Aperture's Blog, page 38

The Japanese Photographers Who Build Experimental Artist Books

In October 2021, Hiroko Komatsu and Osamu Kanemura held a parallel set of exhibitions at the newly reopened gallery space of dieFirma, New York—Komatsu’s Sincerity Department Loyal Division and Kanemura’s Looper Syndicate. In Komatsu’s installation, upstairs, visitors were welcomed by a subtle and moving smell, a combination of photographic paper and printing chemicals, that enveloped them as they walked through photographs, and on photographs, in a multisensorial experience. Amidst the prints, Komatsu also presented a selection of her new artist books. Downstairs, in Kanemura’s exhibition, visitors encountered a monumental collage made of twenty thousand color photographs, mainly of the artist’s hometown, Tokyo, and a few of New York, complemented by a (loud) film on a loop as well as a myriad of books on pedestals that all were invited to browse. Pauline Vermare recently spoke with Komatsu and Kanemura about these experimental installations.

Hiroko Komatsu and Osamu Kanemura, 2021

Pauline Vermare: What struck me first as I visited both of your installations is their incredible physicality: the utter joy of being surrounded by unframed prints and handmade books, of being in such direct contact with your art in an intimate and nonprecious way. It seems like a visceral reaction to our world, a desire to re-materialize, which feels so good in the midst of this COVID crisis. How did this work come to life?

Osamu Kanemura: While many people have been staying home for the past year, I’ve been out taking photographs of Tokyo using the Ricoh GR. I’ve been thinking that a digital camera should be completely different from a film camera and wondering how I could exhibit digital photography that is more than an imitation of film photography. That’s why I decided to present a large number of photographs, not in a conventional way where enlarged, framed photographs are exhibited in a white-cube gallery but as an installation and as handmade books.

Hiroko Komatsu: Same as Osamu, I was busy going outside to take pictures. Actually, I found it very easy to do so because there were few people outside amid the pandemic. In Tokyo, there had been a building rush linked to the Olympic Games, but much of the construction had been halted as part of lockdown. I enjoyed taking photographs of those empty construction sites, which gave me an impression of shiny ruins. When people look at those pictures, they can’t tell whether the scenery shows the process of building or of demolishing something. Those who work in these sites are so-called blue workers, and I believe those sites are where you can see the people who make up the lower part of our society and our infrastructure most clearly. As a photographer, I think it is very important to visit such places to take pictures.

Spread from Osamu Kanemura, Bird Study (Artist book, 2021)

Vermare: Osamu, would you tell us about your other camera of choice, the Plaubel Makina? In your excellent 2019 book, Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura, a collection of your interviews and writings, you explain: “The Plaubel Makina, which creates an element of unintentional noise, taught me the importance of unintended effects. . . . This adds street snap-like motion to static, urban landscape photos.”Why did you choose that camera?

Kanemura: Well, Daido Moriyama was already photographing Tokyo with a 35mm camera, and I didn’t want to do the same thing as him. So I decided to use a camera with better image quality, which was a 6-by-7 camera. I chose Plaubel Makina because it was lighter, which is an important factor for someone like me who shoots all day long. One of the features of the camera is that its viewfinder coverage is 80 percent. With such a wide coverage, when I try to take a picture of something, the object in the foreground enters the picture. Now, I consciously include things in the foreground in my photographs, but I used to think such a photograph would be a failure. Eventually, I realized that it would be more interesting if things I hadn’t imagined or things I had thought of as obstacles were in the images. This kind of “noise” in photography should be appreciated, I thought.

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Vermare: Both of you have incorporated the creation of objects into your recent practice, which we are surrounded with tonight as they feature prominently in the exhibition. I’d love for you both, maybe starting with Hiroko, to talk about those incredible objects—they’re something more than books, really. Black Book #1 (2021) actually is a bottle, filled with little cut-out pieces of paper that are the words from Greta Thunberg’s book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. Another one is filled with Theodore Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future: The Unabomber Manifesto. Hiroko, can you tell us about those books, those objects, and how you started making them?

Komatsu: In making my first artist book, Book #1 (2016), I wasn’t interested in selecting photographs from the approximately one thousand photographs to be shown in my exhibition and arranging them. Nor did I want to make a catalog from the photographs. I felt such a book would not represent what I was doing. I’ve been photographing my exhibition sites with the same camera I use in making the work outside. One time, I put those photographs of my installation side by side with the ones I took outside, and there was something consistent about them, and that inspired me to put them together for Book #1. Digital technology is also an important tool for me, and I digitally scan images made with an 8mm camera. The idea behind my artist book Black Book #1 is that text and photographs are very similar. A single photograph is not enough to make sense. A single word doesn’t make sense by itself, either. And when you put together multiple photographs or words, a meaning emerges. Also, when you take a picture, you frame a part of reality, and then you move the image to another place, such as an exhibition venue or bookstore. I thought the process was very similar to cutting out texts from a book and putting them in an object—in this installation, a bottle.

Installation view of Hiroko Komatsu: Sincerity Department Loyal Division, dieFirma, New York, 2021. Photograph by Hiroko Komatsu
All photographs courtesy dieFirma, New York

Vermare: In your case, and in Osamu’s work with books as well as with photographs, there’s this idea of accumulation. Osamu, you have recently been making two kinds of books: the ones that are collages of images and elements that you cut out and assemble in colorful, unique albums and those made from existing books that you intervene on, by drawing in them, cutting them. When did you start this process?

Kanemura: Before, I had a strong idea of what a photobook should be like. The reason I’m interested in handmade books is because it’s very interesting to see the preconceived notions of books that I’ve been trapped in until now breaking down. I couldn’t treat photobooks violently because I was thinking about distribution and preservation. But once I got rid of those things, many ideas came to me. For example, I cut or fold the pages of a book with a cutter or use tape that will not be well preserved. I made my first artist book two years ago. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about my black-and-white photographs because they were like tableaux. It was also then that I visited New York and bookdummypress (bdp). I was shocked to see the handmade books of Victor Sira, the director of bdp. I thought, This is more like a drawing. I also found it very interesting that he didn’t aim to complete his works but presented them unfinished. I decided to do what he was doing, with collage as a start.

A single photograph is not enough to make sense. A single word doesn’t make sense by itself, either. And when you put together multiple photographs or words, a meaning emerges.

In making collages, I use such materials as digital photographs and clippings from magazines and newspapers. I also realized that I could do things with digital photography that are difficult to do with film photography: taking photographs of my life, of what I see on a daily basis, and displaying my politics. I’m Zainichi—a Korean living in Japan—and because of my origins, I’ve encountered situations that have forced me to feel uncomfortable with the Japanese system since I was a child. In Japan, for example, you can see ads of racist magazines in major national newspapers. They say, “Zainichi Koreans should leave Japan.” This is also my daily life, and I’m clipping those words, too, in my collages. I like to make something out of something that exists, rather than creating something from scratch.

When I make my artist books, I use other people’s photographs, texts, and printed matters, and by doing so, I try to deconstruct the meaning and context of others’ materials and create another context. In this respect, photography is the same. It’s about framing the part of reality that exists in front of us. You may have noticed that I have repeatedly drawn circles in my artist books, using a special ruler. In other words, I drew the shape of an object with a tool, which made me realize that what I do with a camera is photograph the shape of an object. My every action serves to expand my concept of photography.

This piece originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking.” Interview translation by Yuri Mano.

Aperture, For Freedoms, and FREE THE WORK Partner to Launch Google’s Image Equity Fellowship

Today, in partnership with Google, For Freedoms, and FREE THE WORK, Aperture is announcing a six-month, application-based program that will award $20,000 in unrestricted funds to 20 selected creators in the US.

Applications are open to early-career artists who self-identify as a person of color, are based in the US, and are at least 18 years old. The awardees will develop visual bodies of work that present urgent, untold stories of their communities. In addition to a $20,000 award, each fellow will receive support exhibiting their completed projects in-person and online as well as mentorship and dedicated workshops with industry experts.

Led by Google as part of their Real Tone initiative, the fellowship is a continuation of the company’s efforts to more accurately and beautifully represent communities of color on Pixel 6 and in Google Photos. A key part of their work on Real Tone was made possible by partnering with image experts—renowned photographers, cinematographers, colorists, and directors—whose work has uplifted and expanded our collective understanding of whose stories need to be told. This emphasis on community-driven storytelling is the foundation of the inaugural Image Equity Fellowship.

“We are thrilled to partner with Google on the Image Equity Fellowship,” says Aperture’s executive director, Sarah Meister. “This is an extraordinary opportunity to further Aperture’s support of the photography community by collaborating with a group of talented artists alongside renowned mentors. Together, they will be showing us how linking technology with cultural partnerships can create a path toward a more expansive future for photography.”

In addition to Google, Aperture is proud to partner with For Freedoms, an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation. And FREE THE WORK, a non-profit organization committed to addressing the lack of diversity in media and to creating opportunities for a global workforce of underrepresented creators behind the lens in TV, film, and marketing. Together, we have selected five mentors to guide the twenty awardees: 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.

Submit now to the Image Equity Fellowship, open until July 18, 2022.

Lora Webb Nichols’s Mysterious Images of the American West

A blurry bird in a cage against a bright window, like a shadow cast, an omen. A child, ears askew in a kangaroo costume, lit up by the camera’s flash. A sapling flanked by two women, prophets or apparitions, in a far-reaching field. The American West of the photographer Lora Webb Nichols appears as visions from a dream, her breathtaking and improbable archive inspiring a disorienting reverie.

Lora Webb Nichols, Wendy Peryam, 1948

Born in 1883, Nichols was given her first camera in 1899, at age sixteen, and would spend the next sixty-some years taking photographs, many of them in Encampment, Wyoming, the frontier town where her homesteading family had settled. She would watch Encampment boom and bust with copper mining, documenting—in some cases for pay—the industry, ranch life, and the coming railroad. From early on Nichols photographed people with an artist’s intuition. She was attuned to moments not often memorialized then, and her access to quiet, private moments among women allowed her to capture, unusual for photography of the time, images of women brushing out their long hair or outstretched across a settee.

Lora Webb Nichols, “Tabernickle” and team, 1925

The distance between the last gasp of the Old West and the present can seem a chasm too wide to mentally and emotionally cross, even with visual aid. As the photographer Nicole Jean Hill observes in her essay for Encampment, Wyoming: Selections from the Lora Webb Nichols Archive 1899–1948 (2021), which Hill edited, archival images tend to feel remote, in part, because early film’s lack of sensitivity to light often required staging and rigidity. Despite these limitations, Nichols’s inclination toward intimate and idiosyncratic subjects and composition is pioneering. But what brings the eye to widen, then squint with recognition, is the bearing of the people Nichols photographed—how they hold themselves so openly, so honestly in her presence.

Lora Webb Nichols, Clella Brown (left) and unknown (right), 1899

Nichols was among the influx of women who in the early twentieth-century—with the period’s newfound freedoms for women, along with the proliferation of news photographs and portrait studios—made a career in commercial photography. Nichols’s Rocky Mountain Studio, operational from 1925 to 1935, was a Kodak franchise photo-finishing business where Nichols developed film for other photographers in the area, buying negatives she liked and selling the images as postcards. She also briefly ran a local newspaper, The Encampment Echo, as well as a soda fountain where she photographed anyone who’d allow it, including the young men who came through from the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Women, in pairs and alone, recur in Nichols’s work, sharing a laugh or food, or with their animals, and a sense of Nichols’s own conviviality is often apparent in her subjects. There can be a haunting quality, too, to Nichols’s photographs that’s difficult to characterize—a glimpse of the violence and hardship of westward expansion maybe? The landscape, sublime, and our knowledge of how we’ve transformed it? That dreamlike disorientation, again. Nichols’s work is best viewed in miscellany; her portraits of people, place, and industry are inextricable.

Lora Webb Nichols, Frank Nichols, 1942 Lora Webb Nichols, Name unknown, 1938

Nichols died in 1962, leaving behind a vast archive of twenty-four thousand images that are in the public domain and viewable at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center website. A natural record-keeper, Nichols kept extensive diaries that tell, beyond chipper daily details, of financial and marital struggles (she was married twice) and the difficulties of balancing business with the domestic (she had six children, four of them within six years). Nancy F. Anderson, a close friend of Nichols who’s helped to preserve her work, says she continued to take pictures and write in her diary up to her death in 1962.

Lora Webb Nichols, Guy Nichols recovering from flu, 1919
All photographs courtesy the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming

In a photograph of unflinching intimacy, her second husband, Guy Nichols, is pictured recovering from the flu during the 1918 to 1919 epidemic. Here, Nichols conjures a state somewhere between sleeping and waking, a dappled fever dream. Her husband’s vulnerable body, streaked in sunlight, is eclipsed only by the look on his face. Is it resignation or relief?

Dreaming, our minds walk while we sleep. Most vividly remembered when we wake is the lingering feeling left by our nocturnal wanderings, sometimes carried by a memorable image but not often explained by it. What Lora Webb Nichols made are astonishing and mysterious images of pure feeling, at once familiar and faraway.

This article is published coinciding with Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” guest edited by Alec Soth.

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The Subversive Dream Logic of Emila Medková’s Photographs

Dream logic is essentially sideways logic: similarities or kinships that work not by means of sense but along other avenues of relationship. Puns, for example, exhibit dream logic. What kind of socks do bears wear? None. They usually have bare feet.

Visual puns likewise find resemblances between objects not otherwise the same. Since human eyes are self-interested, the similarities they tend to discover are to human faces, from the composite vegetative figures of the sixteenth-century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo to those comic staples of today’s social media, the carrot that seems to smirk or the leering face in a tree.

Emila Medková, Konec obrazu (The end of the painting), 1948

Back up eighty years, and here’s the Czech Surrealist photographer Emila Medková, carrying out an austere version of the same absurdist project. Her work spans four decades, from the end of World War II to her death in 1985. With the exception of the brief liberalization in 1968 around the Prague Spring, Medková operated in the dark of totalitarian rule. Her work was rarely exhibited. Censorship was rife and resistance necessarily coded and covert. Her photographs were made as an act of subversion and bitter humor for a close circle of Czech Surrealists.

She started out in a fairly conventional, if virtuosic Surrealist mode. In the Shadowplay series of the 1940s, real objects are twinned with their shadow selves, the exception being a female figure in Lukostřelec (Archer) (1949), who exists solely in the domain of shadow. With an arrow, she pursues what looks like a flotilla of fish, made perhaps from knots in wood. In another scene, she gazes at a mysterious assemblage, which includes a tap gushing hair and an eggcup that appears to be capped with an eyeball, cheery as the cherry on an ice cream sundae.

Emila Medková, Křik (The scream), 1971 Emila Medková, Zavřená hlava (Closed head), from the series Zavřeno (Closed), 1960–61

These images have a definite power, but are in some ways reliant on a readymade Surrealist language, which centers on the objectification and estrangement of the female body. In her later work, Medková excised the human form altogether, finding far stranger and more potent bodily resonances by way of objects.

I’ve got four of her found forms in front of me. The first, Zavřená hlava (Closed head), from her long-running series Closed (1960–61), shows the middle region of two wooden doors, their surfaces riven and pockmarked. Each has a square black aperture near the top. Underneath, there’s a metal hasp, yoking the two doors together, which has been padlocked shut. It’s irresistible to read this image as a cartoon face, with doleful eyes and flat mouth. In fact, it looks exactly like the emoji for shhh or zip it, the ideal affective icon for the Stalinist government under which Medková worked.

Emila Medková, Lukostřelec (Archer), from the series Stínohry (Shadowplays), 1949

The face is above all a conveyer of expression, while the object is intrinsically speechless and inert. That’s the weird bathos, the lol of the face-in-object. In Medková’s faces, this tension is heightened by the way they’re so often further encumbered by having their mouths locked, filled, choked, or otherwise impeded. Everywhere, these faces that can’t speak are having their capacity for speech emphatically denied.

In Křik (The scream, 1971), we’re seeing another virtuosic surface, every crater and crevice crisply rendered. Is it a road in close-up? Much of the photograph appears dark, surrounding a pale region shaped like a cartoon face in profile—like the “Kilroy was here” face ubiquitous in 1940s graffiti. Kilroy’s hair is grass and his mouth is enormously wide. It looks as if he’s vomiting the darker matter, or, on the other hand, as if it’s being forced down his open gullet, choking the apparatus from which language is produced.

Emila Medková, Untitled, from the series Inkvizitoři (Inquisitors), 1951

There’s more uncanniness afoot in an untitled 1951 photograph from the series Inkvizitoři (Inquisitors). The face is made of bark, with a hank of hair, and another single eyeball, maybe a marble, though it looks a lot like what my godson calls “googly eyes” (a natural-born Surrealist, he often sticks them on unsuspecting fruit and eggs). But this face is lying on a table, as food tends to do. It has a fork shoved in its mouth, which pushes it toward the status of face, and a knife skewered through its cheek, which converts it back into food. Object or subject? Who’s doing the eating, and who is being consumed?

One more, this time not a face at all. This image, wittily titled Arcimboldo (1978), shows a crumple of machinery, with intestinal spokes and ribs and teeth. It looks like a torso, the damaged interior of a body. The French Surrealists, well-fed, enjoyed imagining women’s bodies emerging from inanimate objects in ways that were alternately nightmarish and exposing. Medková’s take is more skeptical and scathing.

Emila Medková, Arcimboldo, 1978
All photographs © Eva Kosáková Medková

Perhaps this is all a person is, she seems to say, a bundle of disarticulated parts, functional until it’s not. But what could seem like a dutiful totalitarian statement is undermined by the cool, displacing irony of Medková’s gaze. The oddness of the composition makes it impossible not to sense the presence behind the camera. The shadow is no longer necessary. What she’s actually managed to document is a person in the forbidden act of looking, thinking, dreaming freely. Maybe this particular rebellious object wasn’t so silent after all.

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This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” under the title “Sideways Logic.”

Reynaldo Rivera’s Delirious Chronicle of Los Angeles Nightlife

In Reynaldo Rivera’s life there are three fires, two of which nearly wiped out his life’s work.

Rivera has been taking photographs for the majority of his life: of friends, lovers, strangers, performers, and those who watch them, mostly in and around Los Angeles. Some document the sun-cracked landscapes and ladies who cleaned the SRO hotel rooms he stayed at in Stockton, California, where, as a teen, he worked seasonally in a Campbell’s soup cannery to support his picture taking and glam thrift habit. Later, as his world grew, he would take pictures in Mexico, Europe, Central and South America, but it’s mainly his photographs of LA scenes in the 1980s and 1990s that are driving an unprecedented institutional interest in his work. These images interpolate every facet of the word scene. Scene as in the East LA scene, the drag scene, the queer scene, the punk scene, the art scene, impressions of a greater scene created by the mix of genders, classes, and orientations milling about the house parties, drag bars, music shows, and bathrooms captured by Rivera’s camera. It’s hard not to cry. Mexican kids growing up under the shadow of the Hollywood sign are haunted by a glamour we’re constantly told is not ours.

The scenic quality of Rivera’s lens was pressed into him by an early love of silent movies and glamorous Mexican singers such as Lucha Reyes and Toña la Negra. “When I was working in Stockton, there was this big used bookstore. The Filipino lady that worked there really liked me. She would let me take boxes of books for like three dollars. I would devour old photo magazines and old movie star magazines because I had nothing else to do. That was my education.” At fifteen, Rivera was rifling through a box of stolen stuff outside the St. Leo Hotel, where he stayed with his father during cannery season. He spied a camera and asked about it. “My dad was like, ‘You want it? Give me 150 bucks.’ I was making a lot of money at this point—well, for that time. And I bought this fucking, broken-down-ass camera. I didn’t even know I could have bought a new camera for a hundred bucks. Some poor tourist probably got whacked over the head for it.” If the bookstore was his aesthetic education, the local Fotomat was his technical education. “I didn’t even know the light meter wasn’t working. I figured out how to load the film, and I would look through this thing, and I couldn’t figure out what anything was. None of my images came out. I started asking the girl at the store, ‘What do you think is going on?’ She taught me how to get an image. She explained that if it was darker I needed to go slower. Basic things.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Gaby, Reynaldo, and Angela, La Plaza, 1993

We’re sitting at an iron bistro table in the front yard of the large, two-story Victorian Rivera shares with his husband, Christopher Arellano (Bianco to friends), in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. There are fruit trees all around—persimmons, limes, pomegranates, lemons, and oranges, some hanging on to their branches, some smooshed and bleeding on the ground, all lightly powdered in smog dust from the mechanic shop next door. In the backyard—weed, herbs, little red-pepper plants, and a wounded dove in a wooden cage. The sun is setting. We’re having doughnuts and coffee. I want to talk about the fires, I say, because I know there are two of them.

“Well, two big ones,” he explains. “There was one before, but let’s just say the first real one was with my ex-boyfriend Steven, after he poked my eye out. Sliced it in half with a piece of glass.” According to Rivera, he ran into Steven at the Dresden Room in Los Feliz. They both got drunk, were removed from the premises, and went back to Rivera’s Echo Park apartment on Laguna Avenue, site of many of the louche gatherings in the background of his party photographs. Steven asked if Rivera was sleeping with his ex-girlfriend. “He always said to me, ‘Whatever you do, tell me the truth!’” Rivera answered yes, and Steven proceeded to trash the apartment, at one point breaking a window with his head. Rivera lunged toward him, and Steven spun around, slashing at his face with a shard of glass. Afterward, Rivera went out to meet some other friends, one of whom happened to be a doctor. She convinced Rivera to go to a hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery, and he finally returned to his apartment two days later. “I walked in, and there’s this little fogata, a pile of burned shit in my living room”—Steven had tried to set fire to Rivera’s life’s work. “He must have been holding the negs and trying to burn them one by one.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Herminia and Reynaldo Rivera, 1981

Rivera was born in Mexicali, in 1964, and pinballed between cities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border throughout his childhood, sometimes escorted back and forth by his father, who worked as a fence for stolen goods, which sometimes included Rivera and his sister. “My dad kidnapped us and took us to Mexico in 1969. We came back to the U.S. in 1975. It was a different world. You didn’t have to be told that everything Mexican was inferior, you could just feel it.” That feeling permeates much of what gets stamped as “Latino culture” in a city whose most influential export is movies that portray Latinos in a limited number of caricatured roles or presents Latino culture disingenuously filtered through a folkloric lens. As an actor, I, too, have been guilty of ethnic pose, of attempts to make the word Mexican broadly legible to the wider culture, to say nothing of the semantic welter that is Latinx—all due respect to this publication—a word we are both ambivalent about. “I’m Mexican,” Rivera says. “In English, Mexican doesn’t have a gender. It’s already gender neutral. I don’t need to get that complicated.”

Reynaldo Rivera, La Plaza, 1997

Rivera switches seamlessly between pronouns, often using several to describe the same person. He was versed in fluidity before there was a lexicon to describe it—the girls were the girls, whether they had dicks or not. Everyone is a cunt sometimes. Men are mostly motherfuckers. For someone who has spent most of his life evading capture—by the poverty of his youth, the gang violence of his adolescence, sexual prejudice, AIDS, house fires, the housing market, you name it—the overdue interest in his work has much to do with a refusal to be caught under certain labels. Labels make it easier to categorize, and, more importantly, fund certain forms of art making. Who gets invited to the Latino group show? “We’ve always been here,” Rivera says. “We’ve been part of everything that’s happened—not just in the city—but art in general. But somehow, we get put into our own little category. We say we want to sit at the table. We never said the table was ‘How to be Latino!’”

“I took people that were ordinarily considered freaky and made them look amazing, or cool, or normal. My gig was to have people look the way they wanted to look.”

Rivera’s work isn’t at the Latino table. It’s not even in the same restaurant. It’s down the street taking a smoke break in a piss-stained alley behind Mugy’s, where inside the owner, Yoshi, is stomping the stage in a flamenco dress while singing in Japanese. Rivera was included in the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2020: a version. Last summer, he began preparing for a solo exhibition at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, in New York, and working with an editor to expand the video he created for the Hammer Museum into a longer film “to submit to festivals and shit.” The exposure of Rivera’s work dovetails with interest in photographers such as Sunil Gupta and Alvin Baltrop, who documented ways of life that complicate the aesthetic and historical narratives set by the canon of white street photographers including Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The people in Rivera’s photographs are complicated, glamorous, louche. And while Rivera is quite deliberate about the cinematic qualities of his images, they contain the layered ambiguity of a Manet painting. Tolerance of ambiguity in our cultural products is the necessary precursor to appreciate his work. Loving ambiguity is how to see yourself in these pictures, however unfabulous you may be in life.

Reynaldo Rivera, Tatiana Volty, Silverlake Lounge, 1986

And yet, his story already has the signs of apocrypha, the constellation of anecdotes that settles into shape around an artist as they become part of art history: a history laid out lovingly and neatly (as much as is possible) by the writer Chris Kraus in a monograph published by Semiotext(e) in 2020. The book, named after her essay, is titled Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City. In addition to Kraus’s introduction, there’s a dizzying stream-of-consciousness text by Rivera himself, set apart by pastel peach matte paper inserted in the middle of the book, like how in the Bible the words thought to come directly from Jesus are printed in red. There’s a biography of Tatiana Volty, one of the drag queens in the book, written by the writer Luis Bauz, and a protracted email exchange between Rivera and Vaginal Davis, another artist who exploded genres and labels, mainly through her punk performances and bands and writing. Rivera captured portraits of her before she moved to Berlin in 2006, and their volley of anecdotes is rhetorical sport of the highest, most shit- talking order.

Many of the drag performers and club goers in Los Angeles chronicled by Rivera are no longer around, succumbing either to drugs or AIDS or violence, but some aspects of his city still concatenate into the present. Rita Gonzalez, currently head of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is caught looking cute and puckish at a house party in the 1990s. Miss Alex, the drag performer who helped Rivera get backstage access to many of the drag bars around LA, where he captured some of his most intimate scenes, died of a stroke at the same county hospital where I had often sat on the floor, waiting six, eight hours to see a doctor when I didn’t have insurance. When I lived in Echo Park in the early 2000s, it was on the same block on Laveta Terrace that Rivera lived on nearly twenty years earlier. Little Joy was still a bit of a shithole then, allowing seventeen- year-old me to drink, and where I’ve known a friend or two to be stabbed. Rivera shows me a picture of a drag queen in a butterfly mask crawling on the pool table there, serving equal parts Mardi Gras and Moulin Rouge in the dingy bar at the foot of Dodger Stadium.

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He shows me more ruined prints: “These were from the other fire.” The one that happened in 2012 and nearly took out his current home. The origins of that fire are less theatrical, more apropos to the life Rivera lives now with his husband and their dog, Coco, surrounded by his work and the books and records that inspire it. Roofers accidentally set the entire attic—where Rivera’s negatives are stored—aflame while sealing roofing tar with a torch. The pressure from the blast of the fire department’s hoses caused more damage than the fire itself, resulting in a strange body of compromised negatives that Rivera has been printing nonetheless. They look otherworldly.

“This was unpublished until I posted it on Instagram, then Hedi saw it, and he’s going to use it for a book cover,” Rivera says, referring to Semiotext(e)’s editor Hedi El Kholti. All that’s legible from what appears to be a house-party scene is the plaid-clad boy on the right, casually leaning against the cabinetry in what might be a kitchen. To the left, a T-shirt and an arm extend downward from the central bloom of damage that makes up the majority of the frame. It spills out like rot, like lungs, like a coral reef, like lava or dried mushrooms, the kind that get you high. These “ruined” photographs feel oddly fitting—to Rivera, to the intensity of the times he lived in, to the fragile and ever-shifting nature of what he documented. “These are definitely more creative,” he laughs. “The water and the heat did something very specific to them. It took a mélange of misfortunes to create these.”

Reynaldo Rivera, Elyse Regehr and Javier Orosco, Downtown LA, 1989
All photographs courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles

It’s hard to square the sensitive aspects of Rivera, who refers to his camera as a “saving grace” from a chaotic and violent childhood, with the lucid confidence with which he talks about his work. “I used to always be compared to what’s-her-name”— Nan Goldin—“or Diane Arbus. We’re completely different. When you look at her shit, I don’t know . . .” He spreads his arms out wide, reifying the spiritual and emotional distance Arbus kept from her subjects, “. . . it felt like you were excluded. Like you’re not invited to that party. My work is not like that at all. She took people that were normal and made them look freaky. I took people that were ordinarily considered freaky and made them look amazing, or cool, or normal. My gig was to have people look the way they wanted to look.”

Some histories do not spool out in a straight line, they explode like confetti left on the ground after a party. A book is one way to do it, so is an exhibition, or a film, all enterprises Rivera has in the works. But words and pictures can’t hold everything that has happened. “Originally the book was more of an homage to these girls than anything else. That’s why I thought it was important to have these texts in here, to give meaning to all this stuff, to connect the dots.” Often what is recovered can only point toward what is lost. “I’m such a cunt,” he says, anytime he struggles to recall a detail. Names and stories fall out of his mouth like glitter, and some are beginning to escape him. To wrangle them is like stuffing a kaleidoscope. The pieces are all there, no one is missing, it’s just that the image never sits still. It will always change depending on how you hold it and from where you look. It’s the aftermath of a party that may be over, but you’re still invited. That has always been the subtext of these images, lit up and brought to life by the third and final fire, Rivera himself.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 245, “Latinx,” under the title “Reynaldo Rivera: Glitter for the Fire.”

How a Generation of Women Artists Broke New Ground in Abstract Photography

In 1971, Linda Nochlin famously asked in the title of an essential essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Lamenting the meager representation of women in art, she declared: “There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol.” In the heated debates of second-wave feminism, these dialogues were crucial and vital, and were essential to creating a more pluralistic narrative of art in the twentieth century. But those conversations rarely included photography—or film, or architecture, or design, for that matter—art forms that were other.

Photography is now our lingua franca—it is the dominant medium of our image-saturated era. Over the last half century photography has joined the ranks of painting and sculpture in the art market and the museum (this May, for instance, the newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art dedicated an unprecedented 15,500 square feet to photography). Recent years have also seen a spate of women-only exhibitions, including the Centre Pompidou’s 2010 elles@centrepompidou featuring works from their collection, the Musée d’Orsay’s Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? 1839–1945 (2015–16), and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016 (2016) at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles.

Anna Atkins, Convalaria Multiflora, 1854
Courtesy the Getty’s Open Content Program

Despite exhibitions to further the visibility of women artists, many museums have fallen short of presenting balanced and diverse programs. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art came under fire for its lack of female representation in its permanent galleries, with critic Jerry Saltz tallying a pitiful 3.5 percent of the art on view from their collection as being by women. But his numbers reflected displays from the collections of painting and sculpture only, not the collections of architecture and design, drawings and prints, and photography, where there were more works by women on view (although still not 50 percent). As a curator working at MoMA at the time, I was acutely aware of the imbalance, but dismayed by Saltz’s limited (and retrograde) view of art. In fact, MoMA was in the midst of organizing Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (2010–11), an exhibition (of which I was a cocurator) that surveyed the history of photography with some two hundred works by women. This is all to say that even in the early twenty-first century, photography is still other.

This century has witnessed a boom of women artists investigating the possibilities of the photographic medium in new and exciting ways. Artists such as Liz Deschenes, Sara VanDerBeek, Eileen Quinlan, Miranda Lichtenstein, Erin Shirreff, Anne Collier, Mariah Robertson, and Leslie Hewitt all defy the dominant idea of a photograph as an observation of life, a window onto the world. While each artist possesses her own aesthetic language and artistic concerns, as a whole, their practices represent a look inward—to the studio, still life, rephotography, material experimentation, abstraction, and nonrepresentation. Driven by a profound engagement with the medium, these artists have created a dynamic domain for experimentation that has taken contemporary photography by storm.

Berenice Abbott, Water waves change direction, 1958–61
© Berenice Abbott/Getty Images

It’s certainly risky to create a binary of “traditional” photography, which claims an indexical relationship to the world, versus the avant-garde tradition that considers the properties of photography itself: its circulation, production, and reproduction. As curator Matthew S. Witkovsky notes, “Abstraction … is not photography’s secret common denominator, nor is it the antidote to ‘traditional’ photography.” Recent scholarship has gone a long way to recuperate, and problematize, the status of experimental photography within photographic discourse. Nevertheless, throughout photography’s history, the avant-garde tradition has been considered an “alternate” to the dominant understanding of photography.

Can an argument be made that women have found fertile ground in the underchampioned arena of nonconventional image making? Have the historic marginalizations (of photography, avant-garde experimentation, and women artists) contributed to the vitality we see today? Can working against photographic convention, in a medium that is still sometimes considered other, be viewed as an act of defiance? It’s also challenging to make an argument based on gender (or race, sexuality, geography), since men have undoubtedly made accomplished work in the avant-garde tradition. Do we still need to discuss gender? Do we need exhibitions of women artists to shine the spotlight on underrecognized practices?

Miranda Lichtenstein, Last Exit, 2013
Courtesy the artist

I think so. At the time of this writing, Hillary Clinton has clinched the Democratic nomination for president, but the threat to reproductive rights and women’s scant representation in boardrooms and in government confirm that there is still much work to do. In the arts, there is marked gender inequality. Last year ARTnews cited the paucity of solo exhibitions dedicated to women in major New York museums (and for women of color, it’s even more dismal), and a 2014 study, “The Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships,” by the Association of Art Museum Directors, reports that female art museum directors earn substantially less than their male counterparts. While there has been some progress since Nochlin’s rallying cry, the artists of this generation are more aware than ever of their roles in an imbalanced art world.

Photography has always been hospitable to women, and women have made some of the most radical accomplishments in nonconventional image making. It’s a relatively new medium, free from the crushing millennia-long history of painting and sculpture. In its infancy, photography was practiced by scientists and alchemists, not artists. A photographer didn’t have to be enrolled in the hallowed halls of the academy; she could cook it up in the kitchen. Victorian England saw the early botany experiments of Anna Atkins, narrative allegories by Lady Clementina Hawarden (featuring her daughters as sitters), and Julia Margaret Cameron’s purposeful “misuse” of the wet collodion process to create her signature portraits. The proliferation of mass media and new camera and printing technologies in the early twentieth century ushered in radical collages by Hannah Höch, Bauhaus experiments by Lucia Moholy and Florence Henri, and the modernist compositions of Tina Modotti. Some women worked in isolation, like Lotte Jacobi, who created her light drawings in seclusion in New Hampshire; others had patronage, such as Berenice Abbott, who was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make pictures of scientific phenomena. The postwar movements of pop art, land art, conceptual art, and performance art significantly incorporated photography—Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, and Adrian Piper leaned heavily on photography, in all its uses. Their work is unfathomable without it.

Recent years have witnessed a generation of women exploring new ground in the photographic medium.

The experimentation, manipulation, and disruption of photographic conventions of the early twentieth century reached a crescendo in the century’s last decades. Art of the past forty years has set the stage for the dominance of contemporary experiments by women today. Since the 1970s there has been a plethora of women working in photography (some asserting they are artists “using photography,” not photographers), including Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kasten, Lorna Simpson, Barbara Kruger, and Carrie Mae Weems. These artists share an interest in the status, power, and representation of both images and women within cultural production. They collectively challenge the chief tenets of traditional photography—originality, faithful reproduction, and indexicality. While we now refer to many of the women of this time period as Pictures Generation artists, Sherman recalls, in a 2003 issue of Artforum, the unprecedented prevalence of female practitioners:

In the later ’80s, when it seemed like everywhere you looked people were talking about appropriation—then it seemed like a thing, a real presence. But I wasn’t really aware of any group feeling…. What probably did increase the feeling of community was when more women began to get recognized for their work, most of them in photography…. I felt there was more of a support system then among the women artists. It could also have been that many of us were doing this other kind of work—we were using photography—but people like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were in there too. There was a female solidarity.

These women embraced the expansiveness of photography’s parameters and have deeply informed, animated, and ultimately liberated the work of the artists who came after.

Liz Deschenes, Gallery 4.1.1, installation at MASS MoCA, 2015. Photograph by David Dashiell
Courtesy the artist, MASS MoCA; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; and Campoli Presti, London/ Paris

Recent years have witnessed a generation of women exploring new ground in the photographic medium. I spoke with several of them for this article. Liz Deschenes, whose work sits at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and architecture, is central to current conversations around nonrepresentational photography. Working between categories and disciplines, Deschenes is also deeply rooted in the histories of photographic technologies, challenging the notion of photography as a fixed discipline. Deschenes questions and resists all power structures, including binaries that confine works of art. Photography is frequently reduced to polarized classifications—color versus black and white, landscape versus portrait, analog versus digital, representation versus abstraction. As an educator, she underscores the medium’s fluidity by introducing disregarded figures (often women) and so-called alternate histories into her teaching. Deschenes explains:

It does not make much sense for women to follow conventions. We have never been adequately included in the general dialogue around image production. I think women have carved out spaces in photography because for such a long time the stakes were so low or nonexistent, that there was no threat of a takeover. I believe that has shifted with the female-dominated Pictures Generation.

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Miranda Lichtenstein, whose lush images have revived the contemporary still life, similarly cites the influence of the Pictures Generation on her work:

I began working in nontraditional ways with photography because I wanted to push against the images around me (particularly of women). I used collage and alternative processes because it allowed me to transform and control the pictures I was appropriating. I studied under Joel Sternfeld, so “straight photography” was the dominant paradigm, but I was lucky enough to see work by women in the early 1990s that had a dramatic impact on me. Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender, and Barbara Kruger were some of the artists whose work cleared a path for me.

Sara VanDerBeek, Concrete Forms, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

As Lichtenstein suggests, these women opened avenues for new ways of observing and interrogating the image in today’s culture. In the digital age, where photographs are most often images (that is, JPEGs and TIFFs, not prints), Lichtenstein, Deschenes, and others affirm the material properties of the medium and contribute to a more malleable idea of photography within a historical continuum.

Photography’s history and its relationship to sculpture, media, and film technologies are central to Sara VanDerBeek’s work. Through carefully calibrated photographs of her own temporary sculptures, neoclassical sculptures, ancient edifices, and architectural details, VanDerBeek has developed an aesthetic language that deftly prods the relationship between photography and sculpture. In addressing the history of sculpture, she shifts a mostly male- dominated history into a contemporary female realm, where object and image are leveled. VanDerBeek, whose recent art addresses “women’s work,” remarks:

This sense that there is a quality of impermanence to our progress [as women] leads me to photography. Specifically I’m referring to its expansive and elastic nature, its space for experimentation and its “democratic” nature. Photography has always been open to diverse practitioners and throughout its history it has included the possibility for expression for many who were not easily allowed into other arenas. I think some of this does come from its status as “other,” and perhaps, for me, even more so from its interdependent relationship with mass media and technology.

Eileen Quinlan, Monument Valley, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

Eileen Quinlan, whose photographs are grounded in material culture, the history of abstraction, feminist history, and, most lately, the ubiquity of screens, cites the predominance of conventional photography curriculums as fomenting a type of resistance:

Photographers have always created constructed, nonobjective, and materially promiscuous pictures. But this history isn’t taught, and if it is alluded to, it’s mentioned derisively. Photography remains a male-dominated field, both in the commercial and fine art sectors, and is saturated with “straight” photographers who supposedly harness the medium’s “strengths,” that is, the ability to sharply and irrefutably record and depict a kind of truth about the world. Maybe women sense that taking unconventional approaches to photography will somehow afford us more room to move? Jan Groover was political when she made abstraction in the kitchen sink. Working with still life, setup, or self-portraiture isn’t only about investigating interior or domestic worlds, either. Women are more sensitive to the potential for exploitation when we photograph others … as an artist I am consciously rejecting much I have been taught about pure photography as observation of reality. I understand all photographs to be made rather than taken or found.

Sarah Charlesworth, Buddha of Immeasurable Light, 1987, from the series Objects of Desire
Courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone

Many of these female artists are educators, and in some cases their roles as teachers can be profoundly impactful. Deschenes asserts, “There is no domain within higher photography education that does not have a male authority and history inscribed in its hierarchies, curriculum, alumni, buildings, and more. To attempt to subvert any of that is certainly a political act.” Perhaps the most important figure in this regard is Charlesworth. Deeply respected by younger artists (she is cited as an inspiration by those quoted here), Charlesworth created a vital link between her generation and the next. She taught, wrote about, conversed with, and empowered a new generation of artists working in experimental ways, who, in turn, have made community and dialogue central. Through her own groundbreaking work and her strong desire to build community among women artists, Charlesworth established a space for diverse photographic practices to flourish. Her advocacy for the medium and its continuation today by Deschenes, Lichtenstein, Quinlan, Hewitt, and VanDerBeek, who teach at prestigious schools, has unquestionably influenced the course of photographic history and how it is taught.

Like their work, each artist under discussion presents a different viewpoint on photography and so-called experimental practices. However, together they affirm that the medium has always been fluid and resistant to typologizing. Through exhibiting their work, teaching, publishing, and public and private conversations, these artists celebrate the inherently hybrid, pluralistic, and mutable nature of photography, within a robust space for dialogue, debate, and, I would posit, defiance. As a curator who has worked with many of these figures, I have witnessed artists creating work, meaning, and community in arenas long hospitable to women but outside the mainstream, marshaling a shift from the periphery to the center. Artist Emily Roysdon, in the 2010 catalogue Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps expressed it best: artists today are not “protesting what we don’t want but performing what we do want.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 225, “On Feminism,” under the title “On Defiance.”

How the Architect Frida Escobedo Thinks About Art and Design

In March 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, announced the selection of the architect Frida Escobedo to design the museum’s new modern and contemporary art wing. Here, we revisit an interview with Escobedo in the magazine’s “House & Home” issue, originally published in spring 2020.

When she landed the commission to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2018, Frida Escobedo established herself as a young architect with a compelling vision. By that time, she already had a number of accomplished projects under her belt, from the renovation of La Tallera, the former studio of the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros turned public art gallery, to Casa Negra, a house featuring wide-screen views of her native Mexico City, designed for a photographer and inspired by the concept of a camera obscura. Escobedo’s works—often made with raw materials like perforated concrete blocks—opt for flexibility and a restrained yet daring form to create simple visual gestures.

Though Escobedo says she was too intimidated to apply to art school, deciding on an architecture path instead, her creative process is close to that of a visual artist who lets her pieces speak for themselves. But she also has an eye on the cultural landscape in which her work exists—Mexico’s social divisions and class dynamics have often been a concern in her investigations of buildings and housing—as well as on the storied history of built environments in her home country. “Mexican architecture is informed by its context,” she has remarked. “I think it’s more like a spirit rather than a style.” Here, she speaks about transforming lives through design and space, and her own spirit of invention.

Frida Escobedo, Casa Negra, Mexico City, 2006
Photograph by José Fernando Sánchez. Courtesy the artist

Alejandra González Romo: One of your first projects was the Casa Negra (2006) on the outskirts of Mexico City, which resembles a dark camera. Is there any connection between the concept for that house and that of an old camera?

Frida Escobedo: The first two projects I worked on were house renovations, so this was indeed the first one I developed from scratch. I was twenty-three back then, fresh out of college, and a small, very simple house had to be built with limited resources. The idea was to build a one room studio with a mezzanine as a quick solution. The owner, who is a photographer, had inherited that plot on the outskirts of Mexico City, on the road to Cuernavaca. A small space, it had to be made permeable to light, and the solution was to build a huge window looking out onto the city, which frames the view. It is a black box standing on columns. One enters by a bridge. When entering the box, one immediately sees the landscape, a mixture of forest and city. At night, especially, the box creates a camera-obscura effect with the city lights visible in the distance.

González Romo: How would you describe the way natural light comes into the space?

Escobedo: The light comes in from the north. Therefore, the house works perfectly as a studio. The only risk was that the house turns out to be very cold. For this reason, we installed an L shaped skylight, so it has an additional light inlet from the south, thus warming it a bit. We painted it dark gray—almost black—so that it attracts more light and heat. It also has a ramp that goes from the kitchen up to a terrace. Therefore, the social space is doubled, the peripheral view from the roof offering a whole different experience. It is indeed a type of camera aiming at the city, but, at the same time, it’s spatially functional. Also, its position and angle resemble the way any photographer would choose to set a tripod.

A photograph by Frida Escobedo’s sister, Ana Gómez de León, at Escobedo’s home, Mexico City, 2019
Photographs by Yvonne Venegas for Aperture Frida Escobedo’s home, Mexico City, 2019

González Romo: Looking at the documentation of your projects, I can see the signature of the photographer Rafael Gamo is on practically every single piece. What is the role of photography in your creative process?

Escobedo: The process behind architecture is overflowing with images. But if we talk of photography’s recording value, my interest is in having documentation done on more than one occasion. I like working with Rafael, because he always comes back to the sites to capture the way a project evolves. Neither of us is interested in the perfect picture. All we want is a living record. Even though, in many cases, owners make it difficult to keep that record, I am interested in capturing how each construction ages.

González Romo: What other photographers have influenced your way of seeing?

Escobedo: Josef Koudelka, Sebastião Salgado, Graciela Iturbide, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Gerhard Richter—their interventions with photographs. My sister Ana Gómez de León is also a photographer. A photograph of hers sits by the entrance of my house. I forced her to give it to me as a present. She took the photograph from a plane, where you can see a river crossing the mountains. When I saw it, I thought of Salgado and his endless journeys to shoot such images. This one was taken through a filthy window using an iPhone. I love it. It is my favorite photograph. Here, in my office, I have a postcard taken by the architect Mauricio Rocha, in 1988. It is an image of a wooden wagon with glass doors reflecting a lake. It is a photograph he took at a very young age, and I interpreted it as some sort of acknowledgment of what I was doing in my first years as an architect.

I recently saw Hans Haacke’s exhibition at the New Museum, in which he analyzes the relationships between power, real-estate value, and built space in New York. His research draws lines between the Shapolsky family and 142 buildings across the city, while keeping a record of each property’s square meters, its conditions, its owner, et cetera. It is well known that power concentrates in very few families around the world; yet, visualizing it in such a clear way takes the subject out of the abstract. A similar analysis, but one made indoors, is Daniela Rossell’s series Ricas y famosas (Rich and famous, 1994–2001), where she shows the interiors of immense mansions in Mexico, unveiling the tastes and personalities of women who may lack anything but money. It is a portrait of society through space and architecture from an intimate perspective.

Carlos Somonte, Still of Yalitza Aparicio in Roma (Alfonso Curarón, dir.), 2018
Courtesy Netflix

González Romo: Haacke’s piece sounds similar to what you achieved with your research project and book Domestic Orbits (2019), based on the fact that there are more than 2.4 million domestic workers in Mexico and that 90 percent of them are women. It is a cartographical analysis of the way the domestic sphere is configured around race, class, and gender. What triggered your interest in this subject?

Escobedo: Few people know that Luis Barragán’s domestic worker still lives in his house, more than thirty years after Barragán’s death. As part of his will, he decided she could continue living there for the rest of her life. We are talking about an iconic house built by a Pritzker Prize winner, which currently functions as a museum but has a hidden configuration: a house within a house that no one knows about and that is designed not to be discovered by visitors. Nonetheless, if you pay attention, there are hints of that invisibility everywhere. There are bells under the tables to communicate with that other zone, and there are secondary routes that allow staff to pass through the main areas without being seen.

This analysis of Casa Barragán was the first exercise. Three years later, we decided to expand our research, as these signs of invisibility can be seen in architecture on different scales. In the building where I live, there are also rooms for the service staff that are completely invisible. Walking around the city, we see massive apartment buildings with wonderful views, built by renowned architects. But what invisible architecture lies behind?

I don’t think there should only be one concept of home. I think the actual problem is the will to standardize.

We also analyzed the house where Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 movie Roma was filmed, which has a little tower where the character Cleo [the family’s domestic worker] lives. Another very interesting case is a building from 1957 in Polanco [a neighborhood in Mexico City], where the service staff rooms are in a separate building a few blocks away. These are very small dwellings built around a main courtyard, where the service staff can have a private life and bring visitors if they so wish, in addition to having a spatial separation between work and leisure. That possibility has almost completely disappeared within one generation, and current domestic workers often commute up to four hours every day from the outskirts of the city to their workplaces.

Frida Escobedo, Mar Tirreno, Mexico City, 2016–19
Photograph by Rafael Gamo. Courtesy the artist

González Romo: You live in a building designed by Mario Pani, one of the most widely renowned architects in Mexican history, and a representative of what was perhaps the golden age of architecture in the country. What reflections do you have from living in a space like that?

Escobedo: Two years ago, I went through a separation and moved into this apartment, although it was rather by chance. This is a building from 1956, a time when many buildings full of two-hundred-square-meter apartments were built. It is a space with a history, which means it has been modified before. In the past, it was divided, but now it consists of rather open spaces. I have very few pieces of furniture: one Wassily chair that my father gave me when I first went to live by myself, and another we made at the office, which is a reinterpretation of the Donald Judd chairs, but made of volcanic rock. It’s more of a joke. The table is attached to the wall, as was Barragán’s, and the bookshelves surrounding the space are very low, so they can be used as seats when throwing a party. There are very few things, but I like the space to look empty, more like a dance floor. My walls are also clear. I do not like hanging pictures on the wall, as it looks way too formal to me. I prefer to lean them against bookshelves or other objects and move them around from time to time.

Objects in Frida Escobedo’s home, including concrete panel research and design models, Mexico City, 2019
Photographs by Yvonne Venegas for Aperture

González Romo: From an architectural point of view, what is your idea of a home?

Escobedo: I don’t think there should only be one concept of home. I think the actual problem is the will to standardize. There are many configurations of housing and family that are not considered when developing real-estate projects. They insist on selling us as many labels as possible in spaces that are increasingly small: a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms … and that nonsense walk-in closet, as if that were indeed going to increase our quality of life. Why doesn’t anyone go for, say, large, flexible areas for people to transform freely?

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González Romo: You built a house for the Ordos 100 project (2008), organized by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron. For this, one hundred architects from twenty-seven countries were invited to build a thousand-square-meter luxury villa in the Mongolian desert. You also designed a small house as part of a program for the Mexican government that sought low-cost housing alternatives for disadvantaged people. How did you respond to such opposite concepts?

Escobedo: For the Ordos 100 project, the challenge was to rethink housing and come up with an experimental proposal to be developed in a rather inhospitable territory. There were guidelines to be followed—some interesting, some obvious. The idea was to create weekend houses. Each one had to have a safe, a cellar, a pool, et cetera. What caught my attention was the fact that they asked for two kitchens: one closed with storage space and the other open, like an island. After talking to the organizers, I understood that the first kitchen was for the service staff, and I realized that they would live there full-time. Therefore, in the remaining space, I designed an independent house for the cleaning staff, cooks, gardeners, et cetera, where they would have their own courtyards, linked to the main construction. For that project, enormous, outrageous houses were designed. I was the youngest among a hundred architects, and my house was the smallest one.

Objects in Frida Escobedo’s home, including concrete panel research and design models, Mexico City, 2019
Photographs by Yvonne Venegas for Aperture

For the INFONAVIT (Institute of the National Fund for Workers’ Housing) project (2019), the challenge was quite the opposite: designing with minimal resources and in a reduced area. I was invited, together with other architects, to design a social housing prototype. We created one that would adapt both to a rural area and to an urban context. It is a very flexible vaulted house, which in a rural context can also be adapted as a barn. As for an urban environment, these arches integrate very well with the local architecture, as they are part of the architectural language of that city, Taxco. On a certain level, it is similar to the Casa Negra, which we discussed at the beginning, because it was an open space with a mezzanine offering easy and economical possibilities of expansion without the need for skilled labor. The idea is that instead of repeating that design ad nauseam—as has been the case with many social-housing projects, and I think it is a big mistake to believe that this configuration should be massive and standardized—families living in contiguous houses would have common, adaptable courtyards and spaces that would contribute to building communities.

Frida Escobedo, From Territory to Inhabitant, INFONAVIT, Vivienda Rural, Apan, Hidalgo, Mexico, 2019
Photograph by Rafael Gamo. Courtesy the artist

González Romo: However, the housing project remained in limbo, making evident the government’s lack of commitment to address the precarious condition in which a large part of the Mexican population lives.

Escobedo: As soon as we completed the project for INFONAVIT, we were told that all those prototypes, designed for different contexts, would be exhibited together in a plot intended to become a housing lab for researchers. Thus, instead of giving those houses to people who actually need them, they are in some kind of showroom. That project ended up being tremendously frustrating for me. It was a waste of resources that we cannot afford.

González Romo: Many of your projects transcend the boundaries of architecture and could be read as similar to those of a visual artist. How do your references to other forms of art come into play in projects like the pavilion you created for the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, or in your installation for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London?

Escobedo: In the case of El Eco, I was dealing with very high-level architecture—a work by Mathias Goeritz. Thus, profiting from the flexibility offered by loose bricks, I proposed guidelines to build a different space configuration for every event taking place in that courtyard: a stage for concerts, seats for a film projection, or simply a brick sculpture that kids could play with or destroy to build something new. In this case, one of my references was the concrete poetry of Ferreira Gullar, who seeks the maximum expression with a minimal amount of words. At first glance, a brick is a rigid industrial piece. It looks like an object that does not allow much expression. Yet, when people appropriate it, the expressions are infinite.

The project for the Victoria and Albert Museum was developed in the context of the Year of Mexico in England, so the challenge was to make a pavilion in the central courtyard that made reference to Mexico. Nowadays a national pavilion is a somewhat forced idea, because everyone has windows to other countries and cultures, so we intended to enable an exchange, which seemed more interesting. We started from an investigation on land appropriations and decided to allude to the first appropriation that took place in Mexico City after the [Spanish] conquest, to recall the original city, which was a lake city full of reflections. This lake city is literally buried under the urban history of the country’s capital. It is fascinating, even surreal. How did anyone come up with building a city on water? The idea involves high doses of magical realism, but somehow they managed.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home.” Translated from the Spanish by Enrique Pérez Rosiles.

Alec Soth Guest Edits Aperture’s Summer 2022 Issue

It is easy to imagine Alec Soth daydreaming in pictures. As an acclaimed photographer, teacher, publisher, YouTuber, and one-time blogger, he is as dedicated to thinking about what pictures mean as he is to making them. Since his 2004 debut, Sleeping by the Mississippi, a series he described not as a chronicle of place but an excuse to wander, Soth has made lyrical bodies of work—modest meditations on consciousness—that parse the surfaces of the everyday. “In my projects, I allow myself to change course and follow my nose,” he notes of his process, which is decidedly driven by a search for serendipity.

As guest editor, Soth pursued a theme that wouldn’t constrain him. “This ‘Sleepwalking’ issue,” he says, “is one in which I’m always surprised on turning the page, where good old descriptive photographs of the real world tap into the logic of dreams. I want the reader to feel like they are sleepwalking.” We hope you enjoy the journey with eyes wide open, or shut.

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Read more from Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking.”

An Artist’s Video Choir Tells a Story about Black and Queer Visibility

Bad singer? Check. Queer female masc? Check. Game to explore both? Check.

On July 15, 2021, I was scrolling through Facebook when I saw a post by Toronto artist Michèle Pearson Clarke announcing a new project about learning to sing. She needed three game participants who fit the above criteria. I stopped in my tracks and immediately answered her invitation because, yes, that’s me.

I am indeed both a bad singer and on the spectrum of queer female masculinity, so I was fully confident in my fit for Michèle’s Quantum Choir. I was also thoroughly discomfited by what it would ask of me. I’m an objectively awful singer: memories of being instructed to lip-sync in my elementary-school choir still haunt me. And this is precisely why I responded to Michèle with lightning speed: I worried that if I had time to think about it, I’d back out. I had a strong desire to embrace what terrified me and reminded myself that I had nothing to lose but face. And in my forty-eight years I’ve learned that saving facing is overrated, anyway.  

There were other reasons for my yes. I admire and respect Michèle’s work, so I welcomed the opportunity to create something with her. And as a writer and photographer who asks people to say yes to sharing parts of themselves with me, I want to offer my own yeses in turn. I also learned that our professional vocal coach would be Teiya Kasahara—not only a supremely talented soprano (and currently a Disrupter-in-Residence at the Canadian Opera Company) but also a former soccer teammate. In short, I knew that despite my trepidation (okay, terror), this would be a unique and compelling learning experience, no matter the outcome.

There was joy in being a complete amateur, in playing around in the sonic sandbox, in letting go, or attempting to let go, of my perfectionism, in having no control over the final product. I knew that, with Michèle and Teiya, I was putting myself—and my voice—in safe hands. My work was the process of learning to sing one song over the span of a few months. The process was the thing, not the product, not perfection.  

I spent a few months learning John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark,” which is an incredibly challenging song to sing because it’s quiet, it’s loud, it’s low, and it’s long. I learned that I’m an alto (no matter how much I’d love to be a tenor). I learned new vocabulary as I worked with Teiya to train my voice as a muscle. I also learned new ways of thinking about my body. I can now utter such phrases as “I’m working on my diaphragmatic breathing” and “inviting resonance from my nasal cavity and occipital bones” and “projecting sound at a forward angle” and know what they mean (sort of).

For Quantum Choir, part of Michèle’s first major solo exhibition, Muscle Memory, currently at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, success meant showing up, being curious about the work, and, in the end, performing for her camera. Getting through the song was the goal. There was a freedom in not needing to be good, in not needing to be attached to outcomes. At the same time, I wanted, desperately, to not entirely embarrass myself in the final piece. There wasn’t enough time to excel, but I wanted to sound less bad in the end. Between weekly lessons with Teiya and daily solo practices (including recording my solo renditions of the song so I could hear myself in playback), I did get better.

Now that the practicing is over, the recording is behind me, and the video installation is live, I look at the performance with some pride. There are moments when I don’t cringe at the sound of my own voice. Seeing Michèle’s final edit, her making the four of us a choir on massive screens, was unlike anything I’ve experienced. My partner watched it multiple times, from different angles, and said (through her femme tears) that it was “hugely moving to be with butch fierceness and vulnerability.” Other members of our queer community thanked us for offering a reflection of themselves on screen. It has been a telling reminder that butch representation matters, and that despite our legibility, there is a continued erasure of us in the culture at large.

I began this project confident in who I am as a masculine-of-center woman with deep awareness of myself as a terrible singer. But one of the biggest takeaways for me is that I sound better if I act like I’m good at it: if I really give it in performance and pretend I’m a superstar. Not holding back meant simultaneously carrying confidence and vulnerability, singing badly with shoulders back, head high, lungs full, voice loud. 

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022

Kerry Manders: Where did the idea for Quantum Choir come from?

Michèle Pearson Clarke: Quantum Choir arose from me thinking about my process and coming to understand that I’m not a good judge of what other people are willing to do in and for my artwork. I’ve made this repeated artistic gesture of asking community members to be vulnerable before the camera, but then a few projects fell apart or needed to be changed quite significantly because nobody was willing to do what I was asking.

Quantum Choir emerged from this question: What is my line in the sand? What would push my limits? How do I lean into discomfort? What would it look like to make a project addressing my greatest source of vulnerability? It was clear immediately that this meant singing because I’ve had this lifelong shame about my singing voice.

Manders: How do you feel about your singing voice?

Clarke: Until Quantum Choir, I’d never sung publicly in my entire life. I’ve always avoided it in every single situation that required it—whether it was “Happy Birthday” or the national anthem. I would mouth the words to appear as though I’m participating. A few years ago, I thought about taking singing lessons to overcome my fear, but even the idea of singing in front of a teacher felt daunting and embarrassing. And I started thinking about this in relation to queer female-bodied masculinity. Is the vulnerability that I was feeling about singing just personal, or was it rooted in something larger? I wanted to combine the personal and the cultural context—to invite us to think about these issues more broadly.

Because part of the shame I feel about singing is rooted in a gendered childhood memory: I went to an all-girls school where choir was very popular—a very “cool girl” thing to do. But I couldn’t sing, so I couldn’t join. There is a very real feeling of failure tied to this girlhood memory that steered Quantum Choir.

Manders: That’s a visceral memory of being a girl who failed and, in a way, a failed girl.

Clarke: That’s the link for me to notions of queer failure and its relationship to female masculinity. But that memory is also linked to being shaped by a Trinidadian culture of performance and wit, of natural entertainers, of enthusiastic dancers, of loud voices, of engaging storytellers. So, it’s interesting for me to feel like a failure at this particular performance thing—singing. So many of us understand what it feels like to be a failure at singing. I hope people can tap into that when they watch us try to do it. I hope I’m touching on both individual and larger cultural narratives around what it means not to be “good.”

Manders: The tensions and intersections between individual and larger cultural narratives are a big part of your work, which brings me to The Animal Seems to Be Moving (2018–23)—a striking title for a series of still images.  

Clarke: Like several of my titles, it was inspired by something I was reading. I was thinking about the ways in which the Black male body is often seen as beastly, animal-like; and I was thinking of how my self-portraits are documenting a transition period in my life. There’s a sense of motion and movement over time in them.

This project is about aging, the shift in my appearance, and the shift in responses to my appearance. I’ve always been read as younger than I am, and now, whatever threat I present to some people seems to be increasing as I physically get older. I was also thinking about my own relationship to masculinity and the complex pleasure that has given me throughout my life. There’s something kind of primal in my sense of my own masculinity, particularly in the yearning. There’s a desire for certain experiences that I will never be able to have. As a female-bodied person, there’s a gap that can’t be bridged.

Manders: I’m thinking about your use of the words primal and animal and associating it with something forceful and fundamental. Often the human relationship to animals is one of paternalism, hierarchy, ownership.   

Clarke: I’m always contending with those power relations given the history of visual representations of Blackness—the ways that photography has been complicit in constructing certain ideas of Blackness, and teaching us to see Blackness in certain ways, including seeing it as something to be conquered and owned. That history continues to provide violent and damaging assumptions about cis Black men, and those beliefs affect me as well, because of my masculinity.

No matter what your race is, we’ve all been fed certain visual representations of Black lives, and these continue to shape and influence the ways we make images.

Black masculinity is often deemed to be dangerous, brute, animalistic. And connected to these ideas is the assumption that we feel less pain. These dehumanizing stereotypes had specific and purposeful effects: to justify enslavement, to justify segregation, to justify torture, and they continue to be deployed to justify the disproportionate amount of force we face when we’re arrested.

Manders: That these ideas and stereotypes are still very current is a crucial aspect of your work.

Clarke: As a Black artist, I have to grapple with that representational history. I think of it as a thick filter that anyone looking at a contemporary image is necessarily looking through. That filter comprises nearly two centuries of negative images that we’ve all been exposed to. Those perceptions and representations get layered on top of contemporary images, and I question whether it’s possible to see a contemporary image of Blackness without these older ideas present. No matter what your race is, we’ve all been fed certain visual representations of Black lives, and these continue to shape and influence the ways we make images.

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Glitter Stache, 2021

Manders: How do you contend with that racist history?

Clarke: To date, for me, the most effective strategy has been performance. I read Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision (2011) during my MFA studies, and her analyses of the relationship between performance, visuality, and Blackness were very compelling.

Also indispensable was Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), in which she invites us to tune into the frequencies that affect how we see Blackness when we look. So, what we feel shapes what we see. Taking my lead from these scholars, I try to harness the affective qualities of performance—to shape a particular relationship to the visual content of the photograph.

I’m not necessarily trying to speak back to or against the history—to resist it. I don’t even use resistance anymore in descriptions of my work because that really frames what I’m doing in a binary relationship to an external anti-Black gaze. Instead, performance becomes a pathway to foreground my own pleasure and agency, to address my communities and to both reveal and withhold my experiences of being queer, being Black, being masculine. I’m good with being all those things. Any issues I have emerge from other peoples’ ideas about them.

With these self-portraits, I am really embracing humor and play as I perform for the camera. They are my attempt to speak to the absurdity of the way my Black masculinity is framed through those racist historical visual lenses. 

Installation view of Michèle Pearson Clarke: Muscle Memory, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, 2022. Photograph by Yuula Benivolski

Manders: At the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the self-portraits are in a room adjacent to our Quantum Choir video installation. Are there connections between these two parts of the show you call Muscle Memory? Did Quantum Choir grow out of the self-portrait work, as an extension of it?

Clarke: They’re connected to my rebuilding of self as I grieved my mother’s death over the past decade. As anyone who has been through the grief process knows, you can become unrecognizable to yourself along the way. Thankfully, I’ve recovered most of myself, I think, and part of that rebuilding has involved both my gender and my aging self.

This happened during a time of increasingly fraught cultural conversations about masculinities. About toxic masculinity. About trans masculinity and increasing visibility. About white masculine privilege. About Black masculinity and police violence. All these masculinities act upon my own masculinity and shape others’ ideas about me. Both The Animal Seems to Be Moving and Quantum Choir emerged from these broader reflections.

Manders: I’m curious about why you crafted a choir out of the idea of learning to sing.

Clarke: When I started to think about this project, I knew I wanted multiple people in it. All my work involves collectivity and kinship. I come from a community engagement background, and that always influences the way I work. And speaking against oppression, addressing difficult issues, doing hard things—all of these things are easier when you can do them with other people.

I’m also trying to say something about systemic issues rather than individual ones. Oppression is not a personal problem, it’s not unique to me. Taking an autoethnographic approach—making projects derived from my own experiences—but including other people who share those experiences is a strategic choice to avoid that reduction.

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022

Manders: Four of us comprise Quantum Choir, but we didn’t actually sing the song together. We’re a bit of a paradox: a choir made up of solo performances. You say that doing a hard thing with others is easier, but we did most of the actual work separately. Can you talk about the balance between the individual and the collective aspects of this work?

Clarke: Practicing and filming individually was always the plan, because I wanted each of you to have your own experience of doing this very hard thing—your own vocal lessons, your own performance in front of the camera. I didn’t want you to have to worry about what anyone else was doing or to have to try to perform in any particular way.

Through my edit and the design and layout of the video installation, I was then able to construct and communicate collectivity—that’s in the very structure of the work. We become a choir in the way we address the viewer. But it felt important to keep the vocal lessons mostly private so that you would have your own relationships with our vocal coach, and we could learn the song in our own time and as we wanted, needed, and were able to.

We were all dealing with our own shame around our “bad” singing voices—I thought about what I was asking of you and what I’d want as a participant, and it wasn’t to feel shame in front of others all the way through. That would be adding another layer of difficulty. 

Manders: It was difficult! When I first saw the artist statement for your exhibition, I had a very visceral reaction to the title, Muscle Memory. It felt incongruous to my experience: I have absolutely no muscle memory when it comes to singing!  

Clarke: But you built some over the course of two months of lessons, right? The title Muscle Memory really ties both parts of the show together. Both look at female masculinity. One is about my own Black aging body, and the other is about the four of us learning to sing as a way to reflect on the vulnerability of visibly queer female masculinity.

The vulnerability in both projects has to do with the external gaze—the way people see me, see us. For any one of us who deals with hypervisibility in our culture, muscle memory develops as a response. Every time I leave my house, I adjust automatically to make myself as least threatening as possible. I’m always aware of others’ eyes on me. This lifetime of hypervisibility means that we’re used to being looked at and to being judged for how we look. Like, we walk into the women’s washroom and automatically code-switch—adjust ourselves, our bodies, to that space and what’s expected there.

Manders: Ah, yes, butch bodies in bathrooms. I find myself pushing out my chest a bit, so others can see that I have breasts and I might avoid the dreaded bathroom battle. When we were all at the AGH for that donor reception, I went to the washroom down the hall from Quantum Choir and got the familiar, “You’re in the wrong washroom, sir.” As soon as I spoke, the woman apologized. My speaking voice is a tell.  

Clarke: Your body knows to expect that surveillance and has engrained reactions to it. It’s that automatic and repeated response: muscle memory as coping mechanism. And it’s so often a spatial thing for us. A lot of what I experience as a queer masculine person is about spatial discrimination—I’m not “supposed” to be in a women’s washroom, or I’m not “supposed” to move in a certain kind of way in a certain kind of place.

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022

Manders: Like how we walk. Apparently, I have a sort of swagger when I walk, and I take long strides. I’ve been told my whole life that I don’t walk in a “ladylike” or feminine manner. I’m not a “proper” woman.  

Clarke: As I mentioned earlier, the exhibition overall addresses that notion of queer failure. If models of success in our society involve heterosexual, white, able bodies, then Muscle Memory addresses the queer, female, masculine body as a subsequent failure. Queer theorists have invited us to think about this failure not as a space of deficit or negativity, but as a generative space that produces other ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling.

I accept that invitation in reframing the “failure” of my singing as an opportunity to generate something meaningful for me, for the three of you, and then hopefully for our audiences. I wanted to explicitly address the homophobia and the shame that the four of us experience by opening up our failure as something playful and productive. Rather than be reduced by it, I wanted to expand—to just allow us a little bit more breathing room.     

Michèle Pearson Clarke, Still from Quantum Choir, 2022

Manders: Speaking of breathing room—that chorus!—why did you choose John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark” for us to perform?

Clarke: It’s the title track from one of my favorite albums. The lyrics resonate, and I enjoy their ambiguity too. The chorus is clearly an address, but to whom? There’s a slippage there that works as both an invitation and provocation. And there’s that drastic change in tempo where the song goes from the melancholic to the soaring. I wanted that drama for us! I also wanted to sing a song by a queer artist, and I’ve appreciated the way that Grant has spoken about gender and queerness in the past. Grant and I might come at the issues in different ways from different lived experiences, but we meet in the song.

Manders: “We meet in the song” is a wonderful and evocative way to describe the individual and collective experience of making Quantum Choir itself, and perhaps the experience of the audience who listens to us. We all meet in the song. That’s part of the experience for the spectators’ bodies, too, how you set up the exhibition space to orient those bodies in certain ways that are maybe uncomfortable and confusing. Many people don’t know where to stand or how to look or listen when they encounter the installation.

Clarke: I’ve been really struggling with the power dynamics of the exhibition space itself. What does it mean to position queer or Black vulnerability in an art gallery for public consumption? There’s a long history of our suffering bodies being used for pure spectacle and entertainment. While I can’t free myself from that history, I don’t want simply to replicate it.

In galleries, a lot of video installations are projected on a wall, and a spectator sits on a bench in front of it and passively consumes the content. For Quantum Choir, I wanted to construct a more active relationship with the spectator—I wanted to ask the spectator to think consciously about their own body in a spatial way while looking at us. I wanted active versus passive viewership. I also wanted to find ways to introduce more opacity into my work. In this case, all four of us are always on screen, but because of the set up, you can never look at all four of us at the same time.

It’s like: I’m going to share my vulnerability with you. I’m going to give you all of this but I’m also going to hold something back. There are moments, too, when auditorily, each of us is holding something back because only three voices or two voices or one voice can be heard. You can never see or hear all of us all at once.

Installation view of Michèle Pearson Clarke: Muscle Memory, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, 2022. Photograph by Yuula Benivolski
All images courtesy the artist

Manders: It’s a different performance depending on where your body is positioned in the space. Move your body and you necessarily see and hear our bodies differently. And speaking of bodies in space, tell me about the soccer balls and practice pylons on the gallery floor.

Clarke: I wanted to have some kind of intervention in the gallery to support this experiment around asking the viewer to be active. I want the viewers to have to do a little navigational work, to actively orient their own bodies in the gallery space and in relation to us. Not a lot of work, but a little bit of effort in this exchange.

Conceptually, I chose the soccer balls and cones because, for all four of us, sports has been the only consistent place in our lives where our masculinity has been encouraged and supported. While the four of us are in the very center of this gallery doing this hard, vulnerable thing, we’re literally surrounded by these symbols of a safe space for our masculinities.  

Manders: Have there been responses to the exhibition that have surprised you?

Clarke: Kids are loving it! I don’t think that I ever considered kids as spectators when I was making this work. They love the soccer balls but are a bit frustrated that they can’t kick them. But the balls are objects that kids run through and by. They are interacting with those aspects of the show in ways that adults don’t.

I think kids like the sonic experience of the song too. Formally, Quantum Choir builds on strategies of intentional repetition, and children respond to that. And I think they respond to the buildup to the song—us doing our different vocal warm-ups.

I also didn’t expect that so many people would cry while watching it. I thought that might happen for people who know us and love us, but it seems to offer a more general sense of release amidst the tension and stress of ongoing pandemic life. After all of this time of being isolated from one another, I can only hope that our collectivity provides some solace. 

Michèle Pearson Clarke: Muscle Memory is on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, in Hamilton, Ontario, through September 5, 2022.

How to Produce a Photobook

What does it truly take to make a photobook? Making a photobook is like playing a puzzle or a game, one with plenty of room for creativity within certain rules or parameters. As Christina Labey, cofounder and creative director of publisher and bespoke production house Conveyor Studio, puts it: “One thing I love about the book format is that it inherently has limitations.” There are many possible permutations in book design, which is perhaps why Labey and other publishers and designers often get involved early on. This can mean coming on board when the project exists solely as a folder of images—or even before the photographer has started shooting.

Designer Hans Gremmen is the founder of Fw:Books, the respected Dutch publisher behind award-winning titles such as Andres Gonzalez’s American Origami (2019) and Lora Webb Nichols’s Encampment, Wyoming (2021), as well as designing a number of Aperture publications, including Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance (2011; reissued 2021), Ametsuchi (2013), and Halo (2017). Gremmen, who has worked during the concept stage and while the photographer was still making the series, explains how getting involved early can allow for a holistic approach, for thinking of the book and the project together. The approach also helps to prevent issues such as realizing too late that something is missing.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from Illuminance (Aperture, 2021)

Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, director of French publishing house Chose Commune, always approaches the artists she wants to work with so she can broach the possibility of a book before they’ve even thought of it. And for Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, the artist, publisher, and brains behind Istanbul’s FiLBooks, the first step is to question whether a project should be a book at all. “I get involved when I really think that the book as a format adds to the narrative of the story,” she explains. “I feel I need to justify the reason behind why that specific work has to be in a book form.”

If a book makes sense, these makers typically get involved in editing and sequencing the images. This can be done digitally—with Poimboeuf-Koizumi using Adobe Bridge to edit images before sliding them onto InDesign—but will usually also involve physically printing the images and laying them out. Making a photobook will always involve making a dummy or prototype at some stage, though this may be without the images. As Poimboeuf-Koizumi points out: “The act of flipping through pages is definitely not the same as clicking on a PDF.”

Working on the edit and layout of Atomic Island by Ben Huff (FW: Books, 2021)
Courtesy Hans Gremmen

That physical aspect is important when thinking through the edit and sequence, because both can be affected by the choice of papers and binding. As Gremmen explains, books are typically made in sections of eight or sixteen pages, which means any special group of images will ideally be gathered in multiples of those numbers; once that set is assembled, it can’t be added just anywhere in the rest of the pages.

The paper—or papers—is a key factor in the book’s tactile impact, but it can also affect the images. Coated or glossy papers typically hold the inks better than uncoated pages, which means the photographs will look sharper, more detailed, and more contrasted. On the other hand, the glossy papers will also reflect light more, making the images harder to see. Uncoated papers feel softer between the fingers but may result in images that are slightly less crisp. If the book is being bound with a spiral ring, the paper will also need to have a minimum thickness to withstand being punctured.

The image and paper combination can also affect a photobook’s size, because one must strike a delicate balance between maintaining creative freedom and keeping within budget. Making the book at one size mean printing thirty-two pages per printing sheet, for example; making the book just one inch bigger might mean cutting that to sixteen pages per printing sheet, which instantly doubles the paper cost.

Factory Visit: Conveyor Studio from Conveyor Studio on Vimeo.

Going large will add weight and therefore transportation costs, which Labey points out can have a significant impact when shipping books long distance for book fairs or distribution. “There is an added pressure to sell heavy books at a fair, or correctly predict how many to bring, otherwise you have to ship them home, and you might end up losing money on that edition,” she says. “When you print in smaller editions the production price per book is notably higher—an important factor if you hope to profit, or honestly, just break even.”

Size and weight are also critical to the reading experience. A big book may work well for very detailed images, for example, which call to be printed at a substantial size; on the other hand, going large can create a monster volume that is unwieldy to hold or move. “In addition to practical considerations for the book maker or publisher, you need to consider how the reader gets physical with your work,” Gönenli says. “The size of the book is a very fundamental element which directly influences the intimacy between the book and the reader.”

“The basic things I always try to get down very quickly are the size of the book and the amount of pages,” Gremmen adds. “When you know about those two things, then the paper choice follows quite quickly afterwards. But also with those two things, you determine what kind of book you are making. You can calculate budget based on those two specifications, but you also decide on the kind of book.”

Cover and interior spread of American Origami by Andres Gonzalez (FW: Books, 2019)

A text—or texts—may also be included, though the publishers included here are wary of thoughtless or overly didactic writing. If a text is going in, a typeface will also have to be chosen. Fonts can be used multiple times by a designer, who may already have some available at minimal cost, but if not, a new font can be bought in or, to go the whole hog, created bespoke for the project.

Printing essentially comes down to two choices: offset or digital. Put simply, offset is the traditional option that involves aluminum plates with a silicon base for each sheet; the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. Since each plate comes at a price, offset is typically used for print runs of a minimum of five hundred copies, allowing the initial outlay to be spread over more units. Though digital printing is often regarded as lower quality, it can work best for smaller prints runs, as the price per book remains the same.  

The choice between offset or digital printing also depends on the capabilities of the printer, because digital offset can be used for bulk jobs to more average ends, or by skilled operators to a very high level. “We print on an HP Indigo, which is considered a digital-offset press,” says Labey. “It combines the electrophotographic process of a copy machine with the architecture and liquid ink of a traditional offset press. In short, the printing plate is wiped clean, and a new image is etched with each rotation. This removes the time and cost of creating physical plates and allows us to print very small quantities with high-quality results.”

Printing the cover of Laissez-Faire by Cristiano Volk (FW: Books, 2022)
Courtesy Hans Gremmen

Whether it’s traditional or digital offset, books are printed with the CMYK color model (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), which means the images must be converted from the RGB color values (red, green, blue) generated by digital cameras and scans. The CMYK gamut contains a much smaller range of colors than the RGB color space, and although the conversion can theoretically be done by anyone with access to Photoshop, it’s a complex art best approached by an expert. In skilled hands, this, too, can become a creative process that might even involve alternative inks. Labey has worked with artists who replaced the magenta ink with fluorescent pink, for example, “which makes the images pop.”

Before pressing play on the print run, it’s advisable to print off some test images (which can cost over five hundred dollars per sheet of test paper, but that’s much cheaper than having to scrap an entire edition). Perhaps surprisingly, it’s unusual to test print all the images when using offset, because of the cost of the plates. Instead, a few key photographs are typically selected and printed on the paper to be used in the book, creating what’s known as a “wet proof.” An upside to printing digital offset is that it is possible to proof the full book on the same press and paper stock, trimmed to the same size as the final version.

There’s no one right way or recipe or formula. A book should always listen to its own rules.

Alternatively, a publisher can make digital proofs, which can represent every image in the book because they are cheaper per print. However, these tests are only simulations of the final result, and Gremmen takes a dim view of them. “To me those things are useless,” he says. “If you make a test print, it’s not about simulating, it’s seeing one on one how things will be.” Gremmen is often willing to oversee and sign off on the printing and production of books himself, but he says he prefers to work with companies he knows. Similarly, Gönenli works with only one printer: “Ofset Yapımevi, and they are perfectionists.”

The final step is putting everything together and binding the book—and, as with everything else in photobook-making, there are many options and lots of creative potential. Binding basically involves stacking the pages and combining them in a durable way, but books can be stapled, screwed together, or even folded together, if in handmade territory. In larger print runs, books are typically glued or sewn together.

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Gluing, considered “perfect binding,” involves adding glue along the spine and simply affixing the cover. It can be efficient and very affordable, but it’s less dependable in the long term—a fact familiar to anyone who’s seen a book spine crack in the cold or melt in the heat. Sewing is more complicated because it involves folding and collating the separate sections, or signatures, of paper, then stitching them all together. There are many different approaches to this stitching, and it’s sometimes left exposed as a design feature.

The technical difference means that sewn books typically open and lie flat more easily than glued ones, though again, that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. The degree of flexibility depends on factors as (seemingly) obscure as the direction of the fibers in the end paper or the quality of the glue, making bookbinding another expert field. “It’s getting more tricky to find really good binders—they all go bankrupt, or retire, or whatever, and the knowledge is lost,” Gremmen says.

“But the most important thing for me is that the book opens very well,” he adds. “I see a lot of photobooks and, with almost half of them, I think, ‘This is horribly bound.’ It’s such a pity. You spend all this money on printing perfectly, and then you don’t care if this book opens well or not? I don’t understand it at all.”

Alec Soth, Two Towels, 2004, from Niagara (Steidl, 2008)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

With all these variables at work, making a photobook can be tricky to get right—but it’s not impossible. When asked, all four designers and publishers easily named outstanding photobooks that they believe pull off everything mentioned above and more. For Gremmen, it’s Elasticity by Aglaia Konrad (NAi Publishers, 2002), which he describes as “perfect on a technical level” but also remarkable because of its interplay of image and design. “They push one another to another level,” he explains. “The photography makes the design better and the other way around.”

Gönenli reflects on Niagara by Alec Soth (Steidl, 2008) for many reasons, but partly for little details, such as the fact that “you have to tilt the book to be able to read the text on the back cover, as if it were a daguerreotype.” Poimboeuf-Koizumi says she was immediately struck by Rinko Kawauchi’s Utatane (Little More, 2001), explaining: “It’s literally when I understood the power of sequencing.”

For Labey, Misplaced Fortunes by Ross Mantle (Sleeper Studio, 2021) is a special book. Mantle cofounded Sleeper Studio with fellow photographers Ben Alper and Peter Hoffman, and his book is a good example of why this model can be beneficial, according to Labey. “It’s clear he was able to choreograph and control all of the elements from concept to design to production,” she says. “Thus, it really feels like a work in its own right.”

“There’s no one right way or recipe or formula,” Gremmen says. “A book should always listen to its own rules.”