Aperture's Blog, page 45

What Can Photographs Tell Us about Latinx Identity in the US?

On the hot and humid afternoon of May 10, 1974, in Dallas, Texas, my mother, Dolores, known to everyone as Lollie, visited with my great-grandfather Juan Sosa, who went by the anglicized name of John. My mother brought John his lunch as he lay bedridden from illness and age. She told him that she was pregnant and going to have a daughter. He cried, perhaps realizing he would never see the baby, and with tears in his eyes said, “How wonderful, mija.” She left the room, and when she returned shortly after to pick up his tray, he had passed away. I was born four months later. Although I never knew John, I always liked to imagine his last encounter with my mother and felt connected to him through that story.

Juan Sosa in Western Union uniform, Dallas, ca. 1920
Courtesy of Evelyn Aguirre and Dolores Cuello Tompkins

When I was invited to guest edit this issue on Latinx photography, the first pictures that came to my mind were not the many artworks and documentary images that I have had the fortune of working with as a curator, but rather the personal photographs that have helped me piece together the story of my family’s history as Latinos in the United States. One is an image of John, whose photograph appeared in the local paper when he saved a family from a burning building during his route as a bicycle messenger for Western Union. John was born in 1899 in the Comanche territory of Oklahoma, before it was a state.

His ancestry was both Mexican mestizo and Indigenous to the Comanchería. He and his family made their way to Dallas after the turn of the century; John served in both World War I and World War II and made his living as a hotel cook.

Matchbook photograph of Ricardo and Consuelo Cuello at Pappy’s Showland, Dallas, 1945

Courtesy of Evelyn Aguirre and Dolores Cuello Tompkins

Luisa Flores and Anita Sosa López making tamales at Christmas, Dallas, ca. 1950s

Other family photographs that came to my mind are images of my grandfather Ricardo Cuello and his brothers in military uniform, as all of them served in World War II and the Korean War. I thought of a photograph printed on a matchbook from a nightclub called Pappy’s Showland of my grandparents Ricardo and Consuelo, known as Chelo, from the 1940s, when they were still teenagers but newly married, their hair piled up in pompadours and their clothes in keeping with the pachuco style they always wore. And I remembered all of the photographs of my extended family shown cramped into small homes, laughing, smiling, and celebrating birthdays and holidays, especially the big tamaladas at Christmas that doubled as yearly family reunions.

The photographers in this issue bring visibility to Latinx experiences—from politics to families and communities, from youth and counterculture to spaces of intersectional identity and expression.

These are, of course, family photographs. But, perhaps, we might think of them as part of a larger history of vernacular Latinx photography—a national project yet to be undertaken within our annals of historicizing the American experience. The countless personal photographs of the more than sixty million Latinx people in the United States today craft the familial origin stories of how we came to be constituents of this country. They are records of our presence that collectively chart the paths and routes of Latinx people—from those whom the border crossed generations ago to those who cross the border today.

The journey is one of negotiating between two cultural worlds that stretch one’s identity across transnational histories, customs, value systems, and languages. Often, this journey is one that rides the edge of visibility. We are frequently the people who live in the background—the laborers who toil in the sun and the kitchens, the heroes and heroines whose legacies you don’t know, the families whose lives are disregarded in movies and on television, the artists whose work you are unfamiliar with, the young people in urban centers across the country who remix fashion, music, and style into hybridized subcultures, and the invisible children who are trapped, alone and afraid, in the migrant detention centers of our borderlands. We are the people who live amid the collective Latinx fight for social, political, and economic justice in the United States.

Photographers unknown; left: Young man wearing a zoot suit, 1944; right: Portrait of Ramona, 1944
Courtesy the Shades of L.A. Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

There is no single story to tell about Latinx people. While rooted in the commonalities of heritage, transnational histories, and lived experiences, Latinx communities are heterogeneous, with shared yet pluralistic identities. This complexity can make it hard to picture Latinx culture. Despite the richness and nuance of Latinx visual production, images of Latinxs in mainstream US culture and media are few and far between. Latinxs, while being a part of the fabric of the United States since its inception, and ubiquitous in urban centers and rural areas alike, are often rendered largely invisible through ongoing systems of erasure, exclusion, and disenfranchisement.

Yet Latinxs in the United States are the largest ethnic group in the country—made up of people of all races, classes, and gender expressions. Our family histories are tied generationally to the land the US occupies, or are linked to multiple waves and periods of immigration to this country, often prompted by the destabilization brought on by imperialistic US military and economic intervention into Latin American countries. Latinx experiences are intersectional and integral to our understanding of the complexities of the populations in the United States and the American hemisphere. It is important to know that there are more people of Latin American descent in the United States than in any individual country in Latin America, with the exception of Brazil and Mexico. Equally significant is the fact that Latinxs will represent 30 percent of the US population by 2030. While Latinx people are critically important to comprehending the past, present, and future of the United States, we are not well represented within the nation’s cultural, historical, and political landscapes. The photography of, by, and about Latinx people has not been widely circulated, nor has it been widely published, collected, or preserved. A deep lack of visibility for this multifaceted community persists.

Why We Need Photobook Criticism

In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag wrote, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” Since then, critics and readers have continually asked, Why is it a book? How does it work as a book? and similar queries about artists’ books and photobooks.

Over the past two decades, this inquiry has expanded significantly with the explosion of books about photobooks, and more recently, online coverage of photobooks. While this coverage offers a wealth of information, often including images or videos of the books, most of the treatment tends to be promotional (with commentary more or less amounting to, This is good, I recommend it, here’s a summary) or descriptive, and more about the photographs than the book. Some might as well be reviews of an exhibition containing the images from the book—leaving open the question of how, or if, the work functions differently as a book. Furthermore, because a significant portion of photobook reviews leverage content provided by the publisher and/or the artist, multiple reviews often reflect the same perspective and information, instead of conveying an evaluation of how a particular reader responds and why.

Courtesy David Solo

While these reviews are important and helpful, a wider range of writing—namely, critical analysis of the photobook—lacks the same kind of platform. This includes discussion of the choices made not only in the content but in the arrangement of the book itself, as well as other design choices that shape the experience of the reader. This deeper criticism can also more adequately explore the relationship between images and text—how the two come together, how collaboration works, and how they shape or challenge the interpretation of the associated content. Criticism should offer a wide set of voices and opinions, analyze work from different cultural viewpoints, and position the work across a wider historical landscape (including both photographic and other art forms).

This is not to say that all writing must do all these things. But I do argue that a richer diversity of writing needs to be encouraged and supported so it can be made available to audiences who are, or who might be, interested. Without robust critical frameworks and debate—and platforms to support and distribute such writing—the audience of the photobook cannot mature or expand. Other art forms have had centuries, or even millennia, of critical discourse. Mainstream coverage of literature, poetry, music, film, etc. includes reviews as well as more structured criticism, producing a range of judgments supported by objective examination of the work’s detailed elements (for example, Carol Rumens’s poem of the week in The Guardian). The photobook has yet to achieve that level of legitimization and recognition.

Jody Quon and Sonel Breslev, shortlist jury members of the 2021 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, New York, 2021
Courtesy Lesley A. Martin

Objectives for Criticism

Richer photobook criticism will serve a range of audiences and objectives above and beyond the advocacy function addressed by many current reviews and lists. Criticism would help to inform readers, and to demystify those photobooks that would otherwise seem totally opaque.

While the current audience for reviews is generally well-versed in the lifecycle of books and the components of their design, there is a wider audience for whom this is a foreign realm. In order to help expand the audience of the photobook, criticism must empower a wider community to pick up a book, see and understand what the makers were trying to do, decide whether they agree with the choices, and assert whether they think it worked and why. That’s very difficult when you don’t know what the menu of possibilities may have been. Without access to the insight that criticism provides, for many readers, the photobook’s medium-specific language is an impediment to opening, let alone enjoying it.

In a related fashion, more robust criticism would also serve as additional feedback (beyond sales and top ten lists) to the artists, designers, and publishers involved in the making of photobooks. An ever wider set of options in dimensions, materials, bindings, inserts, and other features are available, yet there has been limited discussion of how well those choices shape the experience of the book and contribute to the overall success of the work. As with the prior objective, this element of criticism is also oriented around addressing the experience of the reader.

Criticism can also explore in more detail the historical positioning of work—both within an artist’s body of work and across the wider range of photobook history—and contextualize both content and design choices across cultures and time periods. Growing attention around the explicit and implicit signals sent by visual material and design choices like typography and layout in turn requires discussion of these topics as seen in different eras and by different communities and cultures.

Photobook criticism can also engage with a wider set of questions facing the art world, the general book world, and society more broadly. Such topics include:

the communities (those of the maker[s], subjects, and intended audience) associated with a book and how those connections influence the reception of the work;the question of how to extend the dialog across languages and localities, and how to sustain a conversation about work being made locally across the globe;whether there are or should be different frameworks for discussing activist, protest, and socially engaged work;alternative financial, production, and distribution models;zines and related works that may be more ephemeral, or more about working out an idea, experiment, or message

A Photographer Traces the Ghosts of Loss and Trauma in Southern Africa

Nearly four hundred pages into Jo Ractliffe, Photographs: 1980s – now (Steidl and the Walther Collection, 2020), the first comprehensive survey of the South African photographer’s thirty-five years of artmaking, is a graceful short story by Emmanuel Iduma. “Rendezvous: A Fiction” follows the journey of an unnamed man in an unnamed town who is searching for signs of the father he lost to war decades prior. It is strewn with footnotes, by which Iduma intersperses this story with close reads of key photographs by Ractliffe. These asides provide the momentum for an understated narrative of family mourning and the long shadow of war. “She stands facing seven dangling overalls, held by long strips of twine and tethered to narrow branches,” Iduma writes of Ractliffe’s photograph Roadside stall on the way to Viana (2007). “Presences without bodies, exoskeletal men. They are hung there as if in readiness. Later, when the ghosts come, they will need to be clothed.”

Jo Ractliffe, Roadside stall on the way to Viana, 2007, from the series Terreno Ocupado, 2007

They will need to be clothed. So much of Ractliffe’s photographic practice has hinged on clothing ghosts. She attends to the ghostly imprints that political violence has left on the landscapes of South Africa in the wake of apartheid, and on those of Angola in the wake of civil war. Photographs: 1980s – now narrates this career-long commitment, culling work from each of the artist’s major series, such as Crossroads (1986), depicting the titular township where bulldozers razed people’s homes to the ground during the State of Emergency, and Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), made during the artist’s visit to the farm that had once served as headquarters for the apartheid government’s covert hit squad. In these and many other photographic series, Ractliffe focuses her lens not on explicit scenes of human violence but rather on the signs of its haunting: the riven terrain where somebody’s shack once stood, a lone man in the background taking the measure of what is lost; or the ominously blurred gate that marks the way to Vlakplaas, a terror best glimpsed askew.

Jo Ractliffe, Torreno Ocupado (Warren Siebrits, 2008)

Jo Ractliffe, As Terras do Fim do Mundo (Michael Stevenson Gallery, 2010)

The book features both texts written by Ractliffe as well as epigraphs from a range of literary sources to introduce the different bodies of work. Some of these text-quote pairings are adapted from Ractliffe’s original exhibition statements or earlier monographic book publications, like her 2008 volume Terreno Ocupado (Warren Siebrits, 2008). These missives, which mediate the image sequence, offer direct insight into Ractliffe’s artistic framework at the time the works were made. However, it is the text contributions appearing at the book’s end, which open with Iduma’s invocation of the ghosts, that truly illuminate the unique rhythm in which the photographs can be read, while also distinguishing this volume as more than a recapitulation of the artist’s prior projects.

In addition to Iduma’s idiosyncratic story, these contributions include extracts from an interview between Ractliffe and Artur Walther, an original essay by curator Matthew S. Witkovsky, as well as a selection of essays and reviews previously published in various international journals, magazines, and online platforms, such as, notably, an incisive essay by Okwui Enwezor. Witkovsky’s piece discusses Ractliffe’s disinterest in presenting her images as a healing antidote to the profound violence that has marked the world around her. “Her work is not aimed at comprehending trauma per se,” he writes. “Rather, it replays trauma to make clearer the historical conditions that have normalized its occurrence.” Witkovsky posits that both this replaying of trauma as well as the incorporation of photographic montage are “structuring principles (rather than subjects) in Ractliffe’s work.”

Jo Ractliffe, 07: Epping, from the series Everything Is Everything, 2017

The close-knit relationship between trauma and montage becomes clear when flipping through a series like Vlakplaas, in which a continuous strip of black-and-white film bleeds peripheral and disjointed views of the farm into unnatural unity—a “physically disturbed openness,” as Witkovsky puts it. The violent acts that haunt this site, Ractliffe’s sequence suggests, have caused a fundamental disruption to the landscape and our own sightlines.

Ractliffe focuses her lens not on explicit scenes of human violence but rather on the signs of its haunting: the riven terrain where somebody’s shack once stood, a lone man in the background taking the measure of what is lost.

A literary intervention like Iduma’s “Rendezvous” mirrors this disruption. The close read of Roadside stall on the way to Viana that opens the story immediately invites the reader into a visual and narrative meandering. The vignette is footnoted; our eyes travel down the page; move backwards and forwards in the book’s pages to find the image referenced; then linger on the annotated insights. Then the story moves on, intentionally staccato, to an entirely different scene that returns us to our main protagonist, that unnamed man tracking the ghost of his disappeared father. As “Rendezvous” continues, the footnotes begin to build a more elaborate subtext, making space for a greater span of literary references, critical analysis, and creative musings than could fit in the bounds of the main text. In one thrilling tangent, Iduma leaps from a close reading of the “R-shaped” figure of a man standing apart from a crowd in Raising the flag, Riemvasmaak (2013) to explore the resonances of the words this subject’s pose bring to mind: from the French word “limicole,” worm-like, to, soon, “limen,” a threshold. In this way, the text acts as a limen for understanding the full texture of Ractliffe’s work.

Jo Ractliffe, Raising the flag, Riemvasmaak, 2013, from the series The Borderlands, 2011–13

The first image Iduma describes, with its “exoskeletal men,”was made in Angola’s capital, Luanda, in 2007, as part of Ractliffe’s landmark series Terreno Ocupado, five short years after the end of the country’s multi-decade civil war. Yet Raising the flag emerges from Ractliffe’s later series The Borderlands (2013), which considers the aftermath of the Angolan war within South Africa’s borders. Iduma’s story blurs these chronological and geographical distinctions—its invitation to zigzag between the book’s pages and Ractliffe’s bodies of work parallels the destabilized time of traumatic memory, unifying disjointed scenes, enforcing its own kind of visual montage.

Creative text has long played a crucial role in reading Ractliffe’s images. Her out-of-print volume As Terras do Fim do Mundo (Michael Stevenson Gallery, 2010) traces the two years Ractliffe spent following ex-soldiers through the Angolan countryside to explore the landscape as a site of both trauma and mythmaking. Alongside her compositionally dense images of spaces where the ex-soldiers had once fought is an expansive personal narrative from Ractliffe about her time there. Like Iduma, she zigzags across the page in rife vignettes, attempting to track the landscape’s unclothed ghosts. “I have been trying to untangle the convolutions of this impossible war,” she writes towards the end. “I imagine the stories, all their versions and others, unheard, unspoken, time and events, all of it, moving in a slow steady converge like iron fillings towards a magnet.”

Cover and spread from Two Men Arrive in a Village (The Gould Collection, 2021)

In a recently published volume from The Gould Collection, Two Men Arrive in a Village (2021), a literary narrative and a penchant for mythmaking play an equally central role. Ractliffe’s subtle, somber images made between 1985 and 2019 across southern Africa are paired with a short story by Zadie Smith that reads as a parable, and similarly probes the unfolding of political violence. Smith’s contribution, like Ractliffe’s work, and like Iduma’s own short story, destabilizes time and geography, and revels in ambiguities. Jostling with the idea of narrative certainty, Smith follows the arrival of two pointedly unnamed men to an unnamed village who are at once highly particular—“It goes without saying that one of the men is tall . . . a little dim and vicious, while the other man is shorter, weasel-faced, and sly”—and completely allegorical, standing in for the countless harbingers of political violence who pass through local communities and leave haunted lands in their wake.

Jo Ractliffe, End of Time, 1996/99. All photographs from Jo Ractliffe, Photographs: 1980s–now (Steidl and The Walther Collection, 2020)
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

A little less than halfway through Two Men Arrive in a Village, one of Ractliffe’s more explicitly brutal images appears. This image, untitled and undated like the rest of the book’s sequence, shows a skinned, skeletal animal, dangling on a strip of twine against a building of brick, concrete, and ribbed steel. Its nakedness is a gruesome, disjointed counterpart to Ractliffe’s exoskeletal men. In the aftermath of war, when one’s sightlines are disturbed, the creature’s image recalls other ghosts, ghosts who still roil the land and its inheritors. The effect halts the viewer.

“And yet there is always something that places a human hold on the agnostic earth.” These words are written by Iduma, about Ractliffe’s photograph of a mass grave in Angola (Unmarked mass grave on the outskirts of Cuito Cuanavale, 2009). And yet these words meander across books to hold this untitled image from an unrecorded time and place too. If we let our eyes move across the page, we’ll see there is an outstretched arm, cropped but just visible along the bottom right edge of the frame. The hand holds up the bleached wood panel that frames the dead animal. This panel allows us to see the figure in starker relief, retrieved from its indifferent surroundings. Ractliffe cannot resurrect what is lost, but she can be its most steadfast witness.

This article original appeared in The PhotoBook Review, Issue 020, under the title “Clothing the Ghosts in Jo Ractliffe’s PhotoBooks.”

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Published on December 03, 2021 10:39

Why the “Photobook Phenomenon” Is More than Just a Fad

“I know no greater promise than that of a library.” —Guy Sire

My Eureka Moment

A few years ago, I had the somewhat strange idea of printing business cards which, under my name, listed the following for my occupation: “Amateur librarian.” Librarian, because, for around thirty years, I have spent most of my free time looking for the kinds of books that can make life more interesting; I collect, stockpile, and organize them, following a plan that strictly reflects my brain’s topology. Amateur, because this is not my profession; but also, because, according to the Latin etymology of the word, I really love it. When I initially became interested in photography in the mid-1980s, I lived in a provincial town with little access to exhibitions. Books were the main means of access to the medium and they opened, like a door, onto an unknown domain. Books, therefore, strongly shaped my early knowledge of photography—and their importance continued to grow. While working as a museum curator in France and then in the US, I relied more on books than even visits to studios or exhibitions to discover works. For many years, I used books above all as sources, as repertories, as catalogues, in order to select the photographs that might enrich the collection of the institution for which I was working. And a few years ago, I had a revelation, one of those epiphanies that changes how we see things and that we remember for a long time afterwards. I was holding an artist’s book that was entirely made up of photographs. It was so accomplished in its artwork, sequencing, typography, relation between text and image, choice of paper, and in so many other small details, that it struck me: the book itself deserved as much, if not more, of a place in the collection as did the photographs it included. The photobook as a complex and coherent container, became more interesting than its photographic content alone.

Infographic by Julia Schäfer

The Boom of the Book

I am obviously not the only person to have noticed that the photobook—to borrow the phrase from Michael Fried—“matters as art as never before.” For a number of years now, there has existed a “photobook phenomenon.” Its origins could be placed around the publication of Fotografía pública (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1999) by Horacio Fernández, who was one of the first to emphasize the importance of photographs’ context of diffusion by reproducing double-page spreads from each of the featured books. For many, the discovery of this work was a revelation. It confirmed, with a clarity compounded by the abundance of illustrations and the page layout, that photography is not only an image, but also an object whose very circulation must also be examined. Studies devoted to the photobook had been published before, such as early essays by Elizabeth McCausland (1943) and Beaumont Newhall (1983), but Fotografía pública established a genre. It was soon followed by The Book of 101 Books (PPP Editions, 2001) by Andrew Roth, and the first volume of The Photobook: A History (Phaidon, 2004) by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. Twenty years later, the bibliography of illustrated anthologies on photobooks includes more than eighty titles. In my own library, these volumes take up more meters of linear space than traditional histories of photography. As these compilations show, the photobook is not a recent invention. It has existed since the very beginning of the medium (Anna Atkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, etc.) and before the twentieth century it constituted a far greater means of diffusion of photography than exhibitions. So it is in terms, not of novelty, but rather of intensity that we should examine this recent development of photographic publications. In 1999, around one hundred publishers were partially or fully devoted to photography internationally. In preparing for this issue, from lists of publishers circulating on the internet, crossed with my own library, I calculated that this number has since been multiplied by almost five. Over the course of twenty years, and with a peak between 2011 and 2014, around three hundred more publishing houses for photobooks were created.

A World of Its Own

The current popularity of the photobook is no mere fad. It has lasted now for more than twenty years and has had important impacts on the ecosystem of photography. The phenomenon is also of historical importance, since it embodies the new face of photophilia. I know several collectors, such as Manfred Heiting and a few others, who stopped collecting vintage prints to concentrate entirely on photobooks. I can no longer count the former students or trainees who declined careers primarily as photographers, curators, or academics, instead preferring to create their own little publishing organizations. In the everyday practice of my profession, I increasingly meet photographers who are more interested in publishing a book than in making an exhibition. For these artists who evolve, more often than not, far from the circuit of large galleries, the book has become the thing. Careers have been launched with the publication of a book. In the current phase of development, the photobook is situated approximately where the artist’s book was in the 1980s. It offers a level of ingenuity, experimentation, consciousness, quality, or sophistication that had rarely been achieved before. The domain of photographic publishing has also reached a certain maturity. It is a world in itself—with its photographers, publishers, dealers, specialists, and collectors. All of this constitutes an organized network that feeds and regulates itself. It is interesting also to note that over the last twenty years, the world of the photobook has built a model of legitimation similar to the one photography itself used at the end of the twentieth century. The great masters and masterpieces had to be selected and organized by country or by genre. Then came the need to create official institutions, figures of authority, annual meetings, a primary and a secondary market, a system of compensation with prizes or medals, etc. The ultimate phase in this process required that the photobook be recognized as an art form in itself. This is where we are today.

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf 1208: Clément Chéroux, 2021

About Us

It seems a long time since the period when large publishing houses attached to international groups, with branches in several capitals, published photobooks in large print runs. Photographic publishing, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, has been marked above all by the multiplication of the little entities that can only be described adequately with a metaphor from astronomy—with its fields of meteorites, Pleiades, and its constellations. In this extremely dynamic domain that is constantly reinventing itself, it would be risky to try to define the profiletype of these young publishers. One online resource allows us, however, to ascertain what it is that drives them, and that is their presentation page, often entitled “About Us.” Without any definition, a synthesis of these blurbs makes up a sort of identikit-picture of this new generation of publishers. In these statements of purpose, the words “love” or “passion” regularly appear. These publishers love with a passion the book, the photograph, and perhaps above all the combination of the two. They are divided into small structures that are proudly independent, willingly placing themselves on the edges of dominant currents of mass culture. They publish only a few books per year, in relatively small print runs, and are fully conscious of evolving in a niche market. The search for profit is not their main ambition. These new publishers take a political position that defends education, responsibility, ecology, diversity, or social justice. They still believe that a book can change the course of a life and think of themselves as go-betweens of art, ideas, or histories. One of the most common claims in these mission statements is that the book is not the work of one single person, but rather the product of creative chemistry between artists, graphic designers, writers, curators, printers, binders, and publishers. One collaborative American publishing platform even refers to those who take the risk of prepurchasing their works as copublishers. The book is made together, in a community of talents. The result of this tight cooperation goes beyond the mere sum of its parts.

This Is Art!

Books published by this new generation of publishers are thought of as singular objects. Unlike many monograph collections from the last decades of the twentieth century, each volume has its own identity. These works are conceived to withstand the tests of time, with hopes that the grandchildren of the initial buyers will find them still worthy of interest. In their presentations online, these publishers insist on the equality between form and content. The content of the book (subject, vision, narration) is certainly primordial, but the attention given to the conception of its container is just as crucial. Several of these small publishers promote an experimental approach to the book-object in terms of graphic art, printing, or binding. In this context the materiality of the book is also very important. Haptics are combined with optics to offer a sensory experience distinct from the discovery of images on the screen. “Attention to every detail,” “cutting edge,” “highest quality,” “sophisticated,” are words that frequently appear in these publishers’ descriptions. They claim a level of expertise that is far above the general standards of publishing. Strangely, the word “craft” is used very little here. That may be because it refers more to the nineteenth century than to the trendy or connected vocabulary of our Web 2.0 era. But its philosophy is present in the way these publishers describe their profession. Ever since the Arts and Crafts movement, craftsmanship has been linked with art. Some contemporary publishers of photobooks consider themselves craftsmen. They see bookmaking as a vector for the diffusion of art: a gallery without a wall, or a paper museum. Others are artists. In the last years, many photographers—Alec Soth, Stephen Gill, Cristina de Middel, Lukas Birk, Jason Fulford, Vasantha Yogananthan, among so many others—created their own houses to independently publish their own projects or those of like-minded artists. While maintaining the conflation between the container and the content, they also claim that the photobook is a form of art in itself.

André Breton, ed., Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Pierre à Feu [Maeght Éditeur], 1947). Cover design by Marcel Duchamp

Please Touch

I remember very well that when I first became interested in photography, the discussion revolved primarily around the way images were produced. Important subjects included operating technique, zone system, and decisive moments. “At Work” was a common subtitle for the monographs of great photographers, for the principal challenge was to explain how they operated. Henceforth, it has become less the question of production, and more that of diffusion that is at the heart of all conversations on the medium. Numerous recent studies, exhibitions, and conferences have examined the different modalities of photo publication. Today, the internet and social networks have of course become the main vectors for the circulation of images. Yet historically, during the twentieth century, the main channels for the distribution of photographs were exhibitions and books. While these two interfaces with the public have had an absolutely complementary function whose interrelated history should one day be written, they offer a radically different experience of photography. The experience offered by a museum or gallery is generally collective, while that of the photobook invites itself into the home and offers a more intimate and personal understanding of the work. In the exhibition, the photograph is looked at mostly vertically, while in the book, held in one’s hands, placed on a table or on one’s lap, the photograph tends to be appreciated horizontally. The photograph on the wall is generally protected behind glass or plexiglass, unlike the book where the surface of the image remains directly accessible. The wandering in the space of the exhibition solicits the eye as much as the feet, whereas the discovery of a work in a book rests essentially on a combination of the gaze and the hand. Framed and hung up, photographs have a presence, but rarely a physicality, whereas the photobook is an object with weight, materiality, and tangibility. Our relation to the photograph through the book seems then to respond more to the subversive invitation that Marcel Duchamp had written out clearly on the catalogue for the surrealist exhibition of 1947: Prière de toucher.

This Moment of Absolute Joy

I need to confess here that I have a very sensory relationship with books. Once the cellophane wrapping has been removed from the book, I open it and, with an almost Pavlovian reflex, plunge my nose into the hollows between the pages. Its odor is a mix of glue, ink, and paper. I unfold the dust jacket to see if it is hiding any details deliberately concealed from the surface gaze. “Photography is a secret about a secret,” said Diane Arbus. I caress the grain of the paper with the flat of my palm. I follow the outline of the embossing with my fingertips. I enjoy hearing the cracking of the binding. My thumb on the edge of the pages, I feel the flexibility of the paper and free the pages in a cadence guided by my curiosity. After this initial phase of approaching the book, I put it down and slowly begin its discovery from cover to cover. I scrutinize the colophon, read the texts, and pause for a long time in front of certain images; I evaluate the page layout, go back a few pages, open the folding plates, then carefully close them again so as not to damage them. The history of photography has, for years, been marked by an uninterrupted pursuit of speed. Those who have tried to improve it have always sought to make it faster: from the instantaneity of the shot (Kodak, 1888), to the reduction of the development time (Polaroid, 1948), to the immediacy of sharing (Instagram, 2007). In my own relations with images, I very much enjoy the deceleration imposed by the photobook. It allows a richer appreciation than the hasty scrolling of images stimulated by a nervous movement of the thumb against the screen of a smartphone. Seated at a table or in an armchair, with the book nicely placed between my eye and my hand, I feel as though a force field is becoming harmonized, as though something is finding its equilibrium, as in a yoga position. When I think about it carefully, it seems crazy how much intensity a mere stack of partly inked sheets of paper, assembled in a certain order, held between two thicker cardboard sheets, can contain.

Horacio Fernández, Fotografía pública 1919–1939 (Photography in Print 1919–1939) (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1999)

This Replaces That

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the moment when digital images began to acquire a more and more important place in our daily activities, many predicted the end of the paper book. And it is in fact the opposite that came about in the domain of photography. While visual culture on the web developed, photographic book publishing surprisingly followed the same upward curve. Among curators, John Szarkowski is one of the first to have anticipated the positive impact of digital images on the publishing of photobooks. In a televised interview on February 9, 2005, in response to a question regarding his thoughts on new technologies, he avoided the usual soundbites on the end of photographic truth and replied enthusiastically: “I think there is a terrific opportunity in the digital system for making books.” The digital system, he explained, allowed us to reduce the costs of making books in small print runs: “There are some great books that only 200 or 500 people need to have.” The future proved him very right. The digital system helped to reduce circulation costs. Via the internet, it is possible to order directly from the publisher, without using an intermediary. Social networks also announce the publication of a work with a power of dissemination and captivation that had never been seen before in this domain. They offer numerous resources—leaf-throughs,presentations, insight into the making of, etc.—that facilitate the understanding of the book. Many times I have flicked through the pages of a new book in a bookshop and put it back on the stack, only to run back out to get it later after having seen a presentation of the photographer on the internet. Today, the digital system adds a supplementary layer around this already complex object. It is this virtual cocoon that creates the conditions for the extraordinary vitality of photographic publishing. Against all expectations, the book and the digital system are not opposed. Instead, they are perfectly complementary. Szarkowski rightly intuited that they should not necessarily be seen as contradictory.

History in the Making

This current issue of The PhotoBook Review is the twentieth. It marks the tenth year of the existence of this biannual newsprint journal, which is brilliantly directed by Lesley A. Martin and the team from Aperture. In one decade, PBR, as those familiar with it call it, has become one of the main exchange forums for amateurs of the photobook. It has both widely contributed to, and recorded the history of, the photobook as a publishing phenomenon. If we reread the nineteen available issues, we can find almost all of the important debates of the period, along with the photographers, publishers, and graphic artists that were particularly active, and, of course, the most influential books. When Lesley invited me to take on the role as guest editor for this issue, I accepted without hesitation. First, because I am an avid reader and great admirer of PBR. But second because the archival nature of this publication, its ability to record this publishing history while participating in it actively, seems to me to make it the ideal place to attempt an examination of the photobook’s development in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Our discussion began with simple questions: How do we define a photobook? How many publishers of photobooks are there today? Where are they? And then things became more complex, as is always the case when you want to do things thoroughly. It is within a necessarily temporary and incomplete state of questioning that we imagine this issue. PBR, issue 020, poses questions to the contemporary actors in the world of the photobook, as well as a new generation of professionals. It also offers a chronology of the key moments in photographic publishing since 1999, statistics concerning the multiplication of publishing houses, and a cartography showing their locations around the globe. Without claiming to cover everything, this issue aims to bring together a few useful resources that will allow readers, and perhaps also future historians, to understand better the current taste for this fascinating object, the photobook.

This article originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review, Issue 020, under the title “The New Face of Photophilia.” Translated from the French by Shane Lillis.

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Published on December 03, 2021 10:36

Has the Photobook Become More Interesting than Photographs Themselves?

“I know no greater promise than that of a library.” —Guy Sire

My Eureka Moment

A few years ago, I had the somewhat strange idea of printing business cards which, under my name, listed the following for my occupation: “Amateur librarian.” Librarian, because, for around thirty years, I have spent most of my free time looking for the kinds of books that can make life more interesting; I collect, stockpile, and organize them, following a plan that strictly reflects my brain’s topology. Amateur, because this is not my profession; but also, because, according to the Latin etymology of the word, I really love it. When I initially became interested in photography in the mid-1980s, I lived in a provincial town with little access to exhibitions. Books were the main means of access to the medium and they opened, like a door, onto an unknown domain. Books, therefore, strongly shaped my early knowledge of photography—and their importance continued to grow. While working as a museum curator in France and then in the US, I relied more on books than even visits to studios or exhibitions to discover works. For many years, I used books above all as sources, as repertories, as catalogues, in order to select the photographs that might enrich the collection of the institution for which I was working. And a few years ago, I had a revelation, one of those epiphanies that changes how we see things and that we remember for a long time afterwards. I was holding an artist’s book that was entirely made up of photographs. It was so accomplished in its artwork, sequencing, typography, relation between text and image, choice of paper, and in so many other small details, that it struck me: the book itself deserved as much, if not more, of a place in the collection as did the photographs it included. The photobook as a complex and coherent container, became more interesting than its photographic content alone.

Infographic by Julia Schäfer

The Boom of the Book

I am obviously not the only person to have noticed that the photobook—to borrow the phrase from Michael Fried—“matters as art as never before.” For a number of years now, there has existed a “photobook phenomenon.” Its origins could be placed around the publication of Fotografía pública (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1999) by Horacio Fernández, who was one of the first to emphasize the importance of photographs’ context of diffusion by reproducing double-page spreads from each of the featured books. For many, the discovery of this work was a revelation. It confirmed, with a clarity compounded by the abundance of illustrations and the page layout, that photography is not only an image, but also an object whose very circulation must also be examined. Studies devoted to the photobook had been published before, such as early essays by Elizabeth McCausland (1943) and Beaumont Newhall (1983), but Fotografía pública established a genre. It was soon followed by The Book of 101 Books (PPP Editions, 2001) by Andrew Roth, and the first volume of The Photobook: A History (Phaidon, 2004) by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. Twenty years later, the bibliography of illustrated anthologies on photobooks includes more than eighty titles. In my own library, these volumes take up more meters of linear space than traditional histories of photography. As these compilations show, the photobook is not a recent invention. It has existed since the very beginning of the medium (Anna Atkins, William Henry Fox Talbot, etc.) and before the twentieth century it constituted a far greater means of diffusion of photography than exhibitions. So it is in terms, not of novelty, but rather of intensity that we should examine this recent development of photographic publications. In 1999, around one hundred publishers were partially or fully devoted to photography internationally. In preparing for this issue, from lists of publishers circulating on the internet, crossed with my own library, I calculated that this number has since been multiplied by almost five. Over the course of twenty years, and with a peak between 2011 and 2014, around three hundred more publishing houses for photobooks were created.

A World of Its Own

The current popularity of the photobook is no mere fad. It has lasted now for more than twenty years and has had important impacts on the ecosystem of photography. The phenomenon is also of historical importance, since it embodies the new face of photophilia. I know several collectors, such as Manfred Heiting and a few others, who stopped collecting vintage prints to concentrate entirely on photobooks. I can no longer count the former students or trainees who declined careers primarily as photographers, curators, or academics, instead preferring to create their own little publishing organizations. In the everyday practice of my profession, I increasingly meet photographers who are more interested in publishing a book than in making an exhibition. For these artists who evolve, more often than not, far from the circuit of large galleries, the book has become the thing. Careers have been launched with the publication of a book. In the current phase of development, the photobook is situated approximately where the artist’s book was in the 1980s. It offers a level of ingenuity, experimentation, consciousness, quality, or sophistication that had rarely been achieved before. The domain of photographic publishing has also reached a certain maturity. It is a world in itself—with its photographers, publishers, dealers, specialists, and collectors. All of this constitutes an organized network that feeds and regulates itself. It is interesting also to note that over the last twenty years, the world of the photobook has built a model of legitimation similar to the one photography itself used at the end of the twentieth century. The great masters and masterpieces had to be selected and organized by country or by genre. Then came the need to create official institutions, figures of authority, annual meetings, a primary and a secondary market, a system of compensation with prizes or medals, etc. The ultimate phase in this process required that the photobook be recognized as an art form in itself. This is where we are today.

Jane Mount, Ideal Bookshelf 1208: Clément Chéroux, 2021

About Us

It seems a long time since the period when large publishing houses attached to international groups, with branches in several capitals, published photobooks in large print runs. Photographic publishing, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, has been marked above all by the multiplication of the little entities that can only be described adequately with a metaphor from astronomy—with its fields of meteorites, Pleiades, and its constellations. In this extremely dynamic domain that is constantly reinventing itself, it would be risky to try to define the profiletype of these young publishers. One online resource allows us, however, to ascertain what it is that drives them, and that is their presentation page, often entitled “About Us.” Without any definition, a synthesis of these blurbs makes up a sort of identikit-picture of this new generation of publishers. In these statements of purpose, the words “love” or “passion” regularly appear. These publishers love with a passion the book, the photograph, and perhaps above all the combination of the two. They are divided into small structures that are proudly independent, willingly placing themselves on the edges of dominant currents of mass culture. They publish only a few books per year, in relatively small print runs, and are fully conscious of evolving in a niche market. The search for profit is not their main ambition. These new publishers take a political position that defends education, responsibility, ecology, diversity, or social justice. They still believe that a book can change the course of a life and think of themselves as go-betweens of art, ideas, or histories. One of the most common claims in these mission statements is that the book is not the work of one single person, but rather the product of creative chemistry between artists, graphic designers, writers, curators, printers, binders, and publishers. One collaborative American publishing platform even refers to those who take the risk of prepurchasing their works as copublishers. The book is made together, in a community of talents. The result of this tight cooperation goes beyond the mere sum of its parts.

This Is Art!

Books published by this new generation of publishers are thought of as singular objects. Unlike many monograph collections from the last decades of the twentieth century, each volume has its own identity. These works are conceived to withstand the tests of time, with hopes that the grandchildren of the initial buyers will find them still worthy of interest. In their presentations online, these publishers insist on the equality between form and content. The content of the book (subject, vision, narration) is certainly primordial, but the attention given to the conception of its container is just as crucial. Several of these small publishers promote an experimental approach to the book-object in terms of graphic art, printing, or binding. In this context the materiality of the book is also very important. Haptics are combined with optics to offer a sensory experience distinct from the discovery of images on the screen. “Attention to every detail,” “cutting edge,” “highest quality,” “sophisticated,” are words that frequently appear in these publishers’ descriptions. They claim a level of expertise that is far above the general standards of publishing. Strangely, the word “craft” is used very little here. That may be because it refers more to the nineteenth century than to the trendy or connected vocabulary of our Web 2.0 era. But its philosophy is present in the way these publishers describe their profession. Ever since the Arts and Crafts movement, craftsmanship has been linked with art. Some contemporary publishers of photobooks consider themselves craftsmen. They see bookmaking as a vector for the diffusion of art: a gallery without a wall, or a paper museum. Others are artists. In the last years, many photographers—Alec Soth, Stephen Gill, Cristina de Middel, Lukas Birk, Jason Fulford, Vasantha Yogananthan, among so many others—created their own houses to independently publish their own projects or those of like-minded artists. While maintaining the conflation between the container and the content, they also claim that the photobook is a form of art in itself.

André Breton, ed., Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Pierre à Feu [Maeght Éditeur], 1947). Cover design by Marcel Duchamp

Please Touch

I remember very well that when I first became interested in photography, the discussion revolved primarily around the way images were produced. Important subjects included operating technique, zone system, and decisive moments. “At Work” was a common subtitle for the monographs of great photographers, for the principal challenge was to explain how they operated. Henceforth, it has become less the question of production, and more that of diffusion that is at the heart of all conversations on the medium. Numerous recent studies, exhibitions, and conferences have examined the different modalities of photo publication. Today, the internet and social networks have of course become the main vectors for the circulation of images. Yet historically, during the twentieth century, the main channels for the distribution of photographs were exhibitions and books. While these two interfaces with the public have had an absolutely complementary function whose interrelated history should one day be written, they offer a radically different experience of photography. The experience offered by a museum or gallery is generally collective, while that of the photobook invites itself into the home and offers a more intimate and personal understanding of the work. In the exhibition, the photograph is looked at mostly vertically, while in the book, held in one’s hands, placed on a table or on one’s lap, the photograph tends to be appreciated horizontally. The photograph on the wall is generally protected behind glass or plexiglass, unlike the book where the surface of the image remains directly accessible. The wandering in the space of the exhibition solicits the eye as much as the feet, whereas the discovery of a work in a book rests essentially on a combination of the gaze and the hand. Framed and hung up, photographs have a presence, but rarely a physicality, whereas the photobook is an object with weight, materiality, and tangibility. Our relation to the photograph through the book seems then to respond more to the subversive invitation that Marcel Duchamp had written out clearly on the catalogue for the surrealist exhibition of 1947: Prière de toucher.

This Moment of Absolute Joy

I need to confess here that I have a very sensory relationship with books. Once the cellophane wrapping has been removed from the book, I open it and, with an almost Pavlovian reflex, plunge my nose into the hollows between the pages. Its odor is a mix of glue, ink, and paper. I unfold the dust jacket to see if it is hiding any details deliberately concealed from the surface gaze. “Photography is a secret about a secret,” said Diane Arbus. I caress the grain of the paper with the flat of my palm. I follow the outline of the embossing with my fingertips. I enjoy hearing the cracking of the binding. My thumb on the edge of the pages, I feel the flexibility of the paper and free the pages in a cadence guided by my curiosity. After this initial phase of approaching the book, I put it down and slowly begin its discovery from cover to cover. I scrutinize the colophon, read the texts, and pause for a long time in front of certain images; I evaluate the page layout, go back a few pages, open the folding plates, then carefully close them again so as not to damage them. The history of photography has, for years, been marked by an uninterrupted pursuit of speed. Those who have tried to improve it have always sought to make it faster: from the instantaneity of the shot (Kodak, 1888), to the reduction of the development time (Polaroid, 1948), to the immediacy of sharing (Instagram, 2007). In my own relations with images, I very much enjoy the deceleration imposed by the photobook. It allows a richer appreciation than the hasty scrolling of images stimulated by a nervous movement of the thumb against the screen of a smartphone. Seated at a table or in an armchair, with the book nicely placed between my eye and my hand, I feel as though a force field is becoming harmonized, as though something is finding its equilibrium, as in a yoga position. When I think about it carefully, it seems crazy how much intensity a mere stack of partly inked sheets of paper, assembled in a certain order, held between two thicker cardboard sheets, can contain.

Horacio Fernández, Fotografía pública 1919–1939 (Photography in Print 1919–1939) (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1999)

This Replaces That

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the moment when digital images began to acquire a more and more important place in our daily activities, many predicted the end of the paper book. And it is in fact the opposite that came about in the domain of photography. While visual culture on the web developed, photographic book publishing surprisingly followed the same upward curve. Among curators, John Szarkowski is one of the first to have anticipated the positive impact of digital images on the publishing of photobooks. In a televised interview on February 9, 2005, in response to a question regarding his thoughts on new technologies, he avoided the usual soundbites on the end of photographic truth and replied enthusiastically: “I think there is a terrific opportunity in the digital system for making books.” The digital system, he explained, allowed us to reduce the costs of making books in small print runs: “There are some great books that only 200 or 500 people need to have.” The future proved him very right. The digital system helped to reduce circulation costs. Via the internet, it is possible to order directly from the publisher, without using an intermediary. Social networks also announce the publication of a work with a power of dissemination and captivation that had never been seen before in this domain. They offer numerous resources—leaf-throughs,presentations, insight into the making of, etc.—that facilitate the understanding of the book. Many times I have flicked through the pages of a new book in a bookshop and put it back on the stack, only to run back out to get it later after having seen a presentation of the photographer on the internet. Today, the digital system adds a supplementary layer around this already complex object. It is this virtual cocoon that creates the conditions for the extraordinary vitality of photographic publishing. Against all expectations, the book and the digital system are not opposed. Instead, they are perfectly complementary. Szarkowski rightly intuited that they should not necessarily be seen as contradictory.

History in the Making

This current issue of The PhotoBook Review is the twentieth. It marks the tenth year of the existence of this biannual newsprint journal, which is brilliantly directed by Lesley A. Martin and the team from Aperture. In one decade, PBR, as those familiar with it call it, has become one of the main exchange forums for amateurs of the photobook. It has both widely contributed to, and recorded the history of, the photobook as a publishing phenomenon. If we reread the nineteen available issues, we can find almost all of the important debates of the period, along with the photographers, publishers, and graphic artists that were particularly active, and, of course, the most influential books. When Lesley invited me to take on the role as guest editor for this issue, I accepted without hesitation. First, because I am an avid reader and great admirer of PBR. But second because the archival nature of this publication, its ability to record this publishing history while participating in it actively, seems to me to make it the ideal place to attempt an examination of the photobook’s development in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Our discussion began with simple questions: How do we define a photobook? How many publishers of photobooks are there today? Where are they? And then things became more complex, as is always the case when you want to do things thoroughly. It is within a necessarily temporary and incomplete state of questioning that we imagine this issue. PBR, issue 020, poses questions to the contemporary actors in the world of the photobook, as well as a new generation of professionals. It also offers a chronology of the key moments in photographic publishing since 1999, statistics concerning the multiplication of publishing houses, and a cartography showing their locations around the globe. Without claiming to cover everything, this issue aims to bring together a few useful resources that will allow readers, and perhaps also future historians, to understand better the current taste for this fascinating object, the photobook.

This article originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review, Issue 020, under the title “The New Face of Photophilia.” Translated from the French by Shane Lillis.

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Published on December 03, 2021 10:36

The Anti–Road Trip of an Indian American Photographer

Then the pulse.
Then a pause.
Then twilight in a box.
Dusk underfoot.
Then generations.
—Srikanth Reddy, “Burial Practice,” Facts for Visitors

Miraj Patel is running from water. His latest photographic series, Back East (2021), made during a cross-country journey from California to Connecticut earlier this year, is a reclamation of space in his homeland. “It’s the anti-road trip,” Patel, an MFA student at Yale, tells me, describing his project as being grounded in “the reversal of the movement from the East to the Great West”—an advancement mythologized in the American imagination as being in the direction of hope and success. For the first generation Indian American, eastward travel became an expedition toward the Old World, an attempt to orient himself to an ancestral “Eastern” homeland while remaining in the natal “Western” one.

Comprising staged portraits that Patel made of himself and his partner at the time, and composites of found objects cathected with his memories and interpretations of his parents’ culture, the series involves a racially charged narrative fiction that Patel wanted to “remain unresolved, to defy the white gaze.” In recent years, the desire for self-representation has been vociferously articulated by immigrant and diaspora artists of color in the United States. Discussing the series as a process of working out of his identity, Patel notes that he was motivated to insert himself into the landscape and lore of a country that he simultaneously belonged to and felt erased in: “Indian people have no representation—I have no history here.”

Patel’s previous series It Feels This Way (2020) tackles this yearning for a rootedness head-on. Showing his California-based family’s domestic life, the photographs bring to mind Gauri Gill’s The Americans (2000–2007), a germinal document of Indian American life. However, as Bakirathi Mani argues in Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (2020), her book on South Asian American photography (which includes description of Gill’s series): “The problem of representation cannot be resolved through the greater visibility of the racialized subject . . . [it] is itself constituted by colonial histories of documentation and surveillance.” Patel cites as an influence Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s practice, which is invested in this very critique of the apparatus of photography. Wolukau-Wanambwa’s photobook One Wall a Web (2018) interrogates—via portraiture, urbanscape photography, and the repurposing of found negatives—geography, corporeality, and the archive to expose the discontents of racial, gender, and economic representation in the US.

In Back East, part of which he made in Connecticut at Grove Street Cemetery, the oldest burial ground in the US, Patel draws on the register of irony. Sprinting in a kurta along the coast, standing in for a statue of the nineteenth-century New Haven mayor Henry G. Lewis, posing in the style of an old Hollywood glamour shot, he evokes the haunting in a scary movie to capture the experience of being caught between places and times. This isn’t just representation; it’s a reconstitution of the American desi in terms that are conscious and critical of the overwhelming whiteness and West-ness (as a settler-colonial and postcolonial category) of the American visual regime.

The frustration of unbelonging plays out in a quadrant of photos that each feature a mehendi-decorated hand—fisted, splayed out, and curved into a claw. The work is reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s video series For Beginners (instructed piano) (2010), which depicts thirty-one finger combinations as an homage to Nauman’s memory of teaching his son how to play the piano. Patel’s recollections of his childhood were more fraught: he grew up seeing his mother dance, positioning her hands in the various mudras of classical Indian choreography. His inability to comprehend these gestures—important in the cultural schema of his parents—compounded the sense of “not feeling a place.”

The tight frames and medium-format camera Patel used to compose the photographs in Back East resulted in a shallow depth of field and a flatness that emphasize their playfulness and performativity. Filters and lighting—both strobe and natural—are important for Patel in constructing the spooky artifice of his images. Perhaps this theater serves as metaphor for being a brown body navigating white society: “Even as a photographer, I play a role, become a spectacle in my own way,” he says.

Miraj Patel’s photographs were created using a FUJIFILM GFX100S with a FUJINON GF80mmF1.7R WR lens and FUJIFILM Shoe Mount Flash EF-60.

All photographs by Miraj Patel from the series Back East, 2021, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

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Published on November 23, 2021 07:19

The Unexpected Photographs Ansel Adams Made before Becoming a Household Name

It is difficult to associate Ansel Adams with anything other than sublime, silver-print vistas. You picture him alone beneath majestic mountains, in the shadow of Half Dome at Yosemite, and looking up at billowy clouds through which light streams down to the rocky terrain of California’s Central Valley. There are rarely any humans visible in Adams’s most famous photographs, and so, by extension, it’s easy to think of him simply as a quiet man who communed attentively with nature.

Mike Mandel met Adams in 1975 when the former photographed the latter for Untitled (Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards), Mandel’s witty commentary on the rising status of well-known photographers of the time. This was just a couple of years before Mandel collaborated with Larry Sultan on Evidence, which was published in 1977. That book (and exhibition), composed of found photographic oddities culled from governmental and corporate archives, forged an approach to looking at vernacular pictures that wryly reveal commentary when taken out of their official context. Mandel had the idea for Zone Eleven, a new book that culls out-of-character Adams pictures, back then, while Adams was still alive (he died in 1984).

Ansel Adams, Freshmen Reception, University of California, Berkeley, 1966
Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

Ansel Adams, Dr. Benson Roe, Open Heart Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, 1965
Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

The size and horizontal orientation of Zone Eleven echoes that of Evidence, as if they are siblings born forty-four years apart, with divergent personalities. Evidence has an ominous, black dust jacket with the title in white, like a heading on a dossier. There is dark humor to that design that runs counter to the cover of Zone Eleven. A crisp, clean white, this new cover features a title in the same serif font in roughly the same position as Evidence’s, only with letters that move through a spectrum of full black to gentle gray.

This range of shades refers to the famous ten-zone system, which Adams codeveloped. The system goes from zero to ten, black to white, as a means of creating optimal black and white exposure and printing. As a title, Zone Eleven (itself containing ten letters!) suggests Spinal Tap’s pumping up the volume to that next level, though the degree of comedic energy to this project is moderate. Ten is the pure white side of Adams’s tonal spectrum; eleven could be something beyond recognition.

Ansel Adams, C.T. Hibino, artist, Manzanar War Relocation Center, California, 1943
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Ansel Adams, Hat Creek Radio Astronomy Station, Shasta County, California, 1964
Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

The eighty-three images in Zone Eleven are not masterworks but pictures Adams took for commercial clients before he could survive on sales of his artwork. “These are essentially vernacular pictures that happen to be made by Ansel Adams—totally unlike Adams’s best-known photographs,” writes Erin O’Toole in the book’s contextualizing essay. The latter, she adds, “Mandel terms ‘unitary,’ meaning singular pictures that don’t depend on what comes before and after.” Adams’s name is on the spine (just like Sultan’s is on Evidence), and Mandel, in this quasi-collaboration, is responsible for adding the “canny selection and juxtaposition,” as O’Toole describes it. Mandel, in a no-longer-revolutionary strategy, had combed through archives of some 50,000 images at the Center for Creative Photography and the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, most dating from the 1940s through the 1960s.

He chose some outdoor shots of beaches, hillsides, prairies—though these, countering the sublime, seem more like sites of recreation, of beach wading and guided treks up snow-covered peaks. Because these settings are in Adams’s wheelhouse, they’re less surprising than pictures that depict social situations—you realize just how few of his known photos include people.

There are crowds, and there is frolic, as in Recreation Center: University of California Los Angeles (1966), a series of six images that capture divers hovering above an expansive swimming pool with smoggy views of Los Angeles in the background. There is wit and magic to the illusion of levitation, to the figures floating, expectantly, forever captured on film.

Ansel Adams, Drama Rehearsal, Misty Morning, University of California, Irvine, 1966Sweeney/Rubin Ansel Adams Fiat Lux Collection, California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

Ansel Adams, Cole and Dorothy Weston at Home, ca. 1940
Fortune Magazine Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

There is a 1928 photograph of a man in diaphanous drag, titled Fun in Camp—the Premier Danseuse, Ernest Arnold, Canadian Rockies. There’s no information provided on the subject, though bearded Ernest looks rather like a demure member of the Cockettes, that infamous San Francisco hippie drag troupe, with his makeshift costume of cheesecloth and wildflowers. Another college scene, Drama Rehearsal, Misty Morning, University of California, Irvine (1966), shows youthful hipsters emoting and reclining on a rock, and while dressed, they seem like precursors to the desert orgy in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point. You just don’t equate youthquake energy with Adams, and it’s heartening to be able to.

Cole and Dorothy Weston at Home (ca. 1940) shows an ardent kiss framed behind a front-door screen—it’s an amorous winter embrace, and which, surprisingly, comes from the Fortune Magazine Collection archives. Mandel pairs it with Building Through Window Screen (undated), a hazy view of a barn-like structure as seen through a wire mesh panel. The two pictures are linked by domesticity. Other sequences depict shadows on walls, modernist architecture, and scientific equipment.

There was a time when Adams was the most famous photographer working, a household name, and a staple of college dorm room posters.

The center of the book features a few portraits of Japanese Americans at the Manzanar internment camp. These are grounded, humanizing images that focus on individuality over strife. Tatsuo Miyake (student of divinity), Manzanar War Relocation Center, California (1943) shows the subject posing in front of a rectangular sign for camp church services. The composition, however, reads something like an identification photo, even though Miyake leans left and smiles broadly. These, along with a few exteriors of the Manzanar Relocation Center, have a more documentary feel, as they offer an on-the-ground view of a politicized site that Adams famously photographed from an aesthetic distance. This sequence also hints at a social conscience that isn’t as visible elsewhere in the book.

Ansel Adams, Tatsuo Miyake (student of divinity), Manzanar War Relocation Center, California, 1943
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Unlike the anonymous photographers in Evidence, here the photographer is an extremely known entity. The images in Zone Eleven are commercial works attributed to Adams, but are they essentially found images that have little to do with his artistic vision? Outside of the Manzanar pictures, they don’t tell us much about the man other than the fact that he actually had ties to civilization.

There was a time when Adams was the most famous photographer working, a household name, and a staple of college dorm room posters. His role in popularizing the medium cannot be underestimated. His focus on glorious natural subjects and his reverence and advocacy for careful darkroom printing and photo education now seem quaint in a world saturated with digital filters and phone cameras, and when instances of environmental catastrophe are the new sublime. There’s a nostalgic sweetness to this project, both in the images and in Mandel’s form of homage. But there isn’t much urgency. Which is to say, if Zone Eleven is meant to provide evidence for reevaluating Adams, it lands pleasantly in zone five.

Mike Mandel: Zone Eleven was published by Damiani in October 2021.

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Published on November 23, 2021 07:12

Aperture’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide

From best-selling Aperture books The New Black Vanguard and Photo No-Nos; to iconic monographs by Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, and Philip Montgomery; to essay and activity books for all-ages—we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.

Must-Haves for Photography Lovers

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

As We Rise looks at multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection, the book features works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the US, South America, and Africa—providing a timely exploration of Black identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. Over thirty years after it was first published, the influence of The Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms can still be felt, firmly establishing it as a contemporary classic.

American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams

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

Aperture magazine subscription

Leading the conversation on contemporary photography with thought-provoking commentary and visually immersive portfolios, Aperture is required reading for everyone seriously interested in photography. With thematic issues ranging from “Vision & Justice” to “Native America,” “New York,” and more, Aperture has been the essential guide to photography since 1952.

Give the Gift of Inspiration

Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph

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

The Lives of Images, Volumes 1 & 2

The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The first volume, Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation, addresses the multiple life cycles of the image and the significance of technological reproduction for contemporary forms of social, cultural, and political life. Meanwhile, Vol. 2: Analogy, Attunement, and Attention addresses the complex relationships that the reproducible image creates with its viewers, and their bodies, minds, and identities.

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice

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

The Photography Workshop Series Bundle

In our Photography Workshop Series, Aperture works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography, offering the workshop experience in a book. From Richard Misrach on landscape photography and meaning, to Dawoud Bey on photographing people and community, to Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on the poetic image, these books offer inspiration to photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Contemporary Classics

Philip Montgomery: American Mirror

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

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance (Tenth Anniversary Edition)

Ten years after its original publication, Aperture republishes Rinko Kawauchi’s beloved volume Illuminance. Through her images of keenly observed gestures and details, Kawauchi reveals the mysterious and beautiful realm at the edge of the everyday world. As Kawauchi describes, “I want imagination in the photographs—a photograph is like a prologue. You wonder, ‘What’s going on?’ You feel something is going to happen.” This new edition of Illuminance retains the Japanese photographer’s original sequence, alongside texts by David Chandler, Lesley A. Martin, and Masatake Shinohara.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

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

Gillian Laub: Family Matters

For over twenty years, Gillian Laub has photographed her family in an exploration of the ways society’s most complex questions are revealed in our most intimate relationships. For Laub, this became all the more tangible when she found herself on the opposing side from her family during the 2016 US presidential election—and further in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and protests in support of Black Lives Matter. Family Matters combines Laub’s subversively funny and often gut-wrenchingly familiar photographs alongside personal reflections, offering a compelling picture of the fractures in contemporary American society through the artist’s own family.

Ethan James Green: Young New York

Ethan James Green’s first monograph presents a selection of striking portraits of New York’s Millennial scene-makers, a gloriously diverse cast of models, artists, nightlife icons, queer youth, and gender binary–flouting muses of the fashion world and beyond. Young New York showcases a bright young talent who is redefining beauty and identity for a new generation.

Photobooks Celebrating Black Artists

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion

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

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

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

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal

Throughout his prolific and interdisciplinary career, Hank Willis Thomas’s work has explored issues of representation, perception, and American history. At the core of his practice is the ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprise American culture, with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity. All Things Being Equal is the first in-depth overview of Thomas’s extensive career, highlighting the artist’s diverse range of visual approaches and mediums—from advertising and branding, archival Civil Rights and apartheid-era photography, and sculpture, to public art projects and more.

For the Armchair Traveler

Tim Davis: I’m Looking Through You

Since 2017, Tim Davis has photographed throughout Los Angeles, creating an expansive visual poem celebrating the city’s glamorous surface. From closely observed details of LA’s social landscape to a host of absurd and otherworldly street encounters, Davis captures the surreal beauty, fierce energy, and hidden messages harbored in the streets of the City of Angels. “The camera is a machine that can see only surfaces,” Davis writes. “The world casts its spell, and the camera gobbles up its glamour, uncritically, with pure certainty, assuming there is nothing underneath.”

Gail Albert Halaban: Italian Views

Through Gail Albert Halaban’s lens, the viewer is welcomed into the private lives of ordinary Italians. Her photographs explore the conventions and tensions of urban lifestyles, feelings of isolation in the city, and the intimacies of home and daily life. Francine Prose’s wonderful essay discusses the curious thrill of being a viewer. This invitation to imagine the lives of neighbors across windows renders the characters and settings personal and mysterious.

Sergio Larrain: London

In the winter of 1958, Sergio Larrain traveled to London. He spent just a few months there, photographing subjects that interested him and embracing the shadows of the city. In the cold and damp, his images captured a tangible darkness in which he could “materialize that world of phantoms.” This new edition of Larrain’s original and poetic visual volume London features previously unpublished photographs alongside texts by Agnès Sire and the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Caspian: The Elements by Chloe Dewe Mathews

Between 2010 and 2015, Chloe Dewe Mathews traveled through the beguiling region surrounding the Caspian Sea, creating a record of the ways materials such as oil, fire, uranium, and water are integral to the mystical, economic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. In photographs that range from stark and primordial to lush and mysterious, Dewe Mathews’s Caspian: The Elements is a powerful document of the ways humans are inextricably linked to this enigmatic and much-coveted land.

Children’s Activity and Educational Books

The Colors We Share by Angélica Dass

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

Eyes Open: 23 Photography Projects for Curious Kids

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

Seeing Things by Joel Meyerowitz

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

Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids

Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations and build their own visual language. Indoors or outdoors, from a half hour to a whole day, there is a photo activity for all occasions—and some don’t even require a camera!

For the Collector

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

Sara Cwynar’s multilayered portraits are an investigation of color and image-driven consumer culture. Working in her studio, Cwynar collects, arranges, and archives eBay purchases into her visually complex photographs that examine how images circulate online, as well as how the lives and purposes of both physical objects and their likenesses change over time. This special limited-edition box set features a differentiated version of Cwynar’s debut monograph, Glass Life, accompanied by a signed print from the artist.

Daniel Gordon: Houseplants

This highly collectible, limited-edition pop-up book is a work of art in itself, rendering Daniel Gordon’s sculptural forms into a new layer of materiality and animating them in a pop-up performance. The book consists of six works in pop-up form, some featuring simple plants, others unfolding more elaborate tableaux.

Vik Muniz: Postcards from Nowhere

Vik Muniz’s two-volume Postcards from Nowhere grapples with how, through photographs, we have come to “see” and understand distant yet iconic sites we may never actually view with our own eyes, while also serving as an homage to the quasi-obsolete artifact of the picture postcard. Volume I includes thirty-two single postcards displaying each of the images in the series; Volume II presents a series of thirty-six postcards that, when assembled, can be viewed as a single, large-scale work of thirty by forty inches.

Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (Signed Book and Limited-Edition Print Bundle)

Between 1997 and 2002, Justine Kurland photographed teenage girls as imagined runaways, offering a radical vision of community and feminism against the masculine myth of the American landscape. Kurland portrays these girls as fearless and free, tender yet fierce—imagining a world at once lawless and utopian, an Eden in the wild. This bundle features a signed edition of her now-iconic series Girl Pictures and a signed and numbered limited-edition print from the book.

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

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Published on November 19, 2021 09:57

A New Delhi Photographer’s Searching Look at Fathers and Sons

The New Delhi–based photographer Devashish Gaur’s series This Is the Closest We Will Get (2019–ongoing) was sparked by the chance discovery of photographs of his grandfather during the renovation of their family home. “The title is derived from the limitations around knowing someone who doesn’t exist anymore,” Gaur says. “There will always be a certain distance. The gap between generations is one that can’t be altogether diminished.” Arising partly out of his curiosity about the life and persona of his grandfather, and partly from his urge to better understand his own somewhat strained relationship with his father, the series poses an intergenerational dialogue between individuals, objects, and beliefs. This Is the Closest We Will Get is among the winners of the Vantage Point Sharjah prize from the Sharjah Art Foundation, where the series is currently on view through December 18, 2021.

Devashish Gaur, Last treat. Home, 2019

Devashish Gaur, Grandpa. Archives, 2019

Gaur curates his narratives by combining old photographs requisitioned from family albums, archives, and vintage shops onto which the by-lanes of Delhi abruptly descend, with fresh documentation from his research. A number of his past projects are steeped in nostalgia, excavating material memory to reconstruct the notion of home and coalescing intimacies of different kinds—corporeal, social, or spatial. The slow-evolving continuities of domestic dispositions betray traces of the rapidly shifting backdrop of public life. One gets the uncanny sense that Gaur’s mundane and somewhat outmoded subjects—like the last glass of homemade ice cream waiting in the freezer—are holding still for a time-lapse as the world around them streaks forth at the speed of technology.

This is the Closest We Will Get assumes an ambiguous attitude toward surveillance. The many-eyed collage Witness of Existence (2019) exhibits Gaur’s desire to retro-vicariously surveil and inhabit the bodily dispositions of his grandfather, much like how the state surveils and inhabits the public behavior of its citizenry through CCTV cameras. Composed of multiple images cropped to eyes that once must have touched his grandfather, the work positions longing as a mode of “both belonging and ‘being long,’ or persisting over time,” to borrow Elizabeth Freeman’s words from her book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010).

Devashish Gaur, Witness of Existence, 2019

Devashish Gaur, Dad dressing up as Grandpa. Home, 2020

Gaur’s act of pointing a smartphone camera to these pre-smartphone pictures produces the curious anachronism of an AI trying to recognize faces that were never territorialized in this manner. The AI’s confused attempt at back-tracing these sovereign faces to nonexistent data-bodies prompts the following set of questions, encapsulated in the work’s title: How much can the software know? How much meaning is lost in face detection? And how many memories are forever gone? In addition to resurrecting modes of parenting and past traumas, Gaur’s ghosting-in-reverse critiques the recent bids by the Indian government for greater biopolitical control through state-run registers of citizen data. In the most surveilled city in the world, pointing a smartphone camera to an unyielding picture becomes a symbolic act of defiance.

Devashish Gaur, How much can the software know? How much meaning is lost in face detection and how many memories are forever gone?, 2019

The subjects of This is the Closest We Will Get tease oedipal dialectics. In Dad dressing up as Grandpa (2020) the uncharacteristic desire of Gaur’s camera-shy father to be photographed for his social media intersects with his late grandfather’s habit of posing regularly for his friends’ cameras. We don’t know whether or not the choice of donning the white Gandhi cap, like Gaur’s grandfather used to, is conscious, but the correspondence is tantalizing. If these framings help the artist imagine what kind of relationship existed between his father and his grandfather, collages like Me and Dad (2019) hit closer to home. Composed of bits of Gaur’s own portrait overlaid with that of his father’s, the work speculates, queerly, about the commingling of personalities from the standpoint of prolonged proximity, not genealogy.

Elsewhere, the tamrapatra (copper plate) awarded to Gaur’s grandfather for his contributions to India’s struggle for independence, photographed from behind, seems to gently mock the precious freedom that was fought for. “I was told that my grandfather wasn’t a religious person,” Gaur says. Referring to the chance discovery of a forsaken image of the popular saint, Sai Baba, in a riverbed, he adds: “A religious icon that was once worshipped and took up space in someone’s house is now left behind. I think my grandfather would laugh at the absurdity of this cycle from adoration to obsolescence and abandonment.” This fate is echoed by a small votive of Shani Dev (Saturn) that Gaur’s father once worshipped and now lies neglected somewhere in the house, gesturing toward the rising tide of right-wing conservatism in a country that no longer sees faith as innocent.

The black-and-white photograph of a splotchy old pillow beckons with the knowledge of untold mysteries. Titled after a Dean Martin song, Pillow that you dream on (2020), the photograph not only expresses a wish for a more intimate relation with a reticent father but also delineates a broader search for softness within masculinist cultures. As Gaur observes, “details about how people held each other, sat with a certain elegance—placing hands on their legs while sitting—signal rare beauty and delicateness sanctioned to masculinity.” When lips are silent, pillows can talk a great deal.

Devashish Gaur, Portraits of Grandpa; he enjoyed being in front of the camera and would often have photo-sessions with friends. From the archives, 2019

Devashish Gaur, Dad grooming to look like his father. Home, 2021

Devashish Gaur, Untitled. Home, 2020

Devashish Gaur, Pillow that you dream on. Home, 2020

Devashish Gaur, Untitled. Home, 2019
All photographs from the series This Is the Closest We Will Get, 2019–ongoing. Courtesy the artist

Devashish Gaur, Tapmrapatra: An award for outstanding contribution to freedom struggle during the British rule by the Indian Government, 2020

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

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Published on November 18, 2021 11:46

In Frida Orupabo’s Collages, the Black Feminine Figure Is a Rich Expressive Force

Frida Orupabo is a sociologist and artist whose practice spans photography, collage, sculpture, and video. Her artistic work fashions new objects, images, and moving-image sequences from extant images sourced from a variety of common sources, like the internet, as well as from various institutional and parainstitutional archives. The history and presence of the Black woman and the symbolic and material force of Black gender nonconformity sit at the center of Orupabo’s artist work, and these factors surface through collaged figures which she (re)assembles in digital space and (re)produces as sculptural aggregates. In Orupabo’s collages, the Black feminine figure is both a site for reparative work and an agent of rich expressive force: she is taped and riveted together from historical fragments, but possessed of an irreducible scopic power to look back at our looking—from her stance on the margins of history, but at the center of Orupabo’s image world.

Frida Orupabo, Lying with Objects, 2020. Collage with paper pins
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Amsterdam, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Photograph by Mario Todeschini

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa: I’m curious to better understand how images accumulate in your personal archives, both digital and physical, and then how they might slowly or suddenly be transformed into the scaled prints and sculptural objects out of which you make your collages. How are you encountering images, and accumulating, assessing, and exploring them in digital and physical form?

Frida Orupabo: Most of the images I accumulate and work with are digital. I use different platforms (like Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, eBay, Etsy, and Google, among others). Google is often used when I’m already tracking something, when I am actively looking for very specific things; this is often the case when I’m working on a digital collage and need things along the way—a shoe, a pregnant belly, etc. While other times I am more in “research” mode, where one finding leads to another.

It’s hard to speak to how I encounter images or how I am exploring them in digital and physical form, because the whole process (of searching, finding, accumulating, and making use of them) is very intuitive. Some images just make me stop. It can be a person’s face or something about the whole composition or arrangement of objects in a room. Or it can just be something I haven’t seen before—a twist on something that is familiar.

When starting on a digital collage, I will begin with something I really like and then go back and forth—testing different parts that will accompany the first piece. The selection of the different parts is done based on how they or it feel(s). It’s like a silent knowledge and a big trust of one’s own eye.

Frida Orupabo, Untitled, 2019. Collage
Courtesy the artist

Wolukau-Wanambwa: How do you begin to work out a physical scale for the collages? Do they come together digitally first, before becoming scaled objects in space?

Orupabo: Yes, the digital collage is always the starting point, the base for the physical collage. I enlarge it (in Photoshop) and then print it, stitching together all of the layers (first by using tape, then pins). Usually, the collages will be close to human size or bigger. It depends on the project and the space, and how I would like to organize the images (individually or grouped together). The space I am working in—which is my apartment—naturally also sets a limit to how big I can make them.

The first time I enlarged and printed out a digital collage, I was so delighted and a bit startled to experience how present she (the collage) felt in the room, and I immediately knew that this was how they should be presented. Before, I had looked at the digital collages as done; but after this, I started to see them more as sketches.

When it comes to the sculptures, I will use more time finding the right scale. I will make a physical test where I use paper or cardboard. Then all of the info and sometimes even the tests and mock-up will be sent to the company that is going to realize it.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: How do you think about the gesture or grammar of creating Black figures—principally Black female figures, although arguably also Black gender-nonconforming figures—through the language of collage?

Orupabo: I think of it as something liberating, and as something very closely linked to creating and sustaining one’s own self. I see collage as an effective way of questioning and recreating narratives and identities, by combining images that originally were not meant to stand together; to take apart, leave out, bring together. I feel that the layering reveals complexities and contradictions—things that makes us human, but which often are denied Black people within Western discourses.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: Can I ask if you’re thinking principally of the liberation of the depicted figures? (And I guess we’d center here on the faces of the figures.) This idea of liberation through archival practices of reassembly brings to mind a broader set of intellectual, theoretical, and artistic practices of fabulation. But is the liberation yours personally, as well as that of the depicted figure, as you construe the effects of collage?

Orupabo: Liberation might be a strong word, but it is how it feels when working on something. I feel totally free. Just like bell hooks has described her relationship with theory—seeing it as a place of belonging, and healing—I would describe my relationship to my own work the same way.

I am not only speaking about the finished collage (what it addresses or questions), but the whole process of getting there. It’s about my own lived experience and truth, which of course cannot be separated from the political. Or, as Grada Kilomba has said, “My biography theorizes something.”

I don’t think I would say that I am liberating the depicted figures. I would rather say I am trying to recontextualize the images.

Frida Orupabo, Baby in belly, 2020. Collage with paper pins
Courtesy the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Amsterdam, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Photograph by Mario Todeschinini

Wolukau-Wanambwa: I’m drawn to the hybridity of your figures, whom I would tentatively describe as Black women—tentatively, because it’s clear that your figures are assemblages of multiple bodies, and that there’s an element of gender nonconformity at play that exceeds the cisgender frame of womanhood. But in thinking about Kilomba and also a kind of hybridity of personhood grounded in Blackness and Black histories, I hear echoes of Hortense Spillers from her essay “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words ” [2003], in which she writes:

A feminist critique in the specific instance of sexuality would encourage a counter-narrative in pursuit of the provenance and career of word- and image-structures in order that agent, agency, act, scene, and purpose regain their differentiated responsiveness. The aim, though obvious, might be restated: to restore to women’s historical movement its complexity of issues and supply the right verb to the subject searching for it, feminists are called upon to initiate a corrected and revised view of women of color on the frontiers of symbolic action.

It seems to me that you’re also actively engaged in the field of symbolic action, and concerned with Black grammars of personhood, so I wonder if you could talk more about how you think about figuration, agency, the “scene” your work constructs—perhaps in relation to the work’s exhibited forms.

Orupabo: The gaze is important to me, and I see it as linked to agency. I am, for the most part, working with images where the subject gazes directly at the spectator, which (hopefully) makes possible an internal dialogue—engaging people to pose questions like “What do I see?” and “Why?”

You mentioning Spillers made me think of something bell hooks wrote concerning the white feminist movement—that they made woman synonymous with white women and Black synonymous with Black men. Black women were made invisible (or hypervisible). To be white is to be neutral—it defines normality—while everything else is othered and racialized.

I revisited hooks’s writings recently and came across a conversation she had with Carrie Mae Weems [in Art On My Mind: Visual Politics (1995)], where Weems posed the question of whether it is possible to use Black subjects to represent universal concerns, which is something I think about often. I think this question has a strong presence in the process of making, shaping, and also placing my work within a gallery context—like, how to create complex narratives and identities that oppose and break with stereotypical ideas of what it means to be a Black woman.

And so, the twisting of limbs, the gaze, the different bodies and body parts is, for me, an attempt to escape these really narrow and violent understandings or discourses of who I am or who we are.