, obsessively contemplated his own visage, sitting before his camera throughout his career. He was not a member of a photography collective and we know he was friendly with and photographed the notoriously white Beat circle. He frequented and photographed art events, but such images read as if he were an ignored documenter weaving in and around predominantly white crowds. With this in mind, his self-portraits appear to suggest isolation: a prickly man reaching for a sense of self, grasping to comprehend how he sees himself and how the world sees him.

James O. Mitchell, Self-portrait, 1965
All photographs © the artist and courtesy Estate of James O. Mitchell

In 1965 Harlem, a young Mitchell sits before a cracking wall; he stares with mild intensity as he displays his camera and the rolled-up sleeves of a man who labors. A 1973 self-portrait composed during his MFA program at Lone Mountain College (now University of San Francisco) shows us a stern, sweatered Mitchell outlined by a square of light, his face only partially visible. A tight line up of test prints graces the upper edge of the intimate scene. In both self-portraits, Mitchell gestures to the complex slipperiness of identity, but one theme remains undisturbed: he wanted to be seen as a photographer. When I spoke with Mitchell, I appreciated that he was cantankerous and blunt, and that he refused to cower or bend to his audience. This wasn’t a personality of old age—it’s who he was. He wanted this candor to emanate from his self-portraits. Because Mitchell did not always perform the capitulating and ever-grateful Black person, he often found himself ostracized from the photography world. Though Mitchell is no longer with us, he has left behind a trove of images for us to learn from and critique. His love for the medium was fierce. We should endeavor to research and celebrate his life and photography with the same ferocity.

5 Facts about Diane Arbus, Fifty Years Later

Long before Diane Arbus’s suicide in July 1971, her photographs inspired—incited, even—a visceral response for those who cared to look. Much of this has been recorded in writing. In the intervening half century, her photographs have proved to be immune to the hundreds of thousands of words that surround them, their mystery undiminished. So a few more, offered here, are unlikely to do harm.

This fall we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Arbus’s posthumous MoMA retrospective, and that of the Aperture monograph published on the occasion. The book almost didn’t happen (see below), although it was an immediate (and lasting) success. For those who missed the similarly iconic 1972 exhibition will be revisited in September at David Zwirner in New York. Aperture also welcomes a new edition of Diane Arbus Revelations to our book list, which you can use to build your own repertoire of Arbus anecdotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

Diane Arbus, Woman with a veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C, 1968

Shockingly Direct

Arbus was the original research assistant for From the Picture Press, an exhibition that opened at MoMA in January 1973, nine days after the close of her retrospective. As John Szarkowski, director of MoMA’s photography department (and curator of both exhibitions) recognized, these tabloid pictures clearly resonated with Arbus’s photographic sensibility. He could have been speaking of her when he observed this in the press release for From the Picture Press: “As images, the photographs are shockingly direct, and at the same time, mysteriously elliptical and fragmentary, reproducing the texture and flavor of experience without explaining its meaning. They wear the aspect of fact, prove nothing, and ask the best of questions.” 

Diane Arbus, Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C, 1967

She Was Always an Artist

The debate surrounding photography’s artistic status can be tiresome—and arguably settled since the late nineteenth century. Regarding Arbus’s photographs, Szarkowski admired that “all the fanciness had been stripped away and all that was left was the marvelous clear airless experience of life, absolutely without […] any concern for art.” Although he went on to clarify, “Of course, that’s not really true. She was always an artist, and she knew she was an artist; her way of being an artist was to conceal that fact as fully as she could from us when we looked at the pictures.” The presence of her Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. (1967) on the cover of Artforum in May 1971 (the first time a photograph appeared in the magazine), suggests the editors grasped the significance of her achievement. 

Stephen Frank, Diane Arbus during a class at the Rhode Island School of Design, 1970

The Overwhelming Sensation

On the subject of art world validation, in July 1972 Diane Arbus was the first photographer to have work exhibited at the Venice Biennale. New York Times critic Hilton Kramer wrote of her display that summer: “… a portfolio of 10 enormous photographs has proved to be the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion. If one’s natural tendency is to be skeptical about legend, it must be said that all suspicion vanishes in the presence of the Arbus work, which is extremely powerful and very strange. It is strange in an unexpected way, however. It is usually said of Miss Arbus that she specialized in freaks, and it is certainly true that her work rejects our customary notions of social normality. It rejects them in two ways—first and foremost, by dwelling on subjects (transvestites, nudists, giants, identical twins) that exist on the margin of the social norm, and then also by dealing with conventional subjects (suburbia, for example) as if they were bizarre.” This and many other key reviews are newly gathered and available in Diane Arbus Documents, which will be published by David Zwirner Books and Fraenkel Gallery this fall.

Cover of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph

An Immediate Success

Aperture did not originally intended to publish the book accompanying MoMA’s exhibition. It was perceived to be a tremendous risk—a quaint perspective in hindsight, with nearly four hundred thousand copies sold—but the relationship was confirmed in August 1972, three months before the opening. The book was an immediate success, and a reprint was underway within weeks of the exhibition opening. Upon receiving his copy, Peter Bunnell (who had recently joined the faculty at Princeton University after working as a curator at MoMA, and before that at Aperture) wrote to Michael Hoffman, Aperture’s executive director: “Just a note to thank you for the Arbus monograph. I know only something of what it took to get it out, but regardless I want you to know how much one reader and friend of Diane’s appreciated having it. It is a superb book…”

Diane Arbus, Mrs. Gladys ‘Mitzi’ Ulrich with the baby, Sam, a stump-tailed macaque monkey, North Bergen, N.J., 1971; from Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs (Aperture/Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2018)
All photographs © The Estate of Diane Arbus

Another Image

Did you know there used to be another image in Arbus’s Aperture monograph? In the very first printing of the very first edition there was a photograph of two young women wearing matching trench coats in Central Park. Their father objected to their inclusion and the page was subsequently removed, replaced by one of the most recent images in the book, a woman with her baby monkey. 

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Aperture Celebrates Seventy Years in Print

In Aperture’s first issue, published in 1952, the founding editors mapped out the reasons for bringing the magazine to life. With intelligence—and a hefty dose of earnestness—they sought to create a space for photographers and “creative people everywhere” to communicate and speak to one another. This was a daring endeavor at the time, a labor of love driven by an almost messianic belief that photography mattered. Building a community around the publication was essential to their cause. “Growth,” they wrote, “can be slow and hard when you are groping alone.” Photography was a lonely place back in the early 1950s. The medium wasn’t yet widely appreciated as a serious form of creative expression, and so the founders sought to make the case for the power of a still image that “blazes with significance.” That the magazine has continually remained in print for seven decades amid shifting notions of what photography is—and might become—attests to the strong will of the founders, and of those editors, equally indefatigable, who followed and kept the magazine going, even as print media, in the age of screens, seemed destined for the dustbin. We inhabit a vastly different image world today, but the mission of the magazine, oddly enough, or perhaps likely enough because of the founders’ promising trajectory, remains consistent.

Minor White, Tom Murphy, San Mateo County, California, October 24, 1947
Courtesy Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum John Edmonds, Father’s Jewels, 2022, for Aperture


Courtesy the artist Hannah Whitaker, Millennium Pictures, 2022, for Aperture


Courtesy the artist

As editors, we are privileged to engage with photographers, artists, writers, and thinkers whose work provokes, challenges, and blazes with significance. We may be searching at times, or finding new footings, but we are never alone. For this seventieth anniversary issue, we drew on our community to assemble a publication that looks at the past with a view to the future. Seven photographers, through original commissions, each explore a decade of the magazine. Each was invited to consider a single issue, an article, an idea, or even an omission, which seeded their portfolios. Iñaki Bonillas, Dayanita Singh, Yto Barrada, Mark Steinmetz, John Edmonds, Hannah Whitaker, and Hank Willis Thomas have all reanimated our past in revelatory ways.

Seven celebrated, incisive writers—Darryl Pinckney, Olivia Laing, Geoff Dyer, Brian Wallis, Susan Stryker, Lynne Tillman, and Salamishah Tillet—were given the same prompt: Tour our archive, see what’s there. What captures your imagination? What questions are emblematic? They reveal that however much photography and this magazine evolved, sometimes radically, Aperture remained committed to thinking about the meanings of pictures, and all that might encompass. The expansive nature of the medium was a strength, and the magazine could surprise, take risks, move against the grain. Aperture might even be, as Pinckney observes, “a home for the most gentle weirdness.”

—The Editors

Mark Steinmetz, Amelia, Athens, GA, February, 2021, from the series Irina & Amelia, 2017–ongoing, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New YorkHank Willis Thomas, Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful, 2022, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photographs by Kwame Brathwaite courtesy Kwame Brathwaite Archive Iñaki Bonillas, from the series Compositions, 2022, for Aperture

Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York
Yto Barrada, Bettina’s Color-aid papers with 1970s Aperture issues, 2022, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist with Charles Benton; Pace Gallery, London; Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg; and Galerie Polaris, ParisDayanita Singh, Nony loved to photograph her family (they were also all that she had access to) and posed her sister as Scarlett O’Hara after seeing Gone with the Wind, 1962
Courtesy the artist

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Read more from Aperture, issue 248, “The 70th Anniversary Issue.”

How Conservatives Weaponized Photographs in the Campaign against Abortion

While I’ve been reflecting on the many farces and cruelties that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, thus ending the right to safe abortion in the US, one particularly crass manipulation has been turning in my mind: the successful drive of some anti-abortion campaigners, over the decades leading to the ruling, to ensure that people seeking a termination be pushed to look at ultrasound images of the fetus before moving forward with their abortions. To be forced to look at anything is the stuff of nightmares, an almost cartoonish symbol of extreme control, a torture. By 2013, eight states had passed laws requiring providers to suggest a viewing of images from a mandated ultrasound (in three of these states, the law permits the woman to avert her eyes from the image, though the doctor must still display and describe the image). This was done on the justification of giving patients “information,” and off the back of research from the 1980s conducted with just two women, both of whom actually wanted to give birth, that suggested that seeing grainy photos of the fetus helped with bonding. The push for such requirements shows society’s steadfast belief in images to awaken, to chastise, to shame, to convince. The thrill for anti-abortion campaigners was the motif of baby, of tiny man: the bobbing head, the curved body. Could Roe have fallen without the proliferation of such visuals—the theater of fetuses—brandished outside clinics, in schools, and online?

Pro-Life, anti-abortion protesters block access route outside a Planned Parenthood facility and are later arrested by police and sheriff officers, March 23, 1989, Cypress, California. Photograph by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images

As commentators rush to analyze the social, political, and religious shifts and divisions that led to the fall of Roe, the role of photography must also be acknowledged. That means photography in the widest sense, including medical imaging, which, in the context of anti-abortion campaigning, has been subjected to selective editing and visual distortions. See, for example, the infamous anti-abortion propaganda film The Silent Scream—released in 1984 and shown in numerous schools, churches, and at the Reagan White House—in which speed and sound, including doomful music, were used to effectively turn ultrasound recordings of the abortion of a twelve-week fetus into a sensationalized snuff film. The fetus (usually at that moment around the size of a lime and not sufficiently developed to feel pain) was enlarged so as to resemble a grown baby and depicted, via close-ups on key angles of its head and heavy use of slow motion, “screaming” in response to the surgical tools. The visual was intended to back up the narration, by the anti-abortion doctor Bernard Nathanson, that the fetus was “another human being indistinguishable from any of us” and thus acting in ways we would imagine ourselves when in pain: calling out, retreating, writhing.

Images are often taken as evidence of reality, and by default, personhood and existence—all the things anti-abortion advocates are keen to assert. The ability of photographs to supposedly prove, to make things true and lasting, can be a horror and a danger. There was perhaps never a more feverish attempt to harness that power than in the battle to fell Roe, in which the ultrasound has been proffered as an illusion of humanity. In the push for forced pre-abortion fetus-viewing (a drive partly inspired by the sensation caused by The Silent Scream), the hope of anti-abortionists was that women who came face-to-face with the image would be overcome, moved in some way, and change their minds. In fact, researchers have found that the process makes little impact on decisions to go ahead with the procedure. Other impacts of this charade—on women’s time, their patience, their mental health, their peace—are, of course, unknown.

As commentators rush to analyze the social, political, and religious shifts and divisions that led to the fall of Roe, the role of photography must also be acknowledged.

Writing recently on the fall of Roe in the London Review of Books the historian Marina Warner notes of early abortion battles, “it was not only a question of what language to use to express the arguments for women’s authority over their own bodies, but of visual representations too. The antagonists used images quite unscrupulously to spread their arguments about the foetus being a human person, with a soul, images which erased the personhood of the women themselves.” As she implies, the anti-abortion movement owes its success not only to the direct weaponization of images, but also equally to their capacity for misinterpretation, their dangerous veneer of neutrality that smothers questioning, and the impression of progress implicit in the association between photography and technological development.

The thrust of the fetus into the public imagination can be traced to the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson and his book A Child is Born, first published in 1965 by Bonnier, as well as the corresponding Life magazine cover story “Drama of Life before Birth,” which appeared that same year to promote the book. (Interestingly, 1965 was also the year an obstetrician in Glasgow became the first to experiment with the use of ultrasound imagery for pregnancy.) The story featured color images of supposedly living fetuses at various stages of development—an “unprecedented photographic feat,” according to the magazine’s cover. Through Nilsson’s lens, which purported to offer a direct view inside the human body, the fetus was a tiny floating “spaceman,” a being destined for, and deserving of, the chance to continue its life on Earth—something emphasized equally by the magazine’s chosen headline. The images and their insinuations have, as the historian and gender-studies scholar Barbara Duden writes in her 1993 book Disembodying Women, “since become part of the mental universe of our time.”

Photograph of a spread from Life magazine, April 30, 1965

Nilsson began making fetal images in 1952, when the Bonnier-owned magazine See commissioned him for a story on the anti-abortion Swedish gynecologist Per Wetterdal and his hospital’s collection of fetal specimens. Wetterdal had hoped that these specimens, if widely seen, could curb enthusiasm for abortion. This story ran with the headline, “Why Must the Foetus be Killed?”. Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on and contribute to moral panic, Bonnier funded Nilsson to continue the project and sent him to tour hospitals; over the subsequent decade it published various anti-abortion articles with his images. But come the mid-1960s, support for abortion in Sweden was growing, and some of these stories received backlash. Also conscious of a wider appetite for improved sex education and information on women’s health, Bonnier abandoned the debate and packaged Nilsson’s A Child Is Born as a pregnancy guide, with additional images guiding couples through conception, fetal development, and birth. It contained no reference to abortion.

Nilsson’s photographs have since had a complex life. Some have, as the publishers supposedly intended, been used in maternity care and education. Others, over the book’s many reprints and international editions, have been proposed as works of art. In 2009, Bonnier repackaged A Child Is Born as a shiny coffee-table book, with commentary from the picture editor Mark Holborn, rather than the gynecologists and doctors of the early editions. The following year, the images went on display at Fotografiska in Stockholm. The breadth of contexts demonstrates how images of the fetus have, through agenda and interest, crossed genres and been liable to repurposing and reformatting. Perhaps the most notable role of Nilsson’s fetus “feat” has been in providing the anti-abortion movement with a readable symbol, a clear logo, and thus the aesthetic punch that is, arguably, essential to any successful protest movement. The images provided content for countless posters and fueled, in the battle over abortion rights, the replacement of medical knowledge with gut reaction and superficial impression.

Ironically—though fittingly, given the anti-abortion movement’s penchant for chicanery—almost all of Nilsson’s images were not, in fact, of babies steadily developing in the womb. Rather, they were of dead fetuses, the remnants of ectopic pregnancies or abortions, which Nilsson had posed in front of a backlight or in dishes of liquid to suggest their position inside the body and the illusion of a prosperous life. “It is presumed that the readers have realized that the pictures show foetuses that are dead,” the doctor Lars Engstrom wrote in 1965, in a critical review of the book in the journal Swedish Medical Associations. He referred to one especially florid caption for an image of a four-month-old fetus: “Infinite calm rests in these faces. They look as if they are waiting for eternity. But it is the short life on earth they are preparing for and it is not sleep that keeps their eyes shut.” Engstrom asked, “Is this embryological poetry or deception? The truth is down to earth and simple: the eyes in the picture will never see.”

Installation views of Lennart Nilsson: A Child is Born, Fotografiska, Stockholm, 2010

Nilsson’s images pay little attention to the bodies that contained the fetuses—it is unlikely the women were even asked for permission before the remnants of their pregnancies were photographed. His work instead turns pregnancy into a story that could be told without or even despite of the pregnant person, or to them, by external observers. As Warner argues in the LRB, this is typical of images popular with the anti-abortion movement, in which the pregnant body is often not even a mere vessel but completely absent. “Treating a fetus as if it were outside a woman’s body, because it can be viewed, is a political act,” Rosalind Pollack Petchesky writes in her important essay “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” published in Feminist Studies in 1987. Indeed, such visuals helped assert the independence of the fetus, as a separate life and entity, a supposedly soulful being of its own. They helped conjure the utterly inappropriate “pro-life” tag that was, until recently, used widely by anti-abortion campaigners, and create the warped sense of equality between “lives” that allows the rights of the fetus to prevent a ten-year-old rape survivor from pursuing an abortion (as was recently the case in Ohio). The images helped make “real” something that for most people floated tenuously in ambiguities and personal philosophies about the very nature of life—the notion of when personhood begins, of when we become “human.” And, of course, the images are emblematic of the entire concept of photography, the core property of which is to slice, to frame one thing and not the other, to remove context and surroundings. What is out of frame does not matter.

Indeed, there is a bigger link, beyond the fetus, between the fall of Roe and photography. Consider the medium’s entire history as a device for enshrining men’s vision and hopes for the world (natural, given who has typically made and commissioned photography): men as active, driving, moving; women and children as accessories, caring, waiting, fragile. Photography has, for most of its existence, upheld regressive systems. It has been a crucial tool in the lie of the idealized family and the fantasy of serenity. Recall how camera companies, in marketing the technology to the masses, directed new patrons to record their kin and family milestones—weddings, graduations, first days of schools, and births, endless births, and the slippery, ideally pink, forms of babies—and paste them into albums. They directed not only what should be photographed but also what was aspirational, what was normal. In the fight to limit abortion, such motifs have been employed with zeal as a way of reassuring conservatives and disparaging would-be outliers. They appear, for example, in political-campaign videos and images, formats that, tellingly, swelled from the 1984 Reagan presidential campaign onward, and that ushered in a culture of appearances and facades that was crucial to the anti-abortion movement. Such visuals showed domineering fathers, round-cheeked children, and mute wives (the idealized mother). They served to protect an imagined history that was purported, without care for accuracy, to be abortion-free, to be good—better.

A group of Operation Rescue demonstrators protesting outside the home of the mayor of Buffalo, April 21, 1992. Photograph by Mark Peterson/Corbis/Getty Images

The lie of abortion as a “new” right—a supposed result of feminism or modernity or spiritual decline—underpins one of the more bizarre moments of interplay between photography and abortion: the strangely avant-garde films of American father-son duo Francis and Frank Schaeffer, which helped radicalize evangelicals, a group previously relatively neutral on abortion. (Though it is near impossible to imagine now, abortion was once accepted by many religious groups, many of whom viewed it as a Catholic issue or a personal matter between woman and doctor, as Jia Tolentino explores in a recent essay in The New Yorker.) The story starts, of course, with male ambition. In the 1960s and ’70s, the aspiring filmmaker Frank Schaeffer, a devotee of Fellini, Bergman, and Vittorio De Sica, was growing up in the Swiss Alps in the evangelical Christian commune L’Abri, led by his father, the theologian Francis Schaeffer. L’Abri hosted a steady stream of high-profile visitors, including Billy Zeoli, who was president of the large Christian film company Gospel Films and, in the mid 1970s, the unofficial “White House chaplain” to President Gerald R. Ford. Zeoli suggested that Schaeffer turn his attention to moving image, proposing, with the guarantee of a multimillion-dollar budget, a series of Christian documentaries. Through rampant nepotism the teenage Frank got to direct. “I was looking at it as film school,” he recently told the writer and podcaster Jon Ronson, noting that he hoped the work could be a springboard to Hollywood, where he could make “real movies.”

Midway through production, Frank had an epiphany, inspired partly by his experience as a teen father: the films should reference abortion, especially the recent Roe case. He convinced his father to target the issue, and the elder Schaeffer appears on camera, saying, “By this ruling, the unborn child is considered not to be a person.” The film series, titled How Should We Then Live?, was a hit with evangelicals. And yet the audience was not totally overcome or inspired by the abortion segments. Frank was undeterred; he recommended doing a new series just about abortion, and the elder Schaeffer agreed. He was keen, Frank told Ronson, to secure “another paycheck for his errant son.”

Laia Abril, from the book On Abortion (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2018)

The new work, titled Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, was made with similar ambition and a comparable budget. Created in collaboration with C. Everett Koop (later, Surgeon General during the Reagan administration), the five-part documentary includes a scene of an anti-abortion doctor standing on a rock in the Dead Sea, surrounded by a thousand naked baby dolls—a mass of chubby, plastic limbs. Other dolls were filmed rolling down a conveyor belt into an incinerator. In another scene, a toddler is trapped in a cage, crying and rattling the bars. The work is strange and visually experimental, and was, at first, unpopular. Few evangelicals turned up to screenings, and few church leaders cared to give their voice to an issue they considered settled. But when the press picked up on the oddness of the cinematography in the context of the topic of abortion, protestors—including feminist groups—started to picket screenings, which caused Schaeffer fans to turn up in support. With each showing, the group’s size swelled until, eventually, abortion became an issue that reliably attracted evangelical protesters who were inspired by both the film’s rhetoric of baby-killing and the motivational aspect of a clear enemy.

Frank Schaeffer later left the evangelical movement, but he kept images from the films in his show reel and eventually made it to Hollywood. His films include Headhunter, an occult-themed horror film, and the post-apocalyptic Wired to Kill, which features a murderous robot. “[W]ith the abortion issue, the religious right found a catalyst that energized a political movement that then evolved into all sort of other areas, from trying to attack the gay rights movement to getting people to vote for Republican candidates,” Schaeffer told NPR in 2008, “the energy, the catalyst, all of that happened when my father and I went out with these film series and books and basically told Christians you need to apply Christian teaching to all of life.” He recalled the doll scene and how the “surrogates for aborted babies were just this kind of artistic image floating in a turquoise . . . space.” It would be a joke if it weren’t reality. The dreamt-up images of a teen Fellini fan reverberate to this day, shaping policy and ruining freedoms.

Laia Abril, from the book On Abortion (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2018)

Today, the question Warner references—how should pro-abortion campaigners deal with visual representations when it comes to abortion?—remains unsettled, and it will be debated even more as activists unite post-Roe. A small number of photographers have, over the years, offered their own suggestions. In 1972, as part of her bold explorations into women’s limited choices, Abigail Heyman photographed herself having an abortion. The camera points down at her open legs and the light is stark; there is no warmth, no subtlety. More recently, Laia Abril’s exceptional book On Abortion (2018), from her long-term project A History of Misogyny, has been receiving the acclaim it deserves. Abril considers the history of abortion, the damage caused when women lack legal, safe, and free access, and the plight of the forty-seven thousand women, worldwide, who die each year due to botched procedures. The book amalgamates images, text, and ephemera to make its case with clarity and force. It takes on a topic with a thoroughness that exposes how frequently photographers have shied away from addressing it robustly, or from engaging with personal or shared experience.

It has become popular to argue that the pro-abortion cause is, in general, unphotogenic. That there is nothing suitable or palatable to pull at heartstrings that isn’t gory or, by contrast, humdrum. Implicit in this idea is the shame that pervades abortion: the notion that to picture the ease of the process would only make the issue seem flippant, the advocate uncaring, or the patient untroubled (one could build a strong argument that this would be a good thing). A rare project that cuts through the expected histrionics is the committedly calm, and brilliantly useful website This Is My Abortion, where an anonymous woman posted photos she took on a concealed camera phone during her abortion. “My hope is this project will help dispel the fear, lies and hysteria around abortion,” she writes on the landing page. In an article for the Guardian, she recalls arriving at the clinic to see protestors: “Viewing, again, the horrific graphic images they displayed, I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of being harmed by the anti-abortion protesters or if I was more anxious about the procedure itself.”

Screenshot of the website This is My Abortion

A sea of images—what good have they done? To take on Warner’s question, I would propose the answer to the “visual representation” of abortion is not to be found in more photographs. Nor is it to be found in the partisan or the contrivedly wrought. The solution, instead, could come from a push to question what a photograph can be, in the inclination to challenge the truths about images we have accepted in the past. It could also lie in resisting the spray of narratives and sentimental insinuations—of deaths, missed chances, regrets, or could-have-beens—the projections and delusions and imaginatory leaps that have defined the discourse of both photography and abortion. It could be there in the stoicism to confront the tendency to search for meaning or some supposedly lingering emotional truth. Nilsson’s “babies” were not miracles of life but abortions. There was no cry in The Silent Scream. The dolls in the sea were just dolls. The metaphors fall; the reason emerges. A cluster of cells is not a baby. The eyes in the picture will never see.