Aperture's Blog, page 47

October 14, 2021

How Takuma Nakahira’s “Circulation” Breathed Life into Photography

“Now, as a result of this project, I can feel that the things that I say and the things that I do are beginning to agree with one another for the first time.”
—Takuma Nakahira, Asahi Camera, February 1972

On the afternoon of September 28, 1971, when Japanese critic and photographer Takuma Nakahira set foot (several days late) in the seventh Paris Biennale, he felt nothing so much as “hollowness” and “despair.” Reporting these sensations for the Japanese weekly Asahi Journal that December, Nakahira explained his dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary art and, indeed, with his own activities as a creator and commentator on art. The laudable artworks on view mostly attacked a social system from which their makers pretended to keep some distance; Nakahira observed that, in fact, this art could only be the very face of such a system, which created a sort of play area for artists to vent futile opposition to the forces of capital flow and authoritarian control. Those forces had a vested interest in shoring up authorial ego when, in fact, it was the art goods and their exchange value that really mattered: individuality was a commodity construct. Yet his own contribution to the Paris Biennale, which he described at length for Asahi Journal and again for the photography magazine Asahi Camera the following February, allowed him guarded hope that art and art criticism could still have a purpose in the world. What was it about Circulation: Date, Place, Events, Nakahira’s piece for the 1971 Biennale, that gave grounds for optimism?

As Franz Prichard recounts elsewhere in this issue, Takuma Nakahira, who got his start in photography and criticism only around 1965, had by the end of that decade already become one of the most influential figures in contemporary culture in Japan. Nakahira’s incisive writing cut apart standing views in literature, film, politics, and especially photography, and he published both articles and photographs at a feverish rate. He wanted a relation between these two activities that could come closer than complementarity—a joint force of action, perhaps. The intended effect of that joint action might be “illumination,” to quote a word favored by prewar German critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, whose essays were first anthologized in English as well as in Japanese in the late 1960s: searing, flashbulb-like insights afforded by a photograph or fragmentary phrases. Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought—the short-lived photography journal that Nakahira helped to found, which blazed its trail across the Tokyo cultural scene in those years—took its name from such intertwined desires. Writing and photography should illuminate the world, explosively, and they should set each other ablaze as well. Nakahira’s epochal photobook, For a Language to Come (1970), pushed even more insistently at an overhaul of word– image relations. Yet Nakahira remained dissatisfied and, worse, fatigued by his efforts to develop a productive analysis of contemporary culture.

“Has Photography Been Able to Provoke Language?” Nakahira asked in March 1970, around eight months before his book appeared. “Only through human use can a language be given life,” he asserted, for without a subjective viewpoint, language exists as mere symbols and generalities. But to shake a language awake, to deploy it, is also to risk damaging one’s psyche: “This kind of ‘exploding language’ is a language that has been fiercely lived here and now by a single person.” Just such “fiercely lived” insights were what Nakahira sought to produce and circulate, operating calculatedly on the verge of madness. (Prichard has translated that essay and others in the recent reprint of For a Language to Come, as well as in Circulation: Date, Place, Events; issued by the Tokyo house Osiris, both books also have keenly written afterwords by cultural critic Akihito Yasumi.)

In the view of many who have encountered it then or since, For a Language to Come eminently fulfilled Nakahira’s hope for pictures that would give concrete meaning to words while threatening language overall as a system of convention and control. The word tree is general, but a photograph of any tree will be specific, Nakahira argued, with catlike stealth, before pouncing on the surprise conclusion: that close comparison of a single tree in image and word “causes the concept and meaning of tree to disintegrate.” How? Through sentences that leap and dart, and pictures that careen between heavy grays and blinding whites; through sequences of haunting images that overtake the reader, as if the setting for Nakahira’s photographs— the city of Tokyo—were a mental space in which one staggered from desire to trauma, a solitary ego shattered by passion and rage.

Takumi Nakahira, from For a Language to Come (Tokyo: Fudosha, 1970)

The effort of making For a Language to Come left Nakahira spent and temporarily uninterested in further photographic projects. One year later, the commissioner for Japanese entries in the Paris Biennale, fellow Provoke veteran Takahiko Okada, convinced him to travel there only after much debate, “at least to do some sightseeing,” as Nakahira disarmingly recalled upon his return. Yet the very fact of Nakahira’s repeated and extensive commentary on his Paris piece suggests the sense of renewal it brought him. Circulation was not only the title of this piece but also its ambition and modus operandi. More literally than did For a Language to Come, the fleeting work raced with an illuminating flash of brilliance through the early 1970s art scene.

Circulation was, in essence, a performance piece in which photographs were the engine of the performance rather than a record of it. This quality is the greatest guarantor of the work’s uniqueness in photographic terms, but there are other reasons to reassess its meanings today. (New prints from the original negatives were shown in New York in 2012 and feature currently in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.) Rather than send existing pictures to Paris, Nakahira wished to create something “live” during the run of the exhibition. He would hang only pictures taken and printed that very day, making a photo-diary of his Parisian experiences that would cover his Biennale wall in stages. By circulation Nakahira meant his own movements around Paris, the movement of his pictures from darkroom to display, and the perambulation past his evolving piece by visitors to the Biennale, whom Nakahira photographed for this installation as well.

The prints themselves would be “mere remnants” of these circulatory patterns. Nakahira’s description of his procedure, from the February 1972 article in Asahi Camera, suggests a determined resistance to fixity: “To put it concretely, I set myself to photograph, develop, and exhibit nothing but the Paris that I was living and experiencing. My project … was born from this motivation. Every day I would go out into the streets of Paris from my hotel. I would watch television, read newspapers and magazines, watch the people passing by, look at other artists’ works at the Biennale venue, and watch the people there looking at these works. I would capture all of these things on film, develop them the same day, make enlargements, and put them up for display that evening, often with the photographic prints still wet from the washing process.”

Curator Yuri Mitsuda points out, in an essay for the Houston exhibition catalog, that Nakahira was evidently attracted to the wet Parisian streets, for he included many images of them in Circulation, both at the Biennale and in a special section in the January 1972 issue of the Tokyo magazine Design, which stands as the one visual record of the Paris work made at the time. Mitsuda nicely analogizes the washing of city streets with Nakahira’s marathon darkroom sessions to make Circulation, for which he printed, by his own account, some two hundred images each day for a week: the photographer must have spent hours with his hands in chemical baths or running water over his prints to clean them. To focus on wetness is also a way to suggest flow—the process rather than the product. As another hint at Nakahira’s preferences, the few surviving prints are yellow, faded, or blotchy, and one can see that, paradoxically, not enough liquid was on hand to make them; the developer was probably heavily reused, losing its strength, and other sources report that the darkroom apparatus consisted of a bathroom sink and an ordinary wash bucket.

Of course, the Biennale display space became a bigger, brighter, and populated extension of the artist’s cramped and makeshift quarters. This was one of the radical moves Nakahira made with Circulation: evoking at exhibition not an artist’s studio but a photographer’s normally closed and lightproof darkroom, turning that monastic space into a carnival atmosphere. The rows of drying prints that ordinarily hang on a darkroom clothesline, or lie in trays, were here spread out as if at a yard sale, covering the wall and spilling onto other surfaces as Nakahira outgrew his allotted area. This method could also be likened to making public the draft of an essay, showing sheets of jottings for all to read. A quick glance over the shoulder of a Biennale visitor confirms that Nakahira had an eye for written and printed words: “Viva La Muerte!” (Long live death!), “Explosion,” and excerpts from a street poster punctuate the whirl of faces, friends, and street scenes. The first entries for October 12, 1971, meanwhile, include a photograph of the word Paris glued directly after the artist’s handwritten spelling of the city name, inviting a comparison between manual and photographic representations of language; a photograph of a cartoon page below it continues this theme. Here was the visual equivalent for the harmony of critical thought between taking photographs and writing essays that Nakahira would emphasize in explaining the work.

Other stretches of the installation show series of closely related views, like contact sheets turned into exhibition displays. The first step in printing, especially in the news-photographer paradigm that dominated the twentieth century, was contact-printing a roll of film negatives on a sheet of proofing paper to determine which “shots” had the most promise, before enlarging them into final prints. Nakahira did not make contact sheets but instead put that procedure on view, printing up runs of negatives just as they appeared on the film roll. Among these sequential groupings are a street scene with a car and more spilt liquid, and another with a VeloSolex moped rider maneuvering through traffic, both of which look a bit like stop-action cinema. Another sequence shows screenshots from television, intercut with a single photograph of the word hyperreal. There was something hyperreal in this steady accumulation of repetitive and overlapping images, each flowing into the next, doubling back, overlapping, then gushing onward as if from a faucet left running.

There was one precedent for Nakahira’s work in the realm of photography— William Klein—but that precedent gains full meaning only in Nakahira’s highly perceptive and unusual reading of Klein’s work. The “look” of Klein’s photographs— grainy, up close, heated yet acerbic—has been taken by critics since the 1960s as a touchstone for the photographs in Provoke. In a terrifically cogent review from 1967, however, Nakahira argued that it was not really the look but the method that mattered. Graininess and wide-angle lenses did not automatically signify urban anomie; there was no one-to-one correspondence in photographs between appearance and meaning, no key to decoding, indeed no code. What mattered was that Klein had brought forth a particular process of taking photographs in the contemporary city. Viewing it as a dreamscape, even a nightmare, Klein had placed himself in the middle of that mental geography, exposing himself to multiple and colliding vantages with no set idea of his expressive voice. In short, he let his creative identity drift while keeping his critical faculties intact. Nakahira took that approach for a model, as Yasumi points out, and he put into practice his reading of Klein as an authorial cipher passing lucidly yet violently through an unfixed landscape: “The world is not a static, completed universe but rather something which flows and changes its appearance, transforming like a nebula with a movement in viewpoint.”

The trouble was what to do with the photographs, which for all the talk of ceaseless motion would end up having a static form. Photography is hard to think of as a performance medium. Also in the late 1960s, Truman Capote recalled in a breathless sentence seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson at work two decades earlier, “dancing along the pavement like an agitated dragonfly, three Leicas swinging from straps around his neck, a fourth one hugged to his eye: click-click-click (the camera seems a part of his own body) clicking away with joyous intensity.” This comparison, though beautiful in itself, encapsulates all that Nakahira opposed. In the Vietnam era, dead or dying bodies were shown daily in the news media to no apparent effect, and nothing could seem more suspect than a photojournalist sashaying his way through carnage with cameras as breastplates.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Takuma Nakahira, Untitled, 1971, from the series Circulation: Date, Place, Events
© 1971 Takuma Nakahira and courtesy Osiris, Tokyo, and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Circulation made the city into an extended space of performance, forsaking the projection of a stable authorial ego for the representation of collective and mercurial states of mind: hilarity, terror, alienation, ooze, hyperreality. These changing and changeable pictures came from the city and went back into it, albeit via a public exhibition space. The camera that took them was run through the streets as on a great dérive, a “drifting,” as French philosopher Guy Debord phrased it in his classic book of the era, Society of the Spectacle (another one of his terms, psychogeography, is equally relevant). The perishability of the prints in Circulation marks a singular attempt to analyze reality through its traces without memorializing it. Apparently aimless, this daily circulation in fact summed up the city and the moment in a way that no fixing of photographs in a book or in frames could possibly have done.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 219, “Tokyo,” under the title “Nakahira’s Circulation.”

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Published on October 14, 2021 12:13

Ishiuchi Miyako’s Chronicles of Time and History

Through her images of subjects ranging from the American Occupation of Japan and the bombing of Hiroshima, to women’s scarred bodies and her mother’s and Frida Kahlo’s personal effects, Ishiuchi Miyako, born in 1947, has explored the passage of time and history. Like Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama, renowned Japanese photographers who emerged in the 1950s and ’60s, Ishiuchi’s early work was shaped by the residual presence of World War II. Her first series, Yokosuka Story (1976–77), focused on her coastal hometown, the site of a U.S. naval base that was permeated by American culture. Projects that closely followed—Apartment (1977–78), which explored the interiors of Tokyo’s postwar housing, and Endless Night (1978–80), for which she photographed brothels—honed Ishiuchi’s vision as well as her process; for her, the image is a physical object made by hand in the darkroom.

For more recent work such as Mother’s (2000–2005), featured at the 2005 Venice Biennale; ひろしま/Hiroshima (2007); and Frida (2013), Ishiuchi turned to color, taking a forensic approach to examine clothing and objects laden with complex histories, underscoring the idea that the traces of time’s passage are her true subjects. Here, she speaks with Yuri Mitsuda, curator at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, about the evolution of her explorations of time, her ambivalence about photography, and how she has negotiated a field dominated by men.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Yokosuka Story #98, 1976–77

Yuri Mitsuda: Let’s begin with Yokosuka Story. Was this your first show?

Ishiuchi Miyako: When I started out, I was exhibited as part of a group show with Shashin Koka (Photography effect), a short-lived experimental photography group that included Hiroshi Yamazaki and Tunehisa Kimura, among others. [Nobuyoshi] Araki came, and Moriyama—well, maybe Moriyama didn’t make it, now that I think about it. But anyway, Tomatsu, [Masahisa] Fukase, all those guys came and saw it. Araki said, “If you want to show at Nikon Salon, bring some photos over.” It wasn’t really clear to whom he was talking. But when I heard that, I spoke up and said, “Sure, I’ll do it, though only once.”

Mitsuda: Why only once?

Miyako: I didn’t want to be a photographer then, but Nikon Salon was the biggest, most famous, most frequented exhibition space. And here was Araki saying, “If you want to show at Nikon Salon, bring some photos over.” I had just taken my first pictures in Yokosuka. I was absorbed in the darkroom, where I struggled with the photographic materials as objects. They were not only images to me, but materials, and somehow they stood between Yokosuka and myself. But I wanted to show them, and so I thought, Sure.

The title we’d come up with was Yokosuka Elegy. But when we showed it to [Jun] Miki [then the director of Nikon Salon], he said, “No, no, that won’t do. Much too dark.” So he renamed it Yokosuka Story. That was right when Momoe Yamaguchi had that popular song, also called “Yokosuka Story.”

Mitsuda: What did you bring to Araki’s place to show him?

Miyako: 12-by-10-inch prints. About a hundred of them.

Mitsuda: When I’ve asked you before how you started taking photos, you’ve told me, “I haven’t always wanted to be a photographer—it’s more that, from time to time, that’s the equipment I end up using.” It might have been by chance that you ended up taking photos, but nonetheless— at that point you had at least a hundred!

Miyako: That happened once I made the decision to shoot in Yokosuka. Up until then, I had no idea what I wanted to shoot. I went up to Miyako, in the Tohoku region, and I ended up in the station, unable to take a picture of anything. I didn’t know what I should shoot. I just knew people brought their cameras to different places and took pictures. That was the first time I took a camera on the road. I ended up in the waiting area, sitting there wondering why I’d come so far, why I wanted to take pictures here in this faraway place. Then it came to me—what place was I the furthest from really knowing? Yokosuka! Where I’d come from! (I moved from Gumma Prefecture to Yokosuka at the age of six.) So I packed up and went straight back.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Yokosuka Story #5 , 1976–77

Mitsuda: From the very beginning you treated your photographs as objects that one could craft.

Miyako: I threw my whole body into the printing process; to treat a print as something throwaway would be impossible for me. That’s why it doesn’t feel like I’m developing photos. It’s more like I’m making something.

I didn’t learn photography from anyone. I received a pamphlet for a workshop once. It was Tomatsu’s school. I went back and forth about going, but then I saw how expensive it was—200,000 yen for half a year! I decided to do things myself instead. I might try and fail, and I failed a lot. Failing is so important. It’s been such a plus for me, never having been taught photography. Though I’ve been told I hold the camera strangely.

Mitsuda: What is the allure of the darkroom for you?

Miyako: It’s the dyeing process. Dyeing white paper, bit by bit. Each tiny chemical grain, one by one, transforming the paper. I did roll printing, after all, when I was starting out. From the Yokosuka series on, I would start by buying a roll of photographic paper and then cut it as I went. But it always

struck me as crazy that the size of the paper and the size of the film didn’t match. My film was 35mm, and the paper was 4 by 5 or so. When you developed a 35mm image on it, there was so much white. So much white! It was really shocking to me. I developed in two steps. I had to add the black border myself. White seemed like simple excess, and it always stood out, and it really affected the sense of spatial composition to me.

Mitsuda: You considered the paper rather than the image, how the paper had to be incorporated into the finished work.

Miyako: I’d decided my project was not going to be documentary. When you think of Yokosuka, the first thing you think of is documentary. Tomatsu shot it, and so did Moriyama. They all ended up shooting Dobuita Street [the street notoriously frequented by sailors from the Yokosuka U.S. naval base]. That street was America, not Yokosuka. I saw everyone shooting Dobuita and calling it Yokosuka, and I thought, Something’s not right about this.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Apartment #14, 1977–78

Mitsuda: It all seems connected, how you were working then: you wanted to shoot Yokosuka, not Dobuita Street; you wanted to avoid the documentary approach and shoot “your” Yokosuka; you wanted to avoid white borders and use black ones instead.

Miyako: I didn’t want to make my photographs “photo-like.” I wanted to emphasize the presence of the photographic paper itself. I thought it was really something, the sheer physicality of it. To be Tomatsu-like, for example—that meant being documentary. I represented the furthest departure from that kind of thing. What did that really mean? For me, I wanted to present the images right on the walls. I stuck them on with double-sided tape, but they started to fall down, so I bought tacks, enough for 150 photographs.

Mitsuda: Putting all the images into matted frames and lining them up along the wall wouldn’t do.

Miyako: You don’t really look at them that way. You end up moving on to the next image right away. I want to make the viewer stop and really look at each photograph. That’s why I tend to show as few pieces as possible. Like with Silken Dreams (2011). That was an experiment to see how far I could go, if I could display just one image per wall. When I had a show at the [Tokyo Metropolitan] Museum of Photography, people said, “There aren’t enough pieces!” It might have seemed quite paltry to visitors who came just to see images. But I wanted people to look at the pieces more than once— ideally, to look at them again and again.

Mitsuda: Looking at your work again, I’m struck by the themes of the body, of flesh, of flesh and photograph relating to each other. Capturing precisely the way the sensory aspect of a photo- graph, a photograph’s surface, relates to the flesh, to the skin. They have a bodily quality, these prints, even something like the building in Apartment, the feel of the tile, the feel of the dirt, it comes across so vividly. In Apartment, and in Endless Night too, the tile makes an impression. You can think of it as the building’s flesh, perhaps.

Miyako: I considered becoming a tile layer at one point. It was what I would do if I ever quit photography. I’ve always loved tile. It excites me, looking at a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, for example. When I shot Apartment, I did think of it as shooting the body of the building. I felt tender toward it, a certain pity. A building can’t move. It has to stay where it is forever. That’s so sad, I thought. A building has no choice but to sit there and accept everything that happens to it.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Mother’s #3 , 2000

Mitsuda: Perhaps your pictures feel visceral because of your darkroom process?

Miyako: I don’t know about that, but I have always thought that the darkroom is such a sexual place. Its smell is so strong. And if you do it with bare hands, it’s like you’re having sex. Photography has that quality; it engages the five senses. It possesses something like sexuality.

Mitsuda: So the darkroom had a sexual quality. You can see it in the prints you made, their analog quality. And you also felt the building was a type of body.

Miyako: Yes. I thought of people as being part of the walls. I shot plenty of humans in Apartment, but as if they were part of the walls. Like patterns on the walls. People move away; they disappear. Two years pass and it’s all different. So as the humans pass through, leaving their scents, their body odors, their forgotten possessions, the building remains, silent witness to it all. A wall is a skin, you see. That sense was particularly strong in Endless Night. Those were brothels.

Mitsuda: The Scar (2006) work focuses on actual wounded bodies. It strikes me that the building photos resemble these. You said, “Space is formed from the accumulation of detail,” but you might also say that a body, too, is formed from details fitting together.

Miyako: You can say I’m shooting scars, but that’s not really what I was doing.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Endless Night #71 , 1978–80

Mitsuda: Really?

Miyako: Just like in Endless Night, I wasn’t shooting tile. I was shooting time. The traces of time’s accumulation. Like I did in 1 • 9 • 4 • 7 (1990). I was trying to shoot the traces of forty years’ passage.

When I think of where in the body time builds up the most, it’s the hands and feet. Shooting photographs, you end up shooting surfaces, but I wasn’t shooting hands and feet; I wasn’t shooting scars. I was shooting something invisible to the eye, something on the far side of the images themselves.

Mitsuda: You’re using the word “time,” but, for example, with Yokosuka Story, you have the prewar, the war, the American incursion, and then you were born and eventually picked up a camera—your photography suggests layers of time. It feels less like a span of years and more like history itself. Through Mother’s, all your work strikes me as being personal. After that, there’s ひろしま / Hiroshima and Frida.

Miyako: Hiroshima was an enormous tragedy, socially and historically. I had people who could bring me into that, if you will—I had those girls who’d worn those clothes and left them behind for me. With Frida, too. They invited me, so I went. I didn’t have all that much interest in her because of my limited knowledge.

Mitsuda: That’s a fascinating aspect of your work. You never really had that much interest in Hiroshima. You also say that you never really even had that much interest in photography.

Miyako: I’m a cold fish that way. There’s always a distance from photography, since the beginning.

Ishiuchi Miyako, ひろしま/Hiroshima #69 (Donor: Abe, H.) , 2007

Mitsuda: But your photos are so intense, so hot.

Miyako: No, not at all. There’s always something about them that’s cold. Maybe because I never really wanted to become a photographer, never really loved photography itself. With ひろしま/Hiroshima it was a question of what made me able to shoot it. If I hadn’t shot Yokosuka, I wouldn’t have been able to shoot Hiroshima. They’re connected at a fundamental level.

Mitsuda: Looking over ひろしま / Hiroshima, it seems that the images you chose have a certain transparency to them.

Miyako: Well, I shot for luminescence. All of them were shot in natural light. It’s almost seventy years after the war and yet there are still new things, preserved from that time, coming to light—isn’t that amazing? I go to visit and end up getting told, “We have some new pieces.” It’s shocking.

Mitsuda: They’re still alive. These personal effects.

Miyako: Exactly. People can’t bear having them any longer. They can’t bear them alone. So they bring them to the museum, make it so we all can bear them together. This kind of history is lost, usually.

Mitsuda: Your project is so different, though, from something like what [documentary photographer] Ken Domon did, or Shomei Tomatsu. It’s similar in that it’s a way to demonstrate that people’s lives became defined by this event, but it’s such a different approach, taking pictures of people’s clothing but not people.

Miyako: When they were displayed at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, people said, “Oh, they look like high fashion!” Because the images were so pretty, you see.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Frida by Ishiuchi #50 , 2012

Mitsuda: How do you respond to that? That doesn’t sound like praise.

Miyako: Oh, I disagree. I took it as a compliment. I mean, what’s wrong with that? I shot them to be beautiful. The response was interesting when they came out as a book—people in the fashion industry, who work with clothing, were so enthusiastic. Rather unexpected. Fashion models buying my photos!

It’s because I didn’t shoot the clothes worn by the victims as artifacts. These fashionable young women lived, and while they’re no longer with us, they left these things behind. These clothes are really nice, I thought. So that’s how I shot them. To do them that service. If you look, you can find bloodstains. You can see how they’re torn. They went through the bombing, after all. I read later about Comme des Garçons, about Rei Kawakubo and what they called the “postnuclear look.” I was so surprised. I wasn’t so far off after all, I thought. I’ve learned so many things shooting ひろしま/ Hiroshima. Thinking back over it now, it’s striking me anew. It’s quite an ordeal, this project.

Mitsuda: You mean, an ordeal to keep shooting it?

Miyako: I had no interest in Hiroshima, as you know, to the extent that I didn’t think I even needed to visit it. Now I have this bond with the place, even think of it as a second home. Yet I’m still an outsider. Though it’s because I’m an outsider that I can shoot what I shoot.

Mitsuda: That’s important, isn’t it?

Miyako: It was the same with Yokosuka—I could shoot it because I was an outsider. I’d moved there, after all. I wasn’t born there. And with Hiroshima, I was a complete outsider, so that sense of distance remains. One must be a bit cold to be the one taking photos. Up until recently, I’d never known anyone who’d been directly affected by the bombings. I was able to admit: I don’t know. It is impossible to completely understand [the event]. And in doing that, I was able to take on the burden of responsibility for Hiroshima. I’ve only come to this way of thinking recently. I was being interviewed at a museum, and the woman I was being interviewed with put it that way, that the unimaginable was the unknowable. If you can’t even imagine it, then you know nothing about it.

Mitsuda: It’s like what Wittgenstein said: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

Miyako: Yes, that’s it. The unimaginable signifies that which you can’t conceive.

Mitsuda: It’s like Fukushima.

Miyako: That too. Everything to do with the earthquake in Tohoku.

Mitsuda: I had the thought, looking at Frida, that the distance between you and Frida Kahlo isn’t so great.

Miyako: I’d never had much interest in her, but when I went to Mexico City for the shoot, I came to love her work quite a bit, especially her drawings. The drawings have such lightness to them.

Ishiuchi Miyako, Frida by Ishiuchi #86 , 2012

Mitsuda: Looking at the things Frida’s absent body once touched, the traces she left behind, her shoes—they’re not unlike scars. The distance between you and the subject in Frida seems narrower than it is with ひろしま / Hiroshima.

Miyako: I think so, too. It became about the everyday life of an individual woman, but in a way, also her life as a whole. She’s always spoken of as being so intense, so willful and passionate. But that’s just one side of her. No one knew Frida as she was in her daily life. Looking at these things, it really struck me. “Ahh, that’s how she was.”

Mitsuda: In Endless Night and other works like that, you were shooting buildings as bodies, shooting the time those bodies held within them. Were you shooting time as it existed within the spaces of the present?

Miyako: Time itself is accumulation. I’m about to turn seventy. It’s pretty shocking. How can one conceive of seventy years’ passage? There’s not much future left. Maybe twenty more years. I know I’m about to disappear. So it becomes even more imperative for me to treat time with importance. To shoot a photograph is to fix time in place. To fix time like that—I’m only interested in fixing time in its accumulation.

Ishiuchi Miyako, 1906: To the skin #60 , 1991–93

Mitsuda: For 1906: To the Skin (1991–93), you shot Kazuo Ohno. He’s a famous dancer who’d danced with the likes of Tatsumi Hijikata [a founder of butoh dance]. You took nude photos of him, using your signature approach—focusing on different parts, on the surface of the skin.

His body in particular seemed to show the passage of time very vividly. Normally, you think of dancers as young, vigorously moving across the stage and displaying amazing technique and then retiring before time really registers on their bodies. But he continued to dance until he died, dancing even in a wheelchair. And it was so lovely, a kind of dance only he could do.

Miyako: How can I put it? He was like an angel, and so androgynous. As if male and female didn’t matter. There was something very masculine about his flesh, though, his hands and feet. Yet they were smaller than mine!

He was quite willful. It was a difficult shoot. I had thought I was going to photograph his feet and hands, but then I started to have other ideas as I prepared to go. I wanted to take photos of the scars of men. “If you have no scars, then you will pose nude.” That’s what I told him. He was rather obstinate. I asked, “Ohno-san, do you have any scars?” and he said, “No! I have no scars.” So I said, “Could you disrobe for me then?” and all
his clothes came off, just like that! I was a little surprised. He put on some music, and then started to dance. It was overwhelming for me. Though also a pleasure, of course. It felt like rising up to heaven. Just us, no one else around.

October 13, 2021

A New Look at Walker Evans

The title of Walker Evans’s 1938 book, American Photographs, provokes because it is both assertive and ambiguous. How could a photographer, then only a decade into his career, claim such simple, self-assured authority? (It’s not Some American Photographs.) How does he define American? (The book includes two photographs taken in Cuba.) What, for him, constitutes a worthy subject to photograph? From the evidence he presented in its pages, the answer is, first, buildings (both exteriors and interiors), then people, then . . . not much else. Landscapes, still lifes, and other established pictorial genres appear to be of only fleeting interest to him. Despite this limited purview, when the pictures are read in sequence it can feel like he accounted for everything.

Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs on Tingle porch, 1936

The title—and, of course, the stunning photographic achievement the book reveals—has perennially motivated critics to place Evans alongside others, mostly modernist artists and writers, in their attempts to define the contours of a uniquely American culture. Lincoln Kirstein, writing in the essay printed at the end of American Photographs, cites T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, and Ernest Hemingway. Alongside Eliot, historian Alan Trachtenberg mentions Henry James and William Carlos Williams. Now comes the art historian Svetlana Alpers who, in her recent book Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (Princeton University Press, 2020), a fresh consideration of Evans’s pictures, adds to this list both E. E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop. But Alpers is unusual in that, unlike Kirstein, Trachtenberg, and other Evans scholars who wrote often about various American subjects, she is an art historian whose long and celebrated career has focused on European painting. As a subtitle, Starting from Scratch describes not only what she believes Evans was doing but also, to some extent, her own enterprise.

One of several departures that give Alpers her premise of discovery and new beginnings is Evans’s decampment to France in 1926 and 1927. During this period, he gave up the literary career he had dreamed of and made his first creative pictures. The infamous Paris café Les Deux Magots, he later said, gave him “license to stare.” Evans may have set down his pen and picked up a camera, but Alpers is quick and right to insist that literature was more important to Evans than other forms of visual art, even photography. Her detailed explanation of his connection to the tradition of French literary realism is perhaps this book’s most rewarding contribution to the vast literature on Evans. As she succinctly puts it, the budding young photographer “admired Flaubert for his method and aesthetic, but he admired Baudelaire for his spirit.”

Walker Evans, Country Church, Tennessee, 1936. Printed in “Primitive Churches,” Architectural Forum, December 1961

Alpers proceeds from the beginning of Evans’s career because her desire is to follow the making of the photographs rather than Evans’s editing of them or their many interpretations. She goes so far as to claim that the order in which he took his pictures is more “significant” than the sequence he later created for American Photographs: “The prior sequence is the sequence at work—let’s call it Evans’s working sequence. It was an activity, not a plan, which is hard to reconstruct even when one is aware that it is there.”

What results from this vantage point is neither full-fledged biography nor concentrated critical study, but rather an engaging series of case studies: of his month in Cuba in 1933, say, or of his famous 1964 lecture on the “lyric documentary” at Yale. More psychological readings come in chapters on Evans’s Subway Portraits, the making of which provoked in him a “tense relationship between submission and aggression,” and on his late Polaroids and collecting habits, which are “marked less by the expectation of creation to come, than by an acceptance of what is lost.”

Walker Evans, Mule Team and Poster, Alabama, 1936

But what no one interested in Evans can escape are the rich, complicated, deadpan, yet astonishing pictures he made in the American South during the mid-1930s. Some were taken while he chafed under the instructions of Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, others while on a magazine assignment with the writer James Agee. All were made, Alpers asserts, in the wake of the “long Civil War more than the immediate presence of the Great Depression.” This seems right to me, not least because Evans chose to photograph in towns that we know, like Vicksburg, Mississippi, because their names are often associated with battles, and because he didn’t shy away from photographing statues of Confederate leaders.

One of the enigmas of this creative outpouring, however, is what Evans thought his work was saying. Late in life, in formal interviews and informal public conversations, he studiously avoided ascribing political intent or meaning to these Southern photographs. Alpers leans heavily upon these statements, referring repeatedly to certain ones throughout the book. Writing of Evans’s interest in the South, she says, “The answer is not that he was campaigning for better treatment of anyone, but that he was looking, and looking widely. Just how widely has been overlooked or, if noticed, not spoken of.”

Walker Evans, Street Scene, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1936

Not “campaigning” is itself a political act, and I wish that Alpers had “spoken of” his evasions more. What did it mean for Evans, commenting during an era of racial violence and urban unrest, to disavow the politics of the earlier moment he was photographing—often on assignment for a branch of the federal government? Rahel Aima, writing about Starting from Scratch in The Nation, has criticized Alpers’s analysis of race as “often clueless.” When Alpers notes that “being damaged . . . was historically already the state of the nation,” I, too, wished for her to offer an explicit acknowledgement that the institution of slavery caused—and white supremacy continues to cause—such damage. At one point, she claims, “Evans saw truly what had gone into the making of the south.” But a paragraph earlier she writes, “Evans memorializes the South in its complexity, but he cannot be said to have recognized its demons.”

But one thing I believe is that the South, including its demons, is America just as much, if not more, than the Puritan heritage of the North. Puritan is the word Kirstein uses to describe Evans’s eye. An insistence on Evans’s eye, and what it could see, runs through Alpers’s book. On page one she notes, “Instead of the camera, it was the eye [Evans] spoke of as the major thing for him in photography.”

Walker Evans, Graveyard, Houses and Steel Mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935
All photographs courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Alpers’s references to the Civil War bring another uniquely American name to mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in his 1844 essay “Nature” evocatively describes a transparent eyeball to suggest total absorption in nature. Alpers rightly notes that Evans turned away from the natural world. Nonetheless, unable to get Emerson’s image out of my mind, I returned to “Nature.” In it, I found passages that describe what moves me about Evans’s accomplishment, so long as I transposed Emerson’s descriptions of natural phenomena for the man-made. Consider, with this line, Evans’s ability to create what feels like a panorama of American life despite limiting himself to the Northeast and deep South: “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.” Or consider the self-possession of his portrait subjects and the dignifying effect of his frank street views. Though I wish Evans had been more vocal about the racial injustices he saw, and I wish Alpers had acknowledged the shortcomings in the stories he told about his work, the images themselves remain indelible. In Emerson’s words: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.”

Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch was published by Princeton University Press in October 2020.

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Published on October 13, 2021 15:41

Baldwin Lee’s Southern Journeys

The afternoon I spoke with Baldwin Lee about his photographs, I thought of Little Richard.

Specifically, a short clip from a 1973 documentary about Jimi Hendrix, whose early career included a stint in Little Richard’s band. In the clip, Little Richard holds court from a piano bench. He wears a periwinkle-blue jumpsuit. A gray, sequined headband keeps his wild curls at bay, kinda. His face is beat. As the clip opens, Little Richard’s fantastic face and hair fill the frame. He was a star, he says of Jimi. He lifts his hands high and wide as the camera pans out . . . then lifts his eyes to the ceiling, swivels on the bench, turns back to the interviewer, arms still high: When I got him, he was a star. Sly told you that everybody is a star! The only problem is, some people haven’t been put in the dipper and poured back out on the world.

Baldwin Lee, Untitled, mid-1980s

Ten years later, Baldwin Lee stopped through Macon, Georgia, Little Richard’s hometown. Macon was one of many southern towns Lee visited at the start of what would become an almost decade-long project. He drove a Dodge Dart Sport. In each town, he left his car and walked the streets, carrying a 4-by-5-inch view camera, searching for someone to photograph, wilting in the summer heat. Sometimes, he took his map to the local police station. He’d tell them he was a photographer with expensive equipment and hand over a highlighter so they could circle the neighborhoods to avoid. “Of course,” he says in an interview with curator Jessica Bell Brown, in a forthcoming monograph published by Hunters Point Press, “I did the opposite.”

Lee had received perhaps the best photography education one could ask for in the United States in the twentieth century. His father—who fought in World War II with the U.S. Army (although he was a Chinese national) and later studied architecture at Pratt Institute on the G.I. Bill—told Lee when he was five years old that he would go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lee fulfilled the prophecy in his own way, taking up photography there as a student of Minor White. Next came the Yale School of Art, where he studied with Walker Evans and earned an MFA in 1975. Lee served as Evans’s personal printer, frequently stayed at the legend’s house in Connecticut, and handled some of Evans’s greatest negatives from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He’d spent enough time with the so-called best and brightest—or, in his words, “eggheads and all the rest”—so, in 1983, he took a two-thousand-mile road trip through the South.

Baldwin Lee, Untitled, mid-1980s

On that first journey, Lee says he photographed “landscapes, cityscapes, night studies, interiors, and portraits of people—white and Black, old and young, rural and urban, well-to-do and poor.” He proofed the film and realized that what interested him most were the pictures of poor Black Americans. “I was certain I had found my subject,” Lee states in the interview with Brown.

I pause here to confess that I felt a little sick with worry when I first read those words. Was Lee another in the long line of photographers, preachers, politicians, et cetera, et cetera, who seized upon the wretched of the earth as subject-cum-spectacle-cum- cash-cow? Then, I spent more time with one image—of a woman with her wigs.

Baldwin Lee, Untitled, mid-1980s

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come back to this photograph. I come back because it reminds me of my mother, who dragged little me to wig shops all over Dallas, and because I have known and loved so many other women who also loved their wigs. I know one thing thanks to them: there’s not a chance in hell this woman trotted out her wigs for some strange camera-toting man unless she liked him. Unless she trusted him a little bit. And since she trusted Baldwin Lee enough to show her wigs, I was inclined to trust him enough to call and ask why. Why these people, this project?

“The kind of photography that I was most interested in was the kind that involved going outside, involved physically and psychically and mentally and emotionally stepping into an unknown world, an unknown situation,” he explains. “It wasn’t just for entertainment, amusement, or diversion, there was a real mission. I discovered I was a political being.”

He’d been put into the dipper, you could say. He stayed there from 1983 to 1989, on the back roads of Tennessee (he’d already moved to Knoxville), Kentucky, Missouri, the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. What he poured back out on the world is a collection of roughly ten thousand images, most of which have never been seen. It is a body of work that the photographer Barney Kulok, the founder of Hunters Point Press, counts “among the great bodies of work of twentieth-century American photography.”

October 6, 2021

Feng Li’s Absurdist Dramas on the Streets of Chinese Cities

Thirteen years ago, while touring Buckingham Palace in London, Feng Li became enchanted by a colorful African parrot in one of the drawing rooms. A rush of awe and serenity overtook him—if only he, too, could have such a beautiful bird as a companion. The following year, an identical parrot landed on Li’s balcony in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province, and made his home there.

Events such as this led Li, a trained doctor of Chinese medicine who took up photography as a hobby in his twenties, to believe that there is some higher order in the universe. After quitting medicine, Li got a job as a civil servant in local government. Soon, he was taking photographs for the city’s publicity department, recording community events and urban development, always with the aim of making things look beautiful and perfect. This day job allowed him to transition to becoming a professional photographer, as if by accident. Yet, even in his placid, promotional imagery, he could often detect an otherness, like the flip side of a coin, a kind of unspoken performance, a complication, a sinister character lurking beneath the surface.

In recent years, Li has lived in and photographed Paris and Berlin. The change in settings didn’t prevent him from being able to find the subject of his fascination—people and how they reveal their true nature to his camera at unexpected moments. His photographs often unveil a scene in an absurd drama, and, in those buoyant flashes, there is just a whiff of tragedy. In each man-made comedy of errors, something is not quite right, but you can’t bring yourself to look away. “You are born into a world before you can enter it,” he says, “before you can even begin to grasp its power and complexity.”

October 4, 2021

A Photographer’s Odyssey across the Mediterranean

Massao Mascaro’s new series and photobook Sub Sole (2021) takes place around the Mediterranean Sea, the crucible of many journeys—some recent, real, raw, and grievous; others ancient and mythological. The interplay between past and present defines the quiet majesty of Mascaro’s observant eye, as he gazes across architecture, hair, skin, ruins, trees, streets, and the tentative gestures of friendship and connection.

Mascaro was born in Lille, France, in 1990 and studied photography in Belgium. After two published works, Ramo (2015) and Jardin (2019), in which he developed a distinctly poetic, slightly bleached-out black-and-white style, he was granted a fellowship by the Fondation A Stichting in Brussels—where the series Sub Sole is on view through December 2021, after a presentation at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. The Fondation A Stichting grant gave Mascaro a certain liberty to imagine a new project, one that would lead him, like Odysseus, to the Mediterranean Sea. By the end of his three-year itinerary, Mascaro had visited Ceuta, Naples, Athens, Palermo, Istanbul, Tunis, and Lampedusa. “I resorted to literature and poetry and started collecting sentences,” Mascaro told me recently. “Then, I started to build photographic sequences using ideas borrowed from literature,” specifically Eugenio Montale and Jorge Luis Borges.

The evidence of this crosspollination is marked in the titles of Sub Sole’s chapters, which also help intertwine Mascaro’s metaphorical work into one solid piece, starting with “Aujourd’hui” (today) and a vision of our time’s sea, partially blocked by an iron column that separates the landscape. The sea, Mascaro says, “is always a metaphor in the book.”

In the second chapter, “Porti e porte,” Mascaro questions the sea’s capacity of being both a door and a gate. “If you choose to cross the Mediterranean, legally or illegally, it is because you think there must be a door; at the same time, the door can be open or can be closed, and you never know that before standing in front of it,” Mascaro says. He returns to this duality in chapter five, “Hôte, hôte.” Mascaro explains that, in French, the word translates as both the one who welcomes and the one who is welcomed. “One should probably add that, in Greek, the word xenos, which means hôte in these two senses, also means stranger, the one who must above all be given hospitality.”

But who is given hospitality in the worst contemporary migration crisis? Mascaro’s pictures, working with the idea of absence and presence, hint at this question; a braid is completed at the beginning of the chapter and undone by its end. Mascaro captures the Mediterranean story through the people and objects in front of him and beneath the sun, hence “sub sole.” But the context in which Mascaro pursues his noble perspective of capturing all things on equal ground is fraught: the death toll of migrants seeking refuge in Europe may be lower than in the mid-2010s, but lives and boats lost to the sea are a tragically regular occurrence.

Mascaro’s choice not to include captions for the images in Sub Sole places him first as a confidant. “I always ask people to photograph them and, on all occasions, the process starts with me simply speaking to them,” he says. The register of that encounter is shared with us through images, but the verbal exchange is kept between photographer and subject. Mascaro speaks Italian and Spanish, “so it was easy to talk to people in most countries I visited for Sub Sole. But, because I was genuinely interested in their stories, sometimes I didn’t feel I had to take their picture; I just had a conversation and said goodbye.” For years, he adds, everyone saw the same tragic story on TV. “I wanted to know all their stories.”

In Mascaro’s work, can the political and poetic merge? Looking at the images in Sub Sole, I thought of James Baldwin’s words in Giovanni’s Room (1956): “Somewhere beneath this tense fragility was a strength as various as it was unyielding.” A portrait that exists alongside or within the tragedy of migration does not preclude or erase it. For the people Mascaro encountered, there is life ahead, and further unknowable journeys. Still, the photographer doesn’t deny pain, although he may deny the easy refuge in shock.

Sub Sole exists in a state of suspension: while there is warmth coming from the young people of various races and identities that form Mascaro’s “agora” (the ancient Greek gathering place), there is also a note of hopelessness hanging in the air. “Porti e porte”—a door can be a gate. The ruins featured in this mythological location reinforce this feeling. A one-time sovereignty now rests shattered in pieces. Who was welcomed and who was denied? “I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men—I shall be dead,” Mascaro quotes from Borges’s short story “The Immortal” (1947).

For the closure of Mascaro’s wanderings, with images of lettering strewn on the ground, a throng of swimmers in the water, and three disconnected handsets dangling ominously from a phone booth, Mascaro looks back at the beginning: the alphabet. “In my readings about the Mediterranean, I discovered that, in fact, the alphabet came from their civilization.” One of the most ancient steles with Phoenician inscriptions dates from circa 850–740 BCE, and was discovered on the island of Sardinia. “The letter A, for example, comes from the pictorial representation of the head of an ox,” Mascaro says. “I enjoyed the idea of the last chapter being composed of pictures that go back to letters and alphabets.”

All photographs by Massao Mascaro from the series Sub Sole, 2017–21
Courtesy the artist

Massao Mascaro’s Sub Sole was published by Chose Commune in 2021; his exhibition of the series is on view at Fondation A Stitching, Brussels, through December 19, 2021.

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

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Published on October 04, 2021 08:42

Announcing the 2021 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

Initiated in 2012, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. Each year, thirty-five selected books are shortlisted in three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year.

This year’s shortlist selection took place over the course of three days at Aperture’s offices in New York, and involved the review of more than eight hundred submissions. The jury for the shortlist included Emilie Boone (art historian), Sonel Breslav (director of fairs and editions, Printed Matter), Darius Himes (international head of photographs, Christie’s), Lesley A. Martin (creative director, Aperture Foundation), and Jody Quon (director of photography, New York Magazine).

“This year’s submissions faced more than eighteen months of unprecedented production challenges in scheduling and labor, access to material, and the uncertainty of another important element in bookmaking—the ability of artists, publishers, and their collaborators to come together,” observed Breslav. “It’s inspiring to witness the resilience of these artists, subjects, and communities. We’ve all had to learn to adapt in order to continue our work, finding new directions along the way.”

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact made itself known in more than one way, as Martin describes, through “the notable number of very strong, introspective projects that brought forth material grounded in the studio, as well as those drawn from archives and older bodies of work.” This year’s shortlist jury also selected three books as a Jurors’ Special Mention, acknowledging the prevalence of catalogues that responded to canceled shows or reduced audience access with publications that can also serve as DIY exhibitions.

A final jury will gather at Paris Photo this November to select the winners for all three categories. From there, the shortlisted and winning titles will be profiled in The PhotoBook Review (a newsprint publication that will accompany the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine) and exhibited in Paris, New York, and tour internationally thereafter.

Below, see the thirty-five selected titles for the 2021 PhotoBook Awards shortlist.

First PhotoBook

Andrea Alessandrini, Piccola Russia, Witty Books, Turin, Italy

Indu Antony, Why can’t bras have buttons?, Mazhi Books (self-published), Bangalore, India

Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina and Verónica Fieiras, eds., Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, CHACO, Buenos Aires

Melba Arellano, Carretera Nacional, Los Sumergidos, Hudson, New York

Wiosna van Bon, Family Stranger, Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Deanna Dikeman, Leaving and Waving, Chose Commune, Marseille, France

Jeano Edwards, EverWonderful, Self-published, Brooklyn

Nancy Floyd, Weathering Time, GOST Books, London

Will Harris, You Can Call Me Nana, Overlapse, London

Jana Hartmann, Mastering the Elements, Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Joe Johnson, Office Hours, There There Now, Columbia, Missouri

Tarrah Krajnak, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Dais Books, Casper, Wyoming

Luke Le, What are you looking for?, Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Australia

Kanta Nomura, The Yoshida Dormitory Students’ History, Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo

Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Untitled, Capricious Publishing, New York

Pacifico Silano, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine, Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Sebastian Stadler, A Close Up of a Large Rock, I Think, Kodoji Press, Baden, Switzerland

Al J Thompson, Remnants of an Exodus, Gnomic Book, Portland, Oregon

Eva Veldhoen, Play, Self-published, Utrecht, Netherlands

Elliott Verdier, Reaching for Dawn, Dunes, Paris

Previous Next

Andrea Alessandrini
Piccola Russia
Witty Books, Turin, Italy

Indu Antony
Why can’t bras have buttons?
Mazhi Books (self-published), Bangalore, India

Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina and Verónica Fieiras, eds.
Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina
CHACO, Buenos Aires

Melba Arellano
Carretera Nacional
Los Sumergidos, Hudson, New York

Wiosna van Bon
Family Stranger
Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Deanna Dikeman
Leaving and Waving
Chose Commune, Marseille, France

Jeano Edwards
EverWonderful
Self-published, Brooklyn

Nancy Floyd
Weathering Time
GOST Books, London

Will Harris
You Can Call Me Nana
Overlapse, London

Jana Hartmann
Mastering the Elements
Eriskay Connection, Breda, Netherlands

Joe Johnson
Office Hours
There There Now, Columbia, Missouri

Tarrah Krajnak
El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan
Dais Books, Casper, Wyoming

Luke Le
What are you looking for?
Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Australia

Kanta Nomura
The Yoshida Dormitory Students’ History
Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo

Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Untitled
Capricious Publishing, New York

Pacifico Silano
I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine
Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Sebastian Stadler
A Close Up of a Large Rock, I Think
Kodoji Press, Baden, Switzerland

Al J Thompson
Remnants of an Exodus
Gnomic Book, Portland, Oregon

Eva Veldhoen
Play
Self-published, Utrecht, Netherlands

Elliott Verdier
Reaching for Dawn
Dunes, Paris

PhotoBook of the Year

Farah Al Qasimi, Hello Future, Capricious Publishing, New York

Jessica Backhaus, Cut Outs, Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany

Alejandro Cartagena, Suburban Bus, The Velvet Cell, Berlin

Bieke Depoorter, Agata, Des Palais (self-published), Ghent, Belgium

Isaac Diggs and Edward Hillel, Electronic Landscapes: Music, Space and Resistance in Detroit, +KGP, Queens, New York

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

Rahim Fortune, I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Lora Webb Nichols, Encampment, Wyoming, Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, Steidl, Göttingen, Germany

Vasantha Yogananthan, Amma, Chose Commune, Marseille, France

Previous Next

Farah Al Qasimi
Hello Future
Capricious Publishing, New York

Jessica Backhaus
Cut Outs
Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany

Alejandro Cartagena
Suburban Bus
The Velvet Cell, Berlin

Bieke Depoorter
Agata
Des Palais (self-published), Ghent, Belgium

Isaac Diggs and Edward Hillel
Electronic Landscapes: Music, Space and Resistance in Detroit
+KGP, Queens, New York

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

Rahim Fortune
I Can’t Stand to See You Cry
Loose Joints, Marseille, France

Lora Webb Nichols
Encampment, Wyoming
Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Gilles Peress
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
Steidl, Göttingen, Germany

Vasantha Yogananthan
Amma
Chose Commune, Marseille, France

Photography Catalogue of the Year

André Kertész: Postcards from Paris, Elizabeth Siegel, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Bad Ass and Beauty—One Love, Mao Ishikawa, T&M Projects, Tokyo

Mirror with a Memory, Dan Leers and Taylor Fisch, eds., Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

The New Woman Behind the Camera, Andrea Nelson, ed., National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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

Previous Next

André Kertész: Postcards from Paris
Elizabeth Siegel
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Bad Ass and Beauty—One Love
Mao Ishikawa
T&M Projects, Tokyo

Mirror with a Memory
Dan Leers and Taylor Fisch, eds.
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

The New Woman Behind the Camera
Andrea Nelson, ed.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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

Jurors’ Special Mention: Catalogue as DIY Exhibition

Pass It On. Private Stories, Public Histories, Daria Tuminas, ed., Fotodok, Utrecht, Netherlands, and Meteoro Editions, Amsterdam

Propositions for Alternative Narratives, Photoworks, ed., Brighton, United Kingdom

Take It from Here, Zora J Murff and Rana Young, eds., There There Now, Columbia, Missouri

Previous Next

Pass It On. Private Stories, Public Histories
Daria Tuminas, ed.
Fotodok, Utrecht, Netherlands, and Meteoro Editions, Amsterdam

Propositions for Alternative Narratives
Photoworks, ed.
Brighton, United Kingdom

Take It from Here
Zora J Murff and Rana Young, eds.
There There Now, Columbia, Missouri

The 2021 PhotoBook Award winners will be announced during Paris Photo on Friday, November 12, 2021.

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Published on October 04, 2021 06:25

September 30, 2021

Announcing the Winning Artists of the Creator Labs Photo Fund

This summer, Aperture and Google’s Creator Labs teamed up to launch a new initiative, the Creator Labs Photo Fund, aimed at providing financial support to photographers in the wake of COVID-19. Selected by Aperture’s editors, the twenty winning artists are recognized for their exceptional vision as well as the strength and originality of their portfolios, and will be awarded a prize of $5,000 each to sustain their work and practice.

The winners of the Creator Labs Photo Fund are:

Daveed Baptiste, Adraint Bereal, Shawn Bush, Jasmine Clarke, Matt Eich, Arielle Gray, Naomieh Jovin, Priya Suresh Kambli, Tommy Kha, Sydney Mieko King, Miguel Limon, Sophie Lopez, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, Alana Perino, Jade Thiraswas, Bryan Thomas, Maximilian Thuemler, Allie Tsubota, Aaron Turner, and Jasmine Veronica.

Aperture serves as an essential platform for artists, fostering critical dialogue in the photographic community—in print, in person, and online. “We are honored to partner with Google on the Creator Labs Photo Fund,” says Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin. “Aperture’s team of editors has selected a dynamic and diverse group of photographers, whose talent, vision, and promise are truly inspiring. We all communicate with images today—and we encourage all photographers to continue their practices ensuring a more rigorous, more expansive range of expressions to the field. Together, Aperture and Google are proud to offer these twenty photographers our support, which we hope will be meaningful for their work and careers.”

Daveed Baptise, from the series Haiti To Hood, 2018–ongoing

Daveed Baptiste

In a series of built environments, photographer and fashion designer Daveed Baptiste examines social dynamics in Haitian American life. Drawing from his experience immigrating to and growing up in the US, Baptiste collects and rearranges materials into domestic scenes. “The common home is composed of a series of objects and surfaces within their own state of being, at times symbolizing financial status, choice, and personality,” says Baptiste. Brought together in his series Haiti to Hood, Baptiste’s layered tableaux showcase his subjects as individuals, while speaking to the evolution of their Haitian American identity.

Adraint Bereal, Untitled, 2020, from the series The Black Yearbook

Adraint Bereal

Adraint Bereal’s The Black Yearbook combines images and interviews in an effort to share the experiences of Black students at the University of Texas at Austin—where only 5 percent of students identify as Black on a campus of 52,000. Since 2017, Bereal has carried his camera around, photographing moments of communal gatherings and making portraits of his peers. In one image, band members stand in formation with their backs turned to the camera, a choice Bereal explains as an act of “affirming we could hold that space and choose not to face anyone. I like to think of it as giving yourself grace.” For Bereal, this series aims to examine not only the adversity faced, but “the joy of existing in such a place that has historically gone out of their way to keep Black students outside the institution.”

Shawn Bush, Sublimated Notation, 2020, from the series Angle of Draw

Shawn Bush

Through the lenses of the natural landscape and propaganda imagery, Shawn Bush examines the intersections of power, sustainability, and whiteness in the US. Working in his studio, Bush draws from propaganda imagery from the 1900s, 1960s, and 1970s to create his starkly lit, almost surreal black-and-white photographs. Throughout his process, Bush has considered the impact of the fossil-fuel industry on the natural environment, local economy, and future prospects of those left behind by corporations. The resulting series, Angle of Draw, considers the ways framing imagery impacts the national imagination—upholding systems of social, political, and economic control. “I was thinking about the photographic frame and the ability to crop as a form that censors and advertises,” Bush says.

Jasmine Clarke, Marissa, 2018, from the series Shadow of the Palm

Jasmine Clarke

“Myths, like photographs, exist somewhere between truth and fabrication, exactly where I want to stand as an artist,” states Jasmine Clarke. Inspired by a wide range of artists, from novelist Haruki Murakami to filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, each of Clarke’s photographic vignettes transports the viewer into a dreamscape. A shadowed figure stands ominously behind patterned curtains, smoke rises against a fence, an obscured Ludi board’s “Home” is alit with a harsh flash, a single eye peers through shuttered doors. Walking the line between dreams and reality, Clarke’s lushly colored, uncanny images bring together her own disparate strands of familial identity and history. “I see memory and family history as fragmented, pieced together through images, telling multiple overarching narratives of cultural identity,” says Clarke. “Family is also mythology, passed down through generations.”

Matt Eich, Untitled, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2020, from the series Bird Song Over Black Water

Matt Eich

Since 2015, Matt Eich has photographed his home state of Virginia in the ongoing series Bird Song over Black Water. Working with medium- and large-format cameras, Eich documents the natural beauty and brokenness of the landscape, exploring the ways humans have left their mark on the environment. Describing his process as largely intuitive, Eich’s black-and-white photographs simultaneously hold a quality of intimacy and detachment. Informed by the state’s colonial history, the resulting body of work presents a disarming portrait of life in Virginia. As Eich states, “I’m interested in pictures that elicit questions rather than pretend to hold answers.”

Arielle Gray, Otis’ Room, 2020, from the series Exodus 3:14

Arielle Gray

Arielle Gray’s photographs beckon to a near mythical surrounding. Her series Exodus 3:14 takes its name from the scripture in which God tells Moses, “I am that I am,” followed by the instruction to state: “I am has sent me to you.” For Gray, this passage is particularly meaningful, as it nods “to a situation in which a group of people are struggling to find peace and salvation.” Photographing her close friends and family as they sifted through ideas of mortality and guilt—from her grandmother burning a catheter, to her uncle Otis’s bedroom and serene portraits of her loved ones—Gray’s work gives us a glimpse into how a group finds everyday deliverance in each other. After all, as Gray notes, “This is a story of many.”

[image error]Naomieh Jovin, The Gathering, 2021, from the series Gwo Fanm

Naomieh Jovin

The title of Naomieh Jovin’s series Gwo Fanm translates to “Big Woman” in Haitian Creole, alluding to women whose impact on those around them radiates outward. After the passing of her parents, Jovin found herself coming back to this phrase as she explored her family’s origin story. She combines found and original images, audio interviews, and installations into richly multilayered photographs—often featuring the artist’s own direct intervention through colored paper, cutouts, or writing. “I kept in the parts that still complete the narrative and give context to what is taking place in the image while accounting for loss,” she notes. “I’ve always been able to recognize whose body part belongs to who and create this fuller perspective. It impresses me each time, because the picture becomes richer, more vibrant—almost to the point of me being able to imagine the sounds and voices.”

Priya Suresh Kambli, Kambli Family (Studio Portrait) & Which one is different, 2019, from the series Buttons for Eyes

Priya Suresh Kambli

Pulling from her family’s photographic archive, Priya Suresh Kambli’s series Buttons for Eyes explores cultural hybridization, identity, and migration. Working intuitively, Kambli combines photographs and family heirlooms—such as a letter she and her sister wrote to their father—before concealing elements of the images or drawing out certain features. Through the inclusion of natural light and rainbows created through the use of a prism, Kambli infuses playful experimentation throughout the series. She had asked her husband for the prism for her fortieth birthday, but she initially had difficulty using it. “I literally couldn’t make it work,” she says. “It sat in my studio for two years, and when I picked it up again, it worked, like magic.”

Tommy Kha, May (A Costume Drama), 2020, from the series Facades

Tommy Kha

For Tommy Kha, picture-making is tied directly to fragmentation. His series Facades incorporates this concept of fragments in an exploration of Asian American identity and otherness in today’s social landscape. Kha’s playfully experimental images incorporate cardboard cutouts, jigsaw puzzles, paper masks, temporary tattoos, and more, straddling the line between still life, portrait, and self-portrait. Without the use of Photoshop, Kha builds all of his scenes in-camera using a combination of fabricated props, available light, and performance. Leaning into moments of awkwardness, Kha views his work as an aesthetic device to decode, confirm, and validate Asian American identity, stating, “at the moment, there’s quite a bit of space to visualize Asian American narratives and archives, and what that can look like. There’s excitement to see what those pictures can look like.”

Sydney Mieko King, Redcliff St., 2020, from the series Entanglement

Sydney Mieko King

Sydney Mieko King fuses the two- and three-dimensional in her abstracted images layering family archival photographs against plaster molds of her body. Through this intersection, King’s body acts as a container of personal and ancestral memory, as well as a means of exploring her own identity as a mixed-race woman. The plaster molds she creates are attempts at evoking movement and breath, such as a “bend in the stomach, legs wrapped around each other, the overlapping parts of the body.” Ironically, the task of molding herself is an exercise in stillness, in order to prevent the plaster from falling off of her body. “Photography allows me to invent overlaps between my own body and experiences and those of my family. The medium flattens and resolves space,” says King. “The camera’s way of equalizing presence and nonpresence allows me to capture a shifting space in which present and past moments are suspended in time and thus able to interact.”

Miguel Limon, Al Principio, 2019, from the series Hogares Perdidos

Miguel Limon

When Miguel Limon visited the steel mill where their grandfather worked on the South Side of Chicago, they recalled feeling overwhelmed: “Having known the impact the steel industry has had locally and nationally, it’s a lot to consider how many different histories are tied to the space.” Limon’s series Hogares Perdidos highlights the impact of Latinx and Chicanx immigrants in the Midwest, reconnecting members of the community to their work and grappling with familial memory. Citing LaToya Ruby Frazier and Laura Aguilar as influences, Limon utilizes self-portraiture to insert himself into scenes of family life and labor. Limon reflects, “As a whole, I believe being both in front of and behind the camera allows for an assertion of identity outwardly but also inwardly, providing the liminal space to define my histories and their worldly contexts.”

Sophie Lopez, At times I forget my mother has existed in the minds of others, 2021, from the series Productions of Chimera

Sophie Lopez

Inspired by I Spy books, Sophie Lopez combines family photos, household objects, and other ephemera into richly layered tableaux. Certain recurring motifs appear throughout her images, from fruit peeled or cut open, to the artist’s hand intervening into the frame, to washi tape—which Lopez uses to represent nonlinear thinking and history-making. Grounded in postcolonial theory, Lopez’s work explores concepts of belonging, power in agency, and the vernacular photo as evidence. “I named this series Productions of Chimera because it felt as though I was rewriting as I saw fit,” says Lopez. “Chimera is defined as an object that is aspirationally longed for but is ultimately illusionary or impossible to achieve.”

Giancarlo Montes Santangelo, “Young banana plants, growing prospects of a country,” 2021

Giancarlo Montes Santangelo

In an ongoing series, Giancarlo Montes Santangelo traces the effects of colonization in Puerto Rico and Argentina, mapping the relationships between memory, the body, race, and history. Montes Santangelo’s collaged photographs bring together the artist’s own body and staged scenes against archival images from the two countries. “These two archives offer an index of divergent histories that cemented the ways in which many—my family and I included—have had to negotiate with the past, present, and future,” says Montes Santangelo. “Collaging offers me a way to recontextualize archival images and position queer world-making as a method of renegotiating with colonial pasts.”

Alana Perino, Dad, 2020, from the series Pictures of Birds

Alana Perino

Alana Perino’s family has often expressed a concern around the “strangeness” of their work. Their stepmother, Letty, was known to ask, “Why don’t you take pictures of birds?” and eventually, Perino accepted her suggestion. “Everything became a bird to me,” they say. “The plants were birds of paradise; my father is a snowbird.” Depicting otherworldly Floridian scenes that confront disparate ideas, Perino’s photographs possess an uncanny quality that collapses the boundaries between the naturally occurring and the staged. Nativity figures shrouded in plastic stand abandoned on the sidewalk, shells gather in memorial around a bathtub, their father floats in a pool with only his face breaking above the surface. Perino finds their images feel most successful when conceptions of “abundance and scarcity, vitality and despair, acceptance and critique become porous or indistinguishable.” Ultimately, Pictures of Birds serves as a remarkable and bitterly affectionate attempt to find strength in the insecurities of heritage.

Jade Thiraswas, Portrait of Eh Sun at 14 years old, Rochester, New York, 2018, from the series Young Cash Karen

Jade Thiraswas

Since 2017, Jade Thiraswas has documented a tight-knit community of refugee youth from Myanmar who have resettled in Rochester, New York. The men in Thiraswas’s series are Karen, an Indigenous ethnic minority from Southeast Asia. Thiraswas photographs her subjects in their homes, in the backyard, in traditional clothing and soccer uniforms, offering an intimate look into systems of care and belonging. Yet for Thiraswas, these everyday moments balance against the subtle and apparent effects of globalization, assimilation to American society, and the preservation of an endangered Southeast Asian culture. The series title, Young Cash Karen, refers to the self-chosen name the men formed together. “They proudly use the name to express a sense of belonging and solidarity amongst each other and with the global Karen refugee diaspora,” says Thiraswas. “They retain a sense of unapologetic pride of their identity and history.”

Bryan Thomas, Mexico Beach, 2019, from the series The Sea in the Darkness Calls

Bryan Thomas

Each day seems to bring a new alarming statistic about the impact of climate change. Bryan Thomas’s ongoing series The Sea in the Darkness Calls documents the Florida coastline, depicting rising sea levels against present and future changes to its landscape. Rather than exclusively focusing on foreboding research findings, Thomas describes his work as speaking “to the more elemental ways in which our lives—and our physical and spiritual relationship to nature—are being permanently and detrimentally affected.” Photographing the land and sea, and people whose livelihoods depend on them, Thomas searches for the somber truths about the inevitability of loss and the shame of inaction in the face of climate change, asking us to consider how we will respond, not so much in the distant future, but in our present moment.

Maximilian Thuemler, Self-Portrait Toppled Over Out Back, Glynn County, Georgia, 2020, from the series Born From the Limb

Maximilian Thuemler

Maximilian Thuemler’s Born from the Limb uses the landscape of the US South as a means of exploring relationships between labor, land, and migration. Working in the natural world, Thuemler finds “physical traces of the past . . . in the form of ruins, marks, imprints, vacancies.” Approaching his photographs with a balanced mix of directness and obscurity, these traces materialize as the backdrop for his performances. Throughout his images, Thuemler droops over a tree, wrestles with mud, or repeatedly moves around in circles. These movements highlight a cyclical exhaustion that Thuemler views as analogous to the relationship between the US and its history, stating, “The topic of Blackness and its representation is exhausting, because it is in part infinite.”

Allie Tsubota, Untitled (Gila River), 2021, from the series This Brilliant Flash of Light

Allie Tsubota

Weaving together archival imagery of maps detailing sites of Japanese American incarceration during World War II with black-and-white portraits and seascapes, Allie Tsubota examines how the camera can recall and recover historical relics and psychic refuse embedded in both the landscape and the body. Deploying ideas of migration, racialization, and assimilation, Tsubota’s series This Brilliant Flash of Light traces racial melancholia through the past and present. “How do we resist closure in a society that fetishizes resolution? How do we advocate for reparations while refusing to forget the injustices that warrant them?” Tsubota asks. “To stand in an open wound is to resist the neatening of history—to honor the oceans that continue to live in our bodies, and to adopt a temporality through which our pasts, presents, and futures remain intimately entwined.”

Aaron Turner, Untitled (self, extended), 2020, from the series Black Alchemy Vol. 3

Aaron Turner

Aaron Turner asks: what is the role of the color black and what is considered Black art? Working in the studio, his constructed scenes consider how the past, present, and future interact in issues of abstraction, race, and history. Influenced by the work of Frank Bowling, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Adrienne Edwards, among others, Turner’s series Black Alchemy explores what “Black art” is and the representation of the Black experience. In discussing the color black, Turner notes “There are different tones, hues, values of black, just like blue or red. Why treat it as secondary?” Seeing it as both material and metaphor, Turner identifies a duality (or double consciousness) that Blackness can inhabit.

Jasmine Veronica, Snatched Waist, 2021, from the series Guide to a Healthy Body
All photographs courtesy the artists

Jasmine Veronica

Jasmine Veronica’s Guide to a Healthy Body critiques societal assumptions around health and wellness. Layering imagery of the body, nature, food, and movement, Veronica’s compositions bring into conversation the ways our health is often blindly defined by outward appearance. In one image, Veronica contrasts two photos—one of herself wearing a waist trainer; and in the second, holding the stomach the trainer is meant to hide—interlaying them against images of food and workout gear. Presented in a uniform black and white, each image has an almost rhythmic quality, reflecting the ways body positivity, diet, and workout culture continuously consume our day-to-day lives. Veronica’s series wonders aloud what it means to be seen as healthy, while reflecting on her own journey through body positivity. “This is something that I’m still trying to find the answer to,” Veronica says. “I would say that I resonate more with body neutrality or anything that allows someone to love themselves without fear of critique and harassment.”

The Creator Labs Photo Fund is presented by Aperture and Google’s Creator Labs. Artist statements by Allie Monck.

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Published on September 30, 2021 06:42

September 28, 2021

Visions of Nightlife from Johannesburg to Ibiza

To be in a nightclub. Bodies moving in rhythm. The smells—sweat, cigarettes, that sweet tang of a smoke machine. And the beat. The beat, which rewires your movements, your mind. The sway, the ecstasy of release. In that moment, you are saved.

Such memories have been the stuff of lockdown pipe dreams. It is, therefore, both diverting and bittersweet to browse two recently published books on clubbing—one expansive in its broad geography and history, the other contrastingly specific. Ten Cities: Clubbing in Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Berlin, Naples, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol, Lisbon 1960–March 2020 (2020) is an ambitious record of these select music scenes. Dave Swindells’s Ibiza ’89 (2020) brings together images Swindells made on a short magazine assignment in the summer of 1989, sparked by the influence of the island on the U.K.’s then thriving acid house and rave scenes, known as the Second Summer of Love.

Bernard Matussiere, Fela Kuti with the queens, Stratford, London, 1983
Courtesy the artist

The books take distinct, even opposing, views. Ten Cities tries to push against the idea that clubbing is a frivolous or universal experience, citing, through exhaustive essays from various international figures, the political, economic, geographic, and local particularities of various nightlife scenes. Clubs, the book’s editors Johannes Hossfeld Etyang, Joyce Nyairo, and Florian Sievers explain, are “prisms and laboratories of society and the city.” Ten Cities centers Africa’s music and culture, and makes 1960 the narrative starting point because that was when independence swept the continent. “As a general rule, the history of club culture is told without the African musical metropoles,” Hossfeld Etyang writes. The authors position Nairobi as their project’s home—a vivid picture is painted of the Starlight nightclub where Barack Obama Sr. danced in the 1960s—before veering off to other cities, chosen in an attempt to disrupt established ideas of certain cities as clubbing meccas and others as backwaters or slums.

Dave Swindells, Go-go dancing superstars at Ku, 1989, from Ibiza ’89

Dave Swindells, Hug club: celebrating making it through the night
(just about) at Amnesia, 1989, from Ibiza ’89

Amusingly, Ibiza ’89 does everything Ten Cities tries to avoid; it is Eurocentric and fawning (Ibiza, we learn, is “Europe’s best party island,” according to the music producer Terry Farley), and it paints clubbing as hedonistic and vaguely manic, focusing on the young, the beautiful. Still, the photographs are lovely to look at.

In the 1930s, the South African musician and author Todd Matshikiza, then a young boy, attended a party thrown by the musician Boet Gashe, an event he recalled in 1957, in Drum magazine: “You saw the delirious effect of perpetual motion. . . . Perpetual motion in a musty hold where man makes friends without restraint.” The line, which captures the heady feel of clubbing, the existential epiphanies found in ephemeral places, could be a description of any one of the photographs of gyrating revelers in Ibiza ’89, but it is quoted in Ten Cities. Its inclusion there highlights the challenge of analyzing, or indeed photographing, club culture. How does one balance a focus on the shared and at the same time on the specific, the local, the “scene”?

Jürgen Schadeberg, The Jazzolomos: Jacob “Mzala” Lepers (bass), Sol “Beegeepee” Klaaste (piano), and Benni “Gwigwi” Mrwebi (alto sax), Johannesburg, 1953
© the artist Mosa'ab Elshamy, Mahraganat, Cairo, 2013

Mosa’ab Elshamy, Mahraganat, Cairo, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Frágil birthday party at Convento do Beato, Lisbon, 1996
Courtesy LuxFrágil

It is notable that so many astounding clubbing photography projects exist—for example, Tod Papageorge’s Studio 54 or Tom Wood’s Looking for Love. Yet nearly all work around familiar themes: beauty, sex, and glamour, peppered with moments of sexual rejection and flashes of exhaustion. Ten Cities is smart in not scrupling to celebrate these familiar elements, while simultaneously homing in on the unexplored, the theoretical, the minutiae. We are reminded that clubs are shaped not just by dancing bodies and good DJs but also by transport links, alcohol taxes, parking spaces, coups, elections, and governments. Yet gems by Jürgen Schadeberg and Tobias Zielony lend a “God, to have been there” air and offset some of the more intensive academic positing.

Margarida Martins and Mário Marques, Absolut Citron Party, Frágil, Lisbon, ca. late 1980s

Tobias Zielony, Shine, from the series Maskirovka, Kyiv, 2017
Courtesy the artist and KOW, Berlin

For those convinced that COVID-19 has decimated nightclubs, it will be uplifting to remember that they have survived big trouble in the past, be it a monthlong, dusk-to-dawn curfew in Nairobi in 1982, regulations that banned amateur bands in Kyiv in the early 1970s, or ad hoc surveillance, such as that of Fela Kuti, whose growing popularity with Lagos crowds briefly irked the Nigerian government, which, ironically, raided him right ahead of FESTAC ’77, a landmark international festival celebrating African culture.

If Ten Cities encourages reflection, Ibiza ’89 thrills to escapism, embracing the cliché of sun, sea, sand, and sex—the gaze on a thong-clad bottom, the close crops on beautiful youths, the sweat on an entangled couple. It is a fascinating lesson in how myths are made, how rose-tinted glasses are applied. In the book’s introduction, Swindells recalls how clubbers on the island would tell him that 1989 was too late, he should have come earlier: “You’d have loved it here in 1987!”

Dave Swindells, The bold and the beautiful: great pattern clashing from Boy George and the gang at Amnesia, 1989, from Ibiza ’89
All photographs by Dave Swindells courtesy the artist

And yet, despite Swindells’s mocking tone, his book is driven by the same nostalgia, proffering the idea that those were the glory years, that later, in Farley’s estimation, the scene “lost its character.” The beauty of the pictures and the hazy memories tussle with the reality briefly alluded to in Alix Sharkey’s 1989 essay, produced on the same commission as the images, with its smattered references to burnout, addiction, and local distress. But today’s zeitgeist is nostalgic too. Just weeks after its publication, Ibiza ’89 sold out, trading for triple the price on fashion resale sites—evidence of the current thirst for the retro in fashion, photography, and, most visibly, on Instagram. Still, how appropriate. As both Ten Cities and Ibiza ’89 show us, great clubs cannot exist without some nostalgia, without the sense of time slipping away, without FOMO, without the intoxicating promise of unrepeatable experiences, all bolstered by fables and hearsay.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies,” under the column “Viewfinder.”

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Published on September 28, 2021 11:16

September 22, 2021

A Japanese Photographer’s Bittersweet Archive of His Late Wife

Seiichi Furuya, based in Graz, Austria, for almost fifty years, is an established member of the European photo community and cofounder of the esteemed journal Camera Austria International. But his departure from his native Japan to his adopted country of Austria is not widely known. At the end of September 1973, Furuya left from Yokohama on a Soviet cargo ship, arriving in Vienna in early October. Furuya had been a student of photography at Tokyo Polytechnic University during an increasingly turbulent time in postwar Japan. Between the university riots, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the anti–Japan-US Security Treaty movement, Tokyo was like a battlefield. Furuya frequently participated in the demonstrations with his camera. But as the movement cooled off, realizing that there was no longer a place for him in Japan, he burned his negatives and left.

Furuya moved to Graz two years after his arrival in Vienna and soon connected with other photographers. He became a founding and active member of Fotogalerie im Forum Stadtpark, an artist cooperative organizing exhibitions and occasionally planning workshops with photographers, including Mary Ellen Mark and Ralph Gibson. In 1979, the group started the inaugural Symposion über Fotografie (Symposium on Photography), which occurred annually until 1997. The inaugural three-day symposium included participants such as Lee Friedlander, Robert Heinecken, Joseph Kosuth, and John Szarkowski. Furuya also served as liaison to many key Japanese photographers working at that time, including Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Nobuyoshi Araki, helping many of them set up their first exhibitions in Europe. Around the same time as the launch of the symposium, Furuya collaborated with Manfred Willmann and Christine Frisinghelli to launch a new magazine, Camera Austria, the first issue of which was published in 1980.

Face to Face is the sixth volume of work Seiichi Furuya has published under a variation of the title Mémoires (1989, 1995, 1997, 2006, 2010). Unlike with the other five books, Furuya shares equal authorship in this edition: Christine Gössler’s gaze at Furuya, and his gaze at Gössler, intersect through photographs that each made of the other. While Furuya continues to work with the materials created during Gössler’s life—like an ongoing body of work that resulted from a trip they took to Bologna, among other images from their life together—he has stated that this is the last of the Mémoires variations. In these works, Furuya challenges us to think about what it means for an artist to go so deep into a single, emotionally charged body of work, made so long ago and revisited time and time again.

Cover and back of Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler, Face to Face (Chose Commune, 2020)

Yasufumi Nakamori: Face to Face [Chose Commune, 2020], published last year, is the first entry to the Mémoires series in ten years. Before diving into Face to Face, please tell us how you left Japan for Austria in the early 1970s and what you were doing before that in Japan.

Seiichi Furuya: At the end of September 1973, I left Japan from the Port of Yokohama on a Soviet cargo ship called Khabarousk and arrived in Austria’s capital Vienna in early October, along the way passing Nakhodka, Khabarovsk, and Moscow. Around 1970, I was a student photographer in Tokyo during what was known as a turbulent time in postwar Japan. Between university riots, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the anti–Japan-US Security Treaty movement, Tokyo was like a battlefield. I was around twenty years old at the time. Although I didn’t belong to any particular group, I was one of those people who frequently participated in the demonstrations. For me, bringing my camera and taking photos did not preclude me from participating in the demonstrations. The highly charged atmosphere of the society gradually cooled off as the Japan-US Security Treaty was set up to renew automatically. When the turbulence ended, I started realizing that there was no longer a place for me in Japan, and that thought grew stronger over time. I had a friend who had left Japan earlier and was living in Vienna at the time. Eventually I left Japan under the pretext of visiting this friend. After spending two nights on the ship, we docked at Nakhodka. The moment I stepped onto the land, I thought to myself that I was probably never going to return to Japan. Right before leaving Japan, I burned all the photographic records of my bustling life in Tokyo.

Christine Gössler, Graz, 1979

Nakamori: Graz has been the base of your creative activities for forty-five years, during which you cofounded Camera Austria. When and for what reason did you move to Graz? Please talk about how you arrived at co-founding Camera Austria, especially your involvement with Symposion on Photography.

Furuya: After staying in Vienna for two years, I moved to Graz, which is the second largest city in Austria, and I have been here since. The biggest reason for the move was that I got a job at a camera store in Graz through an acquaintance whom I came to know through photography. While working at the store, I came to know others who shared interest in photography and eventually became a founding and active member of Fotogalerie im Forum Stadtpark, an artist-based voluntary organization. In the beginning, we organized about ten photo exhibitions a year and planned workshops of famous photographers from time to time. Some notable workshops that I attended include ones for Mary Ellen Mark and Ralph Gibson. Three years ago, I found in the attic some black-and-white Super 8 film, which had detailed footages of Mark’s workshop from 1979. In the fall of 1979, we started the inaugural Symposion über Fotografie [Symposion on Photography]. We invited a dozen or so guests from around the world who were active in photography and hosted a three-day symposium.

Americans including Lee Friedlander, Robert Heinecken, Joseph Kosuth, Allan Porter, and John Szarkowski also attended the symposium. As part of the brain behind the whole operation, Christine Frisinghelli was involved with the founding of both the organization as well as Camera Austria International. She was in charge of all the negotiations and translated the inadequate words of those of us who were self-claimed photographers into something beautiful. I remember it as if everything happened only a few days ago… driving to the airport to pick up Friedlander and Szarkowski, working on a draft version of what was going to be published about the symposium, Friedlander used a handmade lightbox which was stored in the darkroom up in the attic to copy slides he brought for the lecture. At the time, for Europeans and Japanese, the mecca of photography was America. Instead of us going over to America, we invited folks who were active on the frontline of photography in America to come over and it was a huge success. For the inaugural symposium, we also invited Shoji Yamagishi from Japan. Unfortunately, he passed away while still corresponding with me to finalize his lecture. Szarkowski paid tribute in front of his portrait at the symposium.

We hosted the Symposion on Photography every fall for seventeen years until 1997. In charge of Japanese affairs, I worked with Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Tsuneo Enari, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Nobuyoshi Araki, and probably helped many of them set up their first show or solo exhibition in Europe. While working on the symposium, we started planning for the publication of a photography magazine. Manfred Willmann of the organization and I worked on initial drafts of the new magazine while referencing the latest Japanese camera magazines that were getting delivered to my place every month. In 1980, the first issue of Camera Austria was published. At first, we thought about using our own photos and publishing the magazine under issue 0 as a pilot. Before we knew it, the magazine was published as the inaugural issue. I think it’s worth mentioning the origin of the name of the magazine: When contents of the first issue were mostly decided, we held a meeting in the basement of Forum Stadtpark to decide on its name. Six or seven members put forward their proposed names, but none of them got a decisive yes from the group. At the time, an acquaintance of mine who also left Japan, and was in the middle of his own wandering journey, shouted out the name “Camera Austria.” No one objected. I think that over the years Symposion on Photography has provided a platform to discuss and demonstrate the evolving definition and meaning of photographic expression through real-life examples. Meanwhile, Camera Austria continued to grow while keeping pace with changes that were happening at the symposium.

Spread from Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler, Face to Face (Chose Commune, 2020)

Nakamori: Please tell us how you met Christine Gössler, your life partner and a coauthor of Face to Face, who tragically took her own life in 1985.

Furuya: In February 1978, at Forum Stadtpark, I met Christine for the first time at the opening of a solo exhibition by Gwenn Thomas called Color Photographs. Christine came with another woman who was a mutual acquaintance of both Manfred Willmann and mine. Ten days later, I mustered up the courage to call her and asked her to watch a movie together. We saw the Japanese movie Harakiri. From that day on, our lives became inseparable. Looking back, I realize that our relationship started with a movie about suicide, and ended with her own suicide. In mid-March of that year, we went to Bologna for a week. According to her notebook, I made up my mind to marry her while we were in Bologna. One week after returning from Bologna, I went back to Japan for the first time since 1973 and Christine came with me. During our two-month stay in Japan, we took part in a Shinto-style wedding ceremony at my home in Izu, and with that our relationship quickly moved on to the next level. Thinking back, it may have been the happiest time for us, although she seemed a bit caught off guard by the sudden change in environment. Shortly after returning from Japan, I quit my job at the camera store and started a new phase of life without a regular job. Christine was aiming to complete her thesis at university, but she eventually gave up and started working for the Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation.

There is an old passage that I wrote that describes, in simple terms, our encounter and how I felt about her. The passage was included alongside a portrait of Christine in the first issue of Camera Austria in 1980. It implied a deep connection between the human encounter and the characteristics and essence of photography as an expressive medium. So much so that it wouldn’t be strange to say that the passage could also have been written for Face to Face, published in 2020.

From the first day I began taking photographs of her regularly. I have seen in her a woman who passes me by, sometimes a model, sometimes the woman I love, sometimes the woman who belongs to me. I feel it is my duty to continue to photograph the woman who holds so many meanings for me.

When I consider that taking photographs means fixing time and space, then this work—the documenting of the life of one human being—is exceptionally thrilling for me. In facing her, in photographing her, and looking at her in photographs, I also see and discover “myself.”

Seiichi Furuya, Mémoires 1978–1988 (Edition Camera Austria, 1989)

Seiichi Furuya, Mémoires 1995 (Scalo/Fotomuseum Winterthur, 1995)

Nakamori: After Christine passed away, you edited and published several different editions of Mémoires featuring photographs from her life. I was wondering if all of that might have helped you get to know her better.

Furuya: In 1981, our son was born. Around the summer of 1982, the three of us left Graz and moved to Vienna. By that time, Christine had already started producing her own radio program at the Austrian National Broadcasting Station. One day, out of the blue, she said to me, “I want to be an actor. I want to be on the stage. It’s a dream I’ve had since I was a kid.” I was against it. After having lived together for four years by then, I honestly didn’t think she had what it takes to get through all the hardship that’s necessary in order to become an actor. I thought I knew her sensitive and compassionate personality. I thought I knew how, despite her modesty and tendency to not show her true feelings and thoughts, she was the type of person who would devote herself completely to something. However, as someone who didn’t have a job with steady pay and was at the mercy of Camera Austria, I strongly felt responsible for the impoverished life my family was going through, and thus I couldn’t convince her otherwise. When she started taking private lessons in order to matriculate at a theater college, Christine became like a shell with a closed lid and stopped talking to me about not just theater, but also things in her daily life. This lasted until her final day in Berlin in October 1985. It wasn’t until 2005 that I became fully aware that she was dealing with theater and other problems in her life alone.

Nakamori: Please tell us how Face to Face came about. You published five photobooks from 1989 to 2010 under the title Mémoires (all with Christine as subject). What’s the relationship between those five books and Face to Face?

Furuya: In the summer of 1987, I went back to Graz from East Berlin. It was when I started organizing her belongings that I discovered her notes. But I didn’t have the courage to read them right away. I was afraid that it was something that I either couldn’t bear to know or didn’t need to know. The notes were handwritten in German, so it wasn’t like I could easily read and understand them anyway. If they were written in Japanese, I’m sure things would have been different. It wasn’t until almost twenty years after her death, around Christmas 2005, that I finally decided to find out what the notes were about. I asked a girl who was a total stranger working part-time at the Graz Art Museum to reproduce a clean copy of the notes. I read and reread that clean copy carefully during a two-month stay in Paris. I hadn’t hid any secrets from Christine and always thought that I was living a straightforward life. However, Christine’s notes revealed that she’d become obsessed with theater and was increasingly struggling with her own limits while dealing with her mother and our child. I was shocked to read that at some point, she thought her theater instructor had become the only person who could forgive her, like a true mother. I didn’t know any of this, and it was as if I was reading about a different person. For me, the expressive power of her notes was beyond what photography could achieve. There were quite a few parts of her notes that even the female student who reproduced the clean copy couldn’t fully understand. In 2006, I published the fourth edition of Mémoires [titled Mémoires 1983] using portions of her notes along with photos.

After Christine killed herself in East Berlin in 1985, I worked there for two more years, finishing my job as an interpreter. In the summer of 1987, I returned to Graz to reunite with my son. On June 12, 1987, President Reagan delivered his “Tear Down This Wall” speech to Gorbachev on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, which was also a symbol of the division between East and West Berlin. I listened to the speech along with many Stasi, National Secret Police of East Germany, on the east side of the gate. Of course, for someone who always carried a camera, I took photos of this historic occasion. Although at the time, no one, including probably President Reagan himself, foresaw that just two years later the Berlin Wall would come down along with the collapse of East Germany. In 2010, the fifth and final volume of Mémoires was published, which documented our lives moving from Dresden to East Berlin in 1984 and up until my return to Graz in 1987.

In 1989, my solo exhibition was held at the Neue Galerie Graz [the state museum of modern art in Graz]. The first edition of Mémoires was published at the same time. Meeting the museum director to discuss the name of the exhibition, I suggested a few names, such as Travelogue. But it took a while for us to agree. Eventually, the director said that what I was thinking about and trying to do would fit well with the French word mémoires. Thus, the name of the exhibition and my photobook was born. The exhibition was supposed to be important for both commemorating Christine and for sorting through my own feelings. It toured Vienna and Tokyo, and in the midst of changing venues, I felt that something new was stirring inside me. This feeling first came about when the 1995 edition of Mémoires was published, and lingered over the course of publishing the 1997 and 2006 editions, and even when I published what was meant to be the final iteration of Mémoires in 2010.

I publicly announced, at my solo exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography [formerly the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum] in 2010, that this would be the final publication in the Mémoires series. I felt that no matter how many times I tried with the publications of these photobooks, I didn’t really understand anything new. At the same time, I wanted to work on a book of my works that were not directly related to Christine. However, I had a stroke just before the exhibition in Tokyo, and it took me at least five years to recover. Since the announcement in 2010, I avoided works related to Christine and spent my days away from photography to focus on recovering my health.

Seiichi Furuya, Mémoires 1983 (Akaaka Art Publishing, 2006)

Nakamori: What brought you back to photography and back to the world of Mémoires?

Furuya: Something came along out of the blue. At the end of 2017, the director of a photography museum in Japan reached out to me about doing a solo exhibition. While on the phone, I had this sudden feeling that I was being pulled back into the world of Mémoires. I was surprised, as I had been avoiding it until then, but the feelings just rushed in as if bursting through a dam. But this time, there was a definitive difference from the previous books, as I thought about presenting mainly works done by Christine herself for the exhibition. With only a few exceptions, the different editions of Mémoires had mainly presented photos that I took of Christine. Over the years, I was consumed with my own works, and I didn’t realize that Christine was a creator in her own right, with works expressing herself, until some thirty years after she passed away. To prepare for the exhibition, I started organizing her belongings, which had been stored in the attic for decades. I found her writings, Super 8 footage, cassette tapes, 110 film—things that I had forgotten about or saw for the first time. There was a reversal film of me standing behind a tripod with a 6 by 7 camera, which was taken on the coast of my hometown of West Izu in 1978. Christine must have taken that picture while I was taking a portrait of her standing on the edge of the cliff, with a Leica camera strapped around her neck, wearing tall, black rubber boots and carrying a bamboo stick. I was excited to have discovered this and found myself uttering the words “face to face.”

I arrived at Face to Face after going through five volumes of Mémoires. In a sense, my photos in each of those books are the starting point to make sense of the tragedy and mystery of the woman that is Christine. It was difficult for me to dismiss her death simply as a result of schizophrenia, which is a standard response given by society these days. Some friends tried to comfort me by using this standardized response. But after going through trial and error for over twenty years, the sad truth remains that I still don’t fully understand why it happened. Finally, with Face to Face, at least Christine can be recognized as a creator herself. It’s another volume of Mémoires, with her being credited as the author of her own works.

Christine Gössler, Izu, 1978

Nakamori: A key difference between Face to Face and your other works is the alternation between photos you took of Christine and photos that she took of you. Please tell us about the challenges of making and editing a photobook that focuses on the intersection of two creators.

Furuya: I was hoping to find more photos that Christine took. As if answering my prayer, I found 110 film negatives that I didn’t know existed, as well as color negatives from a 35 mm camera from when she started taking photos again in 1985. Eventually, it became clear that Christine was often taking pictures of me, and that we were taking pictures of each other at almost the same time. The act of taking photos and having our own photos taken continued, with varying frequency, until the day before she took her own life. On top of that, the hardest part was finding myself in my own photographs. I carefully checked the photos that I took from the time I first met her until I lost her, because sometimes she took photos of me with cameras that I was using. I made prints from selected films, arranged them in chronological order, and started to look at them carefully. The exhibition hall for Camera Austria was an ideal place for doing so. When viewed side by side, the prints were about twenty meters long. Just when the prints were completed such that they would fit nicely with the layout of the venue in Japan, we heard the news that the exhibition had been canceled. At the beginning of 2019, I immediately switched from planning an exhibition to planning a photobook, and carried on working. At that time, after having finished the selection of photos and arranging the material in chronological order, I selected the Marseille-based Chose Commune to be the publisher. I was told that Cécile Sayuri Poimboeuf-Koizumi was the editor in charge, and I entrusted the production of the book to her. If the editor wasn’t a woman, I’m not sure that I could have entrusted the whole process to someone else. Instead, I was completely hands-off.

I was shocked when I viewed the printed photobook for the first time in December 2020. After opening the cover and going through the pages, I almost felt that the two people in the book were talking to each other. It was like traveling back in time and space. I didn’t realize this when I was still preparing for an exhibition. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the binding of the photobook and the layout of each page. When the book is closed, the two people are still and facing each other, just like the title, face to face. But when you turn the pages, it’s as if a switch has been flipped, and the two people start to move and talk to each other. I reread the book and it felt the same every time. Maybe it’s something only I can experience, since I know the background of the photos. I also thought that might be what it means to have a book of moving pictures for adults. Some might simply think that what’s happening here is two people staring at each other and trying to read into the meaning of each other’s facial expressions, but one should be mindful that such reproduction of the act of staring is only made possible by the incredible invention of photography. Capturing a momentary image is one of the most salient characteristics of, and the original purpose of, photography. In that sense, what you see in terms of two people’s facial expressions satisfies that aspect of photography very well. But I can’t help but feel that those photos also express something beyond that. This is something that one becomes aware of only after a photo, which captures a past reality, is taken, and it’s something that is almost impossible to experience in real life. Even on the occasions when we take photos of each other, everything is a series of moments that keep changing. The moments when we stare at each other are so fleeting amid the passing flow of time that it is impossible to consciously read into and interact with each other mentally there and then. Photography is the only expressive medium through which we can relive and reconfirm a moment from the past. In that sense, I think Face to Face is a perfect embodiment of the magic of photography.

Seiichi Furuya, Graz, 1978

Christine Gössler, Graz, 1978

Nakamori: What does the act of taking photos mean to you? What does making and publishing photobooks mean to you?

Furuya: While thinking about how to respond to this question, I realized that I had never thought about the meaning of taking photos. I just always took photos before thinking about meaning or purpose. But for the last ten years, I haven’t taken many pictures. The reason is simple—things are less visible to me now, and my inner desire and need to take photos are not what they used to be. I think one of the reasons is that I have had almost no chance to expose myself to the vicissitudes of today’s world, and the lifestyle or habit of always carrying a camera with me wherever I go has largely gone away. For a while, I was taking pictures with a digital camera for blogging. Starting about a year ago, I’ve been taking photos of my grandkids and the change of seasons in my garden with my mobile phone. But at the end of the day, for me, a photo is a copy of reality printed on film that can be touched by hand. I have no interest in creating “artworks” using the medium of photography. For me, photography is the act of quickly capturing an image that approximates a premonition we feel when encountering moments of anxiety or interest in daily life. In my case, it can also be said that the act of taking photos, instead of, say, writing, is a way for me to record my impression and experience of encountering things that I can’t comprehend even through imagination, but is somehow connected to my existence. I’ve been called a “boundary” photographer by some. In fact, one of my works is called Boundary and I took photos of the Berlin Wall, but many portraits of Christine also portray the boundaries between people. It doesn’t matter if the quality of a photo is good or bad; it is no longer my concern in the moment it’s taken. Then, when it revives with the passage of time, it becomes the first time for me to face a photo that I once took.

I think that making a photobook is like assembling chaotic and complex images toward one big theme in your head. As the work progresses, the outline of the theme becomes clearer. I think it might be similar to how a composer writes a symphony by combining individual notes. For me, with the exception of my first photobook, AMS [Edition Camera Austria, 1981], I keep making photobooks so that I can bring them along with me when I eventually meet Christine again. Maybe they can also be called reports. There is another important reason why I keep making these photobooks—it is to tell our son and our grandchildren what kind of a person she was in ways that I could never do with words. The day after Face to Face arrived from Chose Commune, I brought it with me to the front door of my son’s house. There were strict rules in place related to the novel coronavirus. My son was fearful that I might contract the virus from my grandchildren, so we didn’t see each other. It seems that my son was more worried than I was about older folks getting infected. In Face to Face, my son showed up on many of the pages. Since this was his first time seeing these photos, I wasn’t sure how he would react. I was told that later that night, he read the photobook with his eldest daughter, who was six years old at the time. They seem to have enjoyed the book, and he was asked a lot of questions. My granddaughter was a little confused at first since her grandmother, Christine, looked youthful in those photos.

Now that I’m over seventy years old, I feel that I don’t need to hide anything anymore. There are a few reasons why I’ve published photobooks and portraits of Christine again and again over the years, but there’s one key reason that I’ve never publicly stated. That is, I want to help accomplish her childhood dream of standing on the stage—a dream that tormented her and may have forced her to kill herself. For example, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MoMA in New York have collected several photos of her, and her portrait on the coast of Izu in 1978 was just exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seeing her smile at me with that same bamboo stick, this time in New York, I couldn’t help but go up to the photo and talk to her. I never thought I could meet her again in such a place. I will continue to publish works of her and works by her, all of which always contain my unwavering desire to give my deceased wife an eternal life.

Seiichi Furuya, Graz, 1979
All images courtesy the artist and Chose Commune

Nakamori: What do you think about COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown of cities and nations from last year to the present day? Also, please tell us what you are currently working on or would like to work on in a situation like this.

Furuya: It has been exactly one year since measures to battle COVID-19 were issued here in Austria [as of March 2021]. It actually has been a very fulfilling year for me. Thanks to the lockdown, I was able to focus on work that required a lot of patience and concentration. From the non-stop and inescapable news cycle about the virus, the idea that has related to me the most is death. From the moment of birth, a person begins their journey toward death. Yet, for a period of time, there is no need to think about the idea or meaning of death, so one is not aware of death and thinks that death has nothing to do with them. One might even think that they can live forever. After the age of seventy, death creeps into our life on many more occasions, while the eventuality of our own death remains ever more present. In my case, death is neither unpleasant nor frightening, and recently I’m even starting to feel that confronting death can make one feel refreshed. There is a tall gingko tree in my garden. I used to totally ignore its existence. These days, I watch the tree change throughout the seasons and think about the fateful encounters in life. Some of us live to be thirty-two years old, others to seventy-something years old, and yet others to a thousand years old (since I was a child, I’ve heard that gingko trees can live to be a thousand years old). I spend my days meditating on the trajectory and stories of my life, while being amazed at the small miracle that I got through all the trials and tribulations in my life since leaving Japan, and that I’m still around. Since we are still required to refrain from social activities to fight the virus, this is not a bad way to spend my otherwise solitary life.

At the moment, I’m getting started on the production of a new photobook called First Trip to Bologna. The book consists of materials from our trip to Bologna shortly after I met Christine in 1978. I plan on using only frames from videos taken with a Super 8 camera instead of the still photos that appear in this book. I also found this film in the attic and was very surprised when I watched the digitized film on a screen. No matter how many times I watched the video, I couldn’t recollect memories from the trip. It got to the point where I doubted if I was even there with her. It’s as if days that I didn’t know existed were brought back and recreated in front of me. Since I don’t remember anything, I thought about creating a brand-new story of the Bologna trip for us. In addition, I would like to publish a collection of photos taken solely by Christine. I wonder which project would come first, but I hope to bring this photobook with me as a souvenir when I see her again. I want to leave behind records of Christine’s works for our son and his kids. For me, the days of taking photos are mostly over. From this point on, I think my job will be to work with the newly discovered materials belonging to Christine and bring them to the public as her own works as much as possible. Other than that, I would probably continue to take family photos of my son and grandchildren with a 6 by 7 camera from time to time.

Nakamori: Thank you very much.

This piece originally was published in Issue 019 of The PhotoBook Review. Translated from Japanese to English by Shiwei Yin.

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Published on September 22, 2021 13:56

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