Aperture's Blog, page 54

Self-Taught Photographers in Pursuit of Revelation

Joseph Yoakum, the self-taught landscape artist who worked most of his life in Chicago, described his immanent, imagined panoramas as a “spiritual enfoldment.”

“What I don’t get,” he told a newspaper reporter in 1967, “God didn’t intend me to have.”

The list of artists who operated by much the same mechanism is long and extraordinary, many of them arrayed outside the confines of the art world proper: William Blake, Hilma af Klint, Madge Gill, Howard Finster, Frank Jones, Minnie Evans, probably Martín Ramírez (though we’ll never know because he stopped speaking upon his involuntary commitment to a California mental hospital in 1931).

Tomasz Machciński, Untitled, 1988
© Tomasz Machciński/Collection Bruno Decharme

The widespread availability of the camera to the middle classes by the end of the nineteenth century effected a kind of short circuit in the celestial wiring of this visionary production and even in the work of so-called outsider artists without such religious impetus. It was as if the combination of emulsion and shutter provided an accidental portal for the gods—or simply the hidden contours of the world—to slip unawares into the visible, bypassing mediation of mind and hand. Something no one saw manifests itself in the developer bath. Some kind of message is on offer. Or more commonly, a simple snapshot click yields an image of an ordinary thing unintentionally transformed into a marvel that a band of surrealists couldn’t have dreamed up on a bushel of opium.

The spirit-photography charlatan William H. Mumler—sued in 1869 for duping the bereaved with fabricated images of loved ones’ ghosts—got at the public feeling for this possibility when he hailed himself as a pioneer of “new truths” and described the camera as “a medium,” in the metaphysical sense of the word.

Ichiwo Sugino, Untitled, 2015
© the artist

Photo | Brut: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie, the sprawling, messy, deeply engrossing exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, is by far the most comprehensive look yet by an American institution at how the camera’s entry into the domain of art-making materials gave outsider artists a fantastically pliable new means of expression, alluring especially because of its subversive ability “to imbue fantasy with the stamp of realism,” as the art historian Michel Thévoz writes in the show’s catalogue.

The Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý, a foundational figure in the world the exhibition explores, trained as a painter, but the pallid requirements of socialist realism drove him from an establishment career. His intentionally primitive homemade cameras, with their toothpaste-polished lenses, rendered the figural (and erotic) fabric of his eccentric mind in a way that paint likely never could have anyway, accomplishing for a twentieth-century European what André Breton, in reference to Oceanic art, described as a “triumph over the dualism of perception and representation.”

With the camera, Tichý said: “I saw everything in a new light. It was a new world.”

Like Tichý, many of the artists in the show, in pursuit of revelation or titillation or self-transformation, cannot bear to leave the photographic image alone. Modernist formalism might present itself as an influence or element, but stopping at it would be like leaving the cake half-baked; far too much life needs squeezing in for such narrowness.

Steve Ashby, Untitled, n.d. Wood, magazine clippings, lace, and metal
Collection of Robert A. Roth. Photograph by John Faier

Long before Robert Frank or Jim Goldberg began to marry handwriting and image, Lee Godie was layering language and drawing atop her photo-booth portraits. Steve Ashby migrated photos onto wooden sculpture and lamps (he called them “fixing-ups”). Eugene Von Bruenchenhein dyed and double-exposed images. Karel Forman used them to ornament every square inch of his tiny, drab Moravian apartment. Elke Tangeten embroiders them with wandering stitches, bequeathing objects that feel both lovingly handcrafted and pockmarked with contagion.

Throughout the show runs a fever-pulse feeling of film as a miraculous gift especially to artists with emotional and developmental disabilities, offering a way that no other medium can to gobble up, make sense of, and rearrange the world, reminding me of my favorite observation about the camera’s stupendous capacity, from Lee Friedlander: “I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.”

The artist I kept returning to in the show, time and again, is its most spartan and tranquil, an outlier in an assembly of often cacophonous outliers. Elisabeth Van Vyve, a woman with autism and hearing problems who now lives in a retirement home in Antwerp, has used disposable color-film cameras for decades to catalogue her circumscribed visual environment in obsessive detail, creating albums of thousands of snapshots that inevitably evoke the postmodern banal-sublime of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and early Fischli & Weiss.

Elisabeth Van Vyve, Untitled, 1993–2013
© Clément Van Vyve/Collection Bruno Decharme

Except that in Van Vyve’s case, the achingly precise arrangements of color, object, and light—a pair of striped gloves lying side by side on a plaid bedspread, a white dress shirt hanging in a white corner, a yellow custard on a cane chair, clear water swirling in a bathtub, twilight cloud banks seen through a window—feel like images born not of scopophilic necessity, as Eggleston’s can, but of absolute necessity, as imperative to Van Vyve’s daily survival as eating and breathing. This is the vocation of a person documenting her world while also building its exalted counterpart in physical art objects.

In an interview for the exhibition, the French filmmaker Bruno Decharme, whose collection constitutes the majority of the works, aptly describes the sense in which these wildly varied artists share a language spoken beyond the conventional art world, bringing its own into vivid utterance: “Their works are like music scores playing on a parallel stage in another time; they could be called mythological.”

PHOTO | BRUT: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie is on view at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, through June 6, 2021.

Donavon Smallwood’s Photographs Envision Black Tranquility in Central Park

There has been increased foot traffic in public spaces over the past year. As the pandemic set in, with lockdown restrictions put in place, loosened, and then put in place again, people turned to their parks as an easy salve: a place to work out, take a socially distanced walk with friends, and even cruise. For some, the pandemic marks the beginning of their relationship with the outdoor spaces in their vicinity—providing an opportunity to get out and get fresh air beyond the four walls that have boxed in their Zoom calls. For others, the connection goes back much further.

For much of his life, Donavon Smallwood found respite in New York’s Central Park. It has been his stomping grounds, of sorts, a short walk from where he lives in East Harlem. “Growing up, basically whenever we weren’t inside playing video games, we would go to the park and hang out,” he says. Friends, girlfriends, classmates, all came along. Smallwood had favorite spots by the Ravine, an area featuring small waterfalls and hiking trails. But when Smallwood watched The Lost Neighborhood Under New York’s Central Park, an eight-minute documentary released on Vox in 2020, that relationship changed.

The short video tells the story of Seneca Village, a community, started in the 1800s, of mostly Black folks who lived on some of the land now occupied by Central Park. In the mid-nineteenth century, when their land was being claimed for Central Park’s creation, the Seneca Village community was belittled, mischaracterized, and bulldozed in favor of breaking ground for a public space. “It was so interesting that this place that I’d been coming to, that had been like a second home for me, was a literal home that was stripped from people and turned into this nature space that I was enamored with,” Smallwood says.

In his series Languor (2020), Smallwood, who studied documentary film and English literature at Hunter College, contends with ideas, he says, about “what it means to be Black and losing your home to nature” as well as the idea of Black tranquility. In essence, it’s a project depicting Black folks at rest, just being.

History is rife with Black people and communities that have had their mere existence questioned, attacked, or negated, as was the case of Seneca Village. Often clips on Instagram and YouTube of Black folks doing nothing more than sharing their lives, laughing, and joking go viral. But on the other side of that coin, just as many viral videos depict Black folks having the authorities called on them, or in some other way being made victims of harassment for shopping, bird-watching, and many other unremarkable activities. Within this duality, Smallwood began a photographic investigation, attempting to divorce his sitters from either narrative.

“When you see Black people just being themselves, that’s what the art is,” Smallwood says of his project, which he hopes to turn into a book in the future. “Just existing in the park. Or on TikTok, if you go through the viral sounds, it’s all Black people in their daily lives. It’s a sound that has a million people using it, and it’s some guy walking into a room with his daughter and saying, ‘Surprise, shorty. Look what I got you.’” So within his second home with its dark history, the self-taught photographer, who has long nursed an interest in anthropology and archaeology, made a series of portraits devoid of pretension.

Those featured in the photographs were mostly cast either in the park, where Smallwood photographed daily, or from online sites, from Craigslist to Facebook and Instagram. “Part of this project was about just being, about not having to put on anything fake, or being too enthusiastic, or being too happy, or being too sad,” Smallwood says. To preempt participants’ urges to don their Sunday best or put on appearances, and to bring authenticity into the frame, Smallwood often asked them to wear looks he had previously seen them wearing in candid snapshots taken by their friends. There are no toothy, full-faced grins, no “Black boy joy” or “Black girl magic,” no vibrantly colored backdrops to signal exuberance. Instead, Smallwood used a medium-format film camera set on a tripod to create a more placid pace when making the images in Languor.

From YouTube and various online forums, Smallwood learned how to develop his own film—he’s only taken one high school class on photography in his life—and printed these images typically the night after shooting. Though he initially chose to make black-and-white photographs, since they were more economical, the limited palette became a way to focus on, he explains, the “mood of the images,” as opposed to potentially distracting backgrounds or clothing. The photographs in Languor are serene, awash in shades of gray, and invite the viewer to take a meditative moment, gazing into a leafy respite. Staring endlessly. Being.

All photographs Untitled, 2020, from the series Languor
Courtesy the artist

Donavon Smallwood (born in New York, 1994) is a self-trained photographer who grew up in a household that emphasized literature and deep engagement with the tradition of art. For him, photography—like all art and creation—is a communion with the divine; and he uses the medium as a means of exploring humankind, imagination, essence, and nature. Smallwood holds a BA from Hunter College, New York. His first monograph, Languor, is forthcoming in June 2021.

This article will appear in Aperture, issue 243, summer 2021.

Donavon Smallwood is the winner of the 2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize. His solo exhibition will be on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, July 21—August 25, 2021.

2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: William Camargo

In his project Origins & Displacements: Making Sense of Place, Histories & Possibilities, photographer and educator William Camargo addresses issues of gentrification, Chicanx and Latinx histories, and the systemic erasure of the stories of Brown people in his hometown of Anaheim, California—located southeast of Los Angeles, and Orange County’s largest city by population. A lot of people associate Anaheim with Disneyland, the Anaheim Ducks, the Los Angeles Angels, and the manicured resort district, but in the early 1900s, Anaheim was a rural agricultural community with acres of citrus orchards and an ugly history of systemic racism and violence. This included large gatherings of KKK members, who were also involved in city government; school segregation in the Mexican American community; and police violence against Black and Brown people, which continues to this day. Anaheim is more than fifty percent Latinx, and home to a large, diverse immigrant community. After spending a brief time away from Anaheim, Camargo returned with the intention of discovering the erased origins of his hometown.

William Camargo, Anaheim Landscape, 2020

William Camargo, Lavinia, 2019

While sifting through the local public library’s archive, Camargo discovered a history that he didn’t know, one that wasn’t taught to residents and youth in his community—which included photographs of Latinx life in Anaheim. Through the use of photography and performance, Camargo uses his own body and handwritten signs to address the stories repeatedly erased from historical documents, photographs, and news archives. In the photograph Y’all Forgot Who Worked Here?, Camargo stands in front of the Anaheim Packing House, a renovated 1919 Sunkist citrus packing house that is now a gourmet food hall, with a sign that reads “Brown Women Used to Pack Oranges Here.” The image is striking, not only because of the tension that exists between the message on the sign and the space being occupied, but also Camargo’s presence in the frame. His face is hidden—something he does in all of his performative images—and his body becomes a stand-in for other people. These images force viewers to consider the spaces we occupy and question the systems and people that shape our understanding of a place. “I want viewers to reflect on where they live, and the history that is not really centered,” Camargo explains. “Even if it’s a history that’s not so bright.”

Camargo’s work addresses the continued systemic racism that exists in Anaheim—whether by inserting himself into the photograph, documenting contemporary landscapes, or creating intimate portraits of people in their homes. As a community archivist, Camargo approaches his subjects with respect and collaboration. “A lot of my work is a mutual agreement. I am trying to focus on cooperation with community, instead of going in there, photographing, and then leaving,” says Camargo. “It’s an exchange. There’s a power structure in photography, and I’m aware of that.” There is an inherent intimacy and mutual understanding between him and his community; his subjects look relaxed and seem to know that these photographs are important and will go on to tell their stories. While Camargo is working to contextualize and repackage historical texts and contemporary narratives through photography, he is also creating a body of work that will live on as its own archive.

William Camargo, After Stephen Shore but in Penquin City and Paisa, 2019William Camargo, Y’all Forgot Who Worked Here? , 2020William Camargo, Esperanza , 2020William Camargo, That Paisa Haircut , 2020William Camargo, Chicanx Still Life #5, 2019. All photographs from the series Origins & Displacements: Making Sense of Place, History, and Possibilities
Courtesy the artist

William Camargo (born in Anaheim, California, 1989) is an arts educator, photo-based artist, and arts advocate. He is currently commissioner of heritage and culture for the City of Anaheim, and working toward an MFA at Claremont Graduate University, California. He is founder and curator of Latinx Diaspora Archives, an Instagram page that elevates communities of color through family photos. He attained a BFA from California State University, Fullerton, and an AA in photography from Fullerton College. Camargo has held residencies at ProjectArt, Chicago; Chicago Artists Coalition; Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions, Steuben, Wisconsin; LA Summer at Otis School of Art and Design; and the Latinx Project at New York University. He attended the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures’s Leadership (2018) and Advocacy (2020) Institutes, and is a current member of Diversify Photo. Camargo was awarded a Friedman Grant from Claremont Graduate University, and has given lectures at the University of Wisconsin­–Parkside; Gallery 400, Chicago; University of San Diego; California State University, Long Beach; Claremont Colleges; and University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design, among others. His work has been shown at the Chicago Cultural Center; Loisaida Center, New York; University of Indianapolis; Mexican Center for  Culture and Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles; Stevenson University, Maryland; Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Irvine Fine Arts Center, California; and upcoming at the Phoenix Art Museum.

The Aperture Portfolio Prize is an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Chance DeVille

Today, one in four women and one in ten men in the US experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, and growing evidence shows COVID-19 lockdown measures have led to a drastic increase in cases. What’s missing in these numbers are violence against nonbinary individuals (who are statistically most at risk) and the unreported cases—in reality, the numbers are far higher.

Chance DeVille is intimately aware of these numbers and the impact behind them. When DeVille was a child, their mother, Tammy, suffered physical and mental abuse by her ex-husband, David, leading to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and severe PTSD. As Tammy went on to reject psychiatric treatment and struggled with substance abuse, her relationship with DeVille and their power dynamic as mother and child took a drastic turn. Now, years later, DeVille has set out to create a photographic examination of their mother and the long-lasting effects of David’s abuse on their family. “I started making this work with a frustration that a story like my mom’s was not out there,” DeVille recounts. “When I started studying photography, I found that this conversation wasn’t being held in that space either.”

Through careful photographs and ritual observation, DeVille weaves together collaborative images of their mother, self-portraits, and archival imagery. The resulting series, David’s Mark, speaks to the complex relationships between abuse, trauma, sexual desire, and mental health, while also acting as a vital space for reclamation and healing. DeVille describes the experience of photographing their mother as building a new relationship through the act of documenting: “The camera has given us a foundation to a relationship that would not have been there otherwise.”

Chance DeVille, Fingering David, Self Portrait, 2020

Chance DeVille, Fingering David II, Self Portrait, 2020

DeVille’s black-and-white and color photographs navigate between an almost painful, performative energy and moments of contemplative observation. In one image, leaves reflect in a car window, a haze of smoke swirling from the interior, covering Tammy in a physical manifestation of a dreamlike state. Throughout domestic interiors, a foreboding presence of clutter fills the frame, from a tangle of wires to overwhelming piles of clothes. One haunting image, an earlier self-portrait of DeVille referencing the sexual abuse they faced from David as a child, takes on new meaning when paired with an archival image found a year later, directly tying bodily trauma and repressed memories. DeVille, who is queer and nonbinary, sees an irrefutable connection between David’s acts and their own understanding of desire and attraction, and seeks self-portraiture as a way to “regain agency of [their] body, sexuality, and perception.”

Ultimately, DeVille wants their work to make an impact, but also to give light to the deep repercussions abuse has beyond its immediate action. “Trying to understand what makes a ‘good’ photograph is really difficult whenever it comes to displaying trauma. Studying and understanding the ethics, and my ethics, of photography through this work has been challenging,” DeVille reflects. “I hope my work shows that trauma is complicated and these complications are normal. Domestic abuse weaves its way into every aspect of someone’s life and creates ripple effects.”

Chance DeVille, Sometimes We Scream in Unison, 2020Chance DeVille, Mom in a Dream, 2020

Chance DeVille, Mom’s Room, Labyrinth III, 2020

Chance DeVille, Labyrinth, 2020

Chance DeVille, The Offering, 2020Chance DeVille, Suspension, Self Portrait, 2020. All photographs from the series David’s Mark
Courtesy the artist

Chance DeVille (born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, 1994) is a nonbinary Southern-born and -raised artist, currently based in Providence, Rhode Island, where they attend the photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Deville was named a Henry Wolf Scholar in spring 2020. They earned their BA at McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a first-generation student. DeVille has exhibited all over the country, as well as internationally, and was recently a winner of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward competition and VSA Emerging Young Artists competition, as well as an honorable mention in Lenscratch’s Student Prize.

The Aperture Portfolio Prize is an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Jarod Lew

In 2012, Jarod Lew unearthed a piece of his personal family history that set the groundwork for an exploration of what it means to be Asian American: his mother was the fiancé of Vincent Chin—a Chinese American draftsman whose murder in 1982, just days before their wedding, would respark the Asian American Civil Rights movement. Lew’s series Please Take Off Your Shoes, set in his hometown of Detroit—the geographical backdrop to Chin’s life and murder—takes an intimate but emboldened look at what remains in Chin’s legacy and the long history of survival and erasure in displacement.

Enveloped in the American suburban interior, Lew’s photographs capture a particular cross section of “Asian” and “American” visual artifacts. Ornate golden lovebirds hover above silken living-room pillows featuring the Chinese character for prosperity. A turtle shell stuffed with American dollars appears beside a framed five-yuan bill featuring Mao Zedong. A Korean adoptee adorns a white Korean face mask and a Japanese T-shirt of Homer Simpson. Through a paradoxical landscape of assimilation, a singular aesthetic begins to register.

Jarod Lew, Winson, 2019

Jarod Lew, The Guilty Pleasure of a Ladies Home, 2018

Often emerging in stark contrast against the blank backdrops of their bedrooms, the young Asian American individuals in Lew’s solitary portraits inhabit the same nebulous space. Lew’s gravitation toward photographing people in the safest and most private areas of their homes reveals the shared alienation and complex tensions of a younger generation and their experiences with identity and belonging. Their own safe spaces are visually absent of Asian ornaments and objects; we are left unable to access them through the spectacle of any “Asian” aesthetic. “You can leave a room being the most Asian thing in the room and go into a public space of the house and be the least Asian thing in the room,” Lew explains. “I used underrepresentation as a freedom to play, and I think the people I photographed had that same feeling of wanting to play with our experience.” Vincent Chin may have been the access point into how Lew wanted to understand his Asian American experience in the aftermath of a hate crime, but the resulting body of work in Please Take Off Your Shoes moves far beyond the racial violence Chin endured. In the subverted visual language of the hyper-visible (and invisible), the resilient reflection of a community comes into focus.

Jarod Lew, The Tethers of Love (Eugene, Miyi, and Qun), 2020Jarod Lew, Uncle Danny, 2018Jarod Lew, Miyi and Qun, 2020Jarod Lew, The Endurance of Love, 2018Jarod Lew, Tommy, 2019. All photographs from the series Please Take Off Your Shoes
Courtesy the artist

Jarod Lew (born in Detroit, 1987) is a Chinese American photographer based in Detroit. His photographs explore themes of identity, place, community, and displacement. In 2012, Lew discovered that his mother was the fiancé of Vincent Chin, who was murdered by two autoworkers in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1982, resparking the Asian American Civil Rights movement. Since this discovery, Lew has focused his attention on his own identity as a Chinese American, trying to visually understand “Asian-ness” in the American landscape. His photographs have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Design Museum, London; and Philharmonie de Paris. His clients include the New Yorker, New York Times, Financial Times Weekend, GQ, and NPR.

The Aperture Portfolio Prize is an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

2021 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Anouchka Renaud-Eck

Anouchka Renaud-Eck was newly brokenhearted and starting to question perfect unions. The French photographer, who lives and works between Paris and Kerala, India, began her vibrant series Ardhanarishvara: In Search of Union in 2020 as a means of parsing through not only her own recent breakup, but also that of a close friend who, pressured by his parents, had just ended a six-year romantic relationship. Renaud-Eck’s conversations with her friend opened up a trapdoor into the complexities of Indian matchmaking—the cultural, educational and, in some cases, astral compatibilities that must be taken into account by the families involved—and laid the groundwork for flash portraits that situate centuries of honed courtship practices alongside millennial, tech-savvy tactics.

Starting with her friend’s social circle, Renaud-Eck’s subjects soon expanded to include strangers, schoolchildren, and newfound friends that the artist met during her frequent travels through the Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. The people she photographs—wide-ranging in terms of age, gender, and religious backgrounds—are posed in portraits that often look like freeze-frames. A hand just lifted, a head still swiveled away from the camera. Renaud-Eck maintains details of unsettled action across Ardhanarishvara, echoing the swift movements and constant seeking of what she calls the “wedding race.” The series title is the name for a composite form of two Hindu deities, the masculine Shiva and the feminine Parvati. One of Renaud-Eck’s portraits recreates the unified being’s likeness and, at a glance, the reclining subject might seem to offer a rare moment of serene stillness, a reprieve from the race. Look closer—this god holds a cellphone. They, too, must prepare for the next caller.

Anouchka Renaud-Eck, Girls Surrounded by Boys , 2020Anouchka Renaud-Eck, Ardhanarishvara on Bed, 2020Anouchka Renaud-Eck, The Triplet’s Fate, 2020Anouchka Renaud-Eck, The Chosen One, 2020

Anouchka Renaud-Eck, Mudras of Union, Love, and Affection, 2020

Anouchka Renaud-Eck, The Kite of Life, 2020

Anouchka Renaud-Eck, The Immersion, 2020. All photographs from the series Ardhanarishvara
Courtesy the artist

Anouchka Renaud-Eck (born in Briançon, France, 1990) lives and works between Paris and India. Her photographic work questions and focuses on the construction of identity echoing with the “other.” Renaud-Eck mainly concentrates on themes of twinship, as well as the sense of belonging in a group or family, in order to question the construction of the fundamental characteristics of an individual and their uniqueness within a group. Since January 2020, Renaud-Eck has been working on a long-term project about arranged marriages and love in India. She works primarily in portraiture and photographing youth.

The Aperture Portfolio Prize is an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

The Photographers and Designers Who Transformed American Magazines

Since it’s concerned, above all, with context and the printed page, Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine at the Jewish Museum in New York is an exhibition as much about graphic design as it is about photography. From its opening galleries, it focuses on the influence these ways of seeing exerted on one another beginning in the 1930s, when photography began replacing illustration in magazines. The creative push and pull that resulted was exciting, bringing out the best on both sides; Modern Look tracks that synthesis over the next two decades, focusing on key players both on and off the page.

William Klein, Atom Bomb Sky, New York, 1955
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

In a period when art became increasingly linked with activism, many of its innovators were recent European exiles, fleeing repression and a widening war, including Herbert Bayer, Erwin Blumenfeld, Josef Breitenbach, György Kepes, Herbert Matter, László Moholy-Nagy, and Martin Munkácsi. Kepes, quoted in the Modern Look catalogue, spoke for the group’s most high-minded impulses in 1944, when he suggested that art and design can be functional as well as expressive: “Posters on the streets, picture magazines, picture books, container labels, window displays . . . could disseminate socially useful messages, and they could train the eye, and thus the mind, with the necessary discipline of seeing beyond the surface of visible things, to recognize values necessary for an integrated life.” Whether any of these artists realized the most principled of these goals is debatable, but “train the eye” they collectively and most effectively did.

Because they were in a position to employ and direct so many of their peers, the most influential of the émigrés were the artists and art directors Alexey Brodovitch, who took over the design of Harper’s Bazaar in 1934; and Alexander Liberman, whose life-long career at Vogue began in 1943. Both were brilliant, sophisticated, imperious, and famously volatile, alternately charming and waspish; both helped define the “modern look” as designers, assigners, and mentors.

Martin Munkácsi, Woman on Electrical Productions Building, New York World’s Fair, New York, 1938
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

The Jewish Museum exhibition’s curator, Mason Klein, introduces Brodovitch in one of the first galleries with the elegant cover, hallucinatory spreads, and a page-by-page digital presentation of Brodovitch’s 1945 book Ballet, an impressionist vision of the Ballets Russes in performance. Before coming to New York, Brodovitch had painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s original Ballets Russes in Paris; and once in New York, he adopted the impresario’s most quoted directive, “Étonnez-moi! (astonish me)” as his own. Brodovitch’s work in the show, including spreads from Observations (1959), the book that introduced Richard Avedon to the larger world, astonishes us. He might be given showstopping star treatment, but Brodovitch always shares gallery space with other graphic geniuses—including Bayer, Matter, and Paul Rand—who rivaled him at witty and arresting design.

As for Liberman, although he is represented in the exhibition by reproductions of seven knockout covers he conceived for Blumenfeld at Vogue from 1944 to 1954, the extraordinary still-life and portrait images he commissioned from Irving Penn are shown out of context, leaving the art director’s role vague or unacknowledged.

Cover of Scope, November 1941. Designed by Will Burtin
Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology

Cover of Direction, December 1940. Designed by Paul Rand

If the attention to these two magazine design legends is predictable, Klein goes to some lengths to overturn expectations elsewhere in his show, primarily by focusing on women photographers: Lillian Bassman, Margaret Bourke-White, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Frances McLaughlin-Gill, and Lisette Model. Bourke-White and Model help to open up the show, moving further beyond fashion to include the magazines Life, Fortune, and Flair, and surprisingly inventive industrial titles like Scope and Westvaco Inspirations for Printers. Gordon Parks, one of the very few Black photographers with a substantial career in magazine work at the time, is a lonely outlier here, joined only by Roy DeCarava, with a single, superb photograph of jazz musicians, but supported in spirit by two galleries of atmospheric black-and-white images that close the exhibition on a moody, contemplative note.

Gordon Parks, Portrait of Helen Frankenthaler, for Life, May 13, 1957
© The Gordon Parks Foundation

Setting the Parks photograph alongside works by Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Saul Leiter—nearly all of it made on the streets of New York—seems intended to remind viewers of socially engaged Photo Leaguers like Model, Sid Grossman, and Walter Rosenblum, seen in these same galleries in 2011’s The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951 (also curated by Klein, with Catherine Evans). The league’s activities may not have been covered by many of the magazines featured here, but its soulful, reportorial style impacted and inspired most of the photographers; and the powerful last passage of Modern Look makes that abundantly clear.

Lillian Bassman, A Report to Skeptics, Suzy Parker, New York, for Harper’s Bazaar, April 1952
© Estate of Lillian Bassman

Liberman is quoted in the catalogue insisting he wanted to inject “the grit of life into this artificial world” at Vogue. Without making a similar claim, Brodovitch frequently did exactly that at Harper’s Bazaar, and many of the other magazines here (even Fortune at its 1940s best) made grit a specialty. Given the state of the world—with a post-Depression boom quickly swept up in a sobering but invigorating war, followed by an even more aggressive boom—how could they not? Without losing sight of elegance, inventiveness, and style as a saving grace, Klein grounds his show in seriousness, if not grit. But along the way, his focus on the magazine nearly evaporates. Many of the photographs did not appear on the printed page, and those that did are rarely seen in context. The American magazine remains as a force field and an incubator, but its absence in Modern Look as an object of size, weight, and graphic impact is puzzling and disappointing.

Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine is on view at the Jewish Museum, New York, through July 11, 2021.

A Message from Aperture Foundation’s New Executive Director

Hello, Aperture.

Today is my second First Day at a New Job, and I’m giddy with anticipation. My first First Day was in September 1994, fresh out of college, when I walked into the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. We used typewriters—on occasion, floppy disks at shared computers, no internet or email!—John Szarkowski stopped by regularly, and people smoked in their offices. Every Thursday morning, the curatorial staff would gather to look at portfolios that photographers had dropped off and mailed in from all over the world. I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was to spend my days around amazing photographs and brilliant people. That feeling never waned—and in my new role leading Aperture, I imagine it never will.

Aperture has been inextricable from conversations around photography since 1952, something I first grasped in high school, where Aperture magazine was both a teaching tool and a source of inspiration. As an undergraduate, I studied with Peter Bunnell, who had worked closely with Aperture’s founding editor, Minor White, soaking up stories of his connections with by-then-legendary figures. I wrote my thesis about Danny Lyon’s portraits, and avidly perused library copies of Diane Arbus’s Aperture monograph (1972), Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture, 1986), and Sally Mann’s Immediate Family (Aperture, 1992). It would be many years before I purchased my own copies of these books, which didn’t require a major investment, thanks to the fact that Aperture keeps them in print.

Sally Mann, Jessie Bites, 1985, from Immediate Family (Aperture, 1992)
Courtesy the artist

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Aunt Midgie and Grandma Ruby, 2007, from The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014)
Courtesy the artist

Aperture has also been a significant link between most of my favorite projects over the last decade, most recently with the exhibition and book on one of Aperture’s founders, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (MoMA, 2020). I appreciated the opportunity to fine-tune my ideas for the magazine about Horacio Coppola (in Aperture #213), Regina Silveira (#215), and the Club Fotográfico de México (#236), and to contribute to The Photographer’s Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas (2014) and Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (2021). Nearly all the artists I’ve had the pleasure of working with recently are deeply connected to MoMA and Aperture: Sara Cwynar and Stephen Shore, Dawoud Bey and Danny Lyon, Rosalind Fox Solomon and LaToya Ruby Frazier, Irina Rozovsky and Zora J Murff, Richard Misrach and Wendy Red Star, Hank Willis Thomas and Tina Barney. Last fall, I had the privilege of moderating a conversation with the incomparable Dr. Deborah Willis and the editors of To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press, 2020) and of being a juror for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Although no one associated with those events knew it at the time, I was applying for this job. The professionalism of the Aperture staff, their sense of purpose, and their commitment to the medium, combined with our shared admiration for all of the artists I mentioned above and many more, made me redouble my efforts to persuade the search committee to choose me as Aperture’s next executive director. I’m so grateful they did.

As a way of getting to know you—our community—and introducing you to our team, I will be hosting a series of seven conversations on Instagram Live. Beginning on May 19, join us every Wednesday at 1:00 pm EDT at @aperturefnd to hear from:

Lesley A. Martin, Creative Director
Denise Wolff, Senior Editor
Michael Famighetti, Editor of Aperture magazine
Kwame Brathwaite Jr., Board Trustee
Sara Cwynar, Artist
Richard Misrach, Artist
Wendy Red Star, Artist

While these conversations are happening, I’m going to send out a survey and ask that you kindly take the time to reply. Among the new programs I’m planning is an Aperture Book Club—and your interests and opinions will guide it! I look forward to hearing from you as we embark on this next chapter in Aperture’s history.

Left to right: Deana Lawson, Sarah Meister, An-My Lê, and Rosalind Fox Solomon at the AIPAD Photography Show, New York, 2019

Collection of Aperture publications at Sarah Meister’s home, New York, May 2021

Photography brings us together, across continents and decades. No medium can equal its ability to register our individuality and represent the various stories that we refer to cumulatively as history. I cherish the time I spent at a museum where we grappled with the ways photographs rest uneasily within the boundaries of art. As the new executive director of Aperture, I am deeply committed to looking critically and closely at what feels familiar and what feels strange in photography, to broadening our understanding of the medium through the highest-caliber publications and programs, and to leading an organization where conversations between artists, editors, and our audience is central. I believe in our capacity and our responsibility to harness the power of this medium, which we are fortunate to champion, in pursuit of a more just, more joyful world.

Yours,
Sarah Meister

The Post-Documentary Photographers Who Care about the World

There are no big crowds or large gestures in But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World at the International Center of Photography in New York, which brings together the work of nine photographers to illuminate, as if by aleatory spotlight, corners of the United States in everyday endurance. Instead, the mood is quietly contemplative, a muted melancholy settling over the show like a light fog.

But Still, It Turns—what Galileo reportedly said upon the church’s rejection of his most famous theory—was planned before the pandemic but held until this February. If the exhibition feels prophetic, you might attribute that to the tricks of time. If it feels a bit random, that is no accident, writes curator and photographer Paul Graham in the stylish catalogue, published by MACK. “To some viewers, the artists’ work presented here, with its tributaries and eddies, its non-sequiturs and perambulations, its lack of drama and prize winning moments, will mean it does not appeal,” Graham writes in his essay-manifesto, framing the exhibition as a corrective for what he identifies as the “pendulum swing” of esteemed fine arts photography—“shift[ing] away from the world” in its preference for “constructed, conceptualized and staged imagery.”

Curran Hatleberg, Lost Coast (36), 2014
© the artist

Graham, a celebrated English photographer, has eighteen monographs and three survey books to his name, including his 1983 portrait of a Britain in industrial decline under Thatcher in A1: The Great North Road (republished as part of a trilogy this spring, also by MACK) and A Shimmer of Possibility, a twelve-volume look at everyday life in the US. In But Still, It Turns, he brings together “photographers who care about the medium and the world, who keep the heart of photography vital and alive” and whose work “give[s] shape to the world, to straighten the disarray, to reveal the fine web that binds us to each other, to this time, to existence.”

Literature has, among other art forms, seized on formal fragmentation to illustrate contemporary experience, and Graham invokes Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s notion that “constellation, not sequencing, carries truth.” With But Still, It Turns Graham seeks a photographic equivalent, celebrating each artist’s work as post-documentary, post-narrative: “no editorializing, no words to illustrate: that there is no singular story is the story.” Ian Penman’s catalogue essay takes up the literary form, a scrapbook of reflections interspersed with quotes from other writers and thinkers, and the show includes photobooks as “profound art works in their own right.” Six of the featured photographers’ books, along with a handful of other recent photobooks by artists whose work is not exhibited (including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zora J Murff, and Carolyn Drake), are under glass at ICP and illustrated at the end of the catalogue, giving a sense that, with more space, these artists might have been included in the show.

Kristine Potter, Drying Out, 2015
© the artist

All the photos in But Still, It Turns were taken in the US, many of them sometime during Obama’s second term or Trump’s early presidency. They are united as the works of astute artists using their cameras to lift the veil—without the flourish of a magician or morgue attendant—on an unequal and troubled country. There are moments of joy and tenderness, but overall the mood is quiet and contained.

By embracing the freedom left by the Internet’s erosion of magazine editorials and their narrative imperatives—“no didactic story here, no theme or artifice,” Graham writes—But Still, It Turns equates an oblique, observational aesthetic with sincerity, even truth. That there is no singular story is indeed the story of perspective. Separately, many of the works featured are strong. But I left ICP with a feeling of suggestive absence more than presence. The melancholic fog never parts.

Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti, STL PEOPLE no. 17, 2017
© the artists

This absence is most literal in the empty streets of Emanuele Brutti and Piergiorgio Casotti’s Index-G (2016–18), which takes as its subject racial segregation in Saint Louis (the title refers to the Gini Index, a statistical measure of inequality). The series documents the invisible barrier between the 95 percent Black zip code north of Delmar Boulevard, where life expectancy, the wall text tells us, is sixty-seven, and the 70 percent white neighborhood just south where life expectancy is eighty-two. The color photographs taken along the boulevard (one might think of Graham’s A1)—mundane scenes including an American flag, brick walls, an auto repair shop, boarded up storefronts, a nail salon—are shown in jarring juxtaposition with black-and-white portraits of Black Americans and the interiors of vacated home. The absence of the neighboring white residents poses the question: How best to confront whiteness—by picturing it directly, or refusing to give it more time centerstage?

Some may see prescience in these deserted streets. The word is used frequently these days to make sense of the déjà vu of inheritance—of this country’s history building on its own logic. Isolation, alienation, and racial violence are exacerbated by the experience of living with a global pandemic, but they are not novel. Perhaps prescience describes inevitability, further exposed.

Richard Choi, Untitled (Bedside Prayer), 2018
© the artist

America’s recent confrontations with its own brutality, historical and contemporary, have been notably visual—from the videos of police murder of civilians that ignite uprising as well as conversations about spectacle and the ethics of picturing both atrocity and protest, to monument toppling, efforts to memorialize slavery, and more. Inseparable from social movements for material equity—the interconnected struggles for just housing, education, and healthcare, environmental justice and the redistribution of resources, the abolition of police and prisons—is the question of how we see: ourselves, each other, the world.

Photography has a tendency to reinforce the inequity and violence it reveals and, in some cases, claims to dismantle. In a world dominated by Big Tech, our distrust of photographs is met with further reliance on them. Some photography responds directly or self-referentially to anxieties about how technology affects how we see and who we are, addressing themes such as surveillance and saturation; circulation and manipulation; appropriation and the algorithm; democratization and democracy.

The term “post-documentary” has described many things, including a photography that examines these issues of authenticity and power. It now frequently refers to a poetic or ambiguous style whose meaning or message is not overdetermined. A suggestive rather than more overt aesthetic dominates But Still, It Turns, but the images that linger are the ones that most clearly wrestle with the tensions central to the form.

RaMell Ross, Boys, 2014
© the artist

RaMell Ross’s South County, AL (a Hale County) (2012–20) offers glimpses of intimacy, mediated by the thick air of history. Faces are often partially or fully obscured: a little girl wearing a yellow dress and yellow barrettes crouches behind a flowering bush; another’s softly smiling eyes—both mischievous and shy—peer over the seat in front of her in an otherwise empty school bus. The catalogue notes “a strategic ambiguity” in Ross’s images “that speaks of a pursuit not to frame somebody, to grant them the full dignity of selfhood and perhaps unknowability.” Akin to Édouard Glissant’s notion of the “right to opacity,” Ross’s images are numinous in their respect for the untraversable boundaries of individual perspective.

In 2009 Ross moved to Hale County, Alabama, where he taught photography and coached basketball for many years, using his lens to represent the community while working to free his own perspective. Ross’s own catalogue essay for But Still, It Turns, also fragmentary in form, is a kind of dialogue that shifts between the imperative (“Disautomate the consumption of blackness” and “Consider the indecisive moment.”) and analysis (“If blackness/form is unstable and evolving then the ideas of structure and narrative must evolve correspondingly to accommodate. The site of the image in a time-based chain of interpretation must remain fertile.”).

“To be black is the greatest fiction of my life,” Ross has said. “Yet I’m still bound to its myth. I can’t help but think about . . . how the myth of blackness aged into fact and grew into laws . . . How it became the dark matter of the American imagination.” One might think of James Baldwin on the twin myth—or “moral choice”—of believing oneself white; in “On Being White . . . and Other Lies” (1984) he writes that those who “think they are white,” “who believed that they could control and define Black people[,] divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.” What might it mean to learn to see again, to define oneself—to imagine—anew?

Vanessa Winship, Untitled (Seth and John, after the Rodeo), Fort Worth, Texas, October 12, 2012
© the artist

In Vanessa Winship’s she dances on Jackson—a series taken across the US in 2012, and one of the more classical documentary approaches in the show—faces are on full display: open, porous, guarded, seeking. But these are fleeting moments of intimacy, poignant and enigmatic. In one portrait, a father and son in suit-and-tie stand outside a public building—the son elevated by the curb and gently holding the older man’s earlobe between his fingers, the father pigeon-toed and leaning slightly into the gesture. They look away in opposite directions, this moment of sweetness between them, both finite and infinite, sealing the tableau.

Winship’s black-and-white portraits seem to be in conversation with Curran Hatleberg’s light-soaked color narratives in Lost Coast (2014–16)—pictures of warmth and uncertainty in a struggling post-industrial California town—though it’s unclear exactly what is being said beyond a collective, quiet making do. Meanwhile, Gregory Halpern’s ZZYZX (2008–16)—a colorful and carnivalesque, mystical and semi-fictional chronicle in the Mojave Desert—and Kristine Potter’s Manifest (2012–15)—black-and-white portraits of landscapes and lone men in unnerving repose—are also kindred despite their strikingly different styles; both invoke the surreal in their play with the pageantry and brutality of American myth and westward expansion.

Gregory Halpern, Untitled, 2016
© the artist

Gregory Halpern, Untitled, 2016
© the artist

“We know that a photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the various eras of its subsequent rediscovery,” Rebecca Bengal writes in her catalogue essay. In Richard Choi’s What Remains (2011–20), short videos of everyday life—a mother praying with her children, a woman winding a clock—jolt with the sound of a camera’s shutter as a still photograph (framed beside the video) is made, the moment plucked from time. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s All My Gone Life (2014–18)—the artist’s own images from those years mixed with prints of archival negatives he purchased on eBay—are arranged on two stories of the exhibition’s central wall. Some are so small or hung so high as to be frustratingly less legible than others, emphasizing not only the fallibility of perspective but also the distorting passage of time—history’s hold on our vision.

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time,” John Berger wrote. Ross’s Academy Award-nominated film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)—which is screening at the ICP— follows two young men, Daniel and Quincy, to convey a sense of their community without the imposition of a confining narrative. About midway through, there’s a beautiful scene where sunlight streams through trees and smoke as it rises in wisps and blooms—a daytime bonfire burning nearby an old plantation house. Accompanying this everyday fever dream is Ross’s impromptu conversation from behind the camera with a local who’s curious about why he’s filming; we hear bits and pieces about Ross’s project—“We need more black folks making photos in the area and taking pictures,” he says—and the man’s grandson’s scholarship, the dialogue a part of Ross’s practice: “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” The question “What happens when all the cotton is picked?” then fills the screen preceding a 1913 clip of Black American actor Bert Williams in blackface—the true breaking of the fourth wall. (Filmmaker Garrett Bradley also incorporates footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, the earliest surviving feature film with a Black cast, into her 2019 installation America, recently on view at MoMA.)

RaMell Ross, Shaquan, 2012 © the artist

Ross’s film is a reimagining of what it might mean to represent Blackness and the South. But it is also a freeing of perspective more generally, by way of working with and within its inevitable constrictions—of the physical, the individual, and of time. It is artful and open, demanding and free. This possibility is what the post-documentary round-up of But Still, It Turns urges us to see.

But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World is on view at the International Center of Photography, New York, through August 15, 2021.

How David Alekhuogie Navigates the Colonial Past

For his recent exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery, David Alekhuogie worked with photography, collage, and sculpture to produce a visual meditation on his artistic and cultural lineage. His source materials—cotton jersey fabric, wax print fabric, the 1935 exhibition catalogue of Walker Evans’s photographs of African sculptures—are varied and all approached with a tendency towards abstraction. In one series, titled To Live and Die in LA (2018), his fascination is with the body as landscape and with the ways that the body, when photographed, can indicate the tensions and vulnerabilities of its stance. The most acclaimed of his photographs in that series show the midriff area of Black male bodies, the subject of his earlier work Pull-Up (2017), pictured so that low-slung pants seem like bright tapestries. In 2019, when Alekhuogie first visited Nigeria, where his father is from, he created new photographs using a similar strategy, placing the images against a background of floral wax print fabric.

Talking to Alekhuogie feels similar to looking at his photographs: both indicate the possibility of thinking in multiple directions at once. He is a photographer interested in generative thought and in images that do not overexplain, even if they are informed by moments of vulnerability, masculinity, and disposability—such as an encounter with the police near his studio in Los Angeles, when, with their weapons pointed at him, he felt his mortality in a “hyper-realized way.” What follows is a conversation touching on the key themes in his work, in which my questions served only as prompts for his superlative digressions.

David Alekhuogie, rampart police station 34.0567° N, 118.2670° W, 2018

David Alekhuogie, LA convention center 34.0403° N, 118.2696° W, 2018

Emmanuel Iduma: I want to begin with a quote of yours that was included in your Aperture portfolio in the magazine’s 2018 “Los Angeles” issue. You said, “It’s not always the storytelling. Sometimes it’s the accent, the cadence, the how: how a person is speaking, how they are telling the story.” You are speaking about strategies you used in Pull-Up (2017). But I want to know if you remain interested in rhetoric as a way of understanding your visual work.

David Alekhuogie: Definitely. It’s something I’ve been thinking about even more in some of this newer work. When I was making Pull-Up, I was specifically interested in Abstract Expressionism and the way that American modernism had developed around these ideas of abstraction. I still think about modernity as being constantly defined by our relationship with labor and technology. Yet, that part of it seemed to really discount the way different types of marginalized people in the country function.

I grew up DJing a lot. I was DJing parties. I studied jazz for a while. And I would think about this idea of improvisation and abstraction coming out of this kind of structural space—abstraction as a type of protest, where you’re doing your job, you’re getting from point A to point B. But in getting from point A to point B, you’re going to use this opportunity as an expressive moment. And I had been thinking about the relationship between jazz, modernity, and modern painting, as being . . . I wouldn’t call it erasure, but I would definitely call it a misunderstanding of the contributions of African American, radical Black aesthetics.

David Alekhuogie, post colonial bush breakfast “no wahala,” 2021

Iduma: Let me get a sense of how you got started as a visual artist. You’ve described a potpourri of influences, which is visible in your newest work.

Alekhuogie: A lot of this new work I made during the pandemic. But it is a long time coming. I believe wholeheartedly that African and African American studies departments, at least in the States, are populated with people who are in this kind of coming-of-age moment—or maybe that moment is perpetual. There’s this energy for reeducation, for a point of view that they see as compromise or a line of questioning that they see as incomplete. At least that was my relationship to it. That was the relationship of my peers. It seemed like their own frustrations with that is what pulled them into this research. It became critical.

My new body of work is about this way of thinking through Walker Evans and Frantz Fanon. It’s my way of dealing with seeing myself as the colonized intellectual—like the Black friends who give the liberal elite this sense of authority and moral righteousness. And I started to see these characters play out in this modern thing. Everybody is navigating their own pathologies through the consequences of a colonial past, you know?

David Alekhuogie, Banda Headdress “A Reprise,” 2019

Iduma: I like the idea that, for you, there is the possibility of making the connection between modernism and colonialism. The “modernist movement” in Nigerian art—or what is classified as modernism in Nigeria and art history—is really just at the end of the active colonization process and the beginning of the independent years.

At that time, people were saying that we need to think about what it means for us to have had the education that we’ve had. They evolved the conversation beyond colonialism into something that draws from the experience or the pathology of colonialism. For me, this all comes to a head in the work you did after you came to Nigeria in 2019. Before then, had you ever been here? And what spurred you to travel here?

Alekhuogie: I had wanted to go for a very long time. Originally I felt like I wasn’t permitted to go without my father’s consent. And things like visas, the financial burden, really kept me at bay. Then there came a point when I could afford to travel and stay for extended amounts of time. I got this grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. I also think that the work was doing well at that point. So I think that once I had the resources, I started to really commit to making it happen. Honestly, when you wanna do a thing, you find the resources to do the thing.

Iduma: How did you travel in Nigeria? What places did you visit?

Alekhuogie: I had some friends in Tanzania and Kenya so I went there first. One of my friend’s parents is also Nigerian so we were able to negotiate the visas pretty easily. We went straight to Lagos and Lekki after that. And we were supposed to go to Benin City for a wedding but were not able to make that happen because I had teaching obligations.

David Alekhuogie, Pure Life, 2021

Iduma: You’ve spoken in previous interviews of being interested in the body as landscape. My sense is that your understanding of that concept is evolving or even expanding as, for instance, in the transition from Pull-Up to To Live and Die in LA. I’m curious where you are at this point with that concept.

Alekhuogie: In one way, this has to do with a sexual pathology around a conquered space versus something that is remarkable, uncontrollable, and beyond your comprehension. That is the historical relationship that we have to the landscape and the sublime—this space to be conquered but also this space to be made small or made weak. That was something that I was interested in, in terms of the relationships that we have to people. Because we think about race relations or the various forms of oppression that people suffer globally as being localized. I wanted to ask whether a person’s body could be considered a place, whether it could be occupied or not, and what that would be like politically.

To Live and Die in LA was more a response to what I would call this choice to accept the terms of my situation. I had gone through this traumatic experience near my studio, where the police barged in, and they pointed weapons at me and handcuffed me. It was crazy, you know? I had a bunch of stuff in my hands when they came in. The sun was setting in a way where they couldn’t see me well, and I couldn’t see them well. The sun was shining into my face. I could see that they were pointing a bunch of weapons at me, but I couldn’t see them quite clearly.

In that moment, I felt my mortality in this hyper-realized way. As a writer, an artist, a filmmaker—whatever it is that you’re doing—if you’re talking about these types of lived experiences, you need a certain distance from them. And navigating that distance requires this emotional energy that is at the root of a lot of Black music. At least when I think about how the blues, for example, was historicized, it’s about coming to terms with your own condition.

I was making work for a long time that unknowingly responded to that. I had started to think about the music that I was listening to differently, especially a whole type of politicized music that is really not about action but more about acceptance. I think that those records become anthems. The modern one that I think about now is the Kendrick Lamar track, “Alright.” It’s this political battle cry. It’s about understanding and living in the condition that you’re in and choosing to separate your mind from your body.

I started to think about a lot of literary imagery and musical imagery. And I’m just like, oh, this is all about the same thing. At the time, I was making these concrete sculptures that were like vases or tombstones that went on the floor. I was thinking about these places where people have been shot: they put candles here, they put flowers here. I wanted to make these sculptures that spoke to that idea as decorative objects.

David Alekhuogie, Female figure “A Reprise,” 2020

Iduma: I saw the work you made for Topic. It’s phenomenal. It’s a different kind of formal language from your other work, using a different visual vocabulary. The kind of images that you made form a sort of travelogue, even in how you follow the trail of the Great Migration. You write that your work often comes out of formal investigations of the transitions of kinship. I’m interested in what your work does in relation to kinship, through the language of how, for instance, pants are worn. It is almost a universal code of the Black male body, so to speak.

Alekhuogie: In graduate school, I had been making these tapestries from Nike boxes. I was thinking about them as quilts. Then I started taking these tapestries and making [sun prints] with them so there were negatives and positives.

When I was making that work, I was thinking about all these experiments that people were doing with photography and the camera. I was thinking about the Bauhaus and László Moholy-Nagy. And all those visual strategies and influences are very much visible in the work. But you would see a person who did not have access to that art historical reference, yet they would understand, okay, this sneaker came from this thing during this time, and I remember it. So the work became this negotiation of who was the authority on the work.

With Pull-Up, that line of questioning started to be a part of the work as well because some people would see those photographs and situate themselves in that body. Other people wouldn’t do that. Those pictures are about how a body is objectified. There is one person who is actively becoming the person who is looked at. And then there is another person who becomes the person who is looking.

I’m interested in bringing my people to the space. There are various ways to do that. It doesn’t have to be in the work. It could be in the programming. If you have a bunch of institutions, and if they become the authority on the work, that is going to affect or dictate the value. And that power negotiation is really interesting to me on a practical level.

David Alekhuogie, WE 431/2 “A Reprise,” 2021

Iduma: What makes your practice expansive is the fact that you are thinking about tactility. This attempt to find not just new audiences or new kinships but also new mediums, alternative mediums. In some of the work at Yancey Richardson, the wax prints become a new form or a framing device. I see a through line from the close-ups of the pants to the close-ups of wax prints. You’ve also spoken about your interest in working with tapestry, this sense of stitching. I’m curious how all of that comes together. What is tapestry in relation to wax prints, and how does it expand on the work that you’ve done with the pants?

Alekhuogie: It really comes from a couple of places. In one way, it’s about this internal war that I have where I’m trying to convince people that the way these decorative forms are utilized globally have to do with labor, and they do a lot of narrative work. There’s this hierarchy of crafts that is really frustrating to me. You can see it in how the history is written. It goes back to my interest in quilt making, which, for me, shows a clear relationship between Black aesthetics. There’s this show at LACMA, which positioned these quilts in the same way that you would think about a lot of modernist paintings. It starts to come down to a lot of these essential ideas in American modernism, which really come down to how we deal with labor.

A lot of the strategies that I’m employing in this new show are about trying to flatten what is traditionally thought of as a clear documentary style with something that has the trappings of decorative art. So I can get these two things to collaborate instead of just being this artist making literary allusions. No, this is also a visual experience.

David Alekhuogie, Portrait for George 1, 2, and 3, 2020

Iduma: Absolutely. And as a final point, the wax prints: Most of the wax prints marketed within Nigeria, for instance, are made outside of it by huge corporations who only recently saw the need to build factories on the continent. So, in the sense of their origin, these wax prints are not African. It’s what you’re saying about the labor that goes into the marketing of these fabrics as African. On one hand, the labor is really market-driven, at least at the point of its origin. But then what becomes interesting, and where the complexity and the tension is, is that they have been imbued with cultural capital by those who wear them. It’s to go back to postcolonial modernism. It’s not simply, this is who we are. It’s what have we become as a result of two contradictory systems.

For me, by using these wax prints to frame the photographs, you claim or even reclaim them as diasporic. And in the sense of the conversation that we need to have about Africa beyond a geographical location about what Africa, or African sensibilities, can become as a result of its diasporic reach.

And To Live and Die in LA—you are taking this phrasing or framing from Tupac, as I heard you say somewhere. The acuteness of that work and that thinking is in how you triangulate Black masculinity, vulnerability, and even disposability. I’m curious about how you sum up or elicit a visual language from such a triangulation. Your mode is abstraction, and you often push beyond realism even if all of it comes from the realistic.

David Alekhuogie, WE 410/2 “A Reprise,” 2020
All photographs courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Alekhuogie: I honestly think—at least, I hope—that most photographers are trying to negotiate this idea of whether they want to be as humanistic as possible while simultaneously trying to be truthful. This is something that I see in my students: there’s this enthusiasm towards trying to speak truth to power. Oftentimes that means being a spectator rather than actively performing. You see it everywhere, like in the George Floyd incident, where the video of this man being murdered becomes this arbiter of change. And the same thing with the Rodney King beating. Or the Emmett Till photograph. The anxiety of photography is really tied up in that, especially now, when people are feeling the need for their work to be politically relevant. And to not just be about their personal experience but more about a kind of shared experience. You have to ask yourself, “What is the cost?” That is what I think about when it comes to art that has the potential to have a social good.

If I have a party, and I play all these records and everybody feels good, there’s no question of whether this was good. Like, hey, no laws might be passed, right? [laughs] But these people feel good in this moment. There is something to that, which oftentimes in a hyper-politicized moment gets overlooked. One of my students told me to watch this movie that is inspired by Tupac’s “Thug Life” tattoo—he uses these letters to symbolize “The Hate U Give.” I watched it on the plane when I was coming back from New York. And I had never felt so emotionally floored. If I hadn’t had my run-in with the police, just in the way that I had so acutely felt my life threatened, I think that I would have responded to it differently.

But that kept me up at night, you know what I mean? I really had to think about how that made me feel. In one way it’s like, yes, this is what it is. But at the same time, it’s crippling. I know that other people go through that too—this sort of social media PTSD. This is the kind of writing I wanna do. I’m curious about people’s relationship to the media in general, and how that informs art and photography.

David Alekhuogie: Naïveté was on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, from March 6–April 10, 2021.