Aperture's Blog, page 53

June 10, 2021

In Delhi, Dynamic Images and Shared Solidarities

We are described into corners, and then we have to describe our way out of corners.
—Salman Rushdie, in an interview with W. L. Webb

In April 2019, as the general elections in India dominated the media, an international team of astronomers published the first photograph of a black hole, silhouetted against a disc of glowing gas surrounding this cosmic void, the threshold beyond which not even light can escape. The image showed us what we thought could never be seen, almost two centuries after the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a camera obscura to take the world’s first photograph, looking out from his second-story workroom. These acts of imaging have generated a radical, fundamental warping of the space-time of human consciousness and triggered a cultural “event horizon,” by mapping the existential coordinates of memory, genealogy, ecology, aesthetics, history, and geography.

The “aura” of images proliferates beyond time and space, exemplified in this issue by works from both within and outside Delhi, and by various eras, cultures, and media. My mandate as guest editor was to build on previous city-centric issues of Aperture, but as a curator managing a collection, visiting personal repositories, and researching in state and private archives, I am aware that image making is always in the process of expansion and reflection, regardless of frame, paradigm, and aesthetic scaffolding. Through continued engagement with Aperture’s editorial team and independent artists, and while considering the possibility of addressing new audiences, we have tried to offer visual convergences, juxtapositions, and inversions, hoping to explore the forever growing parameters of place and to suggest the migratory, the mutable, the transient.

Sumit Dayal, Studio Self-Portrait, Srinagar, India, January 2009
Courtesy the artist

Delhi, where I live and work, serves as only one complex node of visual possibility, but it can proffer a conceptual prism for the diffraction of evolving photographic practices, perspectives, and forms in and outside the region, with innumerable offerings yet to be made. This city, for me, is also bound to family, one that moved here from Mumbai half a century ago. It is where my thespian grandfather, using the backdrop of medieval ruins, staged productions of the famous play Andha Yug (The Age of Blindness) that draws on the Mahabharata, a classical Indian epic about warring royal clans who clash in a momentous battle. Andha Yug, written in 1953 by the renowned Hindi litterateur Dharamvir Bharati, can be read as a fierce castigation of the politics and politicians complicit in the atrocity of Partition, and as an allegory that continues to reverberate in the present with Delhi’s political position as the seat of assertions and abuses of power.

In this issue, the urban environment is a locus for the dynamic intermeshing of place, personal history, art practice, and radical critique, as seen in Shohini Ghosh’s interview with the writer-activist Arundhati Roy and in Christopher Pinney’s interview with the photographer-activist Shahidul Alam. It was my privilege to invite Alam to the city for a lecture, pre-lockdown, in 2019, and I was absolutely dismayed when the state and its machinery prevented his journey. Undeterred, Alam delivered a riveting talk via Zoom from an airport lounge. Even this interpersonal media may now be regulated.

The social mapping of urban terrain— its people, persuasions, seductions, illusions, and claims—is presented through fascinating interrelationships: Roy compares the city to a “novel with characters who appear and disappear, shaping the physical space around them.” Latika Gupta’s exploration of films/moving images by Anamika Haksar and Priya Sen looks in and delineates how these works capture an “old” and a “new” Delhi through the city’s restless, granular meta-histories as well as its embodiment of urban aspiration and dream, idealism and pragmatism.

Gulmehar Dhillon, Haal Mureeda Da (Plight of His Disciples), New Delhi and Gurgaon, 2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

The lines of sight generated by this issue are intended to manifest through associations and touchpoints that highlight many other sites and works of resistance, albeit not in this single issue. To name a few: the work of Masrat Zahra; the cross- exposed portrait/landscape of a war-torn occupied Kashmir, now acknowledged to be one of the most militarized zones on Earth, by Sumit Dayal; the careful amalgamation of Dalit as well as feminist histories by the Nepal Picture Library; and even the Partition-related photographs by stalwarts such as Rashid Talukder in Bangladesh. The iconography of resistance grows by the day, and it has been an important vector, contributing to the creativity of subcontinental image makers who may or may not self-identify as cultural nomads, their visualizations an organic means of seeing the world, being in the world, and inscribing the world.

Many worlds within and outside Delhi are under threat of being erased. In the 1980s, I would find myself on the steps of the city’s iconic modernist buildings, such as the arts hub Triveni Kala Sangam, designed by Joseph Allen Stein, built in 1963. The modernist legacies of such constructions in the country have been captured by a handful of pioneering photographers, including Madan Mahatta, Lucien Hervé, and Werner Bischof. Mahatta’s documentation of the buildings— which highlight revolutionary architects of that era who used local materials and occasionally amalgamated American and German cultural strands, as suggested by the architecture critic Kaiwan Mehta—is increasingly resonant as the present government is destroying many iconic edifices in a grievously misplaced, myopic bid to further “modernize.” “Nationalism diminishes us, because . . . its principal human activity is war,” states Stein. Perhaps the internationalism of the mid-1950s that he was a part of in India must now be read against the backdrop of a larger community experience, and the uncertain future of urban heritage that is seen or indicated in Mehta’s piece through the work of Rajesh Vora and Akshay Mahajan.

June 9, 2021

A New Digital Platform Asks What Truth Means in Photography

Chris Boot: Earlier this year, you started a website for photography debates and as a meeting place for ideas, Truth in Photography, which has just launched its second edition. Can you start by telling me why the focus on truth?

Alan Govenar: Issues of truth are more pressing than ever. We’re all looking for truth, particularly as it relates to current events, news, photography. The possibilities for manipulation of the truth have never been greater, given the technological advances over the last decades. Truth in photography is a question, not an answer. Truth in photography is a perception. It’s a feeling. In many ways, it’s intangible.

Boot: It’s clear from the second edition that the arguments and issues are evolving. It ranges from Nigel Poor’s work within the prison system, The San Quentin Project, that began as a feature in the “Prison Nation” issue of Aperture magazine and is now a book, published by Aperture.

There’s a piece about the Bronx Documentary Center, another about the girls of Quran schools by the Magnum photographer Sabiha Ҫimen.

Govenar: She is one of the most fascinating new contributors. What’s particularly interesting is that she is a young photographer, and this work related to the Quran schools is her most personal. She told me that in these photographs, she sees herself. She attended Quran schools. Her sisters attended Quran schools. And what she has been striving to depict in her photographs is a sense of what the girls are experiencing, how they manifest their inner lives. Growing up, she was told by her mother that the headscarf was liberating, that if she wore a headscarf, then she could mix in the world. But her mother was also committed to her getting a secular education. So, for her to go into the Quran schools—not only is she in some sense realizing a truth about herself, but she’s also looking at how these girls dress essentially the same, how they engage in group activities, what their fantasies are.

Sabiha Çimen, Nehir (18) embraces her soulmate at a picnic in Istanbul, Turkey, July 15, 2018
© Sabiha Çimen/Magnum Photos

Boot: Her text is incredibly powerful. It’s probably relevant to mention that she’s Turkish and grew up in Istanbul, so she’s right at that crossroads of the secular West and the Muslim East. What she has to say about her adoption of the scarf and how that changed her and made different kinds of photographs possible is a moving piece of writing in addition to the photographs.

Her work, in a way, is both core to a kind of changing set of values in photography, which, judging by the content of Truth in Photography, you’re thinking about and monitoring. And clearly, the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements have had an enormous impact on the field. Do you see a new ethics for photography emerging, and if so, how would you describe the contours of that?

Govenar: I think the awareness, the consciousness, of ethics in photography have become more apparent, more visible. Photographers are having to discuss ethics, perhaps in a way that they have not before. But historically, for me, the ethics of photography are never neutral. Photographers and photography take a position, a point of view that’s inherent to the framing in which the images are made. This has always been an issue. Issues of truth are time-honored and time-debated, maybe time-disregarded. But we now face this floodgate of images daily. We have to somehow try to make sense of them.

Boot: It does feel like the words “cultural revolution,” as they apply to what’s happened in the last few years and particularly last year, have real meaning here. Would you agree with that?

Govenar: I would. But I think in a larger sense, it’s not only those issues. It’s the systemic issues, because so much of the production of photography, particularly as it relates to photojournalism, is driven by magazine editors, newspaper editors, online news editors.

And then the other spectrum is fine art photography—or what we like to think of as fine art photography, when in fact, for me, it’s a kind of artificial hierarchy that emerges in photography beginning with Stieglitz. While photography is perhaps, intrinsically, the most democratic of all art forms—anyone can make a photograph if you have a camera, and it’s become easier—but photographs are not considered equal. The technical and aesthetic criteria by which we judge them is also part of the issue: How do we see the image? How do we feel the image?

Those are the issues that are not often discussed. But then how are the subjects that photographers focus on prioritized? One of the areas in the spring edition that we introduced is this idea of the struggle for gun control. I was very surprised to find, in searching the Magnum photo archive, that there were no photographs ever made of gun buybacks, which have been happening for decades in the United States and in other places around the world. We’re featuring a portfolio of work by Alessandra Sanguinetti of the March for Our Lives protests. She photographed one of these demonstrations. They were held all over the country.

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Analy High School students stage a walk out during a nationwide protest for gun control. Sebastopol, California, March 14, 2018
© Alessandra Sanguinetti/Magnum Photos

Boot: You’re identifying a gap in the perspective. I mean, it does seem like Magnum, and not Magnum alone, but a generation of photographers who perhaps have taken advantage of, let’s call it photographer’s privilege—they could go anywhere and had the privilege of viewing others the way that they were not viewed. That was, in a sense, the essence of photography for many years. These quixotic individuals who could adapt and fit in and record without necessarily having a responsibility to their subjects—although I do very vividly recall a conversation with Philip Jones Griffiths several years ago, where he discounted any photographs that were made without the implicit consent of the subjects, i.e. that his idea of photography was rooted in the sense of serving the subject rather than just catching the subject.

But that generation of photographers is deeply challenged by this new environment. Magazines and the media generally have to think differently about who they commission and what viewpoints they adopt, with much more attention paid to the subjects, paid to whom the subjects would wish to be recorded by, obviously with a drive towards more inclusivity and balance in their commissioning practices. Is that something you encounter in your work, this sense of the older generation being profoundly challenged by new thinking?

Govenar: Consent and context are critical in the making of photography, in the publishing of photography, in the exhibition of photography and its presentation in various media. It’s always been a concern of mine. I founded Documentary Arts in 1985 to have a holistic approach, a way of seeing the still photograph as important, but also to focus on not only, how an individual image can become iconic, but on issues of context and the ways we can contextualize the image in different media. To really understand what is happening around us or what we are experiencing, we need to also listen to audio, or see film, or video. If there is truth in photography, it’s in the multitude of perspectives. And that isn’t limited to the factual media. Sometimes it’s in the interpretation. Sometimes there’s more truth in fiction, than in what appears to be factual. Ultimately, truth in photography is intangible, it’s about what we sense, what we identify with, or perhaps know through the realm of experience.

Fanta Diop, Protestors peacefully march from Union Square to 86th Street in New York City, 2020

Fanta Diop, Protestors peacefully march from Union Square to 86th Street in New York City to protest for Black Lives Matter and against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, June 2, 2020
© Fanta Diop/Bronx Documentary Center

Boot: One of the things that occurs to me about the future of photography is, well, take New York City, for example. You’re out and about with your camera in New York. Subjects are not passive. There are rules of respect and consent that go with the territory of a highly empowered society, let’s call it that. Whereas the history of photography is marked by colonialism and photography served colonial purposes., While much of that has changed, there has been a different attitude to subjects and consent from photographers working in places where people don’t have a voice in the same way.

It occurs to me now that you have to treat every subject the way you would your mother, your brother, another New Yorker. You just can’t have a hierarchy depending on where you are photographing.

Govenar: Part of what we’re trying to do is present the work of professional photographers side by side with the work of community-based photographers and vernacular photography. In the 1980s, I started writing about this concept of community photography. Until that point, discussions of community photography were largely focused on content, what was in the picture. What I was interested in was the process through which these photographs were made. I had received a commission from the Dallas Museum of Art to create a project called Living Texas Blues, and, and at that time, there was a two-volume history of Texas photography being published by Texas Monthly Press. And there was not a single African American photographer represented. When I talked to the curators who were both at major institutions in the state, they said, “Well, we only had time to work with existing collections, and we couldn’t identify any known African American photographers in an existing collection.”

That was in 1985. And that’s when I founded Documentary Arts. Our first major project was focused on African American photography. It’s when I went to New York to meet with Cornell Capa to discuss some of these issues with him. He introduced me to Deborah Willis, who’s been a colleague for decades and who’s been very enthusiastic about the work of Documentary Arts.

In 1995, my wife Kaleta Doolin and I founded the Texas African American Photography Archive. In the first edition of Truth in Photography, we featured a selection from the sixty thousand images that we collected and form the core corpus of this archive. But the bigger point here is that we have worked to present community photographers, who were actively involved in their communities. On the Truth in Photography website, you can hear the voices of the photographers and watch video of people in their communities talking about their work. So, in a sense, what’s being advocated today, which is consent, context, and transparency about the nature of the interaction between the photographer and his or her subjects, the collaborative portrait—all very important ideas—this is the way community photographers have historically worked.

I organized and curated an exhibition on Alonzo Jordan for the International Center of Photography that opened in 2011. He was a barber in the town of Jasper, Texas. His barber shop, when he wasn’t cutting hair, was his studio. His living room was his studio. And he worked in a seventy-mile radius around Jasper in little towns, making photographs. The photograph had greater significance than just what was in it, what the subject was. It was the way in which the subject was depicted and portrayed.

Alan Govenar, Gun buyback at The Stewpot. Dallas, Texas, January 19, 2013
© Alan Govenar

Boot: And the way that image played a role in family lives, individual lives, community lives.

Govenar: And the self-esteem of the subjects. So, when we’re talking today about a new ethics that needs to address these same issues, I think what we’re also talking about is the need to broaden our knowledge of the history of photography.

When the book on Alonzo Jordan was published by Steidl in 2011, it inserted someone who was a total no-name in the history of photography into the canon of photography When we talk about the new ethics, we have to include a reassessment of history going back even into the nineteenth century.

Photobooks have become so important in our world today as a mechanism for transmitting and communicating the work of exciting new photographers but also reassessing historical images. Aperture magazine has also gone in that direction. What we’re doing on the Truth in Photography platform, is, in part, reprinting older articles. For example, in the spring edition, in citizen journalism, we’re reprinting an Aperture magazine article on polling places, for which people were asked to photograph the places where they vote. It’s a wonderful article. And it’s a way to take photographs that were made in the past and present them in the new context. Because we see them differently today. Context defines our perception.

Volunteers who sang and delivered Xmas packages to SHU [Secure Housing Units], December 25, 1975, mapped by Tommy Shakur Ross; from The San Quentin Project (Aperture, 2021)
© Tommy Shakur Ross. Archival image courtesy San Quentin State Prison

Boot: It’s very interesting you should talk about community photography. As it happens, my first job in photography was in London in the 1980s within a community arts and photography movement that was all about empowerment, empowering the subject, empowering people to tell their own stories and photographs as an alternative to the objectification of a professional media. Have you looked at the community photography movement in Britain in the 1980s?

Govenar: Very much so. When I started writing about community photography, one of the photographers whose work I admired was Val Wilmer, whom I’m sure you knew.

Boot: Yes.

Govenar: Val introduced me to exactly what you were talking about. She was immediately interested in what I was starting to write and think about. And one of the first publications—and probably the first outside the United States—of one of these images that I was working with was in that magazine Ten.8, which was such an important photographic journal. Through Val, I was introduced to the Photographers’ Gallery. I didn’t know that much about it, but I was definitely in tune with that. Going to London in the 1980s—you and I didn’t know each other, but we were focused on some of the same issues. It was also around the same time that I met Simon Njami, who was publishing his journal Revue Noire and publishing little photobooks about then-unknown African photographers who were essentially community photographers in different parts of Africa.

There were other parallels. Certainly, the work that was being done by African American community photographers paralleled work that was being done in Latino and Jewish communities. In a sense, by understanding community photography, we had a lens to better understand, for example, the work of Roman Vishniac and others.

Part of it is that we’re searching for the factual in photography because the way photography has evolved is that we’ve tended to attribute higher value to images that aren’t factual, not only as commodities in the art world and artworks. So, the image that is the faux reality may be worth more from a monetary standpoint than the image of something that is factual and accurate.

But it’s interesting to see how things are turning now. In my interview with Clément Chéroux, he talked about how the need for us to know what is factual and accurate is increasingly more important to us, because there’s so much that is false. Sadly, some photographs of fictional realities have created the groundwork for what we now call misinformation. Ten years ago, it was called art. Maybe it’s still called art, and maybe, it should be called something else.

Boot: Alan, I congratulate you on the work you’ve done over your lifetime of expanding the understanding of photography and what you’re doing today with Documentary Arts and with Truth in Photography. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with Aperture.

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Published on June 09, 2021 09:40

June 7, 2021

10 Essential Stories That Illuminate Queer Lives

These Queer PhotoBooks Changed My Life
By Matthew Leifheit

Eleven curators, writers, and artists reflect on images of queer identity. From the early days of photography to the present, these books perform an intimate yet consummately public function: to let people know that they are not alone, that queers do have a history, that someone cared enough to write it down.

The Subversive Fantasies of Ren Hang
By Stephanie Hueon Tung

In tightly composed flash images, Chinese photographer Ren Hang—who passed away at the age of twenty-nine in 2017—pushed the limits of self-expression with his playful vision. Hang’s photographs “function as a form of play or performance,” Stephanie Hueon Tung writes, “in a place where any explicit declaration of same-sex orientation is still considered risky and nude photographs are routinely labeled pornographic.”

JEB’s Pathbreaking Archive of Lesbian Photography
By Sophie Hackett

From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada with a slide show that told an alternative history of photography with lesbians as central protagonists.

Rosalyne Blumenstein and the Art of Living
By Susan Stryker

A trans icon, Rosalyn Blumenstein was instrumental in popularizing the word transgender through her public-health work. In Aperture magazine’s “Orlando” issue, artist and activist Zackary Drucker photographs Blumenstein—a longtime muse and mentor—through the lens of limitlessness.

Clifford Prince King’s Intimate Photographs of Black Queer Men
By Marjon Carlos

Creating tender scenes with friends and lovers, the LA-based artist elevates aspects of queer Black friendship. Tender and sometimes raw, these photographs document ineffable moments of intimacy—offering a stirring vision of everyday ritual.

A Visual Record of Queer Experience in China
By Xuan Juliana Wang

For Lin Zhipeng, the photographer known as 223, taking photographs of his friends has become second nature. With an ever-present camera, the Beijing-based artist captures his friends kissing their lovers, running in the darkness, and eating noodles side by side—creating a visual record of friendship, travel, and queer experience.

“Gay Semiotics” Revisited

In 1977, Hal Fischer produced his photo-text project Gay Semiotics, a seminal examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of cruising gay men in the Castro district of San Francisco. For Aperture magazine’s “Queer” issue, Julia Bryan-Wilson spoke with Fisher about the origins of Gay Semiotics and how it has aged.

The Queer Black Artists Building Worlds of Desire
By Antwaun Sargent

Utopia is not a word that has been widely considered in the contemporary photographic works of Black queer artists. Much of their art has been flattened into the politics of representation. But in recent photographs by Shikeith, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, and others, queer acts and communal yearning flourish beyond the confines of mainstream gay culture.

Laura Aguilar Was a Proud Latina Lesbian, and She Flaunted It
By Yxta Maya Murray

A pioneer of envisioning Latinx identity, photographer Laura Aguilar was known for her images of unapologetically queer bodies. But what do the late artist’s emotional photo-text letters reveal about the craft of self-expression?

The Glamorous World of LA’s Vanished Queer Underground
By Jesse Dorris

Reynaldo Rivera’s photographs of trans women, drag artists, and Latinx scenesters are a thrilling account of 1990s-era nightlife. Unlike his peers at that time—such as Nan Goldin, Christopher Makos, and Alvin Baltrop—Rivera rejected, or was disinterested in, distance, filling his images with presence without flaunting his access.

June 4, 2021

JEB’s Pathbreaking Archive of Lesbian Photography

From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada delivering an ever-evolving slide show, Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present, more affectionately known as the “Dyke Show.” Over the course of two and a half hours, JEB narrated and presented more than three hundred images to women who gathered in church basements, community centers, women’s bookstores, and coffeehouses, eager for, as Carol Seajay, cofounder of San Francisco’s Old Wives Tales feminist bookstore and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, put it in an early review, “Images I had never seen before, images I had seen and not perceived. Images on which to build a future.” The slide show was designed to grow over the years, as JEB added new pictures by contemporary photographers and participants in the photography workshops that she led wherever she appeared with the show. It eventually included 420 images. What began as a way to distribute and give context to JEB’s self-published monograph, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979), became a vocation. She ultimately presented the slide show at least eighty times in more than sixty places.

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self Portrait, 1896
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

JEB structured the Dyke Show in six sections that presented historical photographs by figures such as Lady Clementina Hawarden, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Alice Austen, and Berenice Abbott, alongside a range of contemporary portraits, erotica, and documentary photographs of the early gay liberation movement, her own work, and that of her peers, including Cathy Cade, Tee Corinne, Diana Davies, and Kay Tobin. She laid out for her audiences a new visual history, one with lesbians at its center. In line with lesbian and feminist consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s and 1970s, JEB used the slide shows as a collective exercise in reading photographs to highlight the paucity of the visual record for lesbians and to impart a new way of looking, a queer way of looking.

She did this in two ways. First, she identified historical photographers who, in her view, rebelled against social norms and narrow expectations for women and, in their work and in their lives, embodied a sense of strength, freedom, autonomy. Hawarden, Johnston, Austen, and Abbott formed the focus here. In a recent email, JEB wrote, “Because relatives and others destroyed the evidence of lesbian lives, and because many photographers had to stay closeted in order to survive or make a living in prior times, there wasn’t a lot of overt evidence. That’s why I felt it was necessary to ‘read between the lines’ of the existing biographies to interpret the images myself given my own experience and instincts.” JEB suggested that there is something in the photographs by these women that can be “read” against biographies that may have suppressed or omitted details about their relationships and sexuality. The photographs supplied a different kind of evidence, discernible perhaps only to those who knew what they were looking for.

Publicity flyer for JEB’s slide presentation, “Lesbian Images in Photography, 1850–1984,” 1984
© 2014 JEB (Joan E. Biren) and courtesy Joan E. Biren Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

Frances Benjamin Johnston’s 1896 cigarette-smoking, beer stein–toting, ankle-revealing self-portrait is a strong case in point: Johnston’s playful self-presentation in this photograph defied the more demure, ladylike norms of her time. Offering information about Johnston’s life as a successful photographer— she is described in the 1974 monograph A Talent for Detail as an “eccentric,” “bohemian” woman who never married—JEB hinted during her slide show that Johnston may have been a lesbian. Though not able to offer clear evidence of Johnston’s sexuality, JEB nonetheless felt that assuming Johnston was heterosexual was equally tenuous.

Second, JEB sought to forge what she now describes as a “lesbian semiotics” (though she admits she learned the term much later and was not aware of Hal Fischer’s 1977 book Gay Semiotics). She detailed what she calls the “triangle” of interactions between the photographer, the muse (subject), and the viewer. (She elaborates on this further in her article “Lesbian Photography—Seeing Through Our Own Eyes,” published in Studies in Visual Communication in 1982.) She contrasted photographs made by straight photographers and those made by lesbians. And, in a section called “The Look, the Stance, the Clothes,” JEB attempted to identify more concretely the visual elements that might characterize a lesbian photograph.

Joan E. Biren, Photographers at the Ovular, a feminist photography workshop at Rootworks, Wolf Creek, Oregon, 1980
© 2014 JEB (Joan E. Biren)

For example, she identified a direct look as the product of a certain rapport between photographer and subject, as in Berenice Abbott’s portraits of Eugene Murat, Jane Heap, or Janet Flanner. “There’s a look here that’s passing between a lesbian muse … and a lesbian photographer, something direct about it, without being confrontative [sic], it’s open in a certain kind of way, there’s a presence there behind the eyes,” she stated during a 1982 slide show at the Women’s Building in San Francisco. JEB found this directness lacking in other portraits of these women, indicating that they didn’t “look as powerful.” Or she characterized certain postures (slouchy) or clothing (pants, creatively fashionable garb) as more lesbian than others. Such a project may feel quaintly essentialist today when queer images are so much easier to find. Audience comment cards reveal that not everyone embraced JEB’s approach even then—some felt she was replacing one set of stereotypes with another. Queer looking was just evolving. However, it is important to note how radical it was to even publicly contemplate a question like Is there a lesbian aesthetic? at the time, as that generation of queers fought for basic civil rights, built communities, and embraced their distinctiveness. JEB proposed a new relationship to photography to her audiences, one that would empower them as creators and interpreters of their own image. “Understanding you have a place in history and in the present day with others like yourself is what gave people the courage to take the risks that coming out in those years demanded,” she explained in a recent email.

JEB’s grassroots campaign is best understood as one of the projects that developed alongside the LGBTQ rights movement from the 1960s on, whose larger aim was greater visibility as a path to greater acceptance: the production of a visual record. In a 2004 interview as part of Smith College’s Voices of Feminism Oral History project, she declared, “I dredged up all these images, which may or may not have been lesbian images. I decided to talk about why I thought they were lesbian images from history. Because this void, this emptiness, this blank of history drove me crazy.”

Building this queer visual history has come about as queers have created images to reflect their own experiences and points of view—they made early and effective use of photographic representations as tools for reflection, self-identification, and activism. But many have also, like JEB, cast back into the image record, pre-Stonewall, to reclaim and reinterpret images made decades earlier. Regardless of original intention and publication context, photographs from snapshots to press prints, by known and unknown photographers, have been used as evidence of queer lives lived or to emphasize queer views of the world.

fierce pussy, “Special Right?” 1991–95
© fierce pussy and courtesy the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, In the Life, 1995 (cover)
Courtesy the artists and Special Collections, E.P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Toronto’s monthly gay magazine, The Body Politic, for instance, regularly published such photographs with these ends in mind. Well-known photographers, both queer and not, including Brassaï and Cecil Beaton, as well as images of queer subjects W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Walt Whitman, among others, were pressed into service. A particularly touching example of this reclaiming was published in The Body Politic’s March/April 1972 issue in which writer Ed Jackson penned a tribute to a deceased relative, Harriet Huestis Jackson, whom he had only encountered through a tintype in his family’s archive. Her evident facial hair led him to describe her as “one of the early but solitary fighters in the sexual revolution, an unsung heroine who dared to demonstrate for posterity the relative unimportance to sexual identity of a patch of hair.” The title of Jackson’s homage—“From the Family Album”—highlights not only the source of his astonishing find but also the impulse for creating and maintaining such an album, be it of biological or chosen family.

This queer interpretation of photographs from the past continues. Artists like Canadian Nina Levitt, who recast Alice Austen’s well-known group photograph The Darned Club in her 1991 work Submerged (for Alice Austen), or the American collective fierce pussy, who in the early 1990s created Xerox posters from their own baby pictures, class portraits, and other family snapshots, pushed this queer approach into more mainstream contexts—the art gallery and street, respectively— drawing attention to overlooked gestures and challenging unexamined assumptions. Canadian duo Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan took this one step further, inhabiting the format of Life magazine, mimicking its earnest perspective to both highlight and gently skewer lesbian stereotypes. More recently, critic and curator Vince Aletti created a wall installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario from photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine pages, exhibition invites, and other ephemera from his collection, making an analog cloud that was testament to decades of queer looking.

Berenice Abbott, Princess Eugene Murat, 1929
© Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics/Getty Images and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Though Aletti’s collecting impulse originates from more private, personal interests, as opposed to JEB’s more public, political ones, they nonetheless spring from a common sense that these images stand for more together than alone and that the act of looking shapes us. Perhaps more importantly, they share a sense that this act is one of pleasure. Audio from JEB’s 1982 slide show at the Women’s Building reveals an audience whose reactions ranged from playful raucousness to quiet outrage to knowing laughter, as they responded to the images and the narration. One writer who saw the slide show in Toronto wrote a review for The Body Politic, where she expressed her delight with and her hunger for these images: “It could have continued for hours more and still I would not have been satiated.” Beyond this immediate experience, the reviewer felt her life and desires had been affirmed in a lasting way: “Separately these images are only fragments; put together they form a history that becomes a reality….It has given us a past, shown us a present, and even hinted at a future.”

The future occupies JEB these days as she now actively builds and cares for queer visual records and archives. She is organizing her slides and negatives, preparing to deposit them at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, where they will join her papers. Always attuned to the big picture, JEB is also mentoring her lesbian contemporaries on how to preserve and find repositories for records of their own lives, as well as advising institutions like the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History on how to increase their holdings of queer material. She states simply, “This is the continuing work of making sure we will never be invisible again.”

This article and photographs were originally published in Aperture, issue 218, “Queer,” under the title “Queer Looking.”

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Published on June 04, 2021 09:56

“Gay Semiotics” Revisited

In 1977, San Francisco photographer Hal Fischer produced his photo-text project Gay Semiotics, a seminal examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of cruising gay men in the Castro district of San Francisco. Fischer’s pictures dissected the significance of colored bandanas worn in jeans pockets, as well as how the placement of keys and earrings might telegraph passive or active roles. He also photographed a series of “gay looks”—from hippie to leather to cowboy to jock—with text that pointed out key elements of queer street-style.

Julia Bryan-Wilson: You initially trained as a photographer at the University of Illinois. What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work?

Hal Fischer: I came here for graduate school in photography at San Francisco State in 1975. I really wanted to study with Jack Fulton, but I didn’t want to pay the money to go to the Art Institute. I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. After I moved to the Bay Area, two pivotal things happened. One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak. The second pivotal thing was meeting Lew Thomas [cofounder of NFS Press]. That was incredibly critical.

Bryan-Wilson: What strikes me now about Gay Semiotics is how conceptual it is, how important the photo-text relationship is.

Fischer: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, gelatin-silver prints mainly of the landscape. Then I got out here, and the first thing I started doing was crazy alternative work, predominantly 20-by-24-inch bleached prints with inked- on text and diagrammatic drawings. But I met Lew through my writing, because I reviewed a show of his, and he was at the center of a movement focused on connecting photography and language.

Bryan-Wilson: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late 1970s?

Fischer: There was a huge discourse here. You’d have an opening, and there would be two hundred people there. People talked about photography. They were really interested, and it was passionate.

Bryan-Wilson: Gay Semiotics is an attempt to map some of the discourse of structuralism onto the visual codes of male queer life in the Castro. How did you come to structuralism?

Fischer: Thanks to Lew Thomas, in graduate school I began reading things like Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art. Those were two key texts. Of course, structuralism came late to photography, when you consider that Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation came out in 1966. Reading Burnham, going on to read Claude Lévi-Strauss, all that was crucial. I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me.

Bryan-Wilson: In your bibliography for Gay Semiotics, you cite Walter Benjamin, but not Roland Barthes. Who else were you influenced by?

Fischer: I did read some Roland Barthes, but it’s almost like I read just enough. The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. It was like, Oh my God, these handkerchiefs … this is exactly what they are writing about. Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something out from there.

Bryan-Wilson: You’re doing several things in Gay Semiotics. On the one hand, you’re parsing a signification system that arose out of a nonverbal, erotic exchange, and you’re also deconstructing gay male self-fashioning and photographing “archetypes.”

It is thus a photo-project about the history of photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing.

Fischer: I can’t say I was conscious of it at the time, but one of the first photographers who influenced me was August Sander. I mean, I LOVED Sander. I still do. I probably was a fascist in an earlier life, because I’m definitely into types, and I’m definitely into archetyping. I don’t really think it’s that awful a thing to do; it can be very informative. I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition.

Bryan-Wilson: So the work is also about genre.

Fischer: Yes. It’s also about personal desire; it’s a lexicon of attraction. And there’s a huge amount of artifice, which was also very deliberate.

Bryan-Wilson: Who were your models? They all are about the same age. They’re all white. They’re all fit. They seem to be mostly of a certain class. There’s definitely a fairly homogenous milieu that’s being cataloged.

Fischer: This was my world, and there was no pretense about being encyclopedic. You did not see a lot of lesbians out there. You did not see men of color. I don’t have drag queens in there. In no way was it meant to be comprehensive, all-inclusive. For both the good and the bad, it actually represented gay male masculinity in the Castro in this time, which was not diverse. It was about the white male and it was about this very particular way of being.

Bryan-Wilson: Even though the book has had wide circulation, it’s important that these photographs were first prints meant to be hung on the wall, as components of a serial project.

Fischer: That’s exactly what it was. I was into the fine print, but my own definition of the fine print—the extended gray range, the use of glossy, non-artsy RC paper. But these prints are not indifferent. A lot of the people who were doing photography at the time didn’t make good prints. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the capacity; they didn’t care. It is important to me that the text is not a caption but integral to the image.

Bryan-Wilson: Some of this material is very funny. There’s a submissive leather figure incongruously sitting on cardboard boxes in what looks like an office. Where was that taken?

Fischer: Those pictures were taken at the Trading Post, which was an S and M emporium, and it was very makeshift in those days. It wasn’t the industry it is today.

Bryan-Wilson: Queer sex accessories weren’t coming from a polished manufacturing industry.

Fischer: No. And I certainly didn’t own that kind of stuff. And I don’t know if the work is actually self-deprecating, but there is certainly a level of Jewish humor underscoring this.

Bryan-Wilson: You explain, in a deadpan manner, that the red handkerchief could mean an interest in anal sex, but that red hankies are also “employed in the treatment of nasal discharge and in some cases may have no significance in regard to sexual contact.” Hilarious.

Fischer: Yes, none of them are threatening. A lot of the photographs are deliberately banal. The whole point is getting people to go up to the picture. Then the viewer gets to a certain distance and reads the text. There’s a funny duality at play, particularly when it’s an older viewer, because they lean in, read the text, and then think, Oh my God, this is about anal intercourse or fisting. That was all incredibly deliberate.

Bryan-Wilson: The humor, and the banality, are inroads to the pictures; their everydayness is contrasted by the text. This ties back to Sander and types, because deviance is presented as ordinary.

Fischer: Particularly if you look at the street-fashion part; that’s my own little Sander project. Nobody is costumed. That’s how people dressed. I’ve been thinking a lot about Diane Arbus lately and why I don’t like Arbus—she was a trophy hunter. In my pictures, I let people take the pose that is natural to them, which is what I’m sure Sander did.

Bryan-Wilson: You’re practicing semiotics but you’re also satirizing that discourse, with jokes about nasal discharge and little sly moments. You also spend quite a lot of time talking about ambiguity, because the hanky code isn’t definitive or set

in stone. There is a measure of ambivalence in some of these signs.

Fischer: Again, that’s part of the disarming quality that was very deliberate.

Bryan-Wilson: What were your interactions with the people you photographed?

Fischer: One of them, the natural archetype, is my best friend— still is. I lived in the Haight, and when I moved here in 1975, it was still pretty hippie. I would go down to Gus’s Pub, the only bar I’ve ever liked in my life because it was a neighborhood place; the hippie was from there. Some of these people were from the neighborhood, and then, as I started to build it out, I’d say, as I did to my friend David, “Okay, I’m going to do this classical archetype; do you know anybody with a really nice ass?” Since David had slept with the entire city, he knew somebody.

Bryan-Wilson: These archetypes (you also call them looks), though they were real people in their real clothes, dovetail with stereotypes that have the potential to became somewhat derogatory. For instance, the Village People debuted in 1977, the same year as Gay Semiotics, and they embodied but also parodied gay archetypes. How strange it is to remember what a crossover hit they were.

Fischer: Yes. I think, too, my work crossed over. Heterosexuals were not afraid of my work.

Bryan-Wilson: How did you feel about decoding and making legible what was a subcultural language for a bigger audience? Did it raise questions for you about policing or surveillance, or how that translation might compromise the code?

Fischer: There was some criticism that I was exposing something with the signifiers, but it was minority criticism. I was myself, at that point, very critical of the gay photographers who were working in the city. I might be a little more charitable now.

Bryan-Wilson: What are your feelings about Robert Mapplethorpe, as someone who also worked with the male nude and leather culture?

Fischer: I had a little bit of a history with Robert. I reviewed his first shows here, particularly the one that was at 80 Langton. I liked his early work, the edginess of it. I liked it in the way that I like Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971). We parted ways after I wrote an article called “The New Commercialism” for Camera Arts. Robert didn’t speak to me after that. I really objected to the aesthetic direction in his work. To me, Robert Mapplethorpe is the Bouguereau of the twentieth century. You take this black male nude, and you do it up with high tonality, and then you put it in an ornate frame, and guess what? People back in the day on the Upper East Side could hang it up and think that they were being really daring. There’s nothing daring about it.

Bryan-Wilson: Well, you two were working in such different modes. Your anthropological angle puts you in a conceptual realm, while he was increasingly bidding, with his refined aesthetics, to be a Fine Artist. Now, in retrospect, it’s clear that you were also participating in a groundswell of not just artistic interest but academic interest in queer life. For instance, Gayle Rubin starts her work in 1978 at the Castro, studying and theorizing leather subcultures.

Fischer: My awareness was certainly limited at that point, in terms of what was out there.

Bryan-Wilson: You never faced censorship in the way Mapplethorpe did. Was there any threat of censorship? Those images in which you show S and M equipment but no physical bodies and instead have drawn outlines of bodies, are interesting moments in terms of absence and modesty.

Fischer: There never was any censorship; the work was shown widely. People ask, “Why didn’t you use a real body in the bondage equipment?” It’s because it would have been too real. That was part of the envelope I wasn’t pushing.

Bryan-Wilson: Do you think you provided titillation to a straight audience, too, as in “Look at this whole foreign world?” Maybe the work also functions as a cautionary lesson: “Look at how not to be,” or “I shouldn’t wear my earring on that side.”

Fischer: I think the only titillation was that the work afforded people access to a hip community and made them feel like they knew about a certain scene.

Bryan-Wilson: You made a few projects after Gay Semiotics but then stopped taking photographs. Why?

Fischer: A confluence of several factors: One, the balance shifted to being a critic and it hurt the work, and the Overthinking Jew part of me kicked in, in a bad way. But I also had an awareness that I had done something historically significant, and I thought, As an artist, to even do this once is really lucky; it’s not going to happen again. I think most photographers have about a three- year shelf life.

Bryan-Wilson: How do you feel about the way Gay Semiotics has been received more recently?

Fischer: In 1991, Outlook magazine wanted me to update it, but I didn’t want to. You couldn’t even begin to do it now. It would have no meaning.

All images by Hal Fischer from Gay Semiotics, 1977
© and courtesy Hal Fischer, and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles

Bryan-Wilson: It does function like a time capsule, or a glimpse back to something that doesn’t exist in quite the same way anymore. I sometimes think about how brief the flourishing cruising scene really was. There were only about ten years between the Stonewall rebellion and the beginnings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The gay utopia that seemed to beckon in 1969 lasted only a decade, but it must have been wild to be part of it in the 1970s.

Fischer: It was like a restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet. In my local bar in the Haight, there was an incredible range of people, from activists and doctors and lawyers to people who were half a step above homeless, and it had this wonderful energy. (The Castro was more uniform in its population.) On the other hand, I wouldn’t say it was the most fabulous thing in the world. When you consider the prejudice and the narrowness, it seems that the culture may have picked up a certain hyper-maleness that, in retrospect, was not all that attractive.

Bryan-Wilson: Let’s go back to how Gay Semiotics has been revisited. It was included in the Under the Big Black Sun exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2011, and it is clear that the project not only has significance within queer history but also within art history.

Fischer: I felt very comfortable in that show, because I saw how I fit into a larger narrative of West Coast conceptual photography. I walked away from it and thought, This was really an amazing period.

Bryan-Wilson: You’re having an exhibition in Los Angeles this winter, so you’ve been reprinting this work. What is it like for you, now in 2014, to come back to it?

Fischer: Periodically, over the years, people would ask me to reissue the books. I didn’t imagine the reemergence of the prints. The first thing I thought when I pulled everything out was, How could I do so much in five years? Particularly when you think about how much partying there was going on.

Bryan-Wilson: Has Gay Semiotics become a record of loss and grief regarding HIV/AIDS?

Fischer: No, not at all. Most of my friends who are in the photos are still around. But what is sad, today, about looking back to these images is reflecting on what this city has become. The people who historically have come and made San Francisco creative can’t afford to live here anymore. So the project has a melancholy cast for me because of that.

This article original appeared in Aperture, issue 218, “Queer.”

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Published on June 04, 2021 09:55

June 3, 2021

Tim Davis on the Joys and Pitfalls of Seeing through the Camera

Glamour and grammar are the same word. This is not a clever platitude. The two are etymologically indistinguishable. How you put language together, how you articulate, is how you cast a spell. Glamour is a veil; a new surface that beckons and keeps you engaged. Gramarye, in Middle English, meant, simply, “magic.” The camera is a machine that can see only surfaces. The world casts its spell, and the camera gobbles up its glamour, uncritically, with pure certainty, assuming there is nothing underneath. For photographers, depth is metaphysical. You can try to see inside a subject, but all you are really seeing are the registrations of the inner being on the surface. Edward Weston’s 1930 portrait bust of José Clemente Orozco—the greatest example of how close a photograph can get to describing the inner being life of a person— in no way portrays the inner life of a person. It is a man’s haunted, vivid, resolute face, but the haunting comes from the skin, not the soul. It is articulate as a picture can be about the complexity of the human condition, a good candidate to broadcast out to aliens about what we, as a species are made of, are capable of, but the spell it casts is the glow off glasses and chin onto Weston’s silver film, and the spell is glamorous and profound. Before the Big Bang, all the atoms in the universe were collapsed into one point. There were no surfaces. Since then, there are more and more, and the camera is among the most powerful tools we have to explore them.

I had a girlfriend whose grandmother was like Katharine Hepburn. She’d been a model in the ’50s and if you opened an old Life magazine she’d be in it, draped in chiffon. She was glowy and glamorous, throwing the windows open on a chilly day and inhaling. On one languorous afternoon drive, she noticed how much I can’t help remarking on everything I see, and started calling me “Mister Hey Look at This! Hey Look at That!” I felt flirty enough with my girlfriend’s glamorous grandmother that the remark (on my remarks) smarted a bit, but I knew she was right. A light went on like the first shot of the first trailer in a dark movie theater: my biopic a jumpy, burbling time-lapse of “Hey, Look at This”es and “Hey, Look at That”s.

So imagine you’re a visual kid who can’t stop remarking, and on a divorce consolation trip to Disney World you get a Mickey Mouse camera. Turns out this camera loves everything you love. It sees what you see and feels what you feel. Your camera’s a great listener. You can tell your camera pretty much anything. As long as there’s enough light on, it nods and understands. It hangs around your neck and holds your hand. It loves to do what you love to do. If you feel like skipping school and just walking down the train tracks all day, this camera will want to come. It’s game. It’s on your side. It takes some time to learn to press the buttons it likes, but you want to please your camera so you do. You listen back. You know each other. You’re always together, strutting through town, in cahoots or in love, or all of the above. Eventually you to go into a dark room and pour out your insides.

I’d been working on a project called Sunset Strips, pictures of strip malls at sunset, made from an elevated perspective. Long, ozone rich days were spent in the future fossil layers they’ll call the “Bigboxoscene,” my rented sedan piled with coffee cups and Combos, scouting for hillocks, mesas, and off-ramps just east of This Plaza, That Center, hoping to climb up high enough to watch the sun go down on JoAnn Fabrics. When Sunset Strips work, they work well. They’re a cocktail of sincerity and irony, a cordial of bad urban planning and pure celestial revolution. They have an unusual color palette, acidic and shimmery like gasoline, from the lot lights below and the fire in the sky. They take you to a familiar place and pour gas on it, and isn’t it pretty watching it burn? But the sunset isn’t always in the west. Sometimes there’s no sunset at all. The damn star just crosses the horizon with no fanfare, no farewell fire, no pink. Many days I made zero pictures. Lots of nights I went to bed in a damnably mediocre hotel unable to really remember that first camera love. My wife, my real life love, would call me on the phone and say, “You need to do something that will make you happy.” So, like some Okie fleeing a photographic Dust Bowl, I went to California.

I left a lot behind: the view camera, the film, the consumable project whose artist’s statement writes itself. But I got out of there. I flew through the night and arrived on Christmas. For someone from Upstate New York, Christmas in Los Angeles is like an old man waking up in the body of Bruce Lee: salvation where usually there is only suffering. Like a propaganda film shot in a concentration camp, Christmas is a time for enforced cheer, and here, walking with my Jessica Rabbit/Dorothy Parker sister-in-law in the eucalyptus-scented Los Feliz hills, no force is necessary. It turns out living in paradise feels good. All the forest fires, mudslides, drought conditions, inequality tsunamis, body-image issue typhoons, plagues of uncanny ambition, can’t stop your body feeling good when you’re in the air there. The dark hearted Calvinists driving the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway and Mass Pike are certain you can’t enjoy the good times without enduring the bad. Spring, they say, is only spring because we’ve gotten through winter. Those people are lying. Don’t listen to them. Feeling good feels good all the time.

Right now, I feel like a panda in a bamboo forest. It’s leafy and spindly sliding along these nautilus spiraled Drives, Ways, Places. The houses wobble up cliffs like Borneo beehunters on heavenly stilts. Most are mere real estate, and have been mercilessly redone. Some are wild and unattended, and you expect Joni Mitchell to amble out the door with a dulcimer. My sister-in-law lives in a 1987 gay-porn set with mirrored walls and penis-themed scrollwork. We stop in front of a tacit ranch house that wouldn’t look out of place on any Oak Street in America. The sense of ceramic cherub and bubbling birdbath tells you it’s inhabited by the elderly: I’m guessing the guy who wrote the Andy Griffith theme song and his lover, who whistled it. This one has big sliding glass front and back doors. The house is a frame for a distant view, blocked only by décor: an endtable and a chandelier. You see the house, you see inside the house, and you see beyond it, as Glendale and a bit of Burbank metastasize toward the San Gabriels.

A thing can be interesting, but a picture of a thing isn’t necessarily more interesting than the original thing. Looking through this house makes it mean more, and the more it means, the more photographable it becomes. I raise my camera to my eye without thought, like a sea anemone sensing a clownfish coming. I know there is a picture here. It is waving its glamour and meaning at me, braying, “Hey, look at this!” Paradise. As Adam named the animals, my sister- in-law was born to give things monikers. She sees me looking through this house, deeply, unashamedly in love with photography again, and, grinning conspiratorially, whispers, “I’m looking through you!” I raise up the camera in my hand and say it too.

As I walk under the city’s Dantean underpasses that connect its constellated villages, and across wide, sparkling sidewalks, past each house with its own little imagined ecosystem, I’m having a hard time making these pictures feel realistic. Maybe it’s using a hand camera: squinting dollops of dimension down into that tiny one- eyed viewfinder tightens and fractures the world, coal to crystal, ship in a bottle. If you force a Caravaggio through a keyhole you get a Giotto out the other side. But the more I work, the more medieval I become. Realism isn’t for lovers. Who needs realism here, where no one’s interested? The big break is just around the corner. Every deal is about to go down. It’s 70 degrees and sunny. Everyone’s a star or an icon.

The vertical frame keeps insisting it’s the only way to paint these icons. It cuts the fabric of reality with more friction and rip than the horizontal. It doesn’t look like looking. And the more I use it, the less concerned I am about how my pictures “represent” anything or anyone. Instead, I pray to Saint Veronica, who reached toward Christ’s suffering and wound up with his face on her handkerchief. This face is not a realistic face. Look at Hans Memling’s Veronica. She’s holding a concert T-shirt … from the 1 CE Golgotha tour! Photographs are revelations, not representations. They don’t stand for anything. They are autonomous experiences alongside, conjoined with, minted from, real experiences. Photographs are forgeries. When I click the shutter, I am Veronica, stretching out for a handful of the sacred sweat, but never expecting to tell the story of my savior. The medieval photographer doesn’t represent; she carves what she feels. Perspective is off, space collapsed. People aren’t identities, they’re saints. Realist Caravaggio used prostitutes to pose as virgins. In a medieval icon, the saint is in the painting itself, infused in the poplar panel: not a description, an assertion. “I’m looking through you” means you aren’t you. You are a stiff and awkward pose, eyes rolling to the sky, housing potential miracles. You are holding these assertions in your hands, looking through them. The “you” I am looking through is the camera itself, magical carver of worlds, bringer of gramarye and glamour. Maybe this book should’ve been called Lives of the Saints.

This essay and images were originally published in I’m Looking Through You (Aperture, 2021).

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Published on June 03, 2021 07:48

May 28, 2021

Aperture Patron and Trustee Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla Passes Away

Aperture is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Sondra Gilman Gonzalez-Falla, who served as a dedicated, generous patron and trustee of Aperture Foundation for many decades. Her husband and partner, Celso Gonzalez-Falla, served on the Aperture board as longtime chair and ongoing patron. Sondra also created and chaired the influential Photography Acquisition Committee at the Whitney Museum. Together, Sondra and Celso worked tirelessly to support the photo community and to build an unparalleled collection around the photographs they loved. In Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography (2011), Sondra described their mutual commitment as follows: “We are custodians, and we feel an obligation to the photographer—to the artist who created the work—to allow it to be seen and exposed as much as it can. We don’t own it. Nobody owns art. It’s passing through us, and we have to take care of it.”

We celebrate Sondra’s life and her passion; the work she and Celso gathered with such care lives on.

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Published on May 28, 2021 11:12

In a Bracing Exhibition at the Guggenheim, Artists Challenge the Way History Is Told

When Sadie Barnette was a kid growing up in Oakland, California, her father didn’t talk much about his time in the Black Panther Party. It’s possible he simply had other things to say. Rodney Barnette, who is now in his late seventies, has lived an uncommonly fascinating life. Born and raised in one of the oldest Black communities in the Boston area, he got involved in community organizing early on, followed the teachings of Malcolm X, was drafted into the army, earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam, took a job with the US Postal Service, joined the anti-war movement, took some time off to read W. E. B. DuBois and Karl Marx, helped the national campaign to free Angela Davis, and opened the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, which for three crucial years in the 1990s offered a sanctuary and a site of resistance for the city’s queer communities of color. In the late 1960s, he also cofounded the ninth chapter of the Black Panthers, in downtown Compton.

Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation, 2017

Rodney may have been reluctant to discuss the experience with his daughter when she was little because of his lingering uneasiness about how the party had broken up and drifted away from popular community service initiatives like a free breakfast program for schoolchildren. He felt paranoid at times, but he was sure the movement had been infiltrated by informers who, through various disciplinary stratagems, damaged the party’s work from within. In 2011, Barnette sat down with his daughter and her mother to fill out a request for his FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act. It took more than four years for the file to arrive, not in the form of a dusty old box of papers but as redacted scans on CD-ROMS. Still, filled as it was with the blacked-out names of agents who were omnipresent and lied through their teeth, the file confirmed his suspicions, and so much more.

For several years now, Sadie Barnette has been transforming pages from her father’s 500-plus page FBI file into a series of ruminative artworks, embellished with surprising irruptions of pink spray paint, sparkly stickers, and glitter. On documents revealing patterns of harassment and intimidation that cost Rodney Barnette his job, among other things, the explosions of color read like expressions of love from a little girl to a daddy she adores. Three years ago, five prints from My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017) entered the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Hank Willis Thomas, Farewell Uncle Tom, 1971/2007

Hank Willis Thomas, Something to Believe In, 1984/2007

Thanks to the curator Ashley James’s ambitious, far-reaching, and decidedly self-critical approach to a collection survey highlighting recent acquisitions, an otherwise often dutiful form of exhibition-making, Barnette’s series is now on view throughout the summer. It holds its own hanging adjacent to a searing and powerful suite of prints by Adrian Piper as part of Off the Record, a bracing show of thirteen bodies of work, each of them challenging the role of documents (including official government records, newspaper pages, images from mainstream magazines, pedagogical tools, and scholarly photographic archives) in shaping, obscuring, or suppressing the histories they purport to tell. The exhibition fills a handful of side galleries with predominantly photo-based images that all but one of the artists (Lorna Simpson) used but did not themselves produce. The burst of pink on Barnette’s black-and-white pages signal the exhibition’s interest in interruptions and interventions, in the ways in which the featured artists have not only located and appropriated these records but more importantly acted upon them.

The archival impulse runs deep in contemporary art. Generations of artists have developed a veritable subgenre of documentary projects turning historical records into an artistic medium, from Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, and Alfredo Jaar to Walid Raad, the Otolith Group, Mariam Ghani, Eric Baudelaire, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s Speculative Archive, Yto Barrada, and the Pad.ma project initiated in 2007 by three collectives from Mumbai, Berlin, and Bangalore. Obsessions with archival material tend to trace out some of the most intractable political conflicts on Earth, cohering them into a map of colonial and neocolonial cruelties. Off the Record moves in a similar way, cleaving to the core horrors of racism and power in America. But it also does something different.

Lorna Simpson, Flipside, 1991

The title plays on the notion of going “off the record” in interactions with the media, when a source says something to a journalist that must, by convention, remain unprinted. According to James, the title here can also be understood as a verb, “killing” the record as a means of redress. All of this suggests not so much the melancholy engagements of a scholarly artist as archivist, working through old dusty photographs as forms of evidence, storytelling prompts, or mnemonic devices. The artists in Off the Record are more actively engaged, more playful and pugilistic. Through acts of repetition (Glenn Ligon), deletion (Hank Willis Thomas), subtraction (Sarah Charlesworth), juxtaposition (Lorna Simpson), collage (Leslie Hewitt), brutal captioning (Carrie Mae Weems), they actually seem to tussle with their materials and win. In Coloring Book 9 and Coloring Book 18 (both from 2018), Sable Elyse Smith willfully colors outside the lines on the enlarged pages of children’s activity books introducing the justice system and the carceral state; in Ecology of Fear (Gillum for Governor)(Freedom Riders Bus Bombed by KKK), from 2020—and the only work on loan in the show—Tomashi Jackson creates wells of tension and emotion by layering lines and colors into an accumulation of found images printed on clear vinyl, including an enlarged photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law, the face of Martin Luther King Jr. just visible in the background.

Like many museums in New York and around the world, the Guggenheim has struggled—and sometimes stumbled—in its efforts to address the wider systemic racism of the art world and the urgent need to diversify its exhibitions, collections, leadership, and staffing decisions. Off the Record presents a strong example of how curators with fresh eyes, real vision, and deep art historical knowledge might begin to reform institutions from within, rifling through their own collections, materials, and records to find the pieces of vital new arguments to be made. (James, who previously worked on blockbuster exhibitions such as Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, as well as solo shows devoted to Adrian Piper, Charles White, Eric N. Mack, and John Edmonds, joined the Guggenheim in 2019.)

Sable Elyse Smith, Coloring Book 18, 2018
All works courtesy the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

In an interview with her father that Sadie Barnette recorded a few years ago for the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she was once an artist-in-residence, she asked him where his political convictions began. He told her the story of finding a photograph of a lynching in The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper in the first half of the twentieth century. He was horrified by the cheering crowd in the picture. In another interview made for the current show, Barnette reflected on how their father-daughter story is bigger than them; it is a family story that speaks to universal experience. But she also admitted, about her pink adornments on her father’s FBI file: “How powerful it does feel to know that just me and my small self with my spray paint in my studio can interject.”

Off the Record is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, through September 27, 2021.

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Published on May 28, 2021 08:08

May 24, 2021

How a Collective of Photographers Aims to Affirm Black Life

At the height of the racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s, Breonna Taylor’s, and Tony McDade’s deaths by law enforcement in 2020, a group of six young Black photographers organized themselves into the collective See In Black. Spearheaded by the New York–based image makers Micaiah Carter and Joshua Kissi, the mission was simple: use art to affirm that Black life, disproportionately affected by the coronavirus and state-sanctioned violence, matters beyond moments of crisis.

“See In Black formed as a collective of Black photographers to dismantle white supremacy and systemic oppression,” the coalition’s statement of solidarity reads. “Our intention is to replenish those we’ve been nourished by.” Their first action was to establish a print sale titled Vol. 001 Black In America, which included snapshots, street scenes, self-portraits, still lifes, and editorial images of Blackness by nearly eighty photographers. Collectively, these intimate portrayals present community as an act of hope. Image by image, you see Black America honestly gazed at from within the circle of lived experience. At a time of deep despair, their photographs were a testament that Black narratives will not be devalued. The print sale raised over $500,000, which they donated to five homelessness, youth, queer, political, and legal organizations.

A number of the photographers call New York home. The city, battered badly over the past year, has allowed these artists to establish themselves creatively and to attune their eyes to construct counternarratives that squarely capture what the collective calls “Black prosperity.” Here, I speak with seven of the photographers about how art meets activism in New York.

Joshua Kissi, Nike, BHM Campaign, 2019
Courtesy the arist

Joshua Kissi

Antwaun Sargent: How does New York inform your practice as an image maker?

Joshua Kissi: Being of West African descent, in a place in the Bronx that has a lot of West Africans, people from Ghana and Nigeria and Guinea and Senegal, made me think about what this vibrancy looked like within my work. I always thought, What do color and tone look like? How do I make this photo feel like you’re really in Little Senegal, or on the west side of the Bronx?

Sargent: You see the multiplicity in Blackness in your images. There are differences in the way that skin color needs to be shot from neighborhood to neighborhood to make sure that you capture the richness and the specificity of that identity.

Kissi: Yeah, absolutely.

Sargent: Our city experienced this pandemic like no other at the beginning, and then we went into racial protest. You and Micaiah decided to launch See In Black.

Kissi: We were just thinking, like, Will we be able to live the same type of lives that we were living before? We knew that we weren’t the type of photographers to necessarily go out and photograph protests. That’s really an emotional thing. We love and support the people who do. But, what else can we do that isn’t necessarily on the front lines but is on the front lines? It isn’t necessarily just about a trend. It’s about, How do we solidify our perspective when it comes to image makers who are Black?

Everybody put their head down and just got to work. Getting the photographers together. Trying to organize, getting logos and websites and photos. We were really in it. But we didn’t feel like it was work because we knew the work needed to be done. And we were like, Man, we need to do something. We need to say something.

Sargent: How did you select the photographers?

Kissi: We know a lot of photographers in New York and LA, but there are so many multitudes and layers of Blackness. So it was important to have as much representation as possible within the Black community. We wanted other photographers to be like, “My personal work may not be in there. But I see my lens, I see my understanding, I see my practice.” The main point was if you see your work within this selection, the job is done. You could continue to add on to that narrative. You can continue to shape that story.

Joshua Kissi is a Ghanaian American photographer and creative director based in New York.

Micaiah Carter, Highsnobiety, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Micaiah Carter

Sargent: Why did you and Joshua start See In Black?

Micaiah Carter: We wanted to have a response. As Black photographers, how can we give back to our own communities, not only based in New York but across the country? We wanted to have a plethora of people that we could reach out to for the first round of what See In Black was, and to raise money and help people in need.

Sargent: One of the first actions was a print sale—and they weren’t necessarily all images of activism. It really was about a real deep look at Black life. Why was that important to you?

Carter: Black trauma is something that is expected. There always has to be some type of struggle. We wanted to show that’s not always the case. There are moments of happiness. There are moments of mundaneness.

Sargent: Your photography often takes moments from our rich past as Black people and remixes them in these contemporary images.

Carter: I think that’s consistent from when I first started. Even now, when I’m home, I look back at my dad’s photographs. That’s still a big inspiration for how I view photography, the family album as a whole.

Sargent: How did you develop that style?

Carter: I think it’s just my perspective on how I am as a person reflecting on other people. I am inspired by certain people. So, for example, like with Megan Thee Stallion, when I shot her, I wanted her to be in her style element. I wanted this softness that you don’t really see with her.

Sargent: What do you want the future of See In Black to be?

Carter: Almost like a boys and girls club—to have, from different pockets of America and the world, accessibility to Black photography, Black tools. Like, say there’s a Black photographer who really wants to start. They can go into See In Black, know just how they want to network, and from there build to where they want to go. It’s not an agency; it’s more like a mecca for knowledge and a mecca for community.

Sargent: And history. Right?

Carter: Yeah, and history.

Micaiah Carter is a photographer based in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

Florian Koenigsberger, Carley Adonis, from the series Coloureds, Cape Town, South Africa, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Florian Koenigsberger

Sargent: You grew up in the city, right?

Florian Koenigsberger: Born and raised here.

Sargent: How has being a native New Yorker informed the development of your photo practice?

Koenigsberger: Growing up here makes you unafraid of approaching strangers. I remember when I got my first camera in late middle school, early high school days, the big story for me was having a chance to walk around New York and ask questions to people that I didn’t know, and to make their pictures.

Sargent: Why did you want to use your images in service of the mission of See In Black?

Koenigsberger: Many of us were fearful that what was happening in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death was going to be a moment and not a movement. How do you carry this forward? For us, it was: If you can live with this representation of Blackness in your space, and this becomes something that you interact with daily, it really fundamentally challenges the racism and bias that many people are operating with daily. The other side was we wanted the community to have work. It shouldn’t just be people who are used to buying this work that can have their ideas challenged in their space.

Sargent: This is not a traditional sort of activism. What led you to have an active role beyond sharing your image and actually organizing?

Koenigsberger: My role is operations. I work as a product marketing manager at Google in my full-time job, and my work is focused on making cameras more equitable, particularly for people with darker skin tones. I got the call from Joshua, and he was talking to me about help with finance and legal for this thing that they were going to try to put together.

It was this rare alignment, like, Oh, every skill set that I have been trained to direct toward this multibillion-dollar corporation can now be repurposed to directly serve the community. No frills. No middleman. To me, that was the greatest honor. To spend all of this time learning all of these skills and to finally be able to bring them back into the community in a way that really directly and immediately serves its needs was incredible. And there was never a question for me that that wasn’t the thing to immediately dive all the way into.

Florian Koenigsberger is a photographer and storyteller living and working in New York.

Texas Isaiah, Riley, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Texas Isaiah

Sargent: How did New York help you develop as an image maker?

Texas Isaiah: My first experience of community was being involved in nightlife. It taught me so much about the different ways we can take care of each other within the work that we want to do. When we were curating parties, like Alien or like Roxy Cottontail or like Good Peoples with Katie Longmyer, at least the crew that I was with, we’d come together and just ask, like, “Who are the folk that need support right now? Maybe we can hire them for the door.”

Sargent: One of the things that emerges in your work is this mosaic of young creative New York. Why was this communal portrait making important?

Texas Isaiah: Everyone contributes to a space in some way. You have the door person. You have the host. The DJ. The bartender. The person who cleans up at the end of the night. I took that idea and extended that to the everyday. I want to photograph everybody that will allow me to photograph them. And that felt important to how I was establishing an archive. Everyone is valuable. Everyone deserves a visual space.

Sargent: Why was it important for you to show up in the way that you did by joining See In Black and offering to the community your images?

Texas Isaiah: It was a way to give back. I’m not a big protester. Not everyone can be a part of a protest for five hours. So, it was just a way to remind people that they do have access to artwork during this time. I’ve known Joshua for a while now, and I trusted that Joshua would hold this space, along with Micaiah. It really felt important to also be a part of something that was established by Black people and for Black people.

Sargent: Have your ideas about activism changed?

Texas Isaiah: Activism for me is an everyday thing. It’s how I show up for my partner and how I treat my friends. I think See In Black is part of that, showing up for community and showing up for each other, even if not all of us are familiar with one another. We’re coming together and just trying to figure out how we can make our work more accessible to the community, and then also how we can raise funds and donate them to a plethora of Black organizations and collectives.

Sargent: Do you think of your archive making as a form of activism?

Texas Isaiah: I do. I’m just trying to turn away from these traditional structures of how people believe photography should be valued, and what it means to be photographed, and what it means to step into that space, and how it can be a space for everyone, every single person. It doesn’t matter if you are a janitor or if you are a gardener. You are still contributing to this world, and you deserve that space.

Texas Isaiah is a visual narrator based in New York, Los Angeles, and Oakland, California.

Kreshonna Keane, Project Princess, Bronx, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Kreshonna Keane

Sargent: How has New York informed your work?

Kreshonna Keane: A lot of people strive to move to New York because it seems like the greatest place on earth. I think, being from here, I started to hate it and resent it. Then, moving to Atlanta and coming back, I grew a larger appreciation for New York and, more specifically, for the Bronx, which is where I was born and raised.

Sargent: What are you trying to capture about the Bronx in your images?

Keane: Originally, it started out as the life and culture. I was shooting our local restaurants, my friends in front of them, and things like that. Then I kind of wanted to start a deeper meaning, maybe by shooting the people who own these places and things like that. The part of the Bronx that I live in, the culture there, a lot of the things that we focus on are, like, food and the mom and-pop shops that are owned there. It’s heavily Caribbean-based and Caribbean-owned.

But then it kind of grew into something larger for me. I took these overlooked places, like New York City public housing. We see these project buildings every day when we walk past, and they have these negative connotations attached to them. I tried to turn it into something more beautiful by giving it an editorial spin and putting a model that you wouldn’t see there.

Sargent: When you joined See In Black, why did you feel like your photography could be used in a way to help the city?

Keane: I was actually shocked that I was asked to join it. Looking at the list, I was like, Wow, I don’t really see my work as comparable to all the other artists up there. But I realized that I should be a part of this, that maybe my work could be something for people. It felt good to be part of a larger collective and to make a difference, and I knew the impact that we could make.

Sargent: The brilliant thing about what you did with See In Black was to share images of the breadth and depth of Black life. Why is it important to you that the Bronx is a character in your images?

Keane: Because it’s so overlooked. There’s always this talk about boroughs. Everybody always says, “Oh, my borough is the best—the Bronx is the best,” or “Brooklyn is the best,” or “Queens is the best.” Ever since I was younger, I always used to hate it. I would hate being from the Bronx. I would hate what I saw when I walked around the Bronx. I was experiencing things walking around the Bronx. It’s always been a place to be feared, and a place to be looked down on, and a place to be frowned upon when you tell people you’re from there. So it’s always been important to me to show that there’s beauty here; regardless of the struggle or not, there’s beauty in it.

Sargent: And with your camera, you’re showing it.

Keane: Exactly.

Kreshonna Keane is a photographer, creative director, and visual artist based in New York.

Flo Ngala, Untitled, Brooklyn Bridge, NY, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Flo Ngala

Sargent: How has New York shaped you as an artist?

Flo Ngala: It’s pretty much the whole reason why I think I’m able to approach the world of photography the way I do. From a young age, I’ve always been outgoing and talkative and excited about life. It’s a vigor that I acquired growing up. I think it would be very different if I was raised in the country or another city.

Sargent: Early on, your practice was largely self-portraits at home in Harlem, of you on the roof. How did you frame those images in relationship to the city’s landscape?

Ngala: People call New York a concrete jungle. The city itself builds up more than we build across. So just even being on a roof was something I was used to, being on a fire escape was something I was used to in the homes that my parents and my family lived in.

Sargent: When See In Black was formed, what did it mean to you to use your images in a way that gave back to the community?

Ngala: I remember being in high school and being a fan of what Josh was doing with Street Etiquette. I loved that so much because it was this awesome representation of the city and fashion photography and Black men. So, I was honored to be included. To be able to show an image that a lot of people felt was powerful, that a lot of people felt moved to purchase, something that was taken in my home literally a couple of blocks from my house, to me, that’s a representation of the community at a very important moment in time.

Sargent: Unlike a lot of other photographers who did See In Black, you actually went out there and documented the protests. And we saw each other a couple of times.

Ngala: Well, at my core, I am a street photographer. And I’m grateful that even though I’ve done other work as the years have gone on, that muscle is very sixth-sense, it’s very muscle-memory, it’s very natural to pop back into the action of it and just be in the moment. You communicate with people. And I love that I can hop back into that kind of work very naturally. It’s really a blessing.

To be able to see my work, not just on my social media or on my website, but to see it in people’s homes and to have people hit me up, and say, “I want to buy that print”—I’m like, Wow, that’s so cool. That moment spoke to you enough that you wanted to bring it home with you and have it forever.

Flo Ngala is a New York–based portrait photographer and photojournalist from Harlem.

Mahaneela, Stay Tru, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Mahaneela

Sargent: How does New York inform your way of seeing?

Mahaneela: I should start with how much identity informs my work and my practice, being someone of multiethnic backgrounds. I’m from Jamaica; I’m from West Africa; I’m from India, born and raised in London. My parents are from East Africa, even though they’re Indian. I am used to the mix and blend of cultures. So, for me, that’s always been a really big part of how I see things, and being in New York is a gold mine of cultural richness.

Sargent: Has your portrait practice changed from England to New York?

Mahaneela: Yes, it has, actually. In England a lot of my photography was of people I knew, people within my community; in New York it’s shifted. I’m creating a new home for myself—and so I have to go outside of myself, to kind of reach out to people and start these conversations and connections, rather than them already being there.

I’ve been coming back and forth to New York for years, like since 2014. That’s actually when I met Josh. He showed me around New York. We’d never met before; we just knew each other on Instagram. He was the one who took me around and gave me my first insight into the city.

The subject that I shot for See In Black, she is somebody I met in New York. I met her randomly, at a party. Which I felt was such a New York experience. That was the reason I feel I did that image. Because really, that image reminds me of how things come full circle, and how I just met this girl at a random party, I didn’t know anyone, we started talking, and then maintained that relationship, and ended up doing this shoot, which was very spontaneous. New York gives me that confidence.

Sargent: Why was it important to use your images in a social justice movement?

Mahaneela: I was able to feel like I was actually being an agent for change in a way that was acceptable to me. That period of time between March and June was an extremely scary and unstable time for New Yorkers, especially being that there was such a high concentration of COVID-19. It felt like a moment of powerlessness, coupled with the murder of George Floyd. And it also felt like a time in which we could kind of take matters into our own hands.

See In Black was a way of making a change in a positive way. We are raising money for the Black Youth Empowerment Project, the National Black Justice Coalition, the Black Futures Lab, and also the Bail Project. And we are giving a broad look into what Black photography and what the canon of photography are now. Even just seeing all of our prints there, seeing the diversity of composition and people and characters and subjects that exist within the work, was eye opening. We are not one homogeneous thing, and yet we still come together for these causes that affect all of us and all our families and all of the communities that we belong to.

We saw close to half a million in sales for See In Black. The demand and the value are there. It goes to show the value of this work and our contributions to the world.

Mahaneela is a multidisciplinary artist and DJ from London.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “Seeing In Black.”

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Published on May 24, 2021 13:47