Aperture's Blog, page 48

How Peter C. Bunnell Shaped the Photography World

It is with deep sadness that Aperture learned of Peter C. Bunnell’s passing on September 20, 2021. An eminent photography historian and curator, Bunnell (born in 1937) was also a mentor and friend to scores of individuals engaged with the medium of photography today, including me. Curiously, our professional paths have followed inverse trajectories—his from Aperture to New York’s Museum of Modern Art to Princeton University; mine from Princeton to MoMA to Aperture—but at each step, his example served as a guiding light.

I met Professor Bunnell in 1992, when I took his history of photography course as an undergraduate at Princeton. He animated the full sweep of this history with insight and anecdote. Edward Weston wasn’t simply a legendary name from the past; he was someone with whom Bunnell had corresponded in 1956. As I recall the story, my esteemed professor was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of Technology, studying with Minor White, and he wrote a letter to Weston requesting two prints and enclosing a check for $30. Weston wrote back, enclosing two prints! I also vividly remember encountering a work by Uta Barth in a seminar my senior year, which Bunnell had just acquired for the university’s collection. Bunnell’s attentiveness to new achievements and his passion for Barth’s distinctive approach—removing the ostensible subject of her photograph to draw attention to the surrounding (often blurred) background—was an inspiration to all of us fortunate enough to be in his orbit.

In 1972, Bunnell had been named the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton, the nation’s first endowed professorship of the history of photography. Previously, he was a curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, and it was there that I headed (as an intern) after graduation. Eventually I, too, became a MoMA photography curator, ever-conscious of several landmark exhibitions Bunnell had organized during his tenure there. The most radical of these, still today, is Photography into Sculpture (1970), but he also brought a fresh perspective to historical figures such as Barbara Morgan (a founder of Aperture) and Clarence H. White, whom he described as being “interested in revealing how things are, rather than showing things as they are.” To my mind, Pictorialism was so unfashionable that this embrace of one of its leading figures was itself a radical gesture.

Before MoMA, Bunnell had spent a decade working closely with Minor White at Aperture, nurturing the magazine through uncertain times. The interview that follows, with Diana C. Stoll, was originally published in Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952­–1976 (Aperture, 2012), a treasured resource for anyone interested in the field and full of Bunnellian flair. Peter C. Bunnell’s achievements as a scholar and writer will continue to instruct and inspire—he will be missed.

— Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture Foundation

Robert C. Bishop, Bar in the Hotel Jerome, Aspen Conference, 1951
Seated left to right: unidentified woman, Victor Babin (musician), Aline Porter, Will Connell, Wayne Miller, Ferenc Berko, Vitya Vronsky (musician), Eliot Porter, Nancy Newhall, unidentified man, Beaumont Newhall, Minor White
Image courtesy Norma and Laura Bishop, and The Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

Diana C. Stoll: From today’s perspective, the world of photography in 1952 seems so appealingly finite and manageable. Who was reading Aperture in the beginning? For whom was it intended?

Peter C. Bunnell: In a way, Aperture was for a small niche. It was intended for those who were committed to serious photography.

After World War II, photography as an art was confronted with the new status of photojournalism—the residue of 1930s documentary work—as well as the rise of advertising and magazine photography. Aperture was essentially driven by the idea that there must be some way to reposition a kind of serious photography, and that notion drew together the group of people who founded the magazine.

Aperture grew out of a 1951 conference on photography that was held at the Aspen Institute. A number of people had been invited to the conference who could address the reality of the field. If you look at the seminar titles, you get an idea of what some of the concerns were: “Evolution of a New Photographic Vision,” “Photography and Civilization,” “Picture Language and the Magazine,” “Photography in Advertising and Promotion,” “Photography and Painting,” “Objectives for Photography,” “Creative Directions in Color Photography.”

There was a subgroup at the gathering, which included Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Minor White, Frederick Sommer, Ansel Adams, and Dorothea Lange. Aperture literally started with attendees of that Aspen conference, who after the meeting received letters saying: “This magazine has now been born. Here we go.”

To get it moving, Ansel reached out to people he knew, people like photography patron David McAlpin, for instance, and writer and editor Dorothy Norman, who had been Stieglitz’s sponsor. And there were other bits of help along the way. Jacob Deschin announced the first issue of the magazine in the New York Times [March 16, 1952] and gave the address for subscriptions. So progressively, mostly by word of mouth, it began to reach people. Including faculty and students of universities—like me.

Maquette and final edition of Aperture issue 1, 1952, featuring an untitled photograph by Dorothea Lange

Stoll: What led you to photography?

Bunnell: When I was young, my initial idea was to be a fashion or magazine-illustration photographer. I thought that’s where the glamour was. My father, who was a mechanical engineer, wanted me to be an engineer, but I didn’t want to do that. As a teenager, I bought my first camera, an Argus C3 (which I later learned was the first camera Minor bought, in 1937). I learned how to develop and print, and I realized that I could make money photographing couples at dances and things like that. So I set up a little makeshift studio, and started selling 8-by-10 prints—and it kept getting me further and further from having to be an engineer.

I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology—R.I.T.—to study. R.I.T. was one of the few places to go for photography in 1954 or 1955; it had just begun a four-year program for photography. Minor had been brought in as added faculty when they expanded from a two-year program. He was first hired to teach photojournalism.

Stoll: But he wasn’t a photojournalist.

Bunnell: Right, he was not a photojournalist, but the idea was: if you know anything about photography, you can do it. You just put it in Life magazine! R.I.T.’s photography program was run like a trade school. For the first two years you studied physics, sensitometry, photochemistry; then maybe you could take a few pictures, but not many, because you were always busy in a lab someplace.

Then, all of a sudden, there was Minor. He taught a sophomore course (which derived from his curriculum at the California School of Fine Arts [C.S.F.A.], where he had taught previously) called “Visual Communication.” It was a whole new approach. We cut out pictures and glued them together to make multiple images. We did everything in that class—including learning how to “read” photographs. It was very eye opening.

Before the Thanksgiving break of 1956, Minor said to the students: “I’m having people over on Saturday evening; those of you who are not going home are all welcome.” I wasn’t going home (remember, I was trying to avoid my father), so a friend and I decided to go to Minor’s apartment. He had cooked a turkey—but I think only for about an hour, so it was practically bleeding! There were some other students, and Walter Chappell was there . . . and then in walked Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. We had a wonderful talk, and it was at that point that Beaumont asked if I might be interested in working with Nancy and him at the Eastman House during the summer. “But I don’t have any money,” he said. “You’ll have to find some way to deal with that.” And so I did it.

Minor White in his Jackson Street studio-loft in San Francisco, ca. 1951
Image courtesy Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

Stoll: What did you do for them?

Bunnell: One summer I organized and cataloged the entire collection of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies and another I assisted Nancy Newhall with the research and editing of Edward Weston’s Daybooks. One year the Newhalls were putting together the Masters of Photography book for the publisher George Braziller. They would write an essay on a photographer, and then they would hand it to me and say: “Go pick out some prints to illustrate this.” So I would go and make some choices, and then they would look at them. “Why did you choose that one? That doesn’t have anything to do with the essay.” Then they’d say: “Get out such-and-such a portrait of Sir John Herschel.” So I would, and of course it was then obvious that that was the one that should be used.

Stoll: Were they always in accord with one another?

Bunnell: No. Nancy had a mind of her own. In fact, I’d say, if anything, Beaumont deferred to her. But Beaumont then ran the show at the Eastman House. They were building the collection. He had been the curator of the museum since 1948, and became the director in 1958.

Stoll: You mentioned that R.I.T. was one of the only places to study photography at the time. What other programs at universities existed in those years?

Bunnell: Well, things were just starting out. Among the first were programs at Ohio University, Indiana University, and the University of Minnesota. There was of course already the Institute of Design in Chicago, where you had Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, and László Moholy-Nagy’s legacy, and the C.S.F.A., where Minor and Ansel founded the program. And there was the beginning of a coterie of students who were studying photography elsewhere as well, including on the graduate level.

Stoll: And, getting back to Aperture’s early audience, presumably that’s where some of the magazine’s subscribers came from, the students and faculty of those programs?

Bunell: Yes. The original subscription price was $4.50—today it sounds ridiculous! That was minimal, even for then. Still, I suspect that faculty would subscribe and then hand it around, and then, as the students began to make their own way, they subscribed.

Aperture matured slowly in terms of numbers of readers. In only a few years they were sending out notices crying: “Help! We’re running out of money—please come on board.” 1954 was a crisis year. Certain people did step in to help, and in 1953 the Polaroid corporation began to run a discreet ad, which really saved the magazine from collapse. But clearly, it was not a financial success.

Mailing envelope, Aperture vol. 12, nos. 1 and 2, sent from Rochester, New York, 1966

Stoll: How did the magazine function logistically—I know it was a very small team of people that ran it.

Bunnell: The magazine’s staff was minimal, to say the least. At that point it was edited by Minor in Rochester and printed by Lawton Kennedy in California, and the finished issues were then crated and shipped to Rochester. When I began working with Minor in 1955, I was the subscriptions secretary—I typed every mailing label (actually, I got pretty good at it). I did that for about three years. We had to put each issue in an envelope with postage stamps and these hand-typed labels. I would say that at the height of my years with Aperture it got up to maybe a thousand subscribers—but usually it ran more like five hundred people.

Stoll: There’s a sense that the circle of interest was so concise in those years that everyone reading the magazine must have known one another. There were also a few photography galleries in New York—Helen Gee’s Limelight in the 1950s and later on Light Gallery and Lee Witkin’s space—they must have played into the network of this community of readers, too. Anyone visiting them might also have had an interest in Aperture. What are your memories of those spaces?

Bunnell: I used to go to the Limelight with Minor. We would drive down from Rochester to the city and start at MoMA, then take the E train to Sheridan Square, where the Limelight was. The gallery opened in 1954 and closed seven years later, in 1961. It was a coffeehouse as well as an exhibition space, but it was the only gallery you went to for photography at the time.

In the ’60s a few other little spaces opened up. But really the key players—which had the idea that photographs were important (and for sale!)—were Lee Witkin starting out (his gallery opened in 1969), and Light Gallery (which was founded in 1971). Earlier on, Julien Levy (whose gallery opened in 1931 and ran through the 1940s) in the first few years showed almost exclusively photography. There was also a place called the Downtown Gallery, which as I recall was located in someone’s apartment.

Advertisement for Edward Weston’s fiftieth-anniversary portfolio, Aperture issue 2, back cover, 1952

Stoll: But the real, explosive success of photography would come a few years later.

Bunnell: Yes. And it was encouraged by Aperture in the sense that the magazine was where the list of many of the major photographers came from, more or less. Also, the great masters, notably Edward and Brett Weston and Ansel, were selling their photographs in portfolio form through the pages of Aperture. It was not a blockbuster situation—the Weston fiftieth-anniversary portfolio was advertised in Aperture for sale, and I think they sold only six.

But before its success in the market, this type of photography was really a kind of mission, a calling. It was almost a messianic thing. We believed in it, although it was not taken seriously by others, and it was economically overwhelmed by other kinds of photography. The idea that you would have a forum to show serious photographic work was almost unimaginable. I mean, it was Eastman House or the Museum of Modern Art, and that was it. (And at MoMA—until the 1960s, when they built an addition—the photo galleries were in the basement, outside the lavatories and the entrance to the museum’s cinema.)

So by necessity every avenue that Aperture could pursue, it did—they believed in photography. There is no doubt in my mind that the founders saw this as the new Camera Work.

Stoll: Obviously there were economic differences, and the era was not the same, but what were the philosophical similarities and differences between Camera Work and Aperture?

Bunnell: In some respects, there were very few differences. At the beginning of Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz was propounding a new view of photography, which we now put under the heading “Pictorialism” (which of course had its variations). Over the life of the magazine his concept of contemporary photography, as with art in general, changed and the content of the publication was altered accordingly until, by the 49/50th issue of Camera Work, devoted to Paul Strand, one was very far from the Gertrude Käsebier featured in the first issue.

Similarly, Aperture was propounding a new kind of photography—a new vision of photography. It wasn’t Pictorialism, of course, but it was a new art for a different time; interestingly, however, it was based in part on that of Paul Strand.

Edward Weston, Shell, 1927, from The Flame of Recognition (Aperture, 1965; reissued in 2015)
Courtesy 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Stoll: And what about the writing?

Bunnell: I’d say there might have been even more writing in Camera Work than in Aperture. Stieglitz had a wide circle of literary acquaintances, who all wrote for the journal—from people like Sadakichi Hartmann to Joseph T. Keiley, John Kerfoot, Charles H. Caffin, and Dallett Fuguet. And because Pictorialism had a connection to the Salon movement, which was very active in those days, Camera Work had a lot of reviews. The publication also chronicled the Photo-Secession gallery exhibitions, and those elsewhere; this continued right to the end, in 1917.

Things were quite different in Aperture’s early years. Really, the opportunities for reviewing were fewer from the 1950s and ’60s until the beginning of the galleries era.

Stoll: I know that photographers generally weren’t paid for their contributions to Aperture. Were commissioned writers paid?

Bunnell: I don’t think anyone was paid. (Well, I was paid, but minimally.) Actually, if I remember right, there was one announcement that went out with the magazine and said straight out—I’m paraphrasing: “This is a work of love, and no one gets paid for content.” By emphasizing production costs, Minor was trying to justify the subscription expense, explaining to subscribers where their money was going.

Minor White editing photographs for the Celebrations exhibition and Aperture vol. 18, no. 2, M.I.T. Warehouse, 1972

Stoll: The subscription money went straight to production?

Bunnell: Yes: there was no other money available. I can remember even rationing long-distance calls. I mean, Minor didn’t get on a phone and call somebody and say: “Where’s your goddamn manuscript?” He wrote a letter and used a three-cent stamp, because he didn’t have the money to make a phone call!

Minor always lived very modestly himself. In Rochester he had an apartment above a hardware store at 72 North Union Street. One bedroom was made into the Aperture office, and the magazine was assembled in the large center living area. His darkroom was in the basement. Later on, when he left R.I.T. and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he received a significant salary, so much that he literally didn’t know what to do with it. And on top of that, he had to perform socially. I remember going with him to Brooks Brothers to buy him a blue suit, so that he could go to events that he had to attend at M.I.T. I think the second time he wore it he spilled a martini all down the front, which stained it of course. (If you look carefully at photographs of him at the time, you can see this funny little stain.)

So Aperture operated on practically nothing in its early days—about five thousand dollars a year. At one point Minor wrote an editorial note saying: “We have simply run out of money for half-tones, for engravings, and so therefore this issue is all text.” Despite the simplicity of the first issues, very progressively, the magazine was seen as a quality-reproduction publication. And that is an aspect of Aperture that has been retained to today.

This interview is excerpted from Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976 (Aperture, 2012).

Diana C. Stoll is a writer and editor based in Asheville, North Carolina. She was senior editor of Aperture magazine from 2006 to 2013.

The Women Who Reshaped Modern Photography

At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House, Nora slams the door on domesticity, tired of how her whole life she’s been nothing but a “doll child,” first to her father, then to her husband. Performed in England in 1889, the play exemplified the emerging “New Woman” that would be named by Irish writer Sarah Grand a few years later. Audiences at the time were scandalized that, in search of greater freedom, Nora would leave her husband—even her children!—in order to do what, exactly? And to what end?

Unknown photographer, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Tokyo, 1940
Courtesy Tsuneko Sasamoto/Japan Professional Photographers Society

The New Woman may be most familiar as an aesthetic: sporting bloomers (later trousers) and cropped hair, “rational dress” and androgyny lite, she stands by her bicycle with a cigarette, exuding freedom and sexual liberation. Facing obstacles different from her working-class (who were already laboring outside the home) and aristocratic (who had more freedom generally) peers, the bourgeois nineteenth-century New Woman strove to free herself from the confines of the Victorian “angel in the house” ideal that emphasized a separation between public and private spaces, itself a function of the developing middle class. Fundamentally born of increased rights and opportunities for bourgeois European women, the New Woman (or nouvelle femme, neue Frau, modan gāru, xin nüxing, al-mar ‘a al-jadida) would develop into the twentieth century as women around the world sought new freedoms.

The New Woman Behind the Camera—organized by National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) curator Andrea Nelson, and now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—uses this first-wave feminist framework to revivify the contributions, a few decades later, of women photographers to early twentieth-century modernism. But picturing her is only a small part of the show’s purpose—the New Woman is, after all, behind the camera. The exhibition, as clarified by the catalogue, argues that New Womanhood arose in conjunction with major developments in photography. How this historical marriage offered alternatives to women at the time animates the ample array of images on view at the Met, making a case for the overlooked significance of these photographers and their innovative work.

Dorothea Lange, Japanese-American owned grocery store, Oakland, California, March 1942
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

More study than survey, the exhibition brings together a dizzying range of photos taken between the 1920s and the 1950s by 120 international women photographers (the wall text notes, “the designation ‘woman photographer’ is imperfect [as is the adjective ‘female’], yet it remains a useful framework for analysis”). Remarkably varied subjects and approaches are organized into imperfectly general categories, no doubt needed to mitigate audience overwhelm, but not fully up to the task: The City, Avant-Garde Experimentation, Ethnographic Approaches, Fashion and Advertising, Social Documentary, Modern Bodies, and Reportage—each one granted a room of its own.

The central revelation of the show is the fact that the early twentieth-century New Woman found a natural home in commercial photography. As critiques of gender norms collided with the rise of the Picture Press and the two world wars pushed women further into the workforce, fashion and portrait photography were deemed, to varying cultural degrees, socially acceptable pursuits, and more women experienced increased access to the public sphere. The importance of commercial photography, though represented in number on the walls of the Met, really clarified itself only with the catalogue texts, which I found to be integral to understanding the interplay between the emerging New Woman and the developing medium.

Lillian Bassman, Translucent Hat, ca. 1950
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Advances in technology made cameras more affordable, easy to use, and portable, multiplying the number of studios, camera clubs, and amateur societies. Women have worked in studios since the camera’s invention in the 1830s, but professional training for women expanded into the early twentieth century, especially in Germany and Austria. Opportunities were influenced by class and culture, and those without means or access pursued training in studios, crafts schools, or vocational programs, or were self-taught.

Weimar-era Berlin, the fashion capital of its time, saw women forming 36 percent of the workforce by the mid-1920s as the ready-to-wear Konfektion clothing industry boomed—an early iteration of fast fashion, much of it Jewish-owned, making affordable France’s haute couture—and along with it, the largest and most modern print media in Europe (both industries were violently “Aryanized” with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933). Fashion photography allowed many women access to public life, and in some cases, economic independence and professional success; in 1931 Berlin, women ran 130 of the 430 photography studios (the subversive advertisements and surrealist collages of Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach’s ringl + pit studio are particularly witty).

Consuelo Kanaga, Annie Mae Merriweather, 1935
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY

Through studio work, women were able to live out their New Womanhood while also experimenting with expressing it. During the 1930s and 1940s, there were a number of women-only portrait studios in Iraq, Jordan, India, Korea, and Japan. In Palestine, Karimeh Abbud advertised herself as a “Lady-Photographer,” helpfully bringing her own makeshift studio into private homes. Armenian Maryam Şahinyan ran a studio for almost fifty years in Istanbul; among her 200,000 images of mostly family portraits and passport pictures are striking photographs of people expressing nonnormative gender. With the post-Reconstruction influence of the New Negro Movement, Black American portraiture worked to counter the media’s racist imagery with photos asserting humanity and respectability. Black women photographers faced additional barriers to entry, and “the extent of their . . . contributions to the field has yet to be properly established,” writes Nelson. In one remarkable example, Florestine Perrault Collins of New Orleans, who worked almost exclusively with Black and Creole clients, pictures her friend Mae Fuller Keller looking casually glamorous—from her pose and expression to her bobbed hair and ruffled dress, Keller is all modern mettle.

For the most part, history has discounted the fruits of this fascinating feedback loop between photography and New Womanhood. Commercial work was not seen as serious art, but instead considered technical, market-driven, clichéd. (Photographs of children, an especially marketable and conventional subject for women, have largely been written off by history, despite the fact, as Elizabeth Cronin argues in the catalogue, that some women photographers made innovative and radical artistic choices within socially acceptable constraints.) Fashion photography was often dismissed as frivolous. Here’s Siegfried Kracauer, quoted in the catalogue, on the mass ornament and popular media’s “blizzard of images”: “The new fashions also must be disseminated, or else in the summer the beautiful girls will not know who they are.”

Yevonde Cumbers Middleton, Lady Bridget Poulett as ‘Arethusa,’ 1935
National Portrait Gallery, London

Behind Kracauer’s acerbity is the accidental observation that these images really did offer women new ways of seeing and understanding themselves—photographs of the New Woman, but also the bylines of women photographers. From 1931 to 1937, Shanghai’s Linglong magazine advertised modern images of the Chinese New Woman, including those of women as hobbyist photographers on the model of the Kodak Girl. Margaret Bourke-White was a Life celebrity. To be sure, not all commercial photographs by women were interesting, artful, or radical. But one can imagine the refractive power of seeing, in 1921, the portrait of artist Mariette Pachhofer in hat, tie, and lace-up riding boots—a paragon of New Woman chic—made by Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus), the most established international fashion photographer of the mid-1920s to late 1930s.

D’Ora portrayed women, she said, “as they wished to be seen.” It’s rarely that simple, but as advertising was wholly changed by the advent of photography, experimentation there actually could blur the lines between the commercial and artistic, the realistic and abstract. The New Vision aimed to reflect the reality of the everyday with its geometry, photomontage, and abstraction, spreading parallel to photographic surrealism, in which women participated as much more than merely muses. Photomontages by Hannah Höch, Marianne Brandt, Toshiko Okanoue, and Grete Stern picture a fragmented and frenetic modernity, critiquing gender norms, inequality, and war. Yvonne Chevalier’s Nu (Nude) (1929) is a study in abstracted and ungendered sensuality. Ergy Landau’s 1932 self-portrait shows the photographer in full dark dress positioning her body and camera to capture a serpentine nude on the floor, a twist on the odalisque trope.

Galina Sanko, During an Attack, 1943
Robert Koch Gallery

In this way, the relation between women and photography unfolds in The New Woman Behind the Camera not so much as linear history, but as a circuitous process of seeing and being seen; picturing, being pictured, and picturing anew. In each room and essay, she threatens to burst the frame, resisting containment by any one category, theme, or definition. Nelson and the other essayists flag areas of study they hope will be further explored; this would be welcome, particularly from parts of the world less represented here. The exhibition gives the sense of a bursting, righteous, meticulous, and sometimes messy beginning.

To take down the “great man” theory of photography is not simply to celebrate great women, but to understand photography as a collective and collaborative endeavor.

Between two world wars, global economic depression, movements for decolonization, and the rise of fascism, communism, and the modern city, reportage and social documentary were popular genres for capturing a time distinct from, but not wholly unlike, our own. Fantastic photographs by famous names like Bourke-White, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, and Dorothea Lange—including the latter’s powerful accounts of Japanese-American internment camps—are joined by many less widely known, such as one of India’s first female photojournalists, Homai Vyarawalla, whose kinetic, peopled photos document the beginning of Indian independence. Tsuneko Sasamoto’s Tokyo street photos and Niu Weiyu’s images of newly communist China are not to be missed. (Mao Zedong floating in the Yangtze River, taken in 1956 by Hou Bo, is at once humorous, melancholy, and eerie.)

Some careers were curtailed by marriage and children, others by exile or war. In Lola Álvarez Bravo’s En su propia cárcel (In Her Own Prison) (1950), a woman leans out a window in post-revolutionary Mexico, caged—behind a grid of shadow and light—by domesticity, and perhaps more. As European and American women made pioneering ethnographic portraits of other cultures—notably in Africa—they were not exempt from photographic colonialism. A small number of women, like Lee Miller and Galina Sanko, took combat photographs during World War II, while others documented its ravaging effects. But the majority of women involved in photography were not famous photographers or luminaries. Following the explosion of mass media with rotogravure printing, women participated at every level in the development of photography and its dissemination; Nelson notes that women most often worked professionally as print finishers and retouchers.

Vera Gabrielová, Untitled (Spoons), 1935–36
Courtesy Ellen and Robert Grimes

Celebrating the men behind the magazines—Henry Luce of Life, Jean Prouvost of France-Soir and Paris Match—as single-handedly ushering in a new age of photography discredits “the elaborate teams of editors, art directors, researchers, reporters, and photographers—many of them women—who were the driving creative force behind this international phenomenon,” writes Kristen Gresh in the catalogue. Nadya Bair, in her recent book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (2020), similarly argues that integral to the agency’s lauded photographers and the postwar visual culture they created was the collaboration of sales agents, writers, editors, publishers, and spouses.

To take down the “great man” theory of photography, then, is not simply to celebrate great women, but to understand photography, and media more generally, as a collective and collaborative endeavor. The aim of The New Woman Behind the Camera, explain Nelson and Mia Fineman (who installed the show at the Met) in their preface, is not only “to insert neglected, forgotten, or marginal figures into existing art-historical narratives,” but “to complicate and enrich our understanding of modernity” itself.

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1927
Wilson Centre for Photography

Self-portraits, seen throughout the show, are collected at the back of the catalogue—doubly powerful in their use of reflection and multiple exposure, their visualization of the camera as both a tool for the New Woman’s self-determination and her self-expression. The shadow of Lotte Stam-Beese in profile with her camera appears against a sun-soaked door. Annemarie Heinrich and her sister Ursula are ecstatically captured hands outstretched and laughing in a reflective orb. In each of these images—even the more traditional Bourke-White echoing her tripod’s stance in slacks, gesturing toward her camera as if toward a loved one—we see the New Woman picturing herself as she wished to be seen, both behind and before the camera, powerfully training and framed by her own lens.

The New Woman Behind the Camera is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through October 3, 2021.

Aperture’s 2021 Gala Celebrates the Reach of Photography Today

This year, Aperture’s annual gala celebrates the range of its publishing program with three honorees: artists Sara Cwynar and Graciela Iturbide, and esteemed collector Dr. Kenneth Montague. Aperture’s Executive Director, Sarah Meister, notes “the breadth of their practices reflect distinct and essential approaches to the medium, and point to Aperture’s vital role in adding context and nuance to these achievements.”

The two-day celebration opens with an in-person gathering on October 19 at Selina in Manhattan, featuring entertainment and a preview of special prints and experiences as part of our annual fundraising auction. This is followed by a virtual celebration on October 20, featuring honoree tributes by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Legacy Russell, Jamel Shabazz, and more. Leading up to the gala, a special photography auction in partnership with Artsy will open on October 8.

The gala provides critical sustaining support for Aperture’s publications, educational initiatives, exhibitions, and public programming. It aims to celebrate Aperture’s community of inspiration and almost seventy-year history of publishing groundbreaking photography, fostering the development and appreciation of the medium and its practitioners.

Below, read more about this year’s honorees and see here for information on how to register for the 2021 Aperture Gala.

Self portrait by Sara Cwynar
Courtesy the artist

Sara Cwynar

Aperture honors Sara Cwynar for her research-driven and visually complex photographs that investigate color and consumer culture on the occasion of her first monograph, Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (Aperture, 2021). Cwynar’s images constitute the hallmark of contemporary post­–Pictures Generation work—in which photography is pursued to relation to film, sculpture, digital culture, and the cultural and technological history of image-making. Her previous artist books include Kitsch Encyclopedia (2014) and Pictures of Pictures (2014), and her film Red Film (2018) was featured in the 2018 São Paulo Biennial and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Graciela Iturbide photographed by Mario Bellatin
Courtesy the artist

Graciela Iturbide

Recognized today as one of the greatest living photographers in Latin America, Graciela Iturbide envisions the rich cultural heritage and diversity of life in Mexico, particularly its Indigenous traditions. Known for her lyrical black-and-white photographs, Iturbide has transformed everyday life into poetic and powerful art for more than fifty years. Aperture honors Iturbide’s decades-long practice and inspiring work, including her upcoming title for Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series.

Dr. Kenneth Montague photographed by Markian Lozowchuk
Courtesy the artist

Dr. Kenneth Montague

Dr. Kenneth Montague started the Wedge Collection in 1997 to acquire and exhibit art that engages multifaceted ideas of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power. Aperture honors Dr. Montague on the occasion of the release of As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, a forthcoming Aperture book presenting a compilation of photographs from the Wedge Collection. Featuring over one hundred works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as throughout the African continent, the volume serves as a testament to the support provided to artists by collecting and amplifying their work.

The 2021 Aperture Gala takes place on October 19 and 20, 2021. See here for full program details and to register for the free virtual event.

Judith Joy Ross’s Timeless and Empathic Portraits

Judith Joy Ross wants to show me her garden. As she throws open the back door to her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a large brown rabbit flashes across the yard, a comet trail vanishing into a maze of plants vivid and green against the gray sky. Ross turns to me, her face bright with excitement, “Did you see that?” I am reminded of a story I had heard, how once, while driving in rural Pennsylvania, Ross had seen something in a kid’s face that caused her to pull the car over abruptly, drag her 8-by-10 camera out of the car, and call after two boys, aged twelve or so. Within moments, as Ross disappeared under the cloth and the boys began to arrange themselves before her lens, the alchemy of their connection became palpable.

Judith Joy Ross, 305 North Tenth Street, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1983

Those particular photographs did not materialize—there was a problem with the film that day—but the Judith Joy Ross pictures that do survive are the representation of thousands of such lightning encounters dating back to the late 1970s and first widely introduced at the 1985 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ross is a master of the formal portrait, exquisitely executed with astonishing emotional clarity, as if she could see straight into the innermost lives of the earnest schoolchildren and tormented teenagers, the ennobled gas station attendants and car rental reps, along with veterans, senators, mourners, and protesters, most of them in the United States, most of them not far from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, the former coal-mining town where she was born and raised. These people form her photographic universe. “She has this extraordinary antenna,” former MoMA curator Susan Kismaric, who has worked closely with Ross over the years, told me recently. Kismaric was along for the ride when Ross was photographing in Minersville. “Judith never projects, she never condescends or judges, but she intuits.”

Judith Joy Ross, Celia, 1980

In person, Ross is gentle, emphatically honest, devastatingly funny, frequently cursing—all at once. White blunt-cut bangs frame her face; she wears glasses in an outdated prescription. She rarely is idle for long, but when a thought overtakes her, she is apt to rest her entire head in her hands to fully consider it. She greets me on the porch of her yellow house, which, much to her dismay, overlooks construction that will soon obscure her view of Bethlehem, where she has lived for more than half her life. Inside is a home wholly devoted to photography, from the darkroom in the basement to the archives in the attic. “I long for two thousand square feet to store all this shit,” she says. There is a large computer monitor in the dining room; its table holds recent contact prints. For her major retrospective, set to open in September at Fundación Mapfre, in Madrid, and travel through Europe, custom photographic paper was made to replace the now discontinued printing-out-paper Ross relied on for years.

In the early 1980s, when photographers could simply show up in person on an appointed day at MoMA and drop off their portfolios for review, Ross was called in to speak with John Szarkowski, the photography department’s director, who, looking at her first major series, Eurana Park (1982), asked if she knew the pictures of the German photographer August Sander. Ross lied and said she didn’t. “I was like Judas denying Christ,” she says. “I didn’t want him to think I was cheating.” Szarkowski, who bought two of the pictures, offered reassurance: “It’s okay, Judith. It’s called tradition to be influenced by another’s work.” She had, in fact, studied Sander’s pictures closely—how he photographed straightforwardly, centering the person in the frame. Sander’s monumental series Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century), begun in the 1920s and proceeding for decades, identified and grouped subjects by occupation and social class. Ross isn’t nearly as taxonomic; she is guided by a rapt, intense, wholehearted belief in the individual. (Ross disputes that Sander categorized people.) Her idiosyncratic printing practice—contact prints on printing-out-paper that are then toned with gold— enhances the fundamental uniqueness of the individuals she encounters. “No two prints by Judith are the same,” says Joshua Chuang, who is curating Ross’s retrospective and editing the accompanying catalogue. “Her way of experiencing humanity is through photography.”

Judith Joy Ross, Timmy Wright, Shop Class, Hazleton High School, 1992Judith Joy Ross, Untitled, Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pennsylvania, 1982

When she was coming up, Ross entered a world dominated by the iconographic portraits of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Diane Arbus, pictures often first published in magazines, where they had to leap off the page. Ross’s work, in a range of subtler tones, operates differently. Her contact prints are almost never bigger than the 8-by-10 dimensions of the negative. To enlarge them, she believes, could be “exploitive.” Of the prints’ scale and intimacy, Ross says, “They are asking you to come closer, and say hi.”

“Like Diane Arbus and like Lisette Model, Arbus’s teacher, she is working with the idea of the self, the tension between who one is and who one projects to the world,” Kismaric explains. “With Arbus, one still sees something of that struggle; in Judith’s pictures, outside the cosmopolitan world, it feels as though they’re working against futures that were prescribed for them. The questions become more complicated.”

Just as complicated is the question of why a photographer so revered by other photographers remains, to an extent, under the radar. The photographer An-My Lê once recalled how, when Ross visited her in New York, she’d play a game of guessing who on the subway Ross would choose to photograph; the fact that she was always wrong cemented Lê’s awareness of Ross’s empathic intuition. “Her work is beautiful in its transparency,” Robert Adams writes in his book Why People Photograph—it’s “a record of compassion.” Gregory Halpern, a photographer who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has called her “the greatest portrait photographer to have ever worked in the medium.” The photographer Paul Graham, who has taught with Ross at Yale, fell first for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial pictures. “It’s one of the dirty little secrets of photography,” he told me recently. “People act like they want to photograph rocks and houses and trees but what they really want is to have the gumption to photograph people the way Judith does.”

Ross’s pictures are holy in their awkwardness—the teen with the dark gothic bangs wielding a rake, the way the girls clasp their hands over their bathing suits.

Photobooks dominate Ross’s shelves along with images by friends, such as Chris Killip, who died in October 2020. “I can’t understand how his pictures can be so beautiful,” she exclaims. “Tiny little people shown this big, yet every one of them is seen as an individual! Such humanity. Oh, my God. He is missed.” Cabinets in nearly every room are filled with boxes of prints and negatives. To a visitor, the house can feel like the brain’s memory chambers. Ross claims her own memory is foggy, but whenever a gap emerges, she herds me upstairs to look through the cabinets of boxes of prints to supply the story.

Judith Joy Ross, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1998

Judith Joy Ross, Congressman John P. Hiler, Republican, Indiana, 1987

Above her dresser, framed works by her heroes mingle with family pictures. “That’s our summer home, where my heart is,” she says, pointing at a photograph of a cabin in the borough of Weatherly, Pennsylvania, where Ross grew up daydreaming and playing with her brothers among the creatures in the woods. “That’s my mom, that’s my dad, that’s my Atget,” she says, pointing out a print of the Panthéon, a revered gift from her brother Edward. The influence of the French photographer is evident in a few of Ross’s early personal pictures: One of her mother, a piano teacher, shown in profile, “looking with some sadness at jewelry at the Met,” on a trip she and Ross had taken to New York. One of her father, reclining on a forest floor, dressed in a suit, appears romantic and elegiac. “Fucking suit and a tie in the woods!” Ross says, laughing. It could have been made after a day at the five-and-dime store he owned in Nanticoke, a former mining town where other relatives also had shops selling candy and secondhand books. “He used to let me help out, paint faces on the mannequins,” she recalls. “I’d put eyeliner on them; I made them even worse. But he never minded. He just wanted us nearby.”

Ross made her first photographs in the mid-1960s as a student at Moore College of Art and Design, in Philadelphia. At the IIT Institute of Design, in Chicago, where she earned an MA in photography in 1970, she felt disconnected from Aaron Siskind’s experimental-minded program. “I was lost,” she says. “Eventually, I didn’t go to class. Including the Literature of Alienation. I should have gotten at least a C because I never went. I mean, what’s wrong with these people!” The lost feeling lingered for a decade. Ross went to Bethlehem, where she taught at Moravian College, simultaneously giving herself the photography education she felt she never received in school, via Eastman Kodak materials and the exhibitions she’d see (Arbus and Bruce Davidson, among others) and books she’d buy (Sander, Atget, Lewis Hine) in New York, two hours away. Eventually, she began photographing again.

Judith Joy Ross, Untitled, Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pennsylvania, 1982

In 1982, the devastation she felt over her father’s death carried her back in time. The beloved summer cabin was lonesome in his absence. Ross took her recently purchased 8-by-10 view camera a few miles away, to a public swimming park in Weatherly. In her mind, the children and teenagers she met there at Eurana Park represented a time of innocence before the first experience of grief. The pictures are holy in their awkwardness—the teen with the dark gothic bangs wielding a rake, the way the girls clasp their hands over their bathing suits—barely visible surroundings briefly lifting them out of their lives. In some, droplets of water can still be seen on skin, evidence of how quickly Ross must have forged these connections.

“I photographed people from the get-go. Even though I didn’t know how to have them in my life. That’s probably why I’m good at it,” Ross says. “Something happens, I see them intensely, and we never see each other again. I know it’s just a photograph. I know I’m being delusional. But I like to think I’m capturing the real thing.”

“But if you didn’t think that it was the real thing in the moment, could you even make the picture?” I ask. Ross shakes her head emphatically, no.

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Over the years, the arc of her work has expanded in scope to wider communities, public institutions, and national politics, projects for which Ross has sometimes earnestly sought the permission of mayors and civic organizations. But the true subject is both as simple and complicated as every human she meets. In 1983, thinking she would do a series about the United States and the Vietnam War, she traveled to Maya Lin’s granite memorial in Washington, D.C., and found herself drawn to solitary expressions of grief.

The distinctions between her projects became apparent in her printing techniques. “In Eurana Park, certain browns were happy,” Ross says. “When kids were pubescent they turned gray. For me, I didn’t get puberty. I wasn’t a happy camper with sexuality.” Tones for Ross exist on a psychological register, darkening or morphing over time. “Certainly Vietnam was gray. And the gray got so extreme. Pictures from Nanticoke, they might be an exquisite gray with a dash of purple in it that was melancholy. Or a brown shadow on a gray print. A gray print means something.”

In 1986, armed with a Guggenheim grant, one good suit, a makeshift shopping cart for her equipment, including a suspicious- looking box swathed in duct tape to hold her camera, and an inborn fear of authority figures, Ross set out for Capitol Hill—“gray with highlights and a hint of brown in the shadow.” She photographed Strom Thurmond “with his five-foot-tall shoulders and shrunken apple head, surrounded by his French furniture. . . . This awful racist person but I was seduced by his presence.” Her skill at creating instantaneous connections, and the magic ritual of bringing out the view camera, were crucial in these fifteen-minute appointments. In the faces of the members of Congress, humanized in Ross’s frame, it is possible to glimpse, briefly, an aspect of their private selves, not far removed from her young swimmers and workers back in Pennsylvania.

In the early 1990s, when money was tight, Ross began cleaning houses. “Does it look like I’d be a good maid?” she joked, waving at her stacks of archival boxes. “I carried superglue with me on the job; I broke everything.” It was in the midst of this time that the photographer John Gossage called to tell her she’d won a Charles Pratt Memorial Award of $25,000. First, she retorted, “How do I know you’re John Gossage?” and then she called the owners of the house she was supposed to clean that day to say she wasn’t coming. “I’m Cinderella! I just got a grant!”

Judith Joy Ross, Bus stop, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1989

From 1992 through 1994, she returned to the same public schools in Hazleton she’d daydreamed through while growing up. Again, the goal was idealistic. “I wanted people to pay their taxes. I wanted people to care about public education,” Ross says. “I certainly didn’t care about mine. I thought school sucked.” Ross’s Hazleton pictures are singular in their acknowledgment that school can indeed suck, and in their eerily personal portrayal of the vastness and discomfort and yearning and angst of adolescence— the pride of a perfectly brushed mullet or a cascade of sprayed hair. “These are their own selves,” she says. In a print displayed in her front room, a boy stares at the camera through glasses so thick you long to tell him they’ll be considered cool in twenty years. But here, he simply is a high schooler briefly showing his vulnerable self. Ross’s framing preserves this, acting as a protective shell.

Protest the War (2007), an unassuming little book published by Steidl and Pace/MacGill, her gallery at the time, is about the size of a trucker’s logbook or a horse-racing pamphlet. Ross, hoping the pictures could change people’s minds about who a nonviolent protester is, had wished it would be distributed at gas stations, “right next to the chewing tobacco and the beef jerky and the breath mints.” The fervent, believing expressions of her protesters never made it into this montage, but Ross herself again went to Capitol Hill, hand delivering copies at congressional offices. At the heart of her work is a profound identification with the singular person and a belief in what society can and should be, the rift that exists between the two, and the person confronting the specter of change. “I see you, and, please God, I want to get what I see before it’s gone,” Ross says. “Once you get out the camera, you get discombobulated and you have to find it again. You may not be finding the same thing.”

Judith Joy Ross, Untitled, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 1984

Ross says she is not interested in photographing people anymore. Or, that she does have a new idea about photographing people that she is intent on pursuing, but she doesn’t want to talk about it yet in a public way. She is recovering from eye surgery that she claims made her vision worse. The world has been so uncertain.

Last year, in the days before the U.S. presidential election was called, Ross began to photograph trees. “Maybe it’s sacrilegious to talk about them this way, but I do see them not as people but as individuals,” she says. We get in Ross’s car, stickered Make America Green Again, and she points out favorite elms as we drive to a cemetery in Bethlehem, from which you can glimpse, through a veil of ropy vines, the cemetery that Walker Evans famously depicted in A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1935). “He couldn’t have photographed from here, because everything’s the same tone,” she notes. Ross comes here for walks, not pictures. “The subject of death is so enormous, who can photograph it?”

Judith Joy Ross, Annie Hasz, Easton Circle, Easton, Pennsylvania, 2007
All photographs courtesy the artist and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

She is pleased when I notice that, instead of camera equipment packed in her car, an animal cage rests on the backseat. Later, I will think how cage or trap feels like the wrong word, especially for someone who lights up when she describes seeing a muskrat in the wild and tells me she cannot bear to have dogs anymore (“because you love them more than your family, of course”), especially when I learn that it is for the groundhog that lives under her porch and sometimes ventures to the back steps, standing on its hind legs. She speaks of it in a way, I think, that might apply to some of the people in her pictures: “Sometimes, I think I should try to catch it,” Ross says, “and take it to a happier place.”

In September 2001, Ross began to make portraits at another site of mourning—an overlook on the Eagle Rock Reservation in New Jersey where people come to stare toward New York at the spot where the Twin Towers once stood. Silently, Ross would slip a handwritten request to anyone she wished to photograph. A day after our visit, I drive to Eagle Rock. I try to pick out the people whom Ross might approach, and I am sure I am wrong. On my way out, I notice a young couple walking rapidly away from a marshy thicket, carrying a long trap seemingly identical to the one I’d seen in Ross’s car. The cage is empty; whatever they have brought with them, they have now released.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 244, “Cosmologies,” under the title “The World of Judith Joy Ross.”

After 9/11, Do We Prefer Images to Reality?

The only war that matters is the war against the imagination—all other wars are subsumed in it.
—Diane di Prima

In 1999, David Levi Strauss wrote an essay titled “Can You Hear Me?: Re-Imagining Audience Under the Pandaemonium,” in which he ruminates on a crisis of the imagination beset by panic. “A panic is an irrational terror involving noise and confused disturbance,” he writes. “Panic is a disease of the imagination.” According to Strauss, panic was the centerpiece of an “all-consuming Pandaemonium of sound and image”—the ubiquitous onslaught of information in which “the principle requirements of the audience ha[d] become passivity and obedience.” Although this declaration was made before the rise of social media, and only two years before the events of 9/11, Strauss’s prescient declarations seem to have predicted the course of “iconopolitics”—or the use of images in defining political and cultural activity, art, and the imagination—over the last two decades and the rise of American nationalism and global authoritarianism. What was supposed to democratize information instead created a Pandaemonium. The word “Pandaemonium”—borrowed from John Milton’s Paradise Lost meaning “the place of all howling demons”—embodies the irrational. In action it deafens and blinds, confuses and nauseates, pacifies and dispirits us, as on the morning of September 11, 2001, and in the communications environment that followed.

For over forty years, Strauss has written on the effects that photography and images have had on the twenty-first-century imagination. In particular, he has long been concerned with what happens between things—image and belief, words and images, representation and the real—and has contributed to broader cultural discourses on issues surrounding trauma, democracy, audience, human agency, resistance, and aesthetics. Three recent books published in 2020 encapsulate Strauss’s long engagement with these themes. Co-Illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press), a collection of responses to the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, which he attended as a “culture spy,” realizes an alarming political crisis that we now know in its full and ongoing monstrosity. Paired with photographs by Susan Meiselas and Peter van Agtmael, Strauss’s dispatches read as an imminent accident occurring in slow motion, each iteration a dream of paralysis as a new kind of iconopolitics unfolds. These themes are critically examined in his exposition “On Images & Magic: Towards an Iconopolitics of Belief,” in The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (Autonomedia), illuminating the importance of magic to our systems of belief and twenty-first-century image use. And his succinct book Photography and Belief (ekphrasis) builds on the legacies of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Vilém Flusser. In it, Strauss delves into the historical, social, and philosophical elements between the two titular terms, while elucidating on the relevance of magic, love, and agency under a perceived reality that incessantly vanishes.

Susan Meiselas, An amateur photographer on Church Street captures the collapse of Tower 2, the South Tower, of the World Trade Center at 9:55 a.m., New York, September 11, 2001
Magnum Photos

Strauss’s disquisition on images, belief, iconopolitics, and magic has been haunted by the events of 9/11. On that morning, he was set to begin the first session of his Advanced History of Photography seminar at New York University, where he was teaching. Instead, he was awoken by his wife and, like millions of others, watched the second plane hit the South Tower. When classes began the following week, he told me recently, “the seminar became a triage operation, to deal with the students’ trauma.” He was taken by how utterly transformed they were by their experiences of that day, later writing that “the sadness in photographs, in their relation to death and remembrance, had never been so palpable to them,” while the political uses of photographic images became of vital concern.

For Strauss, 9/11 was a point of convergence—an event that was felt to be very real and unreal simultaneously. As he writes in the introduction to Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), the day “shifted the ground of our thinking about images, wiping away years of accumulated theories about their effects and meanings, and causing us once again to acknowledge and confront our irrational and enduring attraction to them.” Most of us had “witnessed” the event through images. As Strauss has suggested, we were the targets; that is, all of us watching from afar—us image-witnesses. The imaging of that moment was the point, and Strauss has sought to show this through his writing. Of the dramatic moment when the second plane struck the South Tower, he writes in his brilliant essay on 9/11, titled “The Highest Degree of Illusion” (2001), that “it was immediately frozen into a still image that could be infinitely reproduced. It was not legible as ‘reality,’ but as representation it was indelible.” Once seen, these images were grafted into the depths of our minds as a permanent fixture easily conjured and suffered all over again. That is the visual impact of 9/11, an event that can be seen to represent the true meaning of the Sublime (the provocation of terror or horror in the audience); the destruction of those two monumental pillars became symbolic of a radical dislocation of the real.

9/11 and its aftermath manifested as a physical, psychological, and temporal wound: a hole in the building, the loss of loved ones, a mark on the social body, a scar in the collective consciousness.

Belief is inherent in our desire for images, and photographs, according to Strauss, have enough unreality in them to make an event such as 9/11 real to us. As he writes in “The Highest Degree of Illusion”: “We cannot bear reality, but we bear images—like stigmata, like children, like fallen comrades. We suffer them. We idealize them. We believe them because we need what we are in them.” The complex relationship we have with them is bound up in empathy, compassion, and our relationship to “the Real”—the physical and temporal world as we know it. 9/11 was a supreme example of this: “The affective unreality of the event cried out for representation,” Strauss writes in Words Not Spent Today. It cried out because our belief in images was in a state of crisis; Postmodernism and related discourses had dismantled photographic “truth,” while the booming digital and electronic environments had made image manipulation more accessible and dissemination faster and farther reaching.

9/11 and its aftermath manifested as a physical, psychological, and temporal wound: a hole in the building, the loss of loved ones, a mark on the social body, a scar in the collective consciousness and unconsciousness alike, the now absent towers in the city skyline, and the final impressions, two wounds in the earth where the towers once stood. It was a visual event that was felt through images. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we “had to be shown the wounds, as a therapeutic act, to know the trauma,” Strauss writes in Photography and Belief. However, under the Pandaemonium, the ubiquity of images has not given way to a more democratic image-savvy population but rather has burgeoned to create the opposite. As Strauss writes in the preface of Co-Illusion, “The damage done to the symbolic order—to words and images and their purchase on the Real—will take a long time to repair, and the effects of this assault on the public imaginary will be far-reaching and long-lasting.” Strauss believes more images are needed, not less, and that these are images charged with meaning, such as those made by artists and photographers, and images he terms “non-allopathic.” He differentiates between allopathic and non-allopathic images in his 1994 essay “Take As Needed” from Between Dog & Wolf, explaining that the former are anodyne—meant to treat symptoms and lull us into some state of complacency—while the latter have agency and value in a way that treats the cause of affliction and can be revelatory. As an example of the non-allopathic, Strauss mentions a drawing his four-year-old daughter gave him when he returned home after surgery and a stint in the hospital: “She instructed me to drape it over my injury whenever I could, especially at night,” he writes, and “scolded me whenever I forgot to use the image properly.” As such, this drawing became “a practical talismanic device to aid in healing.”

Peter van Agtmael, Donald Trump waves farewell to the crowd at a rally at Verizon Center on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Manchester, NH, 2016
Magnum Photos

Images are bound up in magic. We exchange them and use them to influence, convince, provoke, soothe, and so on. They are also used on us, and against us. “Fundamental to magic is the law of sympathy, whereby things act on one another at a distance through invisible links,” Strauss writes in his essay in The Critique of the Image is the Defense of the Imagination. “The manipulation of such linkages is known as binding.” For Strauss, magic is the invisible link between image and belief and is crucial in our defense of the imaginary. In his essay, “In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: On Joseph Beuys and 9/11,” Strauss returns to Beuys’s artwork Cosmos und Damian (Cosmos and Damian) from 1974. This work, made during the artist’s first visit to the United States, and specifically New York, is based on a 3D postcard photograph depicting the Twin Towers from an aerial vantage point. The towers have been softened and tinted yellow, “making them look like two sticks of butter or fat” as Strauss puts it. On them, Beuys inscribed the names “Cosmos” and “Damian” in blood-red ink.

For Beuys, Strauss writes, the towers had already symbolized death: “rigid, cold, dedicated to the accumulation of money and world domination under Capital.” The inscriptions reference the twin Arab saints and physicians Cosmas and Damian, who were known for their free services, “cooperation and cross-cultural surgery” but were inevitably martyred by beheading. The two were a favorite subject for painters and, most famously, for being the first to successfully complete a surgical transplant, when they removed an Italian man’s diseased leg and replaced it with a previously-deceased black man’s leg, the graft of a Muslim’s appendage onto a Christian’s body. Cosmas and Damian, in Strauss’s words, “are later manifestations of the ancient Indo-European myth of divine twins, and especially the tradition of twins as magical healers.” As Strauss makes clear, it is impossible now to see this work as anything but “a therapeutic operation” in a post-9/11 world. Through symbolic action—or image magic—Beuys attempts to heal the visible and invisible wounds of the structures by renaming them as these “great healers.”

Susan Meiselas, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, VP nominee, speaks to the Republican National Convention, Cleveland, 2016
Magnum Photos

Today, this work has multiplied in its effect, and Strauss pointedly revives it among us. The many emotions post 9/11 were seized and capitalized on by those in power, who ultimately drove the US into pointless conflicts marked by war crimes and torture, and enacted draconian legislation that weakened our democratic institutions and enabled widespread spying. Many images were weaponized to this end, while others were censored and hidden. Today we witness the consequences, with the Taliban reclaiming Afghanistan and the failures of the United States on full display, again through images. Beuys’s work, through Strauss’s eyes, becomes a funerary image—not just of 9/11 but of the polarizing aftereffects (the afterimages) that have led us to this moment—that is also non-allopathic: it cries out for cross-cultural compassion and deep healing.

It’s not that we “mistake photographs for reality,” according to Strauss, but that “we prefer them to reality.” They do things for us as much as they do work on us. In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture, 2003), he describes that in the nightmarish scene “before the dust from the towers had settled, talismans of loss—photographs of the missing—began to appear, carried through the streets by stunned survivors who rushed to try to forestall their loss of the originals. . . . Within days the talismans were transformed into funerary images, but still the living clung to them like life preservers that buoyed them over despair.” The “image-bearers” among the toxic dust and death, with their talismans in hand, became incredibly potent sympathetic images themselves. They provoked in us all a deeply felt humanity, eradicating divisions in the name of our human bond; they showed us how, Strauss writes in Between Dog & Wolf, “non-allopathic approaches recognize that images and symbols are real, and that the crystallization of a desire or concept in the form of an image can become a potent agent, directly effecting the course of events.”

The physical and visual wounds that were created on 9/11 have been repeatedly attended to through image and text by many cultural surgeons, Strauss among them. For him, writing about these difficult subjects is itself a magical act, one which, like his daughter’s drawing or Beuys’s remedy, is meant to have agency that spurs one into action. Therefore, his writings must be applied like a woven suture into the social body of humanity. And we must read them in as an ecology of the divine twins: image and belief. That is, if we are to defend the imagination, which has been under attack since that catastrophic, fiery morning twenty years ago.

A Photographer’s Heartbreaking Images of the 9/11 “Missing” Posters

The day after, the streets were empty. From 14th Street down, east and west, the police patrolled. If you lived below 14th Street, you needed to show proof of your address to be allowed home. Few people walked the streets, fear permeated ordinary habits, and no ambulances screamed up the avenues from the pit, though some sped down, and there were fire trucks. For a while, fires smoldered on the ground, burning the soles of rescuers’ shoes and the paws of search-and-rescue dogs. The fumes were poisonous and deadly, though New Jersey’s governor, Christine Todd Whitman, told us it was safe. She left office that same year.

Wounded people, survivors, were expected and awaited. But there were hardly any the first day, then fewer the next. Families and friends hoped and waited, and grew desperate. Time passed, precious days. People hoped there might be a miracle—my child, my spouse, brother, sister would be pulled from under the ruins. They waited, while hope evanesced. Soon, terror and grief overwhelmed every one of them.

A profusion of 8-by-10-inch posters, hundreds of them, thousands of images, appeared around the city, taped to chain-link fences, stapled and tacked onto community bulletin boards, on school and church walls; Trinity Church, near the site of the disaster, and Grace Church were festooned. The posters hung on fences and were propped on tables. They were typed, handwritten and -drawn, drawn with crayons or ballpoints, some on board, most on paper, with a name and picture, sometimes a more elaborate description, or just a scribbled sentence: “Please, have you seen. . .”

Steve Pyke didn’t print the photographs he took of the 9/11 posters then. “I didn’t even look at the work at all until recently,” he said, and this is their first publication. The 9/11 posters confirmed a gruesome reality: 2,763 individual deaths in the towers, including 343 firefighters and paramedics, twenty-three New York City police officers, and thirty-seven Port Authority police officers. The posters told us these were not anonymous victims. Each person was wanted.

Plain and startling, a plea written by hand with a black marker on a concrete wall, “PLEASE GIVE ME BACK MY SON,” appeals to God or a higher power. The wish registers a pain impossible to describe, retaining its anguished relevance, since every single day wars and illness take sons and daughters.

The photograph of “MISSING FROM TOWER 1 / 97th FLOOR / Please Help Searc. . . / Thank You!” displays this and other posters, row under row, respectfully. All sit neatly side by side, an accumulation of faces, some big images, some small, in color or black and white. “MISSING” at the top of some. Or the name of the person. Each description is carefully wrought to bring them to life, to encourage the search for them. “Wearing docker pants—grey pullover.”

On one poster, a single firefighter wears his uniform and cap; it appears to be an official portrait. On the day, firefighters raced to the site and ran up staircases, like scaling a mountain, going up while people ran down, trying to escape. The firefighters kept going up, which their job required, but their eventual sacrifice of life stunned New Yorkers. Many of the posters honored them, schoolchildren thanked them. Later, downtown firehouses—their firefighters were the first to arrive—hung permanent plaques honoring their dead colleagues.

There are differences among the posters—the people’s faces, design, contents—but the same fate overwhelms any differences. Looking at them back then, I had to turn away, they were heartbreaking. Many people had been photographed smiling—of course, we often smile for photographs—so the juxtaposition of a happy past with a future to a terrible present was immensely disturbing.

Hope was lost, and the posters yellowed and faded; weathered, they looked ragged like grieving faces. They transformed into tributes, not “have you seen my. . . .” but entreaties to remember them.

Pyke didn’t publish his photographs then, because “it was such an awful time, and was followed so quickly by knee-jerk reactions, not just in government but across the land. I guess I couldn’t face them.” One of these “knee-jerk reactions” was to memorialize, instantly. The clamor was loud. For almost ten years, fierce arguments about an eventual memorial shadowed the tragedy. These posters should have been the memorial, I thought then and now. And the beam of light, like a tower, emanating from the site every 9/11—it could have memorialized them with its impermanence.

Twenty years later, the posters are still hard to face. Time is its own demiurge, and events since—historic shifts, environmental shocks, new movements—affect seeing them now. After 9/11, there came more disasters, specifically the US’s preemptive war against Iraq. That huge, human-made destruction continues unsettling countries, claiming lives, and treasure.

Steve Pyke, Missing, September–November, 2001
Courtesy the artist

All disasters have their own faces, though death is faceless, and loss is loss everywhere. Still, the posters’ impact survives the event. They locate a moment in time that seems to have changed everything. And, on this twentieth anniversary, with the Taliban recapturing Afghanistan, history repeats itself, with differences, or erases itself, but the irony is killing.

The New Era of South Asian Photography Festivals

On February 12, 2021, Chobi Mela, a biennial photography festival in Dhaka, Bangladesh, launched its Shunno or Zero edition. The statement accompanying the title read that it “raises essential questions about its own purpose.” Mounted amid a global pandemic, via this “self-reflective edition,” the festival asked a pertinent question: “Is art in any way relevant any more to a time of endless loss of life and livelihood?”

Since last year, an invisible force—one that has raged and ravaged through lives and communities—connected individuals across the world. While the manner in which we have been impacted and the protections that we have been afforded have been a reflection, to an extent, of our independent privileges, the virus, at different times, has managed to bring the entire world to a standstill. As I spoke with the founders and directors of three photography festivals in South Asia, a sentiment that emerged was the need to slow down and reflect. In this time of overwhelming personal as well as collective grief, the forced pause on our trajectories has sprouted reckonings—some that had been in a slow churn before and others that responded intuitively to this moment. 

Salma Abedin Prithi, Untitled, from the series Torn, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2020. The artist’s work was featured in Chobi Mela, 2021
Courtesy the artist

Tanzim Wahab of the Bengal Foundation, who took over as Chobi Mela’s festival director from photographer-activist Shahidul Alam in February 2019, spoke to me about this pause, while elaborating on the title for their latest edition. He sees Shunno as a vacuum that is both “philosophical and spiritual,” essential to “restarting from ground zero,” allowing a space to rethink, unlearn, and recalibrate. For the longest-running major photography festival in South Asia, founded in 2000, this would have been its eleventh edition. However, the festival team decided to position it as a bonus edition, one which was “baggage-free” from the expectations that a legacy of two decades may impose on it in a pandemic year. “We just wanted down-to-earth engagement of people, where people can freely experiment with the form, with the medium, and also with their content. Where they can strategize. They can also make some mistakes,” Wahab said, terming this edition “a star in the sky,” one that would “contextualize time” but will not be counted as the eleventh iteration.

This reconfigured thinking about the form of a festival resonated with others in the region. NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, festival director of the biennial Photo Kathmandu, Nepal’s first and only international photography festival, has been thinking through the relevance of a festival format since its inception. Photo Kathmandu launched in 2015, the year Nepal was struck by a devastating earthquake, and Kakshapati was conscious of the timing of the festival in that critical year, and of the dilemma of spending resources on an arts-based event when over nine thousand Nepalis had lost their lives and thousands of others had their homes destroyed. Kakshapati, along with members of photo.circle, a self-described “platform for photography” based in Kathmandu that she cofounded, were themselves involved in relief efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake. “That year we were also responding to a very specific set of needs,” she told me. At a time when the economy of the country was significantly impacted, especially the tourism sector that sustained many livelihoods, Kakshapati saw the festival as a way to contribute to its rebuilding by attracting visitors and boosting tourism. Five years on, she was once again attuned to the need of the festival to evolve with changing circumstances and realities. 

Prasiit Sthapiit, Hemp weaving, Rachibang, Rolpa, 2019. The artist’s work was featured in Photo Kathmandu, 2020
Courtesy the artist

On December 3, 2020, Photo Kathmandu launched its fourth edition, with a week’s lineup of online artist talks and panel discussions, and an informal virtual “mixer”—an online version of Photo Kathmandu’s infamous “speed dating,” in which attendees networked and introduced themselves to others in rapid succession. In the introductory note, Kakshapati, on behalf of the festival team, proposed to shift from the five-week-long festival schedule to a yearlong form. “The festival is part of a larger continuum of image-making, research and civic engagements for us,” Kakshapati wrote, referencing the non-public facing work that photo.circle and Nepal Picture Library (a digital photo archive run by photo.circle) do throughout the year. Reflecting further on this continuum, she posited, “What might be possible if we were to take the resources and energy we commit to a 5-week festival, and stretch it out over a longer period? Would we be able to foster deeper, less frenzied connections and dialogue? This feels like a good time to shift gears and find out.” 

This need for deeper engagement is a sentiment that reverberates across festivals, including Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB), a public arts initiative based in Chennai, India. Founded in 2016, CPB was meant to have its third edition in December 2020. Imagined as a “city’s biennale,” CPB intended to follow the lead of its counterparts in Dhaka and Kathmandu in extending beyond traditional exhibition spaces to include, as noted in their mission statement, “public spaces and those parts of Chennai that have remained outside the realm and remit of contemporary cultural activities.” With their heavy focus on engaging the city’s public, and the restrictions the pandemic posed to this endeavor, cofounders Varun Gupta and Shuchi Kapoor spoke about shifting the festival to a later date. With the change in timeline, amid an ongoing pandemic, came a shift in the festival’s imagined shape. “If we’re unable to bring people to the biennale,” Kapoor reflected, “aren’t there ways that the biennale can go to them?” Gupta returned to the emphasis on public spaces, calling it a “biennale without walls,” and referred to some of the sites that have been used for exhibitions in prior editions: “the train station, the park, the beach—these are the places we love to work in. So how do we not lose that?” 

Angela Grauherholz, Privation, installation view at the Madras Literary Society, Chennai Photo Biennale, 2019. Photograph by Charles & Dhina
Courtesy the artists

Sheba Chhachhi and Sonia Jabba, When the gun is raised, the dialogue stops, installation view at the Senate House, Chennai Photo Biennale, 2019
Courtesy CPB Foundation

The pandemic has presented a unique conundrum for these three festivals. While public engagement and building community have been at the core of their missions, the isolation forced by the spread of COVID-19 across the world has meant a complete overhaul in conceptualizing how these engagements take place. Chobi Mela, with its two-decade history of civic engagement with a local audience in Dhaka, has always valued this as much as curating contemporary photography for industry professionals. While previous editions have taken photography to the streets and to local residents, by mounting mobile exhibitions on rickshaws or showing photography in public theaters and libraries in the old city, the pandemic year of 2021 was the first that did not include this in its programming. However, the emphasis on the local was not missing, only remapped. Shunno was a South Asia­­–specific edition, including works from India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in addition to the host country, Bangladesh. Many participating artists were alumni of Pathshala, a school for photography in Dhaka recognized as one of the key institutions for photography education in the region (alongside others such as NID in Ahmedabad), and also one of the parent organizations of the festival. “I think we have this fluid network of artists, and we are used to calling it ‘community.’ The community we have built is quite intimate. Intimacy is really important to us,” Wahab said. 

Speaking about the festival’s definition of local, Wahab added, “South Asia is our local regional collaborator in every sense.” This cross-pollination was reflected in Chobi Mela’s cultural partnership with Colomboscope, a contemporary art festival based in Sri Lanka, for this year’s edition. “I think we are answerable for this ecology and ecosystem in South Asia. We always try to see how we can share not only ideas but tangible resources,” Wahab told me, “but our resource is also the community itself, idea-sharing and sometimes courage-sharing in a difficult time.”

With the curatorial focus on regional narratives and collaboration, the festival opened its exhibitions in the newly constructed media space DrikPath Bhobon, using not just the gallery, but the stairways, parking lot, and classrooms as innovative sites of display. The building—designed by Bangladeshi architect Bashirul Huq—resembles a film strip and offered Chobi Mela a dynamic venue, one where the works were in constant conversation with the architecture. While the physical edition ran for ten days, the entire site and all the exhibitions in it were converted into a virtual viewing experience, which continued through August 31. In this new avatar, the festival garnered a worldwide audience, bigger than ever before. I asked Wahab if he missed being on the street with the festival. “Of course. But it was intentional, we don’t regret it,” he said, emphasizing that there was no rush to go back to the physical rendition since, being an integral part of the ethos of Chobi Mela, it will inevitably return as part of regular programming post pandemic.

[Off] Limits exhibition, installation view at DrikPath Bhobon, Chobi Mela, 2021. Photograph by Farhad Rahman
Courtesy Chobi Mela

At their very core, festivals are events that bring people together, and our present circumstances raise many questions about the sustainability of pre-existing formats. Kakshapati, who has been thinking through these questions about the festival form, stressed that each edition should respond to the needs and reality of the community it builds from, as well as the one it serves. She says this adaptation is continuous, “because it is not like the community is a monolithic or permanent entity. It is evolving.” Recognizing the demands—mental, physical, emotional, financial—that the pandemic imposes both on those who attend and host the festival, Photo Kathmandu has laid low after its first week of programming. True to the spirit of malleability that Kakshapati espoused, she said that the festival has somewhat “gone into hibernation,” allowing for a larger reflection on its purpose and position within a broader institutional framework. 

The CPB team has also grappled with the unpredictability of the present moment. While Gupta admitted that the pandemic, by disrupting the biennale schedule, opened up room for them to “catch their breath,” up until early 2021, they were moving ahead, as planned, with a largely physical edition of the festival. However, as the second wave of COVID-19 devastated India in April, their plans changed. The team felt a strong impulse to respond to the urgency of the crisis and launched a print sale titled PhotoSolidarity, in which 137 artists came together to sell prints to raise money for COVID relief. 

It was at this juncture that CPB decided to pivot the majority of the upcoming festival edition online. Having already shifted their interim year programming online in 2020, and, like Chobi Mela, significantly expanded their audience engagement, they had some preparation for the new venture. However, unlike Chobi Mela, CPB does not plan on converting physical exhibition spaces into virtual reality, but rather intends to build “a virtual exhibit that is purely looking at the art works being presented,” Gupta told me. Kapoor echoes this sentiment, adding, “Not everything that was imagined as physical can be translated into the virtual,” challenging the curatorial team to construct a novel exhibition experience in the digital space. While this idea may cater to professional photography audiences, Gupta and Kapoor continue to stress ways to “travel the festival to the public.” To this end, the curatorial team is working on a broadsheet that can make its way into local neighborhoods as well as across the country, and potentially lead to some “home-spun” shows. The team is also planning an e-journal as a precursor to the latest festival edition, which will preview some works and carry critical texts, podcasts, and interviews, all opening up interpretations of their theme, Maps of Disquiet.

Nida Mehboob, Get Indoors When The Mullah Roars, from the series Shadow Lives, 2017–ongoing. The artist’s work was featured in Chobi Mela, 2021
Courtesy the artist

While the pandemic has emerged as the single most consistent disruptor of our lives, it is important to recognize that it has also served as a smoke screen for other injustices that have swiftly been taking place under authoritarian regimes in South Asia, particularly in India and Bangladesh, during this period. As we grapple with the impact of a virus as a “visible” crisis, what is more insidious is the erosion of civil liberties and fundamental rights, especially in vulnerable communities. CPB addresses this directly through their festival theme, and their curatorial statement, with plans to build a collection of lens-based works that respond to today’s political volatility. This tactic of mediating sociopolitical issues through the arts is not new to this edition. Gayatri Nair, the third cofounder of the biennale, has been doing so via CPB Prism, an arts learning program she runs for adolescents and young adults. (Nair is currently working on a curriculum on masculinity that is communicated primarily through image-based learning tools.) The festival, and its spillovers, can then be seen as interventions into civil society, with a hope to influence public opinion and thought.

A need to respond to ongoing societal realities was also reflected in Photo Kathmandu’s 2018 edition, which hosted filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s The Lightning Testimonies, a multiscreen video projection focusing on the experiences of survivors of sexual violence, especially in environments of conflict in India. With the #MeToo movement erupting in South Asia in the month prior, the exhibition was particularly relevant and programming around it continued for six months, well beyond the five-week festival schedule. “We were reaching out to young law students, young journalists, and practicing lawyers, because the role that law plays in addressing sexual violence was something we were very specifically trying to tease out,” Kakshapati explained, speaking about how the festival and its exhibitions can become prompts for conversations that do not happen elsewhere. Wahab, from Chobi Mela, echoed this sentiment of the festival as a “safe space,” and the need to come together under one roof. He sees this as not only necessary to strategize, but also to “build courage through each other.”

The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project exhibition, installation view at Photo Kathmandu, 2018. Photograph by Chemi Dorje
Courtesy the artist

What became increasingly evident through my conversations with these festival directors and curators was the need to focus on intellectual as well as community involvement in the time between festival editions. While the event itself may be a trigger, or a starting point, many engagements really take shape and form after the frenzy of the opening week subsides. The day The Lightning Testimonies closed after its six-month run at Photo Kathmandu, a new initiative called Imperfect Solidarities (IMSOL) was launched. Unwilling to give it a binding definition, and aligning with its fluid nature, Kakshapati described IMSOL as a methodology that relies on narrative psychotherapy tools to cultivate “nonjudgmental conversations” and an “opportunity to create time and space with people who you feel some kind of community with.” As an example of how an image-based work can serve as a prompt for larger, time-intensive conversations on issues that are plaguing society, this initiative helped foster knowledge-sharing beyond the presence of the work itself.

Chobi Mela perhaps has the longest experience with this kind of interdisciplinary exchange with photography, as well as with extending the concerns raised by the festival into the interim period between two editions. Two of the festival’s parent organizations—Drik and Pathshala—engage with civil society throughout the year, as in November 2019, when Drik organized an event on the necessity of prison reform, marking the anniversary of the release of its managing director, Shahidul Alam. Alam, who had been abducted and then jailed for criticizing the Bangladeshi government, shared his experience along with other previously incarcerated individuals. Wahab, when speaking about the future, emphatically says, “Shahidul is our logo, Shahidul is our flag,” while also admitting that the way forward for the medium is to “embrace its transformation.” With Chobi Mela, as well as other initiatives in the region, opening up their doors to cross-disciplinary practice as well as new forms of visual culture, Wahab’s words help root this transition to a purposeful intent—“the medium is only the tool or voice with which we want to question power.”

Read more about South Asian photography communities in Aperture, issue 243, “Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In” (Summer 2021).

Gregory Halpern on the Impossibility of Documentary Photography

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa: This new work you’ve made is a little unusual relative to your earlier work, in that you’re making photographs in a place that’s distant from you and relatively unknown to you. Up to now, you’ve only made work in the US, and yet here, you’re making work on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. How does your relative distance from it all inform the way you’ve approached the project?

Gregory Halpern: It’s true—a lot of my work is about the American experiment, its promises, its failures, and trying to look at that in new ways. But in Guadeloupe, I felt overwhelmed at times by the sense that I was such an interloper. The constant awareness of being a white, American man with a camera in the Caribbean, the relationship between photography and colonialism, the fear that I was no more than a glorified tourist—all of that was creatively paralyzing at times.

For the Immersion commission, I was asked to propose a project based in France. I spent a lot of time thinking about how and where I could work in “mainland” France. I struggled with that question until I realized that it might be interesting to think about France through the experience of a former French colony and landed on Guadeloupe, a modern-day “overseas region” of France.

The barriers were much larger than in previous projects, and my French is pretty poor. Plus, the weight of history there felt immense; it felt unknowable to me in a way that I wasn’t used to. So I felt much less confident at first editorializing in Guadeloupe than I did in, say, Los Angeles—which by comparison I knew quite well, and where I felt more comfortable imposing my vision on the place.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: What was notable to me in looking at the first and then especially the second edit of the book, was the extent to which you’ve found a means to address concerns that I’d argue are integral to your ongoing project as an artist, but from Guadeloupe. I see you looking at death and violence as they’re figured in the earth, in symbols, and on bodies; I see you working across an epic register of forms of light: that seems to me very consonant with your ongoing work.

Halpern: I’ve never been one to make quick photographic visits, especially to foreign countries, so making this work in less than three months was a challenge. I like to sit with the work, show people, figure out what’s working and what’s not, and then return to making pictures with a more informed vision. Both ZZYZX [2016] and A [2011] took five years to finish, and Omaha Sketchbook [2009/2019] was made over fifteen years. But I think you’re right that almost whatever I photograph, I tend to think about the same sets of issues, and want similar ideas and feelings to drive the pictures.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: Do you worry at all that there might have been a different story to be told, but that you were incapable of telling it, whether in this accelerated time frame, or perhaps at all?

Halpern: I worried about both. The time constraint forced me to be productive, but the fear was that I would be desperate to come back with images, without having the time to consider if they were the right images. And yes, a story I couldn’t tell was a story from the perspective of an insider. I worried whether that story would be more compelling than mine could ever be.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: For me, from your vantage point as an outsider, the photograph that most powerfully forces us to reckon with the continuities and discontinuities pursuant to slavery, colonialism, and their aftermath is the one of a dark black male figure with the fisherman’s hat, who stands in the water, carefully carrying the recumbent figure of a white woman. It’s incredibly beautiful, and it’s suffused with the explosively uneven nature of racialized difference, which is as central to the United States as it is to colonial France. I imagine, or I hypothesize, that your way “in” to making work in Guadeloupe might have been to look at it as someone who is an inheritor of settler-colonial violence, and to make work from that standpoint.

Halpern: You’re right that the histories of the two places are not entirely dissimilar, but the trauma of slavery and colonialism somehow feels so much more raw there than in the US. Perhaps the contemporary, semicolonial relationship with France continues to irritate those wounds? But also, the vast majority of the population of Guadeloupe is black, which helps ensure that that history is not relegated to the margins. There’s an incredible number of slavery-related memorials, for example, and there’s nothing like that in the US. They address very directly the violence and trauma of the past, and picturing them was simply one way of trying to visualize that history.

As for the photograph you mention, I liked how that moment was hard to read. Who is playing what role? Are the arms of the dark figure protective or menacing, loving or servile, a reference to the “utility” of colonialism’s past—or present, for that matter, because it’s the labor of locals that carries tourists, as if they were weightless, through their island vacations.

For a picture to work there has to be something that defies expectation, that surprises or unsettles or nags at you, something that doesn’t just reaffirm what you already know or feel. For me, that picture did that.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: Did you try to photograph regular forms of labor and activity? Were you thinking about work specifically? Did you make a choice to more or less avoid the tourist trade?

Halpern: I tried photographing the tourist trade at points, but the pictures were caricatures or one-liners. I couldn’t seem to get past the sort of ridiculous look or “character” of the tourist. There’s a clichéd or clownish image of tourists we all know—bad style, pasty skin, camera, English spoken with an air of loud entitlement—it’s an image we know, true or not, and my pictures sometimes couldn’t get beyond that reference. Or if they did, they functioned within the book to suggest two polarized worlds—tourists and locals— which is a legitimate way of viewing the island, but it made for a more reductionist reading of the book. The individuals pictured became symbols of one group or another, and it felt somehow an injustice to everyone.

In relation to labor, I have recently gone back to Guadeloupe to make a video, which touches on it. There’s a market in downtown Pointe-à-Pitre near the harbor, and when the cruise ships dock, hundreds of tourists flood downtown for a few hours. They stroll into the market and inevitably photograph the women working there, usually without asking permission. The women sometimes respond by yelling “no photo” at the tourists, annoyed that they haven’t asked permission, or bought fruit, or even said hello first.

I sat there one day and watched the dynamic, mesmerized. It was unsettling. I was shocked by some of the tourists’ brazenness and disrespect, shooting as if on a safari, not talking or making eye contact. I found myself sympathizing squarely with the workers as they yelled at the tourists, and yet I also couldn’t help but recognize myself, at least to a degree, in the tourists. There was something quite powerful and instructive in that dynamic being laid so bare.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: I can certainly see how heavily the images you excluded would skew the balance of symbolism in the book toward fundamentally external concerns. They sound a loud, interrupting note. Are there other images in the book that emerge from you trying to look outward from a Guadeloupean perspective, or from following an island dweller’s instructions or invitations as to where to go, or where to look?

Halpern: Maybe half of the images are the result of advice from a Guadeloupean. I tend to wander and talk to a lot of people. I’m sort of a sponge when I have the camera, accepting just about any invitation, picking up hitchhikers, following stray cats down alleys, et cetera. I often start the day with a vague plan, maybe choosing a spot on a map or returning to a place where the light was poor previously. I rarely stick to the plan, but the plan is an important starting point, because it gets me out the door.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: Can you describe a few of the conversations you had with people in Guadeloupe as you made the work, and perhaps speak to the extent that they’ve varied from or mirrored conversations you had in Los Angeles or Omaha, Nebraska, or Buffalo, New York?

Halpern: I think my conversations are pretty similar no matter where I am, but it was definitely more of a challenge to connect with people, because my French is mediocre and very few people are fluent in English there. There were a lot of photographs I couldn’t wind up making well because of language, and perhaps because of my timidity as an outsider, but nonetheless, I occasionally still made strong connections, and that’s always amazing when that happens. Twice in my life, I’ve made portraits of people where the only communication was with hand gestures and facial expressions—once there was a lot of smiling and laughing at ourselves, and once it was just really silent and peaceful, but both times were intense and beautiful experiences.

It’s always hard photographing people, though, even when you speak the same language. I’m pretty introverted, and I usually still have to work up the nerve. I tend to approach people in a sort of formal way—respectful, positive, honest, and direct about what I’m doing. I’m always aware of what a huge ask I’m making. I’m aware of the skepticism I’d feel if a stranger approached me on the street asking for a portrait, and that’s always in the back of my mind. And I carry a little laser-printed card that I hand to people, so they know how to reach me if they want copies of pictures. A lot of people don’t follow up, but I think the gesture is appreciated nonetheless.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: Can you speak about the ways in which your Jewishness informs your sensitivity to ethnic and racial difference? I’m thinking about the ways that certain racial and ethnic differences can go unobserved, and the ways your own personal experiences might attune you to the different, but related, inequities that others suffer.

Halpern: I’ve generally been uninterested in making work about myself or my identity, but increasingly, I’ve come to think my Jewishness is a powerful reality in the background that has deeply shaped how I see. My brother and I were the only Jews in our high school in Buffalo, and there was the sense that it was wise to just “pass.” Oddly that sentiment has lingered, and I sometimes still find myself wondering whether or not to “out” myself in conversations. My grandfather fled Hungary just before the outbreak of the Second World War and snuck into the US illegally because of anti-Semitic immigration laws. I am alive because he made that journey. The family who stayed in Hungary was almost entirely killed in extermination camps by the Nazis, although my great-aunts Olga and Goldie somewhat miraculously survived Auschwitz.

When I was a kid, usually at Thanksgiving, my dad would almost ritually ask my grandfather to tell the story of coming to the US—two weeks hidden in the bottom of a boat, going to the bathroom in the corner. And so this became our family’s origin story—fleeing genocide and sneaking into a country that did not want us. I have a complicated relationship to this story, and over the years have felt various combinations of pain, shame, strength, and pride in relation to it. And then there is the history of those who did not escape—the photographs of the piles of pale, malnourished bodies I somehow saw as a child, and which became, and perhaps remain, the primary association I have with the word Jewish. It’s such an overwhelming experience to see those pictures for the first time, especially as a child, that that becomes your people and your history.

Of course, whether or not Jews came to this country legally, they came of their own volition, not as enslaved people. Whether or not it’s useful to compare griefs, I don’t know, but there is something quite dark and not often talked about in the inherited trauma of Jews. I think it manifests itself in strange ways. It may be present, if latent, in the pictures, which is not to say that viewers need to know any of that when looking at the pictures, but I do think perhaps it’s there. Narratives and traumas across cultures are obviously different, and I don’t make this point to overlook or discredit the singular experience of any one narrative, but I do feel that through art there is the potential for shared experience, for some form of transcendence.

A family photo was taken before the Nazis invaded in 1944. My grandfather had already left Europe, so he is not pictured. Of the rest, all but three were killed in Auschwitz. Of those three, my great-aunt Olga is the only one still alive, at age ninety-two.

All this makes me think of a 2019 New York Review of Books piece by Zadie Smith called “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” It’s a remarkable piece, running counter to the current mood, that argues for the potential value of portraying the “other” as a possible form of connection:

[W]hat insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.

She goes on to argue that in our own deeply personal, unique experiences of grief, there is the potential for us to know each other:

I was fascinated to presume that some of the feelings of these imaginary people—feelings of loss of homeland, the anxiety of assimilation, battles with faith and its opposite—had some passing relation to feelings I have had or could imagine. That our griefs were not entirely unrelated. . . .

What do I have in common with Olive Kitteridge, a salty old white woman who has spent her entire life in Maine? And yet, as it turns out, her griefs are like my own. Not all of them. It’s not a perfect mapping of self onto book—I’ve never met a book that did that, least of all my own. But some of Olive’s grief weighed like mine.

Wolukau-Wanambwa: I think that you’ve often made photographs that engage with the production of difference, or the individuated experience of racial difference particularly. I’d argue that your sensitivity to, and your compulsive interest in the forces that shape how we might articulate our inchoate selves, and the forces that might limit our capacity to be receptive to others, are central to much of the work you’ve made. One thread that runs through some portraits is a powerfully reflexive figuration of difference. You make photographs that point to the activity of picturing in complex and expressly racial ways. Do you think that your sensitivity to the reduction of Jewishness to images of emaciated corpses, or the reduction of Jewishness to anti-Semitic tropes that are expressly visual, might inform your relationship to imaging more broadly? I think about this as a black photographer too: I know how the power of looking can shift suddenly, radically, and all too often dangerously, and that has a meaningful effect on the ways I think about seeing and about images.

Halpern: That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. But I think there’s something fascinating there—especially when I think about the ability of images to work powerfully on our unconscious mind, and how susceptible we are to being manipulated visually, be it through propaganda or advertising.

At the same time, I’m pretty skeptical of the power of images to transform reality or to create change. More and more, I’ve come to feel that change happens almost exclusively through protest and direct political action, when enough people come together to create a tipping point. I think that the art world is driven too much by capitalism to have any teeth as a political tool. I’m not sure any highly collectible commodity can ever really bite its owner, so to speak.

On the other hand, making art is a way of participating in a conversation, and conversation is perhaps the starting point for all change. The images of the [extermination] camps, for example, transformed reality for me. As did a book by Milton Rogovin, which I also saw when I was a boy. Rogovin lived and photographed not far from where I grew up in Buffalo. He made portraits of the same people over the course of twenty-five years, and when I first saw his work, as a teenager, I was shaken to the core.

I remember feeling confused, almost ashamed, that these pictures of strangers had moved me to tears. I hadn’t known art could do that. That book changed the course of my life, and so in that sense, I can’t deny the power of images to create change.

The impact of images is so hard to quantify. It’s so internal, like they skip past the cerebrum and get deep inside, into the body. It’s like they have the power to bypass the conscious mind and infiltrate without us knowing how, or what they’re doing once they’re inside. We think we know what we’re seeing, at least we tell ourselves that. But it’s more like we never really know what we’re seeing.

What about you? Are you ever discouraged to think that what we make are “just pictures”?

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Wolukau-Wanambwa: I recognize precisely the quandary you’re describing, if that’s the right word. How can making objects that circulate in relatively or absolutely small numbers for middle-class people, or infinitesimally in even smaller numbers for wealthy collectors and institutions, be considered a form of radical political action? I get that, and I’d agree that it’s not. I think that there’s a very good case to be made that says that these activities are not inherently radical forms of political action, and that they cannot be divorced from normative politics either.

I think we’ve also certainly seen meaningful social and political mobilizations in physical space as a response to both art images (Dana Schutz) and to the terrible realities approximated by nonart images (Michael Brown, Eric Garner). The circulation of those images does have real-world consequences, even though we need to be careful in those cases not to mistake the image for the real.

Do you think that a viewer of your work would respond differently if they viewed your photographs as fiction rather than as indexical fact? Would adopting the stance of storyteller—à la Zadie Smith—rather than documentarian, alleviate any of the contemporary concerns we’ve been discussing around difference and the structural violences meted out against the marginalized? I have this sense from so many discussions in the contemporary American classroom, that the identity position of the author matters far more than genre today.

Halpern: I agree with you about the emphasis on the author’s identity position, especially in the American classroom. After centuries of (mis)representation, there’s a need for marginalized groups to take ownership of their own narratives. And increasingly that’s being celebrated, and that’s essential. But in my eyes, it doesn’t eliminate the need to connect, to try to create something transcendent, or to look for the shared weight of experience across those lines that separate us.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Marina Abramovic ́’s The Artist Is Present—when over the course of nearly three months in 2010, for eight hours a day, Abramovic ́ sat in a chair at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and stared into the eyes of one person at a time, often for longer than five minutes each—and thinking about how so many of those sessions ended in tears. As children we’re taught not to stare, especially at strangers, and among adults, staring is often considered offensive or threatening. I’ve always been fascinated by how, through portraiture, the face of a stranger can take on meaning for another stranger, how an anonymous viewer can look at that person—a person who should mean nothing to them—and feel something. In an evolutionary sense, there’s no logical reason why one stranger should feel something for another. To me, there is something deeply mysterious and hopeful knowing that we can react to each other that way.

But to get to your question, I see fiction and nonfiction as existing on a spectrum. If science fiction represents one end of the spectrum and journalism represents the other, the middle might be occupied by things like lyric documentary, creative nonfiction, and perhaps, photography itself. I definitely borrow from a documentary tradition and aesthetic, but I have difficulty with the term documentary. It carries so much baggage, and is too often misunderstood as implying indexical fact. Once you claim the authority to understand and represent another’s reality, you’re sort of on shakey ground, as far as I see it. In that sense, to call the work fiction seems more honest.

But it can be both liberating and unsettling to not know how to classify work. When you pick up a book of literature, it’s usually categorized right on the back cover (fiction or nonfiction), and that can be helpful in knowing how to read and process the work. That doesn’t exist in photography, which is interesting.

What about your work—One Wall a Web [2018], for example —how would you classify it in terms of traditional genres?

All photographs Gregory Halpern, Untitled, 2019, from Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Aperture and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Wolukau-Wanambwa: I think that to some extent (but by no means universally) in this identitarian moment, and especially in the (white) liberal art world, who you’re perceived to be as an artist can often dictate what your pictures can say, which then handily relieves a viewer of working that out for themselves. For me, the term documentary is one that I would want to reclaim in all its inherent complexity, rather than abandon it. I think that what I sought to document in One Wall a Web—far beyond a specific place or person—was the enervated psychic states from which white-supremacist, white-heteronormative violence flows. I wanted to document that violence as a real but also importantly intangible force. I tried, through the structure of the book, to trace its presence and effects on the landscape, in and on and around differing people, and through a history of appropriated photographic images and texts that extended into those images and texts I made in the present tense. In that sense, a lot of my “subject matter” is ethereal, immaterial, and inherently fantasist. So the forms of realism I needed varied over time, and those variances (hopefully) help to break up any notion that there’s one stable, transparent, objective lens through which what’s on offer can be reliably seen and understood.

To come back to your earlier points about the perils and virtues of categories like documentary, I think that maybe we’re focused on a symptom rather than the cause. I think that many of us in the Western world are exhausted, overstimulated and undercooked, overworked and undereducated, full of sensations and terrified of feeling, full of thoughts and uncertain how to think. I think that veridical statements and notionally credible documents (“real” news vs. “fake” news; “documentary” images vs. “fake” images) help to alleviate some of our interpretive anxiety. Simplifying our sense of the world by outsourcing interpretive responsibility for understanding it is appealing, precisely because we’re drowning in false choices all day long. I think that we sometimes need to believe that facts are simple, and that documents are true.

Halpern: I think you’re right, and in a way, that’s what concerns me about photography—that at times we all want to be fed facts, that we want to trust what we see. It’s unsettling to think of photography as fiction, but I think it can be useful.

Earlier, when you critiqued the notion of art being “reliably seen and understood,” I was struck by the idea of reliability and found myself thinking about the unreliable narrator in literature. I love the idea that a reader can’t trust an author/artist even when they appear to be telling the reader what to think. It forces the reader/viewer into the uncomfortable, but important, position of having to decide for themselves.

I am thinking here of the way William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury [1929] might get at the messy truth of a single family more than any traditional documentary about a family might. As a narrative strategy/structure, it’s just such a beautiful way of speaking to the impossibility of “telling the story” of a single family, in all its inconsistencies and contradicting truths. In that sense, I find the deliberately fractured nature of One Wall a Web, with its multiple “narrators” or “voices,” similarly beautiful and a fitting way of documenting, as you say, the “enervated psychic states from which white-supremacist, white-heteronormative violence flows.” That is an impossible thing to “document,” as I see it, but the dilemma of that impossibility is one of the things I find compelling about the work, and I like that you don’t shy away from the word. Maybe for documentary to be reclaimed, it needs to be embraced in that way, by artists who are working in profoundly innovative and experimental ways, who celebrate not only its potentials but its pitfalls as well.

This interview and images were originally published in Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Aperture and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, 2020).

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