Aperture's Blog, page 39

Heinkuhn Oh’s Vivacious Portrait of Seoul in the 1990s

Behind the gleaming Namsan Tower that stands imposingly at the center of Seoul rests Itaewon, a compact quarter in which locals, artists, U.S. soldiers, drag performers, Muslims, gay men, transgender people, sex workers, and expats from around the world have long coexisted. The district’s history is thorny: when the U.S. army established a base in the area in the years following the Korean War, it garnered a reputation as an untamed, foreign terrain where GIs and Americana ruled. Soon after, the neighborhood became a territory for outsiders of all kinds, offering refuge for those who did not belong anywhere else in the city. Seoul’s inadvertent dip into multiculturalism thus began under the mythical, Cold War–inspired pretext of U.S. armed forces safeguarding democracy in South Korea—a nation that remains largely ethnically and culturally homogeneous to this day.

That gritty, crude version of Itaewon is extinct now for the most part, as relentless gentrification replaced small businesses with shiny but sterile coffee shops and restaurants. A glimpse into its past is nonetheless possible in the images of Heinkuhn Oh, who ventured out into the streets of Itaewon in 1993, shortly after studying photography in the U.S. at the Brooks Institute and Ohio University. As with his preceding series Americans Them (1990–91), which captures the raw, unglamorous lives of lay protagonists across Louisiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, Itaewon Story is tinted with a documentary outlook, curiously tapping into the disparate lives of individuals unfamiliar to the photographer. But if the earlier project portrayed rural America from the perspective of an outlander from the Far East, Itaewon Story locates the feeling of estrangement within the bounds of Oh’s hometown. Its impetus perhaps originates with the mavericks who meandered the cramped streets between brothels and the nearby Seoul Central Mosque as well as Oh’s own experience encountering his offbeat childhood neighborhood as a returnee from the United States.

Heinkuhn Oh, Jiyoung in the Itaewon Barbecue Ramen House, February 1993

Yet there is little distance between Oh and his protagonists in Itaewon Story. Theatrical as they might be, the characters of the series are photographed, in black and white, at moments of candor with minimal pretension, producing an unapologetic take on the traits of the locale. One image, Jiyoung in the Itaewon Barbecue Ramen House, features a young trans woman immaculately made-up, wearing a dark dress and a light-colored off-the-shoulder crop top, chuckling in the corner of a run-down restaurant whose walls are filled with graffiti. In another, Twist Kim, a forgotten movie star who made a living performing late-night shows in local bars and clubs, stands cheekily on the street with enough flair to land him on the cover of a fashion magazine. Astutely but affectionately, Oh’s camera seizes these releases of fleeting freedom, only made possible in the corners of seedy Itaewon.

Oh’s series thus resonates with other artistic endeavors to represent the marginalized and the vulnerable, including contemporaneous projects from the United States, such as Hustlers (1990–92) by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, that were shaped in the wake of the culture wars in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Nonetheless, unlike counterparts across the Pacific, with Itaewon Story, Oh resists the temptation to politicize the identities of the individuals depicted—almost naively so, perhaps because there was no public sphere to accommodate discourses on identity at the time in South Korea. The series instead serves as a tender reminder of these Itaewon denizens’ existence, capturing a certain childlike sensibility of the young artist. Oh’s images demand that we remain curious about those strangers, foreigners, and outsiders around us, that we let them freely roam, showing us who they are.

Heinkuhn Oh, Twist Kim, Actor and Singer, March 1993Heinkuhn Oh, Background Actress, June 1993Heinkuhn Oh, Youngbok Han, GI Club Waiter, on the Dance Floor of King Club in Itaewon, February 1993Heinkuhn Oh, Bulyi Kim, Actor, in a Backyard behind Tae-pyoung Theater, March 1993Heinkuhn Oh, Some Lady on the Hill of Lucky Club, January 1993
All photographs from the series Itaewon Story and courtesy the artist

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This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 246, “Celebrations,” under the title “Itaewon Story.”

What Is a Feminist Picture?

In her book Girlhood (2021), Melissa Febos describes what it felt like as a child to be a body, before she learned to see herself as a body from without: “I would read or think or feel myself into a brimming state—not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection . . . body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming.” This overpowering sense of sublimity—absent from the “composure and linearity” of “school bus routes and homework and gender and bedtimes and taxes”—feels connected to her young body. The feeling is a comfort in the face of such dissonance between her inner world and the imposing outer world.

It is a familiar story well told: this inner-outer dissonance, both universal and particular to the challenges a girl faces, to stay close to herself through adolescence and into adulthood in a world determined to will us from subject to object. We might resist by refusing to be seen, by looking back—or, as Febos does, by returning our gaze to our selves.

Justine Kurland, Bathers, 1998
© the artist

Gazing as both refusal and becoming informs Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum, an exhibition on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kornblum, a psychotherapist, began collecting the work of women photographers at a time when photography was first being institutionally recognized as a fine art and “maleness was the norm,” as she writes in her catalogue essay. In 2021, she gifted the archive to MoMA in honor of the museum’s senior curator of photography Roxana Marcoci. Ninety of these collected works and a handful of photobooks fill a small room on the fifth floor of the museum, one effort of many made by art institutions over the last half-century to correct the art historical canon. The works were given in friendship, a fact that is unusually highlighted in both the provenance labels and the catalogue. The curator Kathy Halbreich, who introduced Kornblum to Marcoci, writes: “No one talks much about the meaning and impact of friendship on institutions. . . . It’s as if we are afraid of being accused of a lack of critical disinterest or distance if something as subjective and sentimental as affective attachment is broached.”

The show begins with Justine Kurland’s Bathers (1998), an image in which teen girls embody the titular art historical trope, swimming and lounging on rocks in a dappled pond. Febos’s sensory-dizzy narrator might be among them, their freedom exultant, collective yet private—and still, we might sense, threatened. The photo is mounted on a floor-to-ceiling clouded, wavering mirror, beside introductory wall text that asks, “How have women artists used photography as a tool of resistance? As a way of unsettling established narratives? As a means of unfixing the canon?”

Susan Meiselas, A Funeral Procession in Jinotepe for Assassinated Student Leaders. Demonstrators Carry a Photograph of Arlen Siu, an FSLN Guerilla Fighter Killed in the Mountains Three Years Earlier, 1978
© the artist

“The male gaze” has become so commonly referenced as to approach cliché—the sign of a powerful idea. Laura Mulvey’s term—which came out of 1970s feminist film theory—has led to further consideration of what a “female gaze” might entail. One intervention, posed by bell hooks, considers the “oppositional gaze” of Black female spectatorial interrogation; others question the heterosexual female gaze. Some of the work included in Our Selves arguably engages with the notion of a female gaze, but the show does not offer a chronological history or comprehensive account of feminist photography. The wall text explains that instead, “specific constellations of works and ideas” present “an invitation to look at pictures through a contemporary feminist lens.”

“What is a feminist picture?” The question, offered as the title of an online panel held in conjunction with the exhibition, knowingly invites infinitude. Many of the event’s fourteen speakers—including artists in the show such as Susan Meiselas and Cara Romero—wisely did not attempt an explicit answer, in part because feminism itself might be defined as variously as one might picture it.

Documentary photography throughout the show—by Susan Meiselas, Mary Ellen Mark, and others—emphasizes subjectivity, collaboration, and power rather than claiming objectivity or authority.

In her book Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sara Ahmed describes feminism as a collective movement, adding, “A collective is what does not stand still but creates and is created by movement.” Multiplicitous and relational, equally informed by intersectionality and phenomenology, Ahmed’s feminism is about how we move through the world together as bodies. Feminism is often an “experience that begins with sensation.” What is sensed might not immediately be named. But by bringing into the foreground what is so often in the background—things generally assumed unremarkable and therefore unremarked upon, like gender or taxes—a shift in perception can sustain the movement of infinite interpretation. In Our Selves, the camera frames these moments of the invisible made visible to picture feminism—static as an image, ever in flux as a project.

The “constellations” of Our Selves vary between thematic and more associative or conversational clusters. Some images are abstract or conceptual; others are of the natural world. One grouping features mostly early twentieth-century European photographers, including Dora Maar, Grete Stern, Ilse Bing, and Kati Horna. (Many were also present in the exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera (2021–22), organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.) Here their photos explore the literal and figurative mask, in some cases to anti-capitalist or anti-fascist ends, with mirrors and mannequins, dolls and double exposures, obscured faces and the faceless.

Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Vanna Brown, Azteca Style, 1990
© the artist

Many women photographing in this era straddled commercial and experimental worlds, smudging the boundaries or exploring opportunities for critique from within. Germaine Krull’s The Hands of the Actress Jenny Burnay (about 1930) might have been an advertisement for the delicate ring Burnay wears. Her hands are otherwise unadorned: bare-nailed and crossed in a way that obscures a finger on each, giving the impression of abstraction and a more intimate subject. Across the room, Lorna Simpson’s Details (1996) consists of twenty-one images of close-cropped hands from found studio portraits of Black Americans, each paired with words or phrases. Half learned and carried a gun underline the making of racist stereotypes, while separated and stopped speaking to each other seem to comment on the relationality of all knowledge, including that of ourselves.

Documentary photography throughout the show—by Meiselas, Mary Ellen Mark, and others—emphasizes subjectivity, collaboration, and power rather than claiming objectivity or authority. The images grouped in the catalogue’s chapter “Performance as Ethnography” subvert colonial-patriarchal control even more explicitly. Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (whose beautiful essay “When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words?” argues for an Indigenous “photographic sovereignty”), created a photocollage as part of her Native Programming series. Titled Vanna Brown, Azteca Style (1990), the image nods to the Wheel of Fortune personality and the dearth of Native representation in media.

Tatiana Parcero, Interior Cartography #35, 1996
© the artist Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), M.R.M (Sex), ca. 1929–30

Structural inequality—sexual violence, policed bodily autonomy, pay disparity—may seem difficult to picture. Our Selves includes a variety of approaches. In Tatiana Parcero’s captivating Interior Cartography #35 (1996), the artist’s face is overlaid with the sixteenth-century Tudela Codex that details Mexico’s precolonial Aztec culture. The image shows her with eyes closed, fingers resting on cheeks, an illustration of a cacao tree meeting her closed lips. Nearby, Ruth Orkin’s American Girl in Italy (1951) is a straightforward and strikingly composed portrait of street harassment.

But moving through Our Selves, one might begin to see the structural—the background, coming into foregrounded focus—everywhere. An image from Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (1990) shows the artist’s alter ego sitting with a daughter figure at the table, both applying lipstick before their own vanity. It is a moment of private ritual and maternal care, the performance of gender, an assertion of Black female beauty in relation to the gaze, and more. The series came out of Weems’s search for her own voice. In the audio guide she reflects on using her own domestic space: “What I’m suggesting really is that the battle around the family, the battle around monogamy, the battle around polygamy, the social dynamics that happen between men and women—that war gets carried on in that space.”

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and daughter with makeup), 1990
© the artist

In her work, Ahmed often invokes phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s “writing table” to queer it. She considers the kitchen or dining table, recalling A Room of One’s Own and Kitchen Table press to reflect on how long women have understood, by necessity, how tables are multiuse. Women have also understood the work that goes on behind them, out of view. Of the Kitchen Table Series, curator Adrienne Edwards has written: “There are moments when Weems clearly resists the ordering device that is the table—lying across it, leaning against a wall—and through serial images and a polyphonic voice we come to see how the figure comes to know and feel herself, affirming or countering our impressions of her.”

We are often made responsible for coming to our seat at the table. But we might demand that the table change if we are to sit, or we might change the table by sitting. Perhaps we ourselves are the site—or sight—of change. Catherine Opie’s Angela Scheirl (1993), of Scheirl against a rich red background, in a dapper suit, bright socks, and long shoes that command our attention, is a “portrait of becoming,” writes Dana Ostrander, a curatorial assistant at MoMA, in the catalogue.          

Installation view of Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2022
Photograph by Robert Gerhardt

Queerness, in all the fullness of its meaning and possibility, also grants an understanding of the self with the permission to change—to become. Opie’s portrait of the Austrian artist and filmmaker, who would later go by Hans and now Ashley Hans, is a testament to the temporality and fluidity of self. Claude Cahun, whose work was largely overlooked until the 1990s, made complex Surrealist collages in collaboration with their lover and stepsister Marcel Moore. Cahun famously wrote in their 1930 “anti-memoir” Disavowels: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.” Their acute work playfully and presciently explores the multiplicity of the self, anticipating later feminist theory including, Marcoci writes in the catalogue, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990).

The sheer physicality of two pieces on the back wall is memorable. In Jeanne Dunning’s Leaking (1994), what seems to be tomato flesh appears—joyously, erotically—in the place of a woman’s tongue. The portrait is framed beside that same wet red in close-up, both images ovular, like giant locket portraits. Amanda Ross-Ho’s Invisible Ink (2010) is a ghostly imprint of the artist’s body, first made accidentally and then embellished, including with cut-out eyes that hauntingly penetrate.

Jeanne Dunning, Leaking, 1994
© the artist
All works courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Helen Kornblum in honor of Roxana Marcoci

As the narrator’s body in Febos’s Girlhood begins to change, bumping up against the world’s expectations and desires of her (“My hips went purple from crashing them into table corners,” those unyielding ordering devices), she begins to experience shame more than that exhilarating embodiment of the sublime. She learns to fit herself, over time and to painful consequence, around such obstacles and demands. She learns to see from another’s eyes rather than her own. Febos finds her way back to herself, just as in Our Selves, women and gender-nonconforming photographers make their way through seeing, unseeing, and seeing anew. One woman’s life’s work—a collection of the labor of many, given to another in friendship—is a gift of sight seeking self and of self seeking sight.

Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through October 2, 2022.

At the Venice Biennale, a Surreal and Intimate Showing for Photography

The 2022 Venice Biennale opens, in the Giardini, with an image of a green elephant: life-size, atop a white pedestal, radiating in the magnificence of its unnatural being. A surreal apparition, it recalls certain scenes shot by Paolo Sorrentino, in which a silent gorilla may pervade, with enigmatic mystery, the carefree tranquility of the Vatican gardens. Time stands still and the viewer cannot help but wonder: Why? An answer does not necessarily exist. The green elephant is a 1987 work by Katharina Fritsch, winner of this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award, along with Cecilia Vicuña. Standing at the beginning of the international exhibition, titled The Milk of Dreams and curated by Cecilia Alemani, director of High Line Art in New York, the sculpture is a sort of declaration of intent: the dream will be the main dimension of the art presented in this Biennale.

Installation view of The Milk of Dreams. Photograph by Gus Powell Central Pavilion of The Milk of Dreams, with sculpture by Katharina Fritsch. Photograph by Gus Powell

Another animal-symbol present in the Biennale is the giraffe. In fact, there are eight white giraffes that drag a large anatomical model of the male reproductive system on wheels, to which are affixed tags bearing the names of illnesses that can afflict individual body parts. This work by German artist Raphaela Vogel, titled Ability and Necessity (2022), resembles an ancient Roman triumphal procession and positions the male organ as the definitive war trophy for the patriarchy. The Milk of Dreams is a feminist exhibition not only in terms of numbers (it is very difficult to recall a male artist among the 213 participants) but also, and readily, in its contents. The feminist and surrealist imprint will be why this Biennale will make history, no matter what you think of it.

If instead observed from the perspective of photography, which occupies a marginal presence at the Venice Biennale, Alemani’s exhibition does not seem capable of being a watershed moment. We see no true shake-up regarding the medium’s reflections or evolutions, only excellent choices that enrich the exhibition’s collective effect, which is another of its great virtues.

Nan Goldin, Sirens, 2019–2021. Photograph by Ela Bialkowska
Courtesy the artist and La Biennale di Venezia

Let us begin our examination with the well-deserved tribute to Nan Goldin, who is exhibiting for the first time in the Venice Biennale. The work she presents is not a series of photographs but a sixteen-minute video, Sirens (2019–20), that is dedicated to Donyale Luna, considered the first top Black model and who died from an overdose in 1979. The video, a collage of clips taken from works by Kenneth Anger, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Federico Fellini, and Lynne Ramsay, as well as screen tests by Andy Warhol, attempts to convey the glamourous atmosphere associated with drug use. Its title refers to mythological characters who are both seductive and lethal.

Louise Lawler is also having her Biennale debut, and Alemani has entrusted her with the mezzanine level of the central pavilion in the Giardini. Titled No Exit (2022), this wall installation surrounds an area where performers will circulate, through July 3, for a work by Alexandra Pirici. Lawler uses Hair (adjusted to fit) (2005/2019/2021), a vinyl-printed image that completely covers the walls of the room, as an abstract backdrop for ten large-scale photographs. These capture the works of Donald Judd as exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2020, but when the gallery’s lights were off. Lawler often questions art history by attempting to strip works by (male) grand masters of contemporary art of their sacred nature in their exhibition contexts, whether museums or private dwellings. Here, she hunts down works by Judd in the darkness, where the purity of their minimalism is more vulnerable and the luminosity of their conceptual backing is obscured. Another paradox is the relationship between the intrinsic cleanliness of the works portrayed and the chaos of their backdrop, which depicts a Maurizio Cattelan sculpture of a taxidermic cat standing on the back of a dog that faces an Andy Warhol self-portrait.

Outside of the Central Pavilion at Giardini. Photograph by Gus Powell

Not far off, again in the spaces of the Giardini, are works by Sheree Hovsepian, an Iranian-born American artist. Installed on a wall, her assemblages incorporate black-and-white analog prints and various materials such as wood, nylon, ceramics, twine, and nails. Small photographs show portions of the body of the artist or of her sister, her body double. At times, back, torso, and arms become figurative epicenters of sensual, abstract, geometric compositions, or what one might call new bodies born from the artist’s imagination, which has a surrealist and somewhat retro taste. The juxtaposition of these compositions, installed in severe walnut frames, recalls the material and forms of the central pavilion’s window by Carlo Scarpa that is formed by two intersecting circles. It probably constitutes the most successful burst of poetry in this Biennale.

Alexandra Pirici, Encyclopedia of Relations, 2022. Photograph by Ela Bialkowska
Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Among the photographers invited to the Biennale, Aneta Grzeszykowska leaves the most unsettling impression. Her series Mama (2018) consists of twenty medium-sized photographs, in color and in black and white, that portray the artist’s daughter while she interacts with a silicone doll that has Grzeszykowska’s features. In certain close-up shots—of the young girl covering her mother’s eyes with her hands, sweetly resting her chin on her shoulder, or painting her face red—it is the unnatural gaze of the doll that throws the viewer off balance. The deception is revealed when the doll is shown without legs. The relationship between mother and daughter is reversed, and it is the latter who looks after the simulacrum of the former. And the poetics typical of Surrealism demonstrate, in cruel fashion, the crisis of the maternal institution.

Elle Pérez, bodega (new york), 2022
Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York Elle Pérez, Clinch II, 2022

The youngest photographers chosen by Alemani are the American artist Elle Pérez and the Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska (the only photographer shown in all the Corderie dell’Arsenale). What the two have in common, in addition to the use of black-and-white images, is a reflection on bodies that touch each other and interact. Pérez is an artist already featured in the Whitney Biennial. In Venice they present their “configurations,” the subject of which is the so-called “chinch,” the part of martial arts combat in which the contenders are in a standing contact position, using holds on the upper body. For Piotrowska, the contact of bodies is what takes place in domestic contexts, within the walls of the home where, far from the gaze of strangers, gestures of violence as much as those of care are consummated. Some of these pictures appeared in the book Stable Vices (2021). The image of physical interaction, for both photographers, becomes a metaphor for human relationships, grounds where virtue and subjugation, affection and hatred, can coexist, alternate, or oppose each other.

In all these photographs, we find echoes of the poetics of artists with work at the center of the Giardini pavilion, in one of five “time capsules,” as Alemani calls the mini thematic exhibitions that present artists who are no longer living, many of them lesser known. Titled The Witch’s Cradle, it includes works by female photographers such as Eileen Agar, Gertrud Arndt, Claude Cahun, Florence Henri, and Ida Kar.

The image of physical interaction, for both Pérez and Piotrowska, becomes a metaphor for human relationships, grounds where virtue and subjugation, affection and hatred, can coexist.

Among the eighty national pavilions, those representing Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa focus predominantly on photography. Stan Douglas’s exhibition 2011 ≠ 1848 is displayed at two venues, the Magazzini del Sale no. 5 and the Canada pavilion in the Giardini. In the former, Douglas presents a virtuoso two-channel video, in which viewers witness a long-distance dialogue between two rappers from London and one from Cairo; this is probably the part of the exhibition that will make the pavilion most memorable. In the Giardini, the Canadian artist shows four large-scale prints dedicated to various uprisings that occurred in 2011 in Tunisia, Vancouver, London, and New York. These are digital photomontages of scenes made in studios with actors, embedded in reconstructions of urban settings made with computer graphics. From a few yards away, the realistic effect, obtained through an impressive array of technologies, is convincing. But close examination reveals that something is not completely natural. Douglas calls his photographs “hybrid-documentaries.” The photos are fake, but the news is real. The result brings to mind the history-making function of overembellished paintings of coronations or battles in open fields, when photography did not yet exist.

Installation view of Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848, 2017. Photograph by Gus Powell

In the Israeli pavilion we enter Queendom by Ilit Azoulay, who intended to create a space governed by the logic of art based on female and cultural emancipation. The project takes as its point of departure an almost forgotten archive of photographs of Medieval metal vases from the Islamic world. Its collector, David Storm Rice, was an 18th-century Austrian Jewish British art historian who donated it to the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, thus preserving it in one of the most important museums in the world. Azoulay has scanned, cut out, and modified hundreds of these photographs, recomposing them digitally in seven large-scale prints. They are new artifacts of a rewritten history whose protagonists are no longer male warriors and kings but women. Azoulay’s idea, at heart, is to collapse into new images a visual history that has been forgotten and scattered all around the world, reflecting a utopian desire to recompose something that has been shattered. Perhaps her works are a type of kintsugi, the traditional Japanese art of repairing broken objects with gold.

Installation view of Francis Alys: The Nature of the Game. Photograph by Gus Powell

The New Zealand pavilion is devoted to Yuki Kihara, whose exhibition is titled Paradise Camp. The hub of this project, which also includes a video and installations of archives, is a series of twelve photographic images that reinterpret paintings of Tahiti by Paul Gauguin. These are actual works d’apres, for which the models belong to the fa’afafine community, Sāmoa’s third gender. Kihara, who is fa’afafine, was inspired by a 1992 article by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, a Māori academic and lesbian activist, that notes how Gauguin endowed his models with androgynous and exotic features due to his fascination (as the painter described in his journal) for māhū, the Tahitian equivalent of the fa’afafine concept. Kihara gives us a version of Gauguin’s paradise in technicolor or, in keeping with the title of the pavilion, a camp version.

Installation view of Roger Ballen, The Theatre of Apparitions. Photograph by Gus Powell

Viewing the 2022 Venice Biennale through photography, one cannot help but conclude with Roger Ballen’s series The Theatre of Apparitions (2016) in the South Africa pavilion at the Arsenale. Ten medium-sized lightboxes present an equal number of black-and-white photographs of drawings that the artist made with various techniques on the windows of a building in Johannesburg. Disturbing and childish apparitions, the subjects are typical of this South African photographer’s dark imagination. The gallery contains more than nightmares: premonitory dreams imbued with a sense of mystery. As I traversed the small room, Ballen’s words, published in Photo No-Nos, a book edited by Jason Fulford, came to mind: “It is clear to me that at this historical moment, a great percentage of contemporary artists and photographers are not interested in making the transition from the exploring media-driven slogans to coming to terms with the enigmatic, mysterious boundaries of our short lives on this planet.”

Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.

The 59th Venice Biennale, including The Milk of Dreams, is on view through November 27, 2022.

The Photo Studio That Immortalized Argentina’s Popular Culture

Foto Estudio Luisita opened its doors in Buenos Aires in 1958, after Luisa Escarria moved to Argentina’s capital from Colombia with her mother and aunt, escaping La Violencia, a devastating armed conflict that scourged her home country for nearly two decades. Luisa’s sister, Chela Escarria, who also played an integral role in the studio, had arrived the year before. Introduced to photography at a very young age, Luisita and Chela were soon running a successful studio out of their small home on Avenida Corrientes. In the two decades that followed, being photographed their the studio became a rite of passage for the makers of the golden age of theatrical revue, including actors, dancers, comedians, singers, contortionists, sex symbols, and the occasional prize-winning canary or crowned adorned dog.

If the studio continued to thrive through the political and economic upheavals that marked Argentina during the 1970s and ’80s, it was the advent of the digital age that led to its closure in 2009. That same year, cinematographer Sol Miraglia, who is now the custodian of the studio’s archive, met the sisters and quickly became a presence in their lives. Over the next ten years, Miraglia sorted through roughly five decades of material, which might have met a very different fate if not for her fortuitous intervention. In 2018, working with her partner, Hugo Manso, Miraglia directed the documentary Foto Estudio Luisita, which offers a glimpse of her time with the sisters and her experience assessing the forty thousand images contained in the archive.

Page from a theater program, ca. 1970 Diana, 1968

Although the Escarria sisters produced some of the most iconic images of Argentina’s popular culture, the commercial nature of their work has, until recently, denied them a place in the history of photography. The efforts made in the last decade to rescue the sisters from oblivion culminated in the exhibition Temporada Fulgor: Foto Estudio Luisita at Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA). Curated by independent curator Sofía Dourron in collaboration with Miraglia, the exhibition immersed viewers in the world of the sisters and included behind-the-scenes images that had never left their home on Corrientes before. The show featured photographs documenting the revue scene between 1964 to 1980—the largest body of work preserved by the sisters. Those familiar with the celebrities represented in them may have connected with the material on a more intimate level, yet even without that knowledge, the affective force of the images has a broad reach beyond Argentina. While the future of the archive is still being determined, the work done to bring it back into the spotlight has allowed for a critical reassessment of the importance of the studio, the women who ran it, and all the people who passed through its doors.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Miraglia and Dourron about the studio’s legacy and the role of the Escarria sisters as bearers of cultural memory.

Sol Miraglia with Chela and Luisita Escarria (seated) and their dog Kitty in the sisters’ living room/studio space, Buenos Aires, 2015, from the documentary Foto Estudio Luisita, 2018

Marina Dumont-Gauthier: How did you become interested in Foto Estudio Luisita?

Sol Miraglia: In 2009, I started giving Photoshop classes in a camera shop on Calle Libertad. It was your typical carpeted office, located in the epicenter for the sale of photo supplies in Buenos Aires. I was nineteen years old and enrolled in photo school. We were nearing the end of the year when Elsa, the shop owner, hung up a laminated calendar that read “Stars of Buenos Aires – Foto Estudio Luisita.” Appearing full-length on a background of blue stars were some of the country’s biggest celebrities, like [comedian] Alberto Olmedo and [actresses] Moria Casán and Tita Merello. I was immediately struck by it.

“You have to meet her,” Elsa told me. And as luck would have it, Luisita came to the store only a few days later, looking to buy a flash. With the excuse of having a photojournalism gig, I was invited to her house. I remember how I stopped in my tracks as I entered. Hanging on the living room walls, as if guarding both space and time, was a sea of photos of Argentina’s greatest vedettes. It was like entering a 1970s time capsule. I had a strange feeling that is difficult to describe, but it was the same rush of emotions I felt when I saw the calendar in the store for the first time.

Luisita started to show me albums of vintage photos, many of which were signed and autographed for her, as if legitimizing her work to me with this display of signatures and dedications by some of the best-known personalities of the day. Completing the scene were various boxes throughout the room with labels such as “nudes” or “exteriors.”

Going through the boxes, I asked her what had happened to all the material: the negatives, other copies, etc. She told me that a fair amount had been thrown away, mainly due to a lack of space, but also because many of the faces that graced the photos had “left the race” or died and would not be coming back to request additional copies. That was a central part of the studio’s financing beyond photo shoots: months and even years after the photos had been taken, people were still ordering new copies by the dozens.

From that time onward, every Friday after work, I would visit their home/studio at the corner of Corrientes and Uruguay and spend time with Luisita and Chela, looking at old photographs, sharing meals and anecdotes, until it got late and they would kick me out! Through a mix of candor, transparency, humility, and tenderness, what was to become one of my life’s most defining friendships began. And it was that friendship that would give me the impetus to create the documentary.

Holiday card from Luisa and Chela Escarria, ca. 1970

Dumont-Gauthier: Can you tell me about the workings of the studio and the dynamic between the sisters?

Miraglia: They had very different roles from the beginning, all the way back to when they were operating the studio in Colombia. Though the studio bears Luisita’s name, ego played no part in that decision. Luisita described her and her sister as a team, each having a necessary and complementary role. Chela was the laboratory technician extraordinaire: She would process, copy, and retouch negatives. She was also in charge of lighting the photoshoots, scheduling appointments, and receiving the guests that passed through the studio’s doors. Chela would always say, “I’m the dark side of the moon.”

Luisita, on the other hand, was a very shy and sensitive person. Just over five feet tall and soft-spoken, she had a natural ability to make people feel at ease, which I think was vital given that many of the sitters would pose almost fully naked. In that regard, the setting of the studio in the heart of their home was a major plus, since it made the space feel warm and intimate. It was as much a studio as it was a home: they would set up the studio in the living room every day, and visitors had to go through Luisita’s bedroom to access the washroom. Their mother, Eva, who lived with them until she passed away in 1989, would welcome clients with tea and arepas and became a beloved staple of the studio. All in all, Luisita and Chela worked in silent and perfect coordination and did everything together, inside and outside of the studio.

A page from a photo album for prospective clients of Foto Estudio Luisita

Dumont-Gauthier: You spent ten years getting to know the sisters and their archive. What led you to turn this experience into a documentary?

Miraglia: The sisters wanted me to throw away all the negatives. They said no one was going to ask for their portraits anymore and that if they weren’t dead, they would prefer digital photos. Given this sentiment, I realized that it would be very challenging to convey the incredible contents of the archive in an exhibition or book. So I began thinking of ways to share what I felt was both a story and an archive that simply couldn’t fall into oblivion. That’s how I started to bring my camera and tripod to the studio, slowly and silently capturing the sisters in their daily routines and recording our conversations. It was around that time that I met Hugo Manso, a filmmaker who would become my partner. Together we filmed the sisters for almost four years, from 2014 to 2017, not knowing that what ended up being almost two hundred hours of recording would eventually become a documentary.

Argentine dancer Katia Iaros, 1972

Dumont-Gauthier: How did the MALBA exhibition come about?

Miraglia: It all began with an exhibition of Madalena Schwartz [a Hungarian-born photographer who lived in Brazil] that took place at the Moreira Salles Institute [in Brazil]. The curators of the show contacted me because they were aware that images of trans women and other individuals from the entertainment world who were once perceived as “sexually dissident” constituted an important part of the holdings of Foto Estudio Luisita. The curators wanted to paint a picture of what was happening in the region in the 1970s and ’80s, and so the work of the sisters was featured in the Argentine section of that exhibition, along with images from the Archive of Trans Memory. 

The show was then scheduled to go to MALBA at the end of 2021, and I was approached by the museum to collaborate on Temporada Fulgor, a smaller exhibition that would create an interesting dialogue with the Schwartz show. Foto Estudio Luisita held a very faithful mirror to the popular Argentine imagery of the day, so working with this historical archive, but reassessing it from a contemporary perspective, was of great interest to the museum.

Argentine dancer Liana Dumaine, 1965

Sofía Dourron: Given the great diversity of material the archive contains, the museum wanted to build an exhibition whose focus would be on the studio’s involvement in revue. From there, we developed a project that would allow us to pose multiple questions. The goal was to reintroduce Foto Estudio Luisita to the public in such a way as to explain its legacy and contributions to photography—a feat that involved a reassessment of the canon of modern and contemporary photography, and of the boundaries between the artistic and the commercial, institutions and margins. It also required the creation of a proper gaze and language to communicate the sisters’ work dynamic, especially in regard to the home/studio aspect of their practice, and how it impacted their construction of images, of vedettes in particular. It was important to us to convey how the affective, intimate, and personal universe that defined their home/studio functioned. Lastly, we wanted to explore how we could link these things to the cultural phenomenon that was the Argentine theatrical revue and the larger social and cultural context in which the sisters evolved.

For this reason, the exhibition was divided into two spaces that were designed as an “outside”—public space, the theater, and the circulation of retouched images, ready for mass consumption in programs, magazines, and on marquees, as well as photographs passed from hand to hand—and an “inside”: a more intimate and warmer space that is nonetheless a workspace. Moving through these zones, the public could begin to understand the universe of the sisters, the theater scene of the day, and the cumulative affective force of these images, which are part of our collective imagination and our identities as Argentines to this day.

Argentine showgirl Adriana Parets in the piece Cena para amante (Dinner for lover), Teatro El Nacional, Buenos Aires, 1972

Dumont-Gauthier: One could say that they were at the right place at the right time, but what do you think led them to capture the makers of the golden age of revue the way they did?

Miraglia: In 1958, a year before Luisita and Eva came to join her in Buenos Aires, Chela worked as a photo retoucher. As luck would have it, their home/studio was in the entertainment center of the city, where all of the most popular theaters were located. The neighborhood was basically of runway of stars, performers, and artists! In the early years, before they could afford to equip the studio to their needs, they mainly made a living developing and making prints for tourists. In time, once they had acquired enough fabrics and lights and were able to turn their living room into a proper studio space, they were able to reach a wide audience.

The archive tells the story of an encounter between the matriarchal world of the Escarrias—one that is inhabited by female immigrants, canaries, and small dogs—and the macho world of revue.

Their real break came through Marfil, a friend and Colombian singer who lived next door. He introduced them to Cuban actress Amelita Vargas, who was already a household name in Argentina. They became fast friends, and in turn, she introduced them to [actress] Juanita Martínez and her husband, [actor and comedian] José “Pepe” Marrone, who were two of the most important figures in revue at the time. The sisters made great photomontages of the couple, and the successful reception of those images opened the doors of the famed Maipo Theater for them. The rest is history.

Dourron: There was a network that gave them access to the theater world. As immigrant women, they could relate and establish bonds with other immigrants, like their neighbor Marfil, who, as Sol mentions, started the chain of encounters that would grant the sisters a space within Buenos Aires’s revue world. The sisters’ presence in theaters such as Maipo was not a coincidence, but rather the result of great talent, professionalism, and a recognized career.

Dumont-Gauthier: How does their work fit into the photo scene of the time?

Miraglia: While there were many studios at the time, few were run by women or had female lab technicians. In the case of Luisa, Chela, and their mother, Eva—immigrant women of African descent from Columbia—not only was it a fully female-run studio, it was also a very matriarchal space. The women spent most of their time at home, working long hours. Though they played an important role in the entertainment business of the day, their participation was almost entirely remote. They didn’t partake in the city’s nightlife. They also never integrated into the photo scene of the day, which was primarily made up of European photographers who had immigrated to Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century.

Argentine actress Ethel Rojo, 1973

Dourron: Because Luisita and Chela inherited a family trade, we can’t say that they were carriers of traditions, trends, or artistic movements outside of what they received from their parents. [Their father was a famous landscape photographer and their mother, an equally successful society portraitist.] Even when Luisita considered the photo schools in Buenos Aires, she felt there was little they could offer her. Her way of practicing photography, in Buenos Aires in particular, was also a form of living and surviving, a way to inhabit a world made up of all the people and objects that populated the space with them.

We can’t say that Foto Estudio Luisita participated in the photo scene of the day: the sisters remained on the margins, producing work only on demand, while building their own language and sensibilities within those parameters. I think we can think of them in a genealogy of female photographers who were part of a commercial circuit at the time, such as Annemarie Heinrich, who also photographed the Maipo stars for marquees and programs, or Olga Maza, another photographer whose legacy we have yet to explore and comprehend.

Archival materials from Foto Estudio Luisita

Dumont-Gauthier: The theme of perfection and the ideal body is prevalent in their photographic practice. In the exhibition, we saw images where the props were not erased and negatives revealing Chela’s incredible retouching work with red ink. Why was it important for you to display this?

Dourron: The diversity of the material and the untouched negatives, or as we call them, the “complete negatives,” convey a great complexity of meanings and sensibilities that are intertwined with one another. We’re not only talking about a desire to reach perfection; these images also display the tensions at play between the demands of the industry, cultural stereotypes, photographic canons, and a domestic language. In that way, they open the door for us to think about photography as something collective that is built within a particular space and under established material conditions, and as a link between the people, the space, and the objects that inhabit each image. In the case of the material that the sisters might not have considered appropriate for commercial purposes, we see different ways of embodying photography. The archive tells the story of an encounter between the matriarchal world of the Escarrias—one that is inhabited by female immigrants, canaries, and small dogs—and the macho world of revue. In turn, that encounter existed within a turbulent period of transformation in regard to the ways in which bodies, sexuality, and gender were being perceived.

Autographed photograph of Argentine trans performer Vanessa Show, 1976 Photomontage of Argentine actress Pochy Grey and Teatro Maipo, 1972

Dumont-Gauthier: While there was a focus on achieving perfection—as Chela says in the documentary, “Everything had to be done perfectly or not done at all”—the sisters also captured a changing way of conceiving of and consuming bodies, making room for sexualities then considered “dissident.” The photographs reveal the complex realities surrounding body politics, especially for women and transgender people, in what was still a very conservative, heteronormative, and patriarchal society marked by repression and violence. How did the studio manage to claim this marginal space and thrive the way it did?

Dourron: Luisita and Chela were very warm and open people. No one was ever denied entry to the studio. Everyone who passed through their door was treated with the same respect, warmth, and affection, and photographed with the same passion, commitment, and professionalism. In that way, portraits of [actress and sex symbol] Moria Casán and [the pioneering transgender performer] Vanessa Show were made with the same care. The goal was the same for everyone: to “extract” all the beauty that the person being photographed had to offer.

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The sisters did not discriminate based on gender, race, body, or sexuality, but I think that we have to remember that they operated within the revue world, which was a fairly complex phenomenon, especially during the dictatorship. It may sound surprising, but the military were regulars at the shows; they were admirers and even lovers of the vedettes, with whom they established bonds of all kinds. Someone who would have been oppressed in another public space—a trans woman or gay man, for example—was accepted within the context of the theater. On stage, these bodies could dance and delight the same military audience that would oppress them back in the streets: no longer protected by the boundaries of the theater, they had to go back into hiding and assume heterosexual norms in order to avoid anything from a beating to a night in jail, all the way to death.

I think we should also mention that the Escarria sisters did not conceive of their work through such a political gaze, nor were they trying to claim a space for themselves as public advocates for these individuals. They were doing their job in the best way they knew how—that is, in an affective, careful, and nonjudgmental way.

Las gromas, 1973
All photographs courtesy Foto Estudio Luisita

Dumont-Gauthier: While it was challenging for female photographers to make a name for themselves in the twentieth-century Argentine photo scene, some of the most important practitioners of that art were nonetheless women, including Grete Stern, Annemarie Heinrich, and Sara Facio. Along with them, the Escarria sisters captured a changing Argentine woman and society. Their archive and those of other female photographers contain stories and revolutions that are still unfolding to this day. What would you like the public to retain from the exhibition?

Dourron: Both the theatrical revue genre and the images that documented it belong to the field of the popular, and as such, they long eluded the cultural systems that have traditionally dominated both the fields of art and academia. Paradoxically, however, today these systems are actively looking for marginal archives and individuals, in an effort to bring back to light their languages and canons, which were hermetic for so long. The archive demonstrates the enormous contributions that revue and the sisters’ work made to our visual culture, to the formation of our collective identities, to the construction—and deconstruction—of our subjectivities and biases. From their humble beginnings in a world dominated by men, with silent force, they captured the stereotypes that Colombian and Argentine societies tried to impose on them. As they meticulously documented extraordinary scenes that they retouched to exhaustion, this duo, these image workers, continued to undo and deconstruct myths and mandates, including those of modern and contemporary photography.    

Temporada Fulgor proposed a poetic and aesthetic exploration of images that for decades were only active within commercial circuits. The reassessment of the sisters’ body of work within the framework of contemporary artistic practices does not seek to erase or deny its popular essence, nor to paralyze it as a nostalgic fetish. Rather, the archive appeals to the renewal of a sensibility that is charged with meaning and anchored in the universe of work and production, in the exuberance and excess of the night, and in domestic tenderness. The archive contains a small revolution: the work of women who, through their daily actions, broke with the patriarchal mandates of their time.

Interview translated from the Spanish by Marina Dumont-Gauthier.

A Photographer’s Love Letter to Odesa

Odesa is a city of immigrants . . .  In the city of immigrants, people who live in memory as if it is the present moment, the language resists time. Time doesn’t exist. In Odesa it is always Biblical time. The world is created and then we go eat apples. —Ilya Kaminsky, “Of the Language of Odesa”

Nasha. A word that in Russian means “ours” or “belonging to us.” When directed at another person, “ty nasha” is a sign of recognition, as in, “you’re one of us.” In 2008, I traveled to Odesa, the port city legendary for its writers, humor, gangsters, and flourishing secular Jewish community in a region that had historically been hostile to Jews. My mother emigrated from Kyiv to the US in the 1970s and met my Russian-Jewish father in Crimea shortly before he, too, emigrated. I was born in the United States, but the former Soviet Union was as much a part of my psyche, if not more so, than the place where I grew up. I’d traveled to Kyiv with my mother once before this trip to Odesa, but this was my first return to her homeland on my own. Eager to distinguish myself from my travel companions, I lit up when one of our local hosts overheard me speaking Russian and exclaimed, “Ah! Ty nasha!” But as the night wore on, and the party moved from restaurant to seedy bar to even seedier underground club, until we eventually tumbled out onto Primorsky Boulevard with the early morning sun beginning to streak the sky, I realized I wasn’t sure I did belong. We were the same age, we spoke the same language, but I had the privilege of a kind of innocence that they did not. I had grown up too far away—geopolitically and culturally. It would take time before this place and its people ceased being a dreamscape for my nostalgia and revealed themselves in all their nuance and intricate reality.

Photographer Yelena Yemchuk is a native of Ukraine and yet she herself was no less struck by the mystery of Odesa. Born in Kyiv, she emigrated to the United States with her family in 1981, when she was eleven years old. Emigration meant, she had assumed, saying goodbye to Ukraine forever. But the fall of the Soviet Union suddenly opened the borders for travel. Yemchuk found herself taking regular trips to Kyiv. “The country was in the crazy throes of growing pains and identity crisis,” she writes in the poignant afterword to her new photobook Odesa, recently published by GOST Books in the UK. She first visited Odesa in 2003 and found herself utterly mesmerized: “I felt like I had been shown a secret place. Like someone took me around a corner, pulled back a curtain and said, ‘Here look, look at this enchanted city. Believe in it, it’s real. You can be in it. Try to capture its magic. If you keep your eyes and your heart open, you just might be allowed to see.’” Yemchuk brings to bear the knowing intimacy of someone from within, alongside the wonder of an outsider, in her remarkable photographs.

Originally slated to be published in 2020 and postponed by the pandemic, the images in the book were taken over the course of several trips to Odesa between 2014 and 2019. Yemchuk was obsessed with the city’s youth, their wildness, and their sense of possibility. What began as romantic fascination to live their coming of age as Ukrainians, denied to her, quickly turned into a chronicle of a pivotal historical moment. In 2014, in the wake of pro-Western protests in Maidan and the overthrow of then President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia purported to be coming to the aid of Russian separatists as justification for full-scale invasion and subsequent annexation of Crimea. Under the same pretext, in late 2014, Russia began its invasion of Ukraine’s eastern border in the Donbas. Yemchuk felt compelled to take portraits of the teenagers who were then beginning to volunteer for the army and training at the Odesa Military Academy. “I wanted to document the faces of these children going off to fight, but I quickly felt like the faces needed more context. So, I began to shoot everything. This book is that story,” she writes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year, with Odesa under threat of missile attacks, has—to her utter disbelief—added another layer to that story. Most recently, on May 2, 2022, a fourteen-year-old boy was reported killed and a seventeen-year-old girl wounded in the bombing of a dormitory in Odesa, as Russian air raids also destroyed the city’s airport runway.

It is nearly impossible to look at these photographs without considering current events. In several close-up portraits, we see young people with bloodshot, world-weary, or distant eyes. This is a generation born after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time when the newly independent Ukraine was just beginning to relish its identity, its language, its freedom. Yet they seem haunted, unable to shake the past. “When you look at these faces, they have so much history in their look,” Yemchuk tells me. “You’re looking in the eyes of somebody who’s lived a much longer life. I’m attracted to that depth. When they’re willing to share that with you, it is the most beautiful thing.” Yemchuk herself is familiar with the experience of honing a new identity under the shadows of the past. One set of her grandparents were aristocrats killed by the Red Army, the other were killed in a massacre at Babi Yar, during the Holocaust. “How do you not give that to your children? It’s just engrained in you.”

Despite that grim pall, the photographs also evince the vitality of a people who embrace pleasure precisely because they have known tragedy. This is the heart of Yemchuk’s obsession in a book she calls a love letter to the city—she insists on showcasing duality, whimsy alongside dissolution. “I don’t try to hide from the darkness, it isn’t shocking. There’s a darkness you accept as part of life. There’s history . . . hanging over it.” But, she adds, “There’s humor in the work as well. Surrealism, almost, absurdity . . . a nostalgic romanticism.” Indeed, many of the photographs feature an array of patterns and earthy colors that appear faded—Soviet-era bedsheets and wallpaper, domestic scenes in seeming disrepair. Yet these scenes are interwoven with others of women, in decadent costume, who stare into the camera with defiant confidence. These can seem brash, theatrical, but juxtaposed with a coquettish smile is a young girl in military uniform.

All photographs by Yelena Yemchuk from Odesa, 2015–19 (GOST Books, 2022)

Courtesy the artist

Yemchuk says the city has always felt like a Fellini film. In one photograph, an elderly trio appear to be doing water aerobics with their heads emerging up from the water through multicolored inflatable pool floats wedged under a metal pole against the pool wall. They look like they could suffocate but instead they hang suspended in time. Eroticism throughout heightens the carnivalesque atmosphere. In one of the most striking photographs, a voluptuous woman lies sprawled out in the nude on a picnic blanket, head thrown back, eating a cherry as the fruit tumbles out of a pink plastic bag. She lies in a field with an apartment building, or the remains of one, in backdrop. How she got here or why is irrelevant. The moment is hers to indulge. “And then there is March again, and the world is alive again, also, for you. Because you are a part of it, and you cannot escape it, that world which is all about us, and who would want to escape it anyway, this wonder, this astonishment?” writes Ilya Kaminsky, a fellow Ukrainian émigré to the US whose poetry in the book engages the photographs in a disarming conversation. And yet where to find that wonder now, amid war, with the future still so unclear? “I always see light,” she insists. “The fact that people love their homeland, their people, their neighbors. They love this life, with its weirdness, with its darkness, with its humor. They love it and it’s theirs. That to me is incredible.”

Yelena Yemchuk’s book Odesa was published by GOST Books in May 2022.

Felipe Romero Beltrán Chronicles the Experiences of Young Immigrant Men in Spain

The southern Spanish city of Seville offers an utterly excessive amalgamation of Moorish architecture, Gothic iconography, and enough religious fervor to put a saint (or a saint’s name) on nearly every corner. In the photographs of Felipe Romero Beltrán, those details of historical layers and visual textures appear muted and subdued, distilled down to the corner of a bright yellow wall, an old column swallowed by concrete, or the mere glimpse of intricate woodwork on a heavy door. For a few years now, Romero Beltrán has been working on a series of images and related videos, titled Dialect (2020–ongoing), delving into the routines, memories, and experiences of a small group of young immigrants who crossed into Spain from Morocco as minors and are living in a refuge center, awaiting the normalization of their legal status.

The photographs include ruminative still lifes (blackened tomatoes, dried leaves on a table) and architectural curios (a painted-over pattern of bricks, resonant place names like Abu Yacub) as well as lively portraits of the young men (Youssef Elhafidi, Hamza Gharnili, and Bilal Siasse, among others) who appear, by turns, bored, exuberant, and reflective of their circumstances. The videos, more didactic in nature, document the palpable struggle that Romero Beltrán’s subjects endure when they try to read aloud from the first few pages of Spain’s immigration law, the prose leaden and opaque in any language. The remarkable sensitivity with which Romero Beltrán captures the lives of these young men—enmeshed as they are in the structures of the refuge center, the city of Seville, and the wider politicization of illegal migration to Spain—may have something to do with his own path, often precarious, from South America to Europe via a major detour to the Middle East.

Felipe Romero Beltrán, Youssef’s escape route, from the series Dialect, Seville, 2020–22 Felipe Romero Beltrán, Path to the refuge center, from the series Dialect, Seville, 2020–22

It’s not that you can adequately compare the Colombian civil war to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and say that one is more dangerous than the other. It’s just that if you grew up accustomed to the forms of violence exchanged between, say, far-right paramilitaries and the left-wing militant group FARC, then you might not necessarily experience fear or even trepidation as an initial response to the idea of studying at a storied art school in Jerusalem. That’s how it was for Romero Beltrán, who was born and raised in Bogotá, arrived at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2014, and spent a year and half there taking quizzical black-and-white pictures of blocked streets and barricaded houses in the middle of a territorial (and existential) struggle whose contours shifted without warning on a nearly daily basis.

West Bank (2014), the project that Romero Beltrán embarked on during his time at Bezalel, detailing the brutality and absurdity of imposing borderlines in labyrinthine urban environments, may not have been the work that catapulted him to international attention, but it did mark a crucial turning point. After Jerusalem, Romero Beltrán’s formidable training in classical documentary photography—which began at the Motivarte School of Photography, in Buenos Aires, a crucible of Argentinean photojournalism, and continues in Madrid, where he is currently writing a dissertation on the documentary tradition—expanded outward to embrace elements of performance and conceptual art. Dialect, with its insistence on complexity, theatrics, and mystery, has less in common with photojournalistic projects on asylum and illegal migration into Europe than it does with critical and philosophical inquiries such as Yto Barrada’s A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004), Hassan Khan’s video installation Jewel (2010), and Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), all of which predate the current refugee crisis by several years.

Felipe Romero Beltrán, Bilal and Youssef wait for the end of the day , from the series Dialect, Seville, 2020–22

Romero Beltrán first met the subjects of Dialect during a theater workshop, part of a project on inclusion, organized by the mother of his then girlfriend, now fiancée. His soon-to-be mother-in-law invited Romero Beltrán to speak with the group about his own experience as a migrant in Spain. Learning he was a photographer, some of the participants asked him to take a few pictures that they could use on social media and send home to their families. The boys were all teenagers at the time. Romero Beltrán’s collaboration with them evolved into an artwork as they entered adulthood.

Rather than presenting types, tropes, or tragic cases, Romero Beltrán’s images introduce viewers to the humorous quirks and wondrous specificities of Youssef, Hamza, Bilal, and other young men, named and almost knowable characters who, moreover, have a say in how the work is made and shown. Romero Beltrán always photographs with a digital camera and shares his pictures with his subjects. If they don’t like them, he trashes them. The ethics of how they work together are dynamic and sometimes complicated. But in a world flooded with depictions of atrocity, they are sound.

The sensitivity with which Romero Beltrán captures the lives of these young men may have something to do with his own path from South America to Europe.

Romero Beltrán’s series has grown beyond documentary to include staged pictures not only of images that the young men didn’t like and decided to repeat, but also of their past experiences, their dreams. One of the most striking photographs in the series shows the body of Bilal draped over the shoulders of two friends reenacting a moment when Bilal fainted during his journey from Tangier to Seville. Dialect has given its subjects a chance to relive some of the more difficult moments in their young lives, and, in doing so, in remaking the droop of a young man’s hips, the fall of his arm, the sight of his worried brow smoothing out, transform those moments into gestures of real beauty, of tension being poetically undone by novel forms of collective support.

Felipe Romero Beltrán, Fight between Hamza and Aziz. , from the series Dialect, Seville, 2020–22Felipe Romero Beltrán, Found objects at a refuge center , from the series Dialect, Seville, 2020–22Felipe Romero Beltrán, Hamza arrives, from the series Dialect, Seville, 2020–22
All photographs courtesy the artist

Felipe Romero Beltrán is the winner of the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize. His solo exhibition of Dialect will be on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York in summer 2022.

This piece will appear in Aperture, issue 247, “Sleepwalking,” under the column “Spotlight.”

2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Juan Brenner

After ten years working in fashion photography in New York, Juan Brenner, originally from Guatemala, decided to return to his country and turn his lens on his community, specifically the people who inhabit the Western Highlands.

Brenner’s approach, inspired by his decade of fashion experience and borrowing from traditional documentary techniques, is first and foremost driven by a thorough research that aims at depicting the ever-changing character of the country, its people, and ultimately the artist’s own identity.

After tracing Guatemala’s historical path in Tonatiuh, his first monograph published by Editorial RM, where he observed the ways in which history has shaped the current Guatemalan society, Brenner detaches himself from a mere observer’s attitude and embraces a more engaging way of documenting the current fractures of the territory.

It’s in the project Genesis, featured in Aperture magazine’s “Cosmologies” issue, that Brenner starts researching, as he points out, “the ‘process of becoming,’ the shift and changes of the social structure in the highlands.” And then it’s with the project B’oko’, City of Walls that the artist consolidates his vision and begins communicating, or even denouncing, in a clear and enticing manner, how the territory, afflicted for more than five hundred years, now continues to suffer due to the current circumstances and criminal organizations.

In B’oko’, City of Walls, the series submitted to this year’s Portfolio Prize open call, Brenner shows us his streetwise knowledge gained in fashion photography used to picture the impact of a prison experiment in the Chimaltenango community. As the government decided to transfer more than five hundred members of one of the most prevalent gangs in the country to an unfinished prison in the area, the photographer started to analyze the recent repercussions of this decision.

Commissioned by ASU Art Museum in 2019 for “Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration”—a group show at the museum in Tempe, Arizona—the project features striking portraits of domestic life and details of the changing landscape. Brenner worked on this series for over two years, facing several challenges, like the pandemic and various security issues.

Describing the prison as a “really gray place, with lots of rusty metal and cinder block,” the photographer focused his lens on the ecosystem around it, the history of the town, and how its citizens were affected by this intervention. Brenner brings us a unique vision of contemporary Guatemalan society, one that mingles the tradition of documentary work with vibrant color palettes and striking portraits, typical of a fashion-photography approach.

All photographs Juan Brenner, Untitled , 2021, from the series B’OKO’, City of Walls
Courtesy the artist

Juan Brenner is a runner-up for the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Margo Ovcharenko

In the series Overtime, a composite portrait of a local soccer team from the Moscow suburbs, Margo Ovcharenko emphasizes the fierceness and strength of a community of women who feel entirely at home with themselves and with each other. Her subject—a women’s sports team, its individual players, and the industrial suburban landscape of their home—is rendered via cool, quasi-constructivist angles in black and white. In the way that she frequently hones in on abruptly cropped but telling details, the images resonate with the dynamic work of Russian avant-garde artists such as Varvara Stepanova and Maria Bri-Bein. In many ways, Ovcharenko’s depiction of powerful, independent women feels rooted in the radical, visual language of early Soviet photography—as does her use of sport as a metaphor for community, strength, and self-determination. However, she both draws on and diverges from these histories in crucial ways having to do with how the image aligns with or subverts official state narratives. 

Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2020

Last year, Russian-born Ovcharenko made the choice to move permanently to Ukraine, having found the censorship of her work and pressures of Russia’s increasing cultural isolation too much to bear. “Love, femininity, and desire are carefully controlled concepts in countries like Russia,” she writes, from Kyiv, where she is now based, teaching online and spending time with colleagues and friends.  She also writes of her work as grounded in a belief in the power of the image to shape a counternarrative against state propaganda, especially in relation to gender and the role of women in contemporary society. Today, the image of women athletes has become highly politicized—a lightning rod for discussions around the power dynamics of gender, consent, and individual autonomy. Ovcharenko deftly taps into these currents with this series, as with her previous work, to fashion her own radical manifesto.

In her previous series, Country of Women, she created a powerful collection of portraits of queer Eastern European women, and in an earlier series about young women gymnasts, she explored the pressures on body image and on a performative enactment of femininity. Overtime extends these explorations to focus on the importance of a chosen community as a framework for the definition of self.  In doing so, she makes a concerted effort to turn the narratives wielded by the state apparatus back on itself. “A documentary approach to portraiture is a powerful tool,” Ovcharenko confirms, “especially when it is applied to athletes whose public image is historically created by the state as a stand-in for its power.”

Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2018Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2021Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2020Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2021Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2019Margo Ovcharenko, Untitled, 2021
All photographs from the series Overtime and courtesy the artist

Margo Ovcharenko is a runner-up for the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

2022 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Adrien Selbert

Between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian War saw the death of over one hundred thousand people and displaced more than 2.2 million. The war was led by Bosnian Serb forces following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and is widely seen as leading to the rise of the term “ethnic cleansing.” Thirty years later, the citizens of Bosnia still grapple with the aftereffect of the war, even more so in light of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine—leading to the question: Is there really an end at the end of war?

Photographer and filmmaker Adrien Selbert has been making work in, and about, Bosnia since 2005. Selbert has been interested in examining the long-lasting traumas and aftereffect of conflict on a place and its people. His previous works include the film Nino’s Place (2010), which follows a mother’s struggle to find the body of her son who disappeared during the war in 1995, and the series Srebrenica, From Night to Night (2015), which documents the lives of young adults living in the shadows of Srebrenica’s war atrocities.

In 2016, Selbert began his series The Real Edges, a portrait of contemporary Bosnia as it exists in the aftermath of its war trauma. Over the course of four years, Selbert returned to Bosnia more than thirty times, traveling throughout the country, creating photographs of its people and landscapes. “The idea of this in-between time that we call ‘post-war’ always fascinated me,” Selbert states. “In Bosnia, war is no more, but it is not yet peace. It is the time comprised of the dash between those two words.”

Adrien Selbert, Krstovdan, 2020 Adrien Selbert, The Veteran, 2020

This concept of “in-between” threads throughout each of Selbert’s moody vignettes. Working with both color and black-and-white, the people and locations Selbert documents are cast in a hazy veil of dark greens, blues, and grays. The scenes depicted in The Real Edges offer an ambiguous look at life in Bosnia, which Selbert has described as “a strange and turbulent coma.” A man walks along a railroad track, his figure clouded; two lovers lay in the forest hugged by dark foliage; a pair of young men rest in a set of ruins in the countryside. Though Selbert’s series functions within the documentary genre, the photographer is more interested in the impression of realness than its actuality, stating, “It’s about transcribing a sensation of this country, rather than describing it.”

The Real Edges does not aim to provide answers or solutions, instead it offers an unwavering, intimate study of a country still trying to resolve its past—and perhaps, a warning of the ways war extends beyond its battles. As Selbert states, “This project is like the never-ending dash between the war and its aftermath.”

Adrien Selbert, The Boys II, 2020Adrien Selbert, The Hole II, 2020Adrien Selbert, Family Men, 2020Adrien Selbert, The Lovers, 2020Adrien Selbert, The Abandoned House, 2020
All photographs from the series The Real Edges and courtesy the artist

Adrien Selbert is a runner-up for the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Allie Tsubota

We know relatively little about Necessary Evil, one of the seven aircraft deployed in the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Being the only camera plane in the squadron, its primary objective was to observe and record, then produce a scientific, strategic, and visually consistent picture of the attack—which repeated three days later in Nagasaki. As an instrument of administering and archiving war, the camera plane held particular significance in the wanning years of World War II, when aerial bombings were increasingly central to military strategy. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, for instance, employed over a thousand people to assess the efficacy of Allied aerial attacks, first in Europe and then in the Pacific. Published a year after the atomic bombings, the USSBS collated some 330 individual reports, including nearly 10,000 images in the Japan segment alone.

“I’m interested in the idea that volume actually incites a type of withdrawal,” says photographer Allie Tsubota, whose ongoing project, The Magician’s Bombardier, contends with the limits and possibilities of photographic archives to confront the aftermath of nuclear warfare, both in the Pacific Theatre and the US. “Images of war have generalized meanings that many spectators are already primed to project on the photographs,” she says. Interpolating visual material from collections, such as the USSBS, with a series of essays and original photographs of carceral ruins from Japanese American internment in the US, Tsubota explores how historical memory is constituted, framed, and often effaced in service of archival designs. The acts of making images and making war are intimately connected; the title of her project references this connection, suggesting “that acts of war (like acts of photography) are invested in a type of fatal and ghostly magic.”

Allie Tsubota, Unidentified Bunker from USSBS General Photographic File, 2021. Reproduced courtesy the National Archives

Exhuming images from a military archive is not without its complications, and Tsubota is aware of the dangers of extracting archival materials in a way that might reproduce the state’s indexical relationship to the image. In her own re-aggregation of original and archived images, she suggests more subtle and expansive connections, paying close attention to where the camera is located across this trans-Pacific history. A recent image of shattered porcelain strewn across the Tule Lake Segregation Center—one of ten internment camps constructed by the US to forcibly detain Japanese Americans in the 1940s—mirrors a US Air Force photograph of bomb ruins in Otake, Hiroshima; another archival image from an unidentified bunker made by the USSBS Photo Intelligence Division in Japan bears a striking resemblance to images of abandoned American theatres made by photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto in the 1970s.

Against the disciplinarian logic of the military survey—and the function of tools such as Necessary Evil—Tsubota is committed to the imaginative and civil political potential of archives. “History keeps haunting us,” she says, “and any attempt to foreclose on the haunting is to foreclose on the history itself, an attempt to contain it as a catastrophe of the past.”

Allie Tsubota, Strike Attack, Himeji, 2021. Reproduced courtesy the National ArchivesAllie Tsubota, Aerial Photographer Poses for Ground Photographer, 2021. Reproduced courtesy the National ArchivesAllie Tsubota, Shattered Porcelain, 2021Allie Tsubota, Lineup of Japanese Aircrafts, 2021. Reproduced courtesy the National ArchivesAllie Tsubota, Persimmons Tree, 2021Allie Tsubota, Bomb Ruins at Otake, Hiroshima, 2021. Reproduced courtesy the National ArchivesAllie Tsubota, Big Sur, 2021. All photographs from the series The Magician’s Bombardier
Courtesy the artist

Allie Tsubota is a runner-up for the 2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.