Aperture's Blog, page 46

Announcing the Winners of the 2021 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. From the thirty-five shortlisted, a final jury in Paris selected this year’s winners. The jury included Aurélien Arbet, founder and creative director, Études; Daniel Blaufuks, visual artist; Taous R. Dahmani, art historian and author; Fannie Escoulen, head of the photographic department, Ministry of Culture, France; and Tatyana Franck; director, Photo Elysée.

Final juror Taous R. Dahmani commented that the jury chose “books with strong narratives that were able to find the right forms for the stories they were telling; up-and-coming image makers surprising us with transatlantic stories, highlighting the things we have all been missing over these last few difficult years—families and communities, parties, traveling, and being able to connect with each other. Importantly, the selected winners present strong individual investigations and artists whose stories have been untold, using the book form to disseminate those voices more widely.” 

All shortlisted and winning titles are profiled in The PhotoBook Review, a newsprint publication that accompanies the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine. As well, an exhibition of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2021 PhotoBook Awards is currently on view at Paris Photo and will travel to Printed Matter in New York City, January 20–February 27, 2022.

Below, read more about this year’s winning titles.

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999
Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, eds.
10×10 Photobooks, New York

The winner of the Photography Catalogue of the Year, What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, features a selection of 250 photobooks, including traditional publications (from landmark titles to largely unknown works), as well as items not generally considered “books”—portfolios, personal albums, scrapbooks, and zines. Final juror Fannie Escoulen commented that this project is important to recognize for its “extensive, original research and the contributions it makes to the history of photography,” noting that the photobook is historically grounded in the production of a female photographer, Anna Atkins. “In What They Saw, the design, the research and discoveries come together to make a great book,” Escoulen concluded. 

From What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, eds (10×10 Photobooks, New York)

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Muhammad Faldi and Fatris MF
The Banda Journal
Jordan, jordan Édition, Jakarta Indonesia

The winner of the PhotoBook of the Year Award, The Banda Journal, by photographer Muhammad Fadli and writer and folklore enthusiast Fatris MF, presents the little-known story of the Indonesian Banda Islands, a tiny archipelago that has served an outsize role in global trade and the modern economy. Through incisive and engaging storytelling, the book connects a seemingly distant and brutal past with its contemporary consequences on the islands today.Final juror Daniel Blaufuks noted that, “The Banda Journal is very well-designed; very engaging—a book in which text and image are expertly intertwined, inviting return viewing and reading—and that offers us new perspectives from a region we don’t often have the opportunity to hear from artistically.”

Muhammad Fadli from The Banda Journal

Courtesy the artist

Winner of First PhotoBook

Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Untitled
Capricious Publishing, New York

The winner of the First PhotoBook Award, Untitled by Sasha Phyars-Burgess, was selected by the jury as a prime example of the fresh perspective mentioned by Dahmani. As a first-generation American born to Trinidadian parents, Phyars-Burgess explores her heritage and its complicated history through photography. Her images are by turns gentle and meditative, expressive and energetically vibrant. Shortlist juror Darius Himes noted that this book “takes a position, states an opinion, and doesn’t pull any punches.” 

Sasha Phyars-Burgess, from Untitled
Courtesy the artist and Capricious Publishing

Juror’s Special Mention

Vasantha Yogananthan
Amma
Chose Commune, Marseille, France

The final jury also chose to award a Jurors’ Special Mention to Amma by Vasantha Yogananthan, the final volume of A Myth of Two Souls, a seven-book series the artist started in 2016. In the series, Yogananthan intervenes and reinterprets the Ramayana, creating his own modern retelling of this classic Hindu epic tale. Final juror Tatyana Franck highlighted the overall project as “a very persuasive, visionary, and committed journey by the artist; one which employed a wide range of materials, formats, and approaches to storytelling over the life of the book series”—all of which is clearly manifest in this latest offering, Amma. 

Vasantha Yogananthan, The Fishermen, Danushkodi, Tamil Nadu, India, 2013, from Amma

Courtesy the artist

Vasantha Yogananthan, Sea Of Trees, Valmiki Nagar, Bihar, India, 2014, from Amma

The 2021 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Exhibition opens on January 20, 2022 at Printed Matter, New York.

Aperture Establishes First-Ever Endowment through $1 Million Matching Grant from the Andrea Frank Foundation

On November 9, the birthday of the late artist Robert Frank, Aperture announces the establishment of its first-ever publications endowment through a landmark $1 million matching grant from the Andrea Frank Foundation (AFF), dedicated to continuing Aperture’s nearly seventy-year history of supporting photographers and expanding conversations around the medium of photography. The grant is one of the biggest donations in Aperture’s history, one that will further and significantly strengthen Aperture’s position at the forefront of photobook publishing in the United States and internationally.

In conjunction with the grant, AFF and Aperture will collaborate on a new edition of Robert Frank’s formative photobook The Americans, to be published in 2024, the centennial of Frank’s birth. The new edition will be created in close collaboration with AFF, using scans made from a complete set of Robert Frank’s own prints. The new edition extends Aperture’s longstanding history with the series, most notably its 1968 edition of The Americans, copublished with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a subsequent edition released in 1978.

“We are humbled and inspired by this signal of confidence in Aperture’s future,” said Sarah Meister, executive director of Aperture. “This transformative gift will allow us to expand the ways in which we are able to elevate emerging voices in the field. In assuming responsibility for the publication of The Americans, we are able to foster connections between this landmark achievement and similarly original, ambitious photobooks for generations to come. It is equally pivotal that the impact of AFF’s support is amplified by challenging the rest of our donor community to match this level of funding. We are honored that AFF has entrusted us with the incredible responsibility of publishing The Americans for the centennial of Frank’s birth, and for AFF’s confidence in the future and enduring impact of Aperture for decades to come.”

Cover of The Americans (Aperture/MoMA, 1968)

First published by Delpire in France in 1958, The Americans was released in English a year later by Grove Press, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. In his characteristically spontaneous prose, Kerouac compared Frank’s photographs to an epic poem, and presciently suggested its effect on the culture: “What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail.”

The Americans has influenced generations of photographers around the world and became the subject of a major exhibition, Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans, presented in 2009 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and traveling to New York and San Francisco. Aperture honored Robert Frank in 2014 at the foundation’s gala celebrating The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip, a best-selling photobook about journeys and the freedom of the road in US photography, from Frank to Justine Kurland, Stephen Shore, and Alec Soth.

Frank’s revelatory sequence of eighty-three photographs, made with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship throughout his ten-thousand-mile road trip across the United States, has become a touchstone. “The Americans challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure,” Philip Gefter noted in the New York Times in 2019. “Mr. Frank’s photographs—of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life—were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon.”

Awol Erizku’s Surreal Visions of Africa and Its Diaspora

In Awol Erizku’s Jaheem (2020), an African mask is engulfed by fire, an orange-white burn so totalizing that the lapping flames light the steel-mesh fence against which the object is set. Energizing in every sense, Jaheem is a singular image, but the picture also coheres many of the aesthetics and subjects characteristic of Erizku’s multivalent conceptual photographic practice: Africa and its diaspora; the mystical, the spiritual, and the surreal; creation both natural and cultural. High saturate color. Luminosity. Heat.

Awol Erizku, Fit it, critic, get it, hit it, run it, drill it, wet it, I’m in it, really. Split it fifty-fifty. Ball, Reggie. Ready, set, go!, 2021

Awol Erizku, Jaheem, 2020

Fire is not seen but implied in Quotidian Drip (2018–20), the scene bathed in a warm orange, near-red, glow. A still life, the work demonstrates Erizku’s open yet refined embrace of wide-ranging cultural reference points. Leather loafers—one shoe propped up on bricks—meet a Stanley-brand measuring tape, stacks of crisp Benjamins, a single rose stem in a clear vase, alongside a half dozen other dissimilar items. In one art-historical sense, this assemblage can be understood as purposefully nonsensical, engaging traditions of Dadaism and Surrealism. A photographic scrim that a C-clamp would conventionally clasp gets enigmatically replaced by an Ashanti “Akuaba” fertility doll. Behind it, a maneki neko, “lucky cat,” peeks out from behind a jar. To stop at the absurd, however, would risk occluding the ways that Erizku’s arrangements are constructed with intentions toward meaning-making of a kind. The unconventional construction visualizes the syncretism and multiplicity characteristic of contemporary global life, and, perhaps, especially Black creative life: leather, flowers, dollars, labor. At the same time, through selection, placement, and staging, these stable (and ofttimes staid) referents and symbols are cracked open and made anew both ontologically and aesthetically. There is no single reading of any object or juxtaposition, each unfurling along unending chains of signification. A bumblebee is a sartorial flourish . . . an ecological touchstone . . . a simple flash of gold.

Awol Erizku, Quotidian Drip, 2018–20

This persistent signification is especially true in the case of Erizku’s treatment of cultural objects from the continent. In Quotidian Drip, the faint profile of the Queen Nefertiti bust—ubiquitous within the Western imaging of African cultural import—is enclosed within a semitransparent jeweled cube. Barely visible but resolute, she is both familiar cultural referent and distanced glistening form. In Love Is Bond (Young Queens) (2018–20), Nefertiti is again present, with a quintet of young Black girls encircling a pedestaled bust of the royalty, while playing ring-around-the-rosy. In Erizku’s imaginings, Africa is not only ancient but also mythical, technical, experimental, futurist, innovative, (e)strange(d).

Awol Erizku, Moon Voyage (Keep Me in Mind), 2018–20

All photographs courtesy the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts, London

Awol Erizku, Untitled (Orchid #9), 2021

It is also cosmic. In Moon Voyage (Keep Me in Mind) (2018–20), a picture that features two individuals in a ballroom- like embrace, a female figure wears what appears to be a stylized African mask pigmented in blue. Her silk dress and arm-length gloves bring tradition to the image, while the mask presents an electrifying portal to the mythological alien. The energy powering Moon Voyage is not solar but lunar, a green celestial light under which the two dance. But even without fire, the same sensibility that guides work such as Jaheem is present here, as it is in all of Erizku’s still lifes, portraits, and tableaux. It is an approach marked by intuition, style, history, and opacity. A reverence and a confidence. Heat.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies,” under the title “Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax.”

The Artist Creating Ethereal Photograms from the River Thames

Soft color fields, obscure chemical compositions, hazy space photographs—Anne Hardy’s recent work presents us with evocative photograms that oscillate between the concrete and abstract, between the real and the fantastical. The hard-to-define images move gradually from an inky black to bright hues. Their color palette ranges from cool blue and turquoise tones to warm reds and orange tints, conveying an alternation between coolness and heat, or—as the title of one image suggests—the “rising of heat.”

Anne Hardy, Simultaneous Reality, 2020

The photograms are based on encounters with light and small objects that Hardy gathered from the foreshore of the River Thames while she was working on her 2019 commission for Tate Britain, The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light. The large-scale, dystopian installation transformed the museum’s neoclassical façade into an abandoned building decorated with fairy lights, ripped banners, and a rhythmical cascade of objects. The dark, mystical aesthetic was accompanied by a soundscape that used elements recorded at the river.

Anne Hardy, Descent, 2020

Anne Hardy, Call Sign, 2020

Hardy’s first photograms came into existence in 2015, when she was working on an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. Using leftover materials and dusty debris swept up from the studio floor, she made a series titled Process Photograms that is comparable to the photograms of The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light in its atmospheric aesthetic. Through intuitive as well as highly controlled alchemical darkroom processes, Hardy composed her recent photograms during lockdown. London, usually bustling and busy, showed its vulnerability and was forced to stand still. Against this background, the link of the photograms to Hardy’s immersive Tate work seems particularly fitting, as the installation was essentially, according to Hardy, “about a point of collapse and fragility and what might spring from that as a result.” The Thames debris can be viewed as a sad representation of the extreme threat we humans cause the planet, which is gradually heating up. It symbolizes countless untraceable people and their long-lasting impacts on the earth, linking different times and spaces.

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However, The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light is a multilayered photogram series that references the micro as much as the macro, the tangible outside as much as the intimate inside, physical space as much as perception, the conscious as much as the unconscious. The fragments from the river convey an infinite planetary aesthetic, and real objects suggest fantastical images. Asked about these relationships and transformations, Hardy has stated: “I’m interested in the ‘gap’ between what you call the concrete and the abstract as a productive space of reencounter and imagination, in which knowledge or certainty becomes more tenuous. . . . The micro and infinite seem interchangeable to me. It’s all about your perception and what scale of measurement you decide to apply—the same systems and energies are at work.”

Anne Hardy, Rising Heat, 2020. All works from the series The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light
Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

Whether the atmospheric photograms are viewed as depictions of tiny river objects or as fantastical space images, the series draws attention to time and its endless cycles of transformation, as reflected in titles such as Rising Heat or Into Darkness. Hardy herself stresses the potential of change. In the soft forms and bright colors of her photograms, there is a sense of postapocalyptic magic that turns old waste into new, beautiful art.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies,” under the title “Anne Hardy: Return of the Light.”

How Autograph’s Photobooks Champion Black British Photography

If you step out of the tube station at Old Street, in London’s East End, and wander the narrow lanes of Shoreditch, with their chic gastropubs and boutique hotels, you might suddenly find yourself in front of an inviting yet commanding building, its slate gray and glass distinct from the nineteenth-century stock brick of the neighborhood. Rivington Place, as it’s known, was built by David Adjaye in 2007, and it’s the home to Autograph, the influential organization that supports Black photographers through exhibitions and publishing. Founded as an agency in 1988, Autograph ABP (Association of Black Photographers) intended to advocate for Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) artists by commissioning new work and producing traveling exhibitions. Publications, especially artists’ monographs, were central. “The model was massively ambitious,” Mark Sealy, the longtime director of Autograph, recalled this spring, speaking over Zoom from his house in South London. “The aspiration for publishing was always on the table.”

Among Autograph’s most influential titles are monographs by the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode (an Autograph founder), Omar D, Joy Gregory, Youssef Nabil, Yto Barrada, Syd Shelton, and Sunil Gupta. Autograph has collaborated with the Power Plant and the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, and the Photographers’ Gallery in London, on major group exhibitions and studies of historical archives. One measure of Autograph’s sustained, thirty-year commitment to the visibility of Black artists, and the centering of identity and human rights, is its reverberation in establishment British art museums. A decade before Zanele Muholi’s solo show at Tate Modern and James Barnor’s at the Serpentine Galleries, Autograph presented exhibitions by both photographers; before Barrada and Gupta were renowned internationally, they worked with Autograph. Sealy knows about the long game: he spent much of his career, as a scholar, curator, and arts leader, trying to convince cultural institutions of the importance of diversity. It’s why Autograph’s elegant gallery and offices on Rivington Street—which represent the manifestation, in the form of a publicly funded arts building, of the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s ideals about difference and belonging—will welcome you, and challenge you.

Cover of Sunil Gupta: From Here to Eternity (Autograph ABP, 2020)

Brendan Embser: In the 1980s, when the people who started Autograph were getting going, were there any publishers in the UK who were regularly putting out monographs or studies of Black image makers?

Mark Sealy: There were one or two. Some photographers had got their act together to self-publish. Armet Francis, for example, had published his book The Black Triangle [Seed, 1985]. And Clement Cooper had been published by Cornerhouse Publications. Rotimi Fani-Kayode published his monograph Black Male/White Male [1988] with Gay Men’s Press. But there was certainly a gap there to be filled.

Embser: Was there a culture around photobooks? For example, for Black American photographers, specifically, there is an iconography that emanates from The Sweet Flypaper of Life [Simon & Schuster, 1955]. In the UK, were there any similar books that held the same power for Black British artists?

Sealy: For me, it was Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage [Random House, 1967]. In the UK, we were much more focused on what was happening in South Africa, especially in the ’80s, with the ANC, the demonstrations in Trafalgar Square every day, with the popular culture being really aligned with the ideas of people like Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela, who was still in jail. Sweet Flypaper was in the conversation, absolutely. But to actually see it, to get hold of it, I don’t think I actually saw an original copy in the flesh until I knew what I was looking for—it was not something you could find with ease.

Covers of Eileen Perrier and Maxine Walker (Autograph ABP, 1999)

Embser: Autograph began publishing books soon after the organization was founded. Were books a way to allow projects to travel beyond the space of an exhibition?

Sealy: The most important thing that we did was publish. I always thought that publishing was kind of the cherry, the golden fleece of a cultural organization—if we could get there, in a meaningful way. I was very keen to make sure that everything had an ISBN, because if they have an ISBN, you legally have to register them with the British Library: it lives forever, rather than the ephemeral nature of an exhibition coming up and down and being left with an invite card and the memory of people, or a review.

It was very difficult to go out into the world and sell exhibitions in London, Manchester, or Liverpool, of Black photographers’ works, because the answer would be, “It’s not very good,” or, “We don’t have an audience for that,” or “Why would we do it?” It was very, very derogatory in terms of the reception of the work. So the book was a way of at least, then, syndicating their work—get them out there, and then they’ll become alive in the world.

Embser: It’s interesting that you emphasize the ISBN, because I was able to find Autograph’s books on WorldCat and Amazon because of that—they exist in the tentacles of the internet as a result of this data that you entered early on.

Sealy: Yeah, thank God.

Maxine Walker, Cleansing, 1991, from the series Black Beauty
Courtesy the artist and Autograph, London

Embser: In the late ’90s, Autograph did a number of small monographs that were between twenty or thirty pages each, for example, by Eileen Perrier and Maxine Walker [both 1999]. Were those small books among their first artist publications?

Sealy: Absolutely. In many instances, that monograph series, I think, is really important. I think that is one of the first monograph series dedicated to Black photographers.

Embser: And did those publications often arise on the occasion of an exhibition that Autograph had organized, or were they separate initiatives?

Sealy: Often it was just, “You’ve got enough work, let’s do it.” Or we would commission a new body of work and find a permanent way to record it.

Yto Barrada, Ceuta Border, Illegally Crossing the Border into the Spanish Enclave of Ceuta, Tangier, 1999
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris

Embser: Can you talk about the range and aesthetic of Autograph’s books? You have exquisite artists’ books, for example—I have a copy of Yto Barrada’s A Life Full of Holes / The Strait Project [2005].

Sealy: Oh, yeah, keep that.

Embser: Apparently it’s five hundred dollars on Amazon!

Sealy: I thought Yto’s look at the whole issue of migration in the Maghreb, in Morocco, of “the burnt ones,” was such a powerful project. But also, done through a lens of ennui, a nation’s depression. And in many ways, the book launched that body of work.

Spread from Rotimi Fani-Kayode & Alex Hirst: Photographs (Autograph ABP and Revue Noire, 1996)

Embser: Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst: Photographs [1996] was copublished by Revue Noire in Paris. How did this book come about?

Sealy: Rotimi died in ’89. Alex, his partner, was looking after the estate, but he died of AIDS in 1992. I made a solemn pledge that I would advocate for the work and try and bring it into the public sphere, in the best possible way we could. I was lucky enough to meet the guys at Revue Noire—Simon Njami and Jean Loup Pivin—who also appreciated the work. They saw Rotimi’s radicality as a queer African guy, and they really appreciated that. And that was good. They wanted to invest in the politics of that transgressive relationship. Which, of course, they identified with as well, for personal, cultural, and political reasons. You know, what’s interesting for me, when we talk about diversity in our institutions and all that stuff? It really is just to do with the people in the room. If people get it, then we get it.

Embser: Absolutely.

Sealy: If they’re not in the room, then we have to sell so much and work so hard just to try and have the conversation, right? The moments of success for Autograph happened because sometimes the people in the room kind of got it, you didn’t have to work so hard. When you literally fight for visibility, what are you doing? That sense of urgency gets interpreted as anger, and it’s wrong, because it’s not. It’s to do with, do you get the urgency of what we’re trying to talk about here? And it’s thirty years of that sense of urgency, and we go round in circles. And we’re in another cycle now, which is interesting. I’m hoping that with each turn, the turn gets easier, or a bit faster, so that things can change. I think publishing is part of that, helping people. That’s why Sweet Flypaper is so important, that’s why House of Bondage is so important. That’s why Rotimi’s book is so important.

Cover of Omar D, Devoir de mémoire / A Biography of Disappearance, Algeria 1992– (Autograph ABP, 2007)

Embser: In addition to artist monographs, Autograph has also published compendia on really difficult, hard-hitting issues around human rights. Why is copublishing important for these kinds of research-based projects, where you bring together lots of ideas, some of which will be challenging for audiences?

Sealy: Human Rights, Human Wrongs [2013] was the result of three years working in the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. I wanted to try and make a case for how awkward the archive is, in terms of documentary photography concerning the image of the Black subject. Always framed, always debased. And it was great that a university gallery could try and understand that conversation, which was nuanced and difficult. As we develop a project, the ideas do need to be encapsulated beyond the show.

With a copublishing project, you share the risk in terms of the investment. You can do much more in partnership. You can take a thirty-thousand-pound production, and it’s fifteen each. Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck’s book Suturing the City [2016], for example, has about four or five different stakeholders in there. There’s his gallery, there’s the Power Plant, and the dealers; they invest in it, they get their amount of copies. But Autograph was the publisher, and we thank them very much for supporting it. And sharing that, sharing that risk means things can happen.

Syd Shelton, Specials Fans, RAR Carnival Against the Nazis, Leeds, 1981
Courtesy Autograph, LondonSyd Shelton, Bagga, vocalist with Matumbi, Hackney, London, 1978
Courtesy Autograph, London

Embser: There’s a sense of idealism with Autograph’s publishing, but also perseverance, trying to get stories into the world. How does this extend to marketing?

Sealy: We sell things directly. We don’t distribute in a really aggressive way. We often do around about a thousand copies of a book, and the idea is that they’re not really made to make money. If they make money, that’s great, and they often do. Like, for example, Lina Iris Viktor’s book Some Are Born to Endless Night—Dark Matter [2020] is sold out. Syd Shelton’s Rock Against Racism [2015]—off, gone. We could reprint them, but that’s not the purpose. The idea is to just get them circulated, get them out there. And they’re great success stories, you know?

Lina Iris Viktor, We are the Night—The Keepers of Light, 2015–19
Commissioned by Autograph. Courtesy the artist and Autograph, London

Embser: What are a few of your favorite Autograph titles, either because they’re really beautiful, or because you know that they’ve had a lasting impact—you see them on your shelf, and it just fills you with joy or pride?

Sealy: I enjoyed watching the impact of Yto’s book; that was very nice. Sunil Gupta’s recent book on his ephemera From Here to Eternity [2020] is beautiful. But I don’t think there’s any particular one that I would champion. In that series, the artists do such different kinds of work. One of the things I try and do at Autograph is to talk about Blackness as a politically conscious space. I can’t help but think how divisive racial politics are, and the labeling of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic), and how things get segregated. I always wanted to build an inclusive conversation around consciousness and thinking, and I still think that one of the few frames by which I can join the dots across that thinking is the lens of human rights.

This piece originally was published in Issue 019 of The PhotoBook Review.

A Prolific Video Artist’s Infinite Screens

The opening to the mirror box is a gilded frame through which viewers can watch a kaleidoscopic film. Titled Brave New World (1999)—versions of which have been installed in exhibitions in Washington, D.C., Rome, and New York—the film is “a very simple idea but very effective,” as one viewer says to Theo Eshetu, its creator. You poke your head into the mirror box where the film is playing, and where, given the continuous loop of bisymmetrical clips, you get the illusion of being surrounded by seemingly endless reflections of yourself as you watch. Filmed with a Super 8 camera, the footage is looped together from a thrilling array of sources, including a ceremony of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a commercial for an Italian insurance company, and enchanting images of dancers in Bali. “The idea is that it sort of creates an image of the world, no?” Eshetu asks a mesmerized viewer as they both stand in front of the mirror box, observing its fantastical twists. He is proposing an image of the world tripled or quadrupled many times over, so that what is seen is not simply illusory but infinite and indeterminate, as though gathering the entirety of the world’s faces into a single orb.

Theo Eshetu, Self-Portrait, 1975

Brave New World is a quintessential primer for Eshetu’s four-decade career; the artist’s video work—for cinema, television, and exhibitions—is often an assemblage of images or clips from a range of histories and worldviews. His biography gives a clue as to what informed his nonprovincial outlook. Born in London in 1958 to an Ethiopian father and a Dutch mother, Eshetu spent his childhood between Ethiopia, Senegal, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Italy, due, for the most part, to the peripatetic nature of his parents’ work. When he was ten, he spent time with Ato Tekle-Tsadik Mekouria, his grandfather, a diplomat and perhaps Ethiopia’s most renowned historian. Eshetu was out of school and somewhat bored. During a trip to Pompeii, his grandfather gave him an Instamatic camera, effectively launching his fascination with photography and his career—a recurring origin tale for many artists. “I recognize it’s a cliché story,” says Eshetu.

More than twenty years later, perhaps to make something of that cliché, he returned to Ethiopia to create Blood Is Not Fresh Water, a 1997 film dedicated to the life of his grandfather, whom he had seen only twice in the years since. The film explores the cultural and spiritual history of Ethiopia, drawing a cyclic line from the Queen of Sheba to the pomp of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to Lucy, the oldest known human skeleton at its discovery. By making Blood Is Not Fresh Water, Eshetu recently told me, he could delve into the contrast between “the TV image of famine in Ethiopia” and his “childhood memory of a bright, wonderful place.” And he could connect with his Ethiopian self. The experience of being biracial causes a split, in a sense, of identity. “I create dialogues between these two perspectives,” he says, connecting his European and African selves. In a statement about the video, he explained, “I don’t have a photographic memory of the places where I lived as a child, but often photographs remind me of a past existence I don’t recall having seen.”

Theo Eshetu, Self-Portrait with Mirror, 1979

In Eshetu’s videos, biography—what he calls “lived experience”—is never the end in itself. It enables him “to merge two cultures into giving an outlook on something.” Some of his earliest photographs are conceptual touchstones for such a world-blending approach. One double exposure image, Self-Portrait (1975), taken when he was sixteen, shows a quarter of his face juxtaposed with more than half of a mask, depicting a convincing image of a humanoid figure; in Self-Portrait with Mirror (1979), his face is bifurcated with a mirror, giving the illusion of a two-faced figure. Masks became a leitmotif in his early photographs, mostly black-and-white images taken in the years leading up to his studies in London, where he obtained a degree in communication design from North East London Polytechnic in 1981, and just before he took up video art full time. For Eshetu, these early photographs point to “the beginning of an artistic process, where aesthetic and conceptual considerations merge.”

Theo Eshetu, The Slave Ship (The Law of the Sea), 2015. HD video installation

Before he started making videos, Eshetu took photographs of musicians, including Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye. This was how, as a shy teenager, he could come close to his musical heroes. “I learned about photography by photographing musicians live on stage. The performative element was instantly the first material that I was drawn to,” he says. Yet he understood that he was also engaging with the relationship between reality and representation. Thinking about that relationship remains at the core of what Eshetu does; his affinity for music continues to influence his sensibilities. The videos Eshetu makes are notable for their soundtracks, with affecting crescendos and decrescendos indicating emotional charge.

If the arc of Eshetu’s career indicates anything—in his transition from photography to video, from making work for television to installing exhibitions—it is that he is most attentive to video as a nomadic form.

Identity and belonging, as complex propositions in a world of pluralistic knowledge, are underlying dilemmas in Eshetu’s work: the relationship between the self and the non-self. “The non-self,” he says, “is a recognition that you have your self and others have their selves.” He is searching for a non-totalizing worldview. In The Slave Ship (The Law of the Sea) (2015), a video installation evoking the history of slavery, bilaterally symmetrical moving images are shown in a circular frame, as though to indicate the limits of thinking about cataclysmic histories in a linear, straightforward fashion. Other videos by Eshetu achieve a similar destabilizing of the singular view: The Return of the Axum Obelisk (2010) presents a documentation of the restitution of a cultural artifact to Ethiopia by Italy in fifteen screens and Till Death Us Do Part (1982–86), recently presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, considers the exponential growth of 1980s media culture in twenty screens.

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In a conversation with the late curator Okwui Enwezor, published in The Body Electric (2017), the first comprehensive monograph of Eshetu’s work, the artist notes that he was part of a larger movement by Black filmmakers and video artists in Europe who were questioning regimes of representation. “We were driven by the need to define our identity because we saw that it wasn’t represented on TV or in cinema,” he said. “We had to create it ourselves.” But he was faced with a formal dilemma. How could he identify with the medium? Cinema has a well-documented history, and, by the 1980s, independent filmmaking had also taken off. “I created a bond with the medium itself,” he told Enwezor. “I created an artificial distinction between film and video, as a device, which gave me a path. What started as the malaise of not knowing my identity became what I have somehow tried to solve, and transforming that to making videos has helped me do that.” He was an artist who came of age when television was the central medium to produce videos for, or rebel against, and, in the early 2000s, the Internet was taking over as the central platform for the dissemination of images. By 2002, Eshetu moved away from making videos within the context of television—his work began to be shown mainly in art installations or film festival screenings.

Theo Eshetu, Atlas Fractured, 2017. Video, 35 minutes, color, sound. Installation view at Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, 2017

Perhaps his videos are best suited to be shown in art contexts where, at the very least, Eshetu can break “out of the single-monitor mold,” to quote Wulf Herzogenrath, who writes in The Body Electric of Eshetu as one of the pioneers of video art. Eshetu, Herzogenrath says, was part of a generation of artists who “extended televisual monocultures and their linear narrative structure by applying new collage techniques and exploring possibilities by which to disrupt the chronological narratives of the single living-room TV.” Eshetu had studied communication, which, he says, produced a different relationship to film and video making than if he had studied fine arts. With a fine arts perspective, one is concerned with self-expression, while coming from a communication background, “you somehow have the tools of this expression, so you explore those tools.”

Eshetu’s exploration has widened in range and expression, such as in Atlas Fractured (2017), a film produced in two versions for the Kassel and Athens editions of Documenta 14, where he continued to work with masks. The Athens version, projected on a cave wall, shows a slow pan of faces filmed against masks, paintings, and photographs, until, in most cases, they are transmogrified. The film is mesmeric. Atlas Fractured is accompanied by the intermittent voices of a range of thinkers—Carl Jung, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, among others—whose views emphasize the value of knowledge that is receptive to what is unknowable. In the Kassel version of Atlas Fractured, the filmed portraits and footages of historical incidents were projected onto a giant banner that had previously hung at the entrance to Berlin’s ethnological museum. The banner, which showcased masks from each of the museum’s departments, had been cut into sections to be discarded when Eshetu recovered them.

Theo Eshetu, Till Death Us Do Part, 1982–86. Installation view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020
Photograph by Denis Doorly

If the arc of Eshetu’s career indicates anything—in his transition from photography to video, from making work for television to installing exhibitions—it is that he is most attentive to video as a nomadic form, one that is able to take shape under any rubric. In his conversation with Enwezor, he states: “I think there’s an almost comical interplay in my works, through which rules are constantly being set up and broken: a certain liquid quality that makes them fit into various spaces.”

Nearly every year since 1982, Eshetu has premiered or exhibited his videos in and outside Europe, in the major global video art festivals as well as in notable museums and galleries. Alongside artists such as John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, and members of the Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Eshetu is a pioneer—a diasporic African artist who has shown the inexhaustible potential of video art as a primer for the politics and aesthetics of belonging. Yet, he is only beginning to receive broader attention, at least in the United States—in addition to a recent screening at MoMA, Eshetu’s work was included in The Sorcerer’s Burden, a 2019 group exhibition at the Contemporary Austin. Perhaps his significance is most telling in his 2010 work The Return of the Axum Obelisk, which predates the current, widespread cause célèbre of restitution of African artifacts in European institutions as a cultural necessity. He is currently making an essayistic film about the move of the ethnographic collection from Berlin’s Museum of Asian Art to the Humboldt Forum. This controversial new museum in Berlin has served as a kind of laboratory for several of Eshetu’s recent works, including Ghostdance (2020), a video installation for the Gwangju Biennale, filmed, in part, at the Forum.

Theo Eshetu, Sailors, from the series The Mystery of History and His Story in My Story, 2015
All works courtesy the artist

Eshetu is elusive on the question about the influence of biography. In 2015, when he was commissioned to produce work on the Non-Aligned Movement, he recalled that he had lived in Yugoslavia, where his grandfather had been Ethiopia’s ambassador in Belgrade. He went to the Museum of Yugoslav History, delving into the extensive photography archive of the former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, in search, as he put it later, of “oblique traces of biography, tangential associative thoughts, fragments of forgotten memories, and unwritten personal histories.” The result is The Mystery of History and His Story in My Story (2015), an essay of forty-four photographs. One of the most intriguing images shows six sailors facing a map of the African continent. Their stance seems like a synecdoche for Europe as it observes Africa. It equally reflects the fusion of Eshetu’s bicontinental family history with a grander one, a confluence from which he sprung as an artist. “This idea of biography,” he says, “is not anything really to do with me. It’s to do with a hypothesis of a world vision.”

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies,” under the title “Theo Eshetu: Infinite Screens.”

Aperture’s 2021 Gala Honors Sara Cwynar, Graciela Iturbide, and Dr. Kenneth Montague

On October 19 and 20, Aperture’s annual fundraising gala celebrated the range of its publishing program and the field of photography with three honorees: artists Sara Cwynar and Graciela Iturbide, and esteemed collector Dr. Kenneth Montague. Aperture’s executive director, Sarah Meister, observes, “Since 1952, Aperture has attended to ‘professional and amateur, pictorialist and documentarian, journalist and scholar’ (in the words of its founders). Our choice not to have a theme this year honors the democratic breadth of this legacy, bringing forward individuals who mirror the diversity of photography. We thank each of our honorees for the inspiration they bring to our lives and for their trust in Aperture.”

The two-day celebration began with an intimate in-person gathering on October 19 at Selina in Manhattan, which featured an unforgettable musical performance by Queen Esther. The evening also included cocktails from Yola Mezcal and Ghia and hors d’oeuvres, auction artworks installed in collaboration with Artsy, oysters from Oysters XO, a unique photobooth by The Self Portrait Project, and more.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Dr. Stephen Nicholas, Sarah Meister, Eugene Richards, Janine Altongy

Lyle Ashton Harris, Billy Frae, Nicole Fleetwood

Elle Perez, Brendan Embser, Farah Al Qasimi

Gail Albert Halaban, Lauren Weyand, Casey Weyand

Sara Cwynar

Anastasia Voron with Graciela Iturbide (on-screen)

Dr. Kenneth Montague

Melissa O’Shaughnessy with prints on display from the Magnum Square Print Sale in Partnership with Aperture

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Selina also featured a special installation of prints from the Magnum Square Print Sale in partnership with Aperture, which runs through October 24, 2021. Sarah Meister suggested the theme for this year’s iteration, On the Horizon, and the list of participating artists reflects her curatorial vision: Tina Barney, Mitch Epstein, Luigi Ghirri, Naima Green, Sabine Hornig, Susan Meiselas, Richard Misrach, David Benjamin Sherry, Laurie Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, Aperture trustees Lyle Ashton Harris and Joel Meyerowitz, and so many more.

Rifko Meier, Oysters XORobyn Stein, Sharon Dye, Cathy Kaplan, Gail Albert Halaban Esther Zuckerman and Bob Marshall Melissa and Jim O’ShaughnessySarah Arana, Dr. Kenneth Montague , Liza MurrellMichael Paley, Michael Hoeh, John McGovern, Noel Kirnon, Elaine Goldman Kristen Gresh and Ivan Abarca-TorresMichael Famighetti, Nicole Acheampong, Brendan EmbserSarah Meister , Rosalind Fox Solomon, Oluremi C. Onabanjo 

The event at Selina was followed by a virtual celebration on October 20, featuring tribute speeches by Farah Al Qasimi, Julie Crooks, Lucy Gallun, Kristen Gresh, Melissa Harris, Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, Legacy Russell, Trevor Schoonmaker, and Jamel Shabazz. The cohosts for this year’s gala were Julie Bédard, Kate Cordsen, Lyle Ashton Harris, Cathy Kaplan, and Lisa Rosenblum.

Queen EstherDeborah Willis, Cathy KaplanMichael Hoeh, Elio ArteseNoel Kirnon, Michael PaleyRobin Schwartz, Penelope UmbricoSarah Meister, Cathy KaplanLegacy Russell, Andreas Laszlo KonrathElizabeth Gregory-Gruen, Bob Gruen, Kellie McLaughlinDr. Deborah Willis, Dr. Kenneth Montague, Sarah AranhaJulie Bédard, Daniel MirandaTiffanie Ho, Nina CelebicMichael Hoeh, Helen NitkinCathy Kaplan, Tom SchiffTim Davis, Giada De Agostinis, Michael FamighettiElizabeth Levine, Mark LevineCathy Kaplan, Andrew LewinRifko Meier

About the 2021 Honorees

Sara Cwynar’s research-driven and visually complex photographs investigate color and consumer culture. Her images constitute the hallmark of contemporary post­–Pictures Generation work—in which photography is pursued in relation to film, sculpture, digital culture, and the cultural and technological history of image-making. 

Recognized today as one of the greatest living photographers in Latin America, Graciela Iturbide envisions the rich cultural heritage and diversity of life in Mexico, particularly its Indigenous traditions. Known for her lyrical black-and-white photographs, Iturbide has transformed everyday life into poetic and powerful art for more than fifty years.

Dr. Kenneth Montague started the Wedge Collection in 1997 to acquire and exhibit art that engages multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Dr. Montague’s 2021 book, As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, presents the works of Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as throughout the African continent—serving as a testament to the support provided to artists by collecting and amplifying their work. 

For nearly seventy years, Aperture has championed photography as an essential art addressing urgent issues and questions in culture and society. The gala provides critical sustaining support for Aperture’s publications, educational initiatives, exhibitions, and public programming. If you haven’t already, please consider giving a 100% tax-deductible gift today.

18 Photographers on What It Means to Embrace the Unknown

Horizons are where the finite meets the infinite; a site of endings and beginnings, anticipation and transformation. The latest edition of the Square Print Sale, On the Horizon, features over one hundred photographers invited by Aperture and Magnum. The selected prints push the boundaries of what we know and see, explore the edges of the photographic practice, and embrace the unknown.

“Photography is a profoundly democratic media, and this Square Print Sale is a rare opportunity for all of us to own work by some of its most creative and inspiring practitioners,” observes Aperture’s executive director Sarah Meister. “The multitude of perspectives gathered here reflect the vitality and breadth of the medium. All of these intimately scaled prints are compelling visual statements that merit close contemplation: whether purchased for oneself or as a gift, these memorable images encourage attentive connection with the world around us.”

Through October 24, 2021, collect these signed and estate-stamped, six-by-six-inch, museum-quality images for $100 each. When you purchase through this link, you directly support Aperture’s programming, publishing, and operations. Below are highlights On the Horizon.

Sabiha Çimen, Girls are standing against the waves, Istanbul, Turkey, 2016
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Sabiha Çimen

“Like distant stars, horizons always seem to be out of reach, but that’s what dreams are made from.” —Sabiha Çimen

Ernest Cole, New York City, 1972
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Ernest Cole

“Ernest recognized that the future was going to be a struggle over identity as much as it would be a battle for liberation. Unlike the majority of people of his age, Cole exhibited little or no prejudice towards the subjects of his photographs. Indeed, he seemed to celebrate the extremes of difference on New York’s streets. Everyday was a glorious walk on the wild side.” —Estate of Ernest Cole

Bieke Depoorter, Agata, Paris, France, November 2, 2017
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Bieke Depoorter

“This is the first image I took of Agata, after I met her the night before her twenty-fourth birthday. It was the day I realized that our chance encounter was special, and we would not manage to step away after this one portrait. What followed has been an intense and complex collaboration; a beautiful friendship with much self-reflection and constantly shifting boundaries.” —Bieke Depoorter

Elliott Erwitt, New York City, circa 1950
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt

“People like to point out that this picture was taken from the dog’s point of view. I sometimes wonder whatever happened to that dog.” —Elliott Erwitt

Bruce Gilden, Japan, 1998
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Bruce Gilden

“It was in a coffee shop in Ginza, Tokyo. I saw a yakuza lighting his partner’s cigarette and after I took one photo of them, I asked if they could do it again to make sure that I didn’t miss it.” —Bruce Gilden

Nan Goldin, Lost Horizon, n.d.
Courtesy the artist

Nan Goldin

“Two worlds, like audiences, disperse And leave the soul alone.” —Emily Dickinson

Proceeds from the sale of this print will benefit PAIN, Aperture, and Magnum.

Todd Hido, #5406, from the series A Road Divided, 2006
Courtesy the artist

Todd Hido

“Coming or going? Full or empty? I say going and full.” —Todd Hido

Gillian Laub, Dolly Parton, 2008
Courtesy the artist

Gillian Laub

“This was an unforgettable day in Los Angeles with Dolly Parton. I have long admired her for both her multitalents and her generous spirit. I’ll never forget the advice she gave me that day. It was right before I was about to get married, and I was anxious. I asked her what her secret is to a long-term successful relationship, since she has been married for decades. She answered: ‘Travel a lot—and not together.’” —Gillian Laub

Mary Ellen Mark, Craig Scarmardo and Cheyloh Mather at the Boerne Rodeo, Texas, 1991
Courtesy Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation

Mary Ellen Mark

“DJ Stout, the art director at Texas Monthly, assigned me to spend a month traveling across Texas to photograph small-town rodeos. He chose me for this project because of my work on the Indian circus. There was only one thing that I found terribly disturbing: it was the sport of bull riding, because it was so dangerous. These two young boys were excellent bull riders. You can tell by their attitude that they knew it. Even though they were still children, they displayed a machismo beyond anything I had ever seen.” —Mary Ellen Mark

Yael Martinez, Abuelo-Estrella, An elder from the Cerro de la Garza, Guerrero, Mexico, December 31, 2020
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Yael Martinez

“Through narrow, winding, and treacherous mountain terrain, the Na Savi Indigenous communities in Guerrero, Mexico, every December 31, climb the Cerro de la Garza to perform rituals that commemorate the end and beginning of a cycle in life. They perform processions, dances, animal sacrifices, and other Indigenous spiritual practices of gratitude to the earth to ensure good harvests and full rivers, and to protect against water scarcity and the ravages of heat. It is a ritual that seeks to close the past and open the path to new horizons.” —Yael Martínez

Don McCullen, The Steel Town, Consett, County Durham, United Kingdom, 1974
Courtesy the artist

Don McCullen

“When I came back from [photographing] wars, I would immediately throw myself into my own personal journeys, like going to Bradford or Liverpool, or I’d head up to Scotland to do landscape photography. So I never had time to think about posttraumatic stress. This image strikes me for its alien lunar landscape; an environmental disaster which is so uncomfortably at odds with the presentation of this young mother pushing her shiny pram.” —Don McCullin

Daido Moriyama, Hokkaido, 1971
Courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation; Courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery

Daido Moriyama

“One day in 1971, on a whim, I traveled to Hokkaido. It was my obsession that urged me—with the wasteland and the wilderness, and with the endless horizon behind it. There is a strong sense of attraction and attachment that I feel to a certain place that may, although not in reality, lie somewhere even further beyond. It is a place in my heart, and my desire to get there, see it with my own eyes, that was driving me.” —Daido Moriyama

Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Bridge at sundown, Tokyo, Japan, 1996
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Gueorgui Pinkhassov

“Returning to Tokyo several times, I tried to find this bridge. I remember catching a train and getting off at a random station. Everything there intrigued me in its transparent harmony. The departing day fed my melancholy. I sought emptiness. And it colored my picture blue. I accepted it.” —Gueorgui Pinkhassov

Alessandra Sanguinetti, The Black Cloud. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Alessandra Sanguinetti

“A summer storm had just passed over us. As soon as the lightning stopped they both went out, shivering, to watch the wind push the storm clouds away.” —Alessandra Sanguinetti

Jamel Shabazz, Best Friends, Brooklyn, 2004
Courtesy the artist

Jamel Shabazz

“My father, who was my first photography instructor, provided me with all of the essential tools that I needed to embark on my personal journey as a photographer. He taught me about light, speed, composition, subject matter, and the importance of having concrete themes. The one thing that he would always say is: ‘Carry your camera everywhere you go, have it out and properly set at all times.’ I took that advice and everything else he shared with me and set out on a journey to explore the larger world around me. That was over forty years ago. It would be through the craft of photography that I found my purpose in life, which was to use my camera as a tool to freeze time and preserve the moment as an historical record for future generations. I have often been asked, ‘What do you look for in making an image?’ My answer is simple: I look for love, friendship, and joy.” —Jamel Shabazz

Rosalind Fox Solomon, I Love NY, Staten Island Ferry, 1984
Courtesy the artist

Rosalind Fox Solomon

“I’m a composer playing with light and darkness. The camera is my instrument. My parents put me down because I was different. I see myself as an outsider. I’m always a beginner. I approach the woman on the ferry. Saying nothing, I stand before her in a tattered hat and a fishing vest. I focus the camera and take her picture. She ignores me.” —Rosalind Fox Solomon

Alec Soth, Bogotá, Colombia, 2003
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Alec Soth

“Nearly two decades ago, my wife and I visited Bogotá, Colombia, to adopt our baby girl, Carmen. During the two months we spent waiting for the courts to certify the adoption, I explored the city. The pictures I took in Bogotá are as much about my daughter’s future as they are about her birth city.” —Alec Soth

Hank Willis Thomas, Hall of the City of God, 2021
Courtesy the artist

Hank Willis Thomas

“I’m looking at puzzle pieces like pixels in a photograph and putting the pieces of history together to make connections to past and present. I’m trying to understand how it all fits together.” —Hank Willis Thomas

The Magnum Square Print Sale in partnership with Aperture, On the Horizon, is available through October 24, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

The Artists Building a Black Cosmos

The visual enjambment we see in collage works entered the collective consciousness through song, specifically the sonic territories mapped and invented by jazz and blues music. Black music made audible ideas that trauma had stifled and muted, and once these sentiments could be heard, it became easier to visualize them and reenact them through images and movement. Black visual artists who do with light what jazz instrumentalists and blues vocalists and hip-hop producers do with sound emerged and began to experiment—pioneers like Romare Bearden early in that tradition, and working artists of today like Jacolby Satterwhite, Lauren Halsey, and Tavares Strachan.

Jacolby Satterwhite, Flying in Paradise, All Above the Business, 2020
Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

These artists merge the analog and digital with uncanny ease. The nephew of afro-harpist Alice Coltrane (widow of John Coltrane), Flying Lotus is one of our portals between what’s happening in music and what’s happening to bodies on dance floors and at home, and in factories and offices and schools and prisons and everywhere bodies are sold—and what occurs in the work of Satterwhite, Halsey, and Strachan as a result of the demands the new sounds impose upon how we see ourselves and where we locate the gaze. On Flying Lotus’s album Cosmogramma (2010), harp, bells, voice, synth, and Lil Wayne samples force digital and analog textures to coexist, as if one physical place inextricably united by the texture of desire. He creates a template there for a new grammar of the cosmos. A few years later, we get Jacolby Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire series, videos in which he dances with himself in several dimensions. The same way Black music has purposed sampling as a slick archiving technique which keeps out-of-print music circulating, Black visual intonation takes archives made on paper and film, video, or even cassette tape, as well as the bodies of the artists themselves, and overlays or arranges them to bend time and space and render a paradise of ruins, picturesque detritus.

Collectively, we are at a precipice where we want to embody our gods and ancestors and reclaim their testimonies without reliving their trials. The ancestors we have no names or discernable forms for—because we lost or traded their names on the path to liberation or bondage—we reanimate through fantasy and terrain-making in the visible world using the momentum of music and rumor. The results are unsentimental nostalgias that allow us to see trajectories in Black cultural tradition without overidentifying with their sorrow or mania. It’s as if these artists promise intimately, I’ll be your mirror, and then use that mirroring to deflect everything they are trying to get over and through; they give you your problem back and exorcise their loyalties to struggle and show us that process. Their mazes of Black artifacts and rituals accrue so many personal signifiers for the artists that the weight of their influences is lifted by overfamiliarity, outrun, or so fused with the self as to offer the illusion of having been transmuted.

Jacolby Satterwhite, Black Luncheon, 2020
Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

Jacolby Satterwhite / People in Me

There is an element of remothering in Jacolby Satterwhite’s world-making. Beginning with Reifying Desire (my personal introduction to his work), he bends and reshapes his origin story and turns what was stigmatized as mental illness in his mother into a spectacle of her genius for drawing and singing, for “madness” made into domestic mysticism. Satterwhite focuses on her capacity to remain intentional and hopeful throughout her struggles, and how that hope turns to revelry and obsession. He says he maintained an “objective” distance, that he had to take an almost “sociopathic” approach to working with his mother’s archive. Yet the final product is much more vulnerable than he suggests: songs his mother recorded while at home or institutionalized serve as the soundtrack of an imaginary universe where Satterwhite dances. His mother is lucid and self-aware about her troubled mind, and he is loose-limbed and receptive, genuflecting both literally and in spirit, replaying each memory over and over again at different octaves to see if he can detect where it turns, where she goes from full of light to blinded by it. The gestural tapestry created is its own cosmogramma, a method of reinstating the primacy of dismissed or dissembled modes of testifying. He creates a portal using his mother’s voice, her tones, and in this way she accompanies him, collaborating with him posthumously. The exchange is in no way clinical or remote. They are holding hands in their own exclusive universe; she passes him a note, and he only dictates pieces of it to us.

The cosmic reparenting that many Black people are forced to perform as a rite of passage out of or through abandonment demands the ruthless use of personal archives, sometimes to such an extent that the archives become masks to wear while the face is missing. Satterwhite’s mother is so present in his work that she both disappears and becomes omnipresent, the dark matter of his omniverse. (He refers to himself as a “digital hoarder” in one interview.) To experience his work is to experience the opposite of that: someone intently mapping his personal star pattern and then releasing that constellation into the world of the Black myth, freeing himself of his preoccupations by letting them overtake him for a time. Nothing personal, he shrugs, while recreating his entire social life as an infinitely looping virtual reality. His displacement into forms he can control is wise because what becomes hyperfamiliar cannot haunt as much, and generous because both Satterwhite and his mother transmute distress so well that the audience is only let in to revel with them. We aren’t forced to earn it, we don’t have to hold back our awe to make them feel appreciated in this world they create together; we have to surrender to it.

Lauren Halsey exhibition, installation view at David Kordansky Gallery, 2020
Courtesy the gallery

Lauren Halsey / A New Reality Is Better than a New Myth

Lauren Halsey mixes hoodrich kitsch like neon “check cashing” signs, banana-yellow Afro Sheen aerosols, and technicolor Cheetos logos with sacred cultural iconography and language, including images of musicians Isaac Hayes and Sun Ra, in order to reappropriate the grammar of Black local life. In her 2020 exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, the effect is both dazzling and sobering. You want to be a member of that society, but you also understand that its weakest links––the economic exploitation, the conflation of stimulation with nourishment––threaten to sabotage all of it. If the state and real-estate mergers and restrictive covenants didn’t dictate the zoning and aestheticizing of neighborhoods, how would historically Black regions of towns and cities be? We’d play more music, surely, and businesses like liquor stores and KFC wouldn’t be more prevalent than fruit stands and mom-and-pops, but at the same time, what does exist would be embraced with love, less a point of shame and more a matter of pride and empowerment. If the liquor store and the fast-food spot are where we convene to discuss free jazz or soul music, and how to build community centers and our own schools, then let them proliferate with all their viscous temptation, simultaneously temping us to resist them.

Halsey invents brand-new environments using the most mundane and familiar ones. She discovers a spectacular mundane, full of soul and glitz and as confident as its detractors. Most importantly, her work, her cosmogramma, dispels the nagging trope in our culture that Black people need a white savior aesthetic to come in and distribute white poise unto Black people or teach us how to be better capitalists, less decadent. Our legacy is one of leaning into ornamentation, orbiting all shades of the light spectrum and, in so doing, being suns ourselves. Halsey rejects energies of lack and collective self-doubt in favor of unapologetic Black opulence. We own everything we touch is her work’s message, so touch this sculpture of a strip mall wrapped in Funkadelic’s royal blue cape and be glad.

Tavares Strachan, No Name in the Street, 2020Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Tavares Strachan / Leave No Traces

If Satterwhite and Halsey are constructing whole worlds, virtual and tangible, Tavares Strachan is rendering blueprints for the next world. When those dreams and apparitions inevitably implode or grow bleak and redundant, we will crave the nourishment of their bones, their guts sputtered into elegant retractable horizons we can walk toward, or enter, to reinvent ourselves. Strachan constructs such havens and horizons, letting some of his archives remain 2D, at bay, and a little aloof, so that their syncretism can stretch out playfully, a little languid, not committing itself to a bulkier form. He makes footnotes, not ideologies or fully realized new worlds. And instead of implying outer space and takeoff and launch from the local into the infinite, the way Halsey and Satterwhite do, Strachan includes splayed shards of the natural world turned into speaking objects and humans—astronauts and spaceships mid-launch mingle with African fractals and a portrait of James Baldwin. The visual enjambment is a poetics which loops the notion of cosmogramma back to its roots in order to make that visible or “seen” world look the way our music sounds, and the way our bodies aim to move to the sounds of our music.

Tavares Strachan, The Alchemist, 2018. Photograph by Brian Forrest
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

In his 2D collage works, Strachan’s cosmos is a catalogue of irreconcilable ideas: a crossword puzzle, a football diagram, and a goddess all converge in one iteration called The Alchemist (2018). All of this against the quieting backdrop of a forest. He is more of a digital hoarder than Satterwhite, but his incessant collecting is also aimed at a myth of Black minimalism: the streamlined intent that transforms displaced ruins into new land. He objectifies his need for escape and contradicts it with a clear need to be organized and situated with elements that he cannot tame. His cosmos has less of a sense of being willed by tragedy and urgency and feels more like the thinking one gets to engage when they have touched a bit of the Black pastoral, tidy but dissolved on purpose in places, and private in ways that cannot be breached with words, only pierced with focused looking and deliberate turning away.

Strachan, like Satterwhite and Halsey, is thinking about departure, where we go from here. This is a graduation from obsession with escape; this is a less frenzied approach to leaving, but still the stodgy old world has to go, is the idea. Rather than echoing and looping this concept, the most adventurous Black artists are enacting it, architecting a new universe that exiles any traditions they don’t want to uphold. This exclusivity, while perilous in that it could drive the dwellers in these new universes mad with specificity, is also a form of justice. Toni Morrison spoke defiantly about her novels as not being reactionary to the white world, just existing as their own worlds; and when she announced this, it was a thrilling and new notion. Jacolby Satterwhite, Lauren Halsey, and Tavares Strachan are similar in their approach to world-making that centers the image without denigrating it or making it a source of pity and charity or vulgar protest. Jubilation is more effective. Finally, work that doesn’t visibly wonder what the white gaze will make of it. Finally, a Black cosmos nearly impermeable to detractors, and artists dedicated to accessing and occupying that cosmos without destroying or gentrifying it.

Read more about the visual grammar of Black cosmologies in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies” (Fall 2021).

The Luminous Openness of Rinko Kawauchi’s Photographs

The current ecological crisis urges us to formulate new ways of thinking about the real world in which we live. The increasing prevalence of natural catastrophes, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires, stirs the fundamental conditions upon which the existence of humans depends. In this moment, we are forced to admit that we cannot be free of the inertia of material reality. As Amitav Ghosh puts it in his Great Derangement, “The stirrings of the earth have forced us to recognize that we have never been free of nonhuman constraint.” In a sense, we realize that humans are not free agents but instead are caught within a nonhuman realm—and far from mastering it, we are constrained by it. We feel that we are thrown into vast depths without surfaces or boundaries. We are caught within a truly wild dominion of openness.

Yet we are also, in another way, oblivious to it, because this realm is suppressed beneath the superficial representation of the smoothly functioning everydayness made manageable by the logic of late capital- ism. Contemporary art has often been complicit in this obliviousness. According to Ghosh, “Human consciousness, agency, and identity came to be placed at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise.” For that reason, most dominant artistic practices are so bounded by the anthropocentric view that they become impervious to the shock of the ongoing ecological crisis. Even though a natural disaster such as an earthquake urges us to examine the exterior reality beyond human consciousness, artists often appear oblivious to the harsh realness of the world.

As is well known, in March 2011, Japan was horrendously damaged by the tripartite catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident known colloquially as 3/11. In the face of this unprecedented event, which inflicted severe harm on those living in the villages and towns in the Tohoku area, Kawauchi responded as a photographer. After that incident, she walked around the area, took photos, and published the results as Light and Shadow (2014). Her response was not directed at the tragedy she witnessed; rather, it was oblique. Her photographs force us to encounter the inert materiality of the world that is emancipated from the glittering surface of the spectacular world.

One of the themes of that book is silence. Depicted in its pages is a pair of pigeons, one black, the other white. The pigeons, who had been uprooted during the tsunami, were in search of safe haven. She writes the following:

Looking at these pigeons, I thought of them as symbols of so many things, especially the dualism of our world. White and black, good and evil, light and shadow, man and woman, be- ginning and end. Throughout existence there have been, and will be, innumerable occurrences of delight and dread.

Because of the devastation, many things, including pigeons, were certainly expulsed from a previously stable habitat. They were uprooted. Yet, on the other hand, an earthquake reveals to us a hidden reality that usually remains submerged beneath the consistent and coherent yet illusory framework of the present world. Such an event urges us to encounter the otherness of the ambiguous realm with its “innumerable occurrences of delight and dread.” A dark and shadowy sphere may have existed prior to the stable consolidation of the present world—an undifferentiated state of heaven (ame) and earth (tsuchi).

The reason I am fascinated by Kawauchi’s photos is that they enable us to be susceptible to the doubleness of reality. The world that we inhabit is not only the self-contained human world. Simultaneously, it is open to the mysterious realm that operates at the edge of the mundanity of the human lifeworld. Her act of photographing is less a way of referring to the appearance of everyday reality than it is a revealing of the luminous open space within which sensuous elements are free-floating. That is to say, in her practice, a sequence of photographs does not fix the appearance of everyday events, but rather evokes the realness of ambiguous ether that existed prior to the fixation of the predominant worldly setting.

Illuminance was published the same year that the catastrophic earthquake happened. I feel it is something like a prophecy of the unprecedented event that totally changed what Raymond Williams calls the “structure of feeling” for all of Japan. Ahead of this shocking incident that revealed to us the fragility of the human world, Kawauchi’s photographs attuned us to its intrinsic frailty.

In an interview, she related the following:

I need many elements to come together in a series to create a mood, not just portraits—including seemingly unrelated subjects, such as landscapes and tiny details, as well as different moods and atmosphere, expressing my own feelings about time passing, the fragility of life. They are metaphorical images, really, [about] how fragile our world is.

The idea that our world is fragile does not mean that it is doomed to extinction. Rather, according to Kawauchi, fragility concerns her feelings about time passing. Perhaps this means that things in our world are perishable. In a way, Kawauchi’s sense of fragility is in accord with Timothy Morton’s statement, “In order to exist, objects must be fragile.” Both of them seem to intuit that everything is ephemeral to the point that it cannot be fixated—in other words, fragile things in this world are not individually fixed objects but rather lose their separateness.

What is remarkable about Kawauchi’s photographs is the way they evoke the sense of mysterious openness at the edge of the everyday human world. One of the images included in this volume depicts an upward-leading stair that middle- and high-school students are ascending, for instance, is photographed in such a way as to show us the vastness of the exterior world that surrounds and penetrates our ordinary living. Illuminance, the title of this photobook, indicates the realness of what is beyond and above our own reach. The fact that something can be illuminated means that some other thing remains in shadow.

What Kawauchi reveals to us is the sensuous realm within which the boundary between things becomes blurred. It is filled with light. David Chandler holds that “Illuminance builds into a sustained meditation on light’s miraculous qualities and revelatory power.” Certainly, light is endowed with an active power that brings something invisible into the visible. Yet, we should not confuse Kawauchi’s revelatory use of the power of light with the violence of light. According to Jacques Derrida, the neutrality of lightning, pure transparency, is often synonymous with the violent oppression that makes everything the same. That is to say, within the neutrally lighted space, “to see and to know, to have and to will, unfold only within the oppressive and luminous identity of the same.”

Kawauchi’s light is quite contrary to this violence criticized by Derrida. Rather, she shows us that there is a different kind of light. In Kawauchi’s Illuminance, Chandler argues, “light obscures as much as it reveals: it reflects, penetrates, dematerializes, and renders things invisible.”

How do we think of light that obscures and dematerializes things? Perhaps it evokes a spacious realm within which things become indistinct, deep beneath the surface of our common perceptual framework. I argue that Kawauchi’s act of photographing captures what Alphonso Lingis calls “luminous openness.” According to him, the light that fills visual space is not transparent; rather, “its radiance fills and thickens the space such that the surfaces of gleaming or shadowy things at a distance are dissolved in it.” Objects within luminous openness are not identifiable nor fixed.

They remain ambiguous. The radiance is sometimes so pervasive that we can demarcate nothing in it. Prior to the construction of the perceptible framework of human consciousness, there was such a luminous openness. Thus, the reason why Kawauchi’s light is different from the violence of lighting is that it allows for the playfulness of sensuous elements—it amplifies the openness and weightlessness of the spacious realm, so as to enable multiple elements to resonate with each other.

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Kawauchi’s practice reminds us of how the conditions in which we exist are fragile and vulnerable. The natural world underneath the human-made world cannot be completely mastered by the act of human will. On the contrary, it stirs and disrupts the human world. In a sense, the world is independent of us, indifferent to our concern. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us, we encounter “the radical otherness of the planet.” This otherness, or the earth’s uncanny aspect, is revealed to be beneath the human lifeworld. It belongs to another kind of reality, the underworld of things, which remains on the edge of human life.

All photographs by Rinko Kawauchi from Illuminance (Aperture, 2021)
Courtesy the artist

Illuminance shows us that the world we truly inhabit is withheld from our consciousness, or rather, it reveals that things in the world’s luminous openness are endowed with an aspect that is not empirically observed: the shadowy aspect. To be in shadow is not so much to be in mere darkness, but rather to be vaguely cast in light. Within a realm of illuminance, one that existed prior to the neutral light of violence, the essences of things are manifested—yet, quite mysteriously, the world of things is independent of us. Kawauchi’s work, however, allows us to witness this shadowy realm on the edge of the everyday. Like weeds growing through the cracks in broken pavement blocks, her photographs penetrate the quotidian. In a sense, to be penetrated means to allow things to enter a world; in order for that to happen, that world needs to be fragile. Yet, as Kawauchi reveals to us, fragility is already intrinsic to our world. Eventually, the awareness of fragility means susceptibility to the realm of interpenetration suppressed within everyday human life.

This essay originally appeared in Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance (Aperture, 2021) under the title “The Feeling of Luminous Openness.”