Aperture's Blog, page 56

How James Barnor’s Photographs Became Symbols of Black Glamour

James Barnor’s deeply personal artistic practice has traversed cities, continents, and genres over six decades, all in reverence of the African diaspora. Barnor is a newsman, studio photographer, and fashion image maker. But the too common neglect of Black artists in the art world means his genteel images have been presented only on a handful of grandstand stages, beginning with exhibitions in London, in 2010, and Ghana, in 2012. Now, art history is finally catching up. Barnor, who was born in Ghana in 1929, was pronounced a 2020 recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Awards, and his work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries this year.

James Barnor, Drum cover model Marie Hallowi at Charing Cross Station, London, 1966
Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

The result of cataloging tens of thousands of photographs, the exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London will be the most comprehensive survey of Barnor’s work. Originally scheduled to open in June 2020 on the event of his ninety-first birthday, the exhibition was delayed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A second national lockdown in the U.K. last autumn meant that I could only speak with Barnor by phone. Barnor is forthcoming and earnest despite not being able to travel home to Ghana for the burial of his sister Ivy Barnor, who modeled for him, or his close friend Jerry John Rawlings, Ghana’s former president, both of whom passed away in quick succession in November 2020. Rawlings once said, “I’m just an ordinary, hungry, screaming Ghanaian who wants to realize his creative potential. Who wants to contribute.” Barnor began making his own contributions in 1950, as the first appointed photojournalist for Accra’s Daily Graphic, a state-owned newspaper. Self-motivated and eager, Barnor captured a nation remaking itself. Twenty-eight years after Barnor’s birth, Ghana would gain independence from Britain in 1957.

James Barnor, Self-portrait with Kwame Nkrumah, Roy Ankrah, and his wife, Rebecca, Accra, ca. 1952
Courtesy Autograph ABP, London

Whispered news spread that Ghana was planning to introduce color television, and it was impressed on Barnor how invaluable it would be for him to travel and learn new imaging techniques to bring back home to Ghana. Taking heed, Barnor left behind his first, and successful, portrait studio, Ever Young, in Jamestown, a neighborhood of Accra, frequented by young couples, artists, and government officials, and arrived in London on December 1, 1959. Looking at a 1952 self-portrait with Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first prime minister and president of Ghana, it’s easy to imagine the kind-eyed young man who arrived in the London metropolis curiously enchanted, unaware of the literal and figurative cold challenges ahead.

James Barnor, A group of friends photographed during Mr. and Mrs Sackey’s wedding, London, ca. 1966
Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

In the 1960s, Black photographers were not actively employed in the United Kingdom, and only on occasion would some be assigned to jobs in darkrooms, out of sight. In his first years in London, Barnor worked multiple jobs to generate enough income. He attended Medway College of Art, in Kent, for two years (despite not having a general certificate of education), learning how to take photographs, process film, and print in color. He also worked at the Colour Processing Laboratory, where he was eventually promoted to an assistant technician.

James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl, Erlin Ibreck, at Trafalgar Square, London, ca. 1966
Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

During this time, when fashion was limited to very specific European ideals of beauty, Black women would become symbolic repositories of glamour, style, and Black social life in Barnor’s photography. Erlin Ibreck and the Jamaican-born Rosemary “Funflower” Thompson frequented his editorials for Drum, the anti-apartheid South African lifestyle and politics magazine, which had offices and editions in various African cities and was distributed internationally. Drum’s London office on Fleet Street became a personal and professional safe home for Barnor. His sitters were aspiring models, passersby, and, in one case, a London bus driver, but all were effortlessly alluring and a much-needed counterimage to the esteemed British swinging ’60s model Twiggy. On a trip to London, the Ugandan musician and singer Constance Mulondo was photographed for the August 1967 Drum cover. Her oval eyes are framed with thick black eyeliner and her chin is angled downward, nestled into the powder-blue collar of her dress.

James Barnor, Cover of Drum magazine with Constance Mulondo, East Africa Edition, August 1967
Courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris

James Barnor, Constance Mulondo at London University with the band The Millionaires, published inc Drum magazine, London, 1967

Barnor returned to Ghana in 1969, as a representative for Agfa-Gevaert, to introduce color processing facilities in Accra; soon after, he established a new portrait studio, Studio X23, which ran from 1973 to 1992. But in 1994, Barnor chose to adopt London as his permanent home. There, he developed a brotherhood with the younger Black British photographers Neil Kenlock and Charlie Phillips that continues through the pandemic. That sense of community has been visible in Barnor’s work all along. “What unites all the images is Barnor’s extraordinary ability to make visible his personal connection to his sitters,” says Lizzie Carey-Thomas, the chief curator of the Serpentine Galleries. “As he has stated: ‘People are more important than places.’”

James Barnor: Accra/London – A Retrospective will be on view at the Serpentine Galleries, London, from May 19–October 22, 2021.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the column “Backstory.”

Carrie Mae Weems Confronts the Fraught History of American Photography

I sliced a watermelon open across its belly last summer and gasped, as the red flesh and black seeds resembled bodies inside the barracoon. When I go to the nation’s edge and put my feet into the shore of the Atlantic, I think of women throwing their babies overboard to be set free by the water, and the crashing waves turn to screams. When I ask my grandmother about her time on the cotton plantations of Louisiana, she rolls her eyes: “Here she go remembering again.”

Carrie Mae Weems, You Became Mammie, Mama, Mother & Then, Yes, Confidant–Ha, 1995–96

A “land condemned to forgetfulness” is what the writer Eduardo Galeano once called America. Forget where you come from, forget your languages, forget your rituals, religions, homeland. Forget centuries of enslaved labor. But it’s all I can think about. To be Black in America often means that your history has been deliberately withheld, and the fragments that remain have been reframed to veil the unconscionable terrors that built the foundation of this nation. Conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems has taken these fragments to construct a narrative that reckons with this somber history and draws a straight line to contemporary racialized norms in her photographic series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96), currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Installation view of Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020
Photograph by Denis Doorly

Thirty-three images, a divine number—including four enlarged daguerreotypes of enslaved men and women captured in 1850 by Joseph T. Zealy, produced in the name of eugenics by Harvard University scientist Louis Agassiz, and archived at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. Weems’s series was originally commissioned in 1994 by the J. Paul Getty Museum for an exhibition called . The Zealy daguerreotypes and other portraits of unnamed souls from the 1850s are situated alongside more contemporary images, like Garry Winogrand’s Central Park Zoo (1967), depicting a white woman and a Black man holding monkeys (the presumed outcome of miscegenation’s one-drop rule) and, furthermore, just how insignificant progress has been. But what of the Black woman whose hair is tied down, but her legs lie wide open on the bed, her hand and the lens positioned in between? In the way she holds her mouth, slightly turned up but not quite a smile, you can see that the subject has subverted her oppression to power as Black Venus, both despised and hypersexualized: You Became Playmate to the Patriarch. Weems’s prose bites and stings. I look away quickly, in fear of further demeaning Black Venus, in fear of seeing myself in her.

Carrie Mae Weems, Some Laughed Long & Hard & Loud, 1995–96

Weems, the sixty-seven-year-old Portland, Oregon–born artist-curator, has long been a genius—even before she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013, and before she became the first Black woman artist to have a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2014. She has been most notably characterized by the care and complexity that she extends to her subjects, and also to her peers and colleagues, such as the photographer, curator, and historian Deborah Willis, whom Weems invited to Los Angeles for her first professional exhibition. HBO’s recent documentary film Black Art: In the Absence of Light (2021), directed by Sam Pollard, highlights the dynamic community formed with the Studio Museum in Harlem as its nucleus and home base, and the insistence on Black artists to reshape the ways that the world sees. To reclaim and expand the limiting views projected onto the Black body. Weems is featured saying what many have recognized: “Most of the primary cultural institutions have been behind.”

Carrie Mae Weems, You Became an Accomplice, 1995–96

In From Here I Saw What Happened, the images Weems draws from are cropped, tinted red, like the bloodshed that is not immediately present, placed in circular mattes that emulate the lens of the camera, and covered by glass sandblasted with Weems’s famously poetic prose; that circular lens, like a spotlight or crosshair, focuses on the subjects, but exposes the intent of the shooter. As well as the oppositional gaze of the subjects. Even in physical captivity, their eyes express dignity and dissent. The subjects captured by Zealy are mostly positioned naked and profiled, much like mug shots or anthropological specimens, revealing a race so eager to demean another in support of theories of superiority that it renders those responsible pathetic, and yet more, deeply ill.

Carrie Mae Weems, An Anthropological Debate, 1995–96

Science has a long, dark history that includes the mistreatment of darker-skinned individuals: from J. Marion Sims’s establishment of modern gynecology on enslaved women, whom he made addicted to morphine to perform nonconsensual procedures, to the Tuskegee syphilis study. In Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2007), the author is in conversation with Weems’s work when she draws a direct line between the images captured by Zealy and today’s Black infant mortality rates and a life expectancy that is six years less than that of white people. Weems and Washington are in unison with a chorus that sings the song of reckoning. In 1996, Harvard threatened to sue Weems for her use of Zealy’s images, as she had originally agreed not to appropriate them without permission, but then changed her mind. Instead, as Weems later recounted to Willis, she summoned the university, saying, “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing. You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” The question of ownership shows itself again. Who is entitled to images of enslaved humans who were captured by Europeans? Harvard backed down and simply acquired Weems’s collection. Capitalism is but a white sheet.

Carrie Mae Weems, House, 1995–96

Entering the gallery at MoMA where From Here I Saw What Happened is displayed is a bit like entering a time portal. Inside the dreamy grey room in the David Geffen Wing, the viewer is made to feel completely immersed in the throes of a history we often try to escape. Bookended by blue-tinted images of a royal Mangbetu woman named Nobosodrou, positioned to bear witness to her lineage—much like Janus, the ancient Roman god of beginnings and passages. Weems’s commitment to history and memory has reached into popular culture, as Nobosodrou’s style has been reimagined in films like Beyoncé’s Black Is King (2020) and Lemonade’s “Sorry” music video (2016), as well as Angela Bassett’s character, Ramonda, in Black Panther (2018). With narrow context, these films have been viewed as a form of cultural appropriation, just as scholars and critics accused Weems’s series of being sarcastic and nothing more than a revictimization of the subjects.

Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I Saw What Happened, 1995–96

But to dispose of and forget the reality of this cruel history is another form of violence, of erasure. As the Nigerian proverb states, “Don’t let the lion tell the giraffe’s story.” Is Weems not entitled to a history that lives inside her bones? A history that beckons her? She was called to the South in her Sea Islands Series (1991–92) and The Louisiana Project (2003), in which she explored the landscapes and land built and tilled with Black hands in South Carolina, Georgia, and New Orleans. One can imagine the tremors that exist inside her as she works to bridge the gaps between the memories of the land and waters that betrayed the enslaved in their journeys across the Atlantic, yet also provided a means of escape and sustainability, proving that water is a body too.

Carrie Mae Weems, (Musical Score to “God Bless the Child”), 1995–96
All works from the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–96. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Weems, who studied dance and folklore, is able to identify the silences present in the appropriated photographs and read the gestures of the bodies like a poem. The musical notes of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” (1941) lay over the frame of a young girl holding sadness in her eyes, perhaps her only inheritance. Each of Weems’s rhythmic syllables lands with impact, taking us deeper into a past that we have been taught to avoid. Weems dissects the messages communicated through their limp limbs, forced smiles, and slouched welted backs. And we see that, sometimes, a camera is a gun.

Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through spring 2021.

Why Jamel Shabazz Is New York’s Most Vital Street Photographer

New York is a ghost town. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the metropolis to a standstill. Many are scared to even leave their apartments to buy groceries. The globe-trotting photographer Jamel Shabazz is tucked away in his Long Island home, his “sanctuary.” Shabazz’s world is rocked daily by yet another phone call announcing the death of a loved one. It is a calendar of loss with which he is intimately familiar. He survived the 1980s crack era and the AIDS crisis, when so many friends from his Brooklyn neighborhoods—Red Hook and then East Flatbush—did not.

Every morning, while living under quarantine, Shabazz saunters into one of the several closets in his home and picks up a heavy archive box. Hundreds of identical boxes line every available space in his home. They are organized chronologically and then subdivided by type: black and white, color, medium format, and so forth. One box, just like the others, holds bits of time frozen on negatives, slides, and photographic prints. It is an archive so vast (which even contains the negatives belonging to his father, who was also a photographer) that when asked about the quantity, Shabazz replies, “I just can’t give a count.” He carries the box into the center of his work-space floor. This is a new routine that has become the only consistent thing in uncertain times. Shabazz will spend the next eight hours meticulously sifting through the box, rediscovering faces and city landscapes that he had forgotten even photographing. He scans some of his faves. Then he posts them on his Instagram, sometimes with an accompanying music track, sometimes not. Within seconds, likes and comments from his one-hundred-thousand-plus followers of all ages, from around the world, start flooding in. Those frozen bits of time still elicit the same delight, pride, and awe as they did in the ’80s and ’90s.

Jamel Shabazz, Rolling Partners, Downtown Brooklyn, 1982

“I think I’m an alchemist,” Shabazz tells me. “I freeze time and motion.” It is as if this moniker were a new revelation, the result of now having the time and space to reflect on his odyssey into professional photography. When examined as a whole, Shabazz’s brand of portraiture cannot, and perhaps should not, be characterized simply as street photography or fashion photography. He says he is an alchemist. I believe him.

In the early ’70s, the Shabazz home in Red Hook was alive and buzzing with the funky sounds of Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, and Earth, Wind & Fire. And books. There were tons of books. Books on politics, photography, and culture were neatly organized on a massive wall of shelves. “My father had a really vast library of books, and I would go through every single book he had in the house,” he remembers. “National Geographic, Life magazine—all those publications informed me.” Shabazz, who had developed a serious speech impediment when he was quite young, discovered that while he struggled to communicate verbally, he could get lost in the worlds of his father’s books and album covers. Leonard Freed’s Black in White America (1968) was among Shabazz’s favorites. He flipped through it so often during his adolescent years that the book had fallen apart by the time Shabazz reached high school.

Jamel Shabazz, Harlem Week, Harlem, 1988

To escape the brewing trouble that was ensnaring many Black boys in Brooklyn in the waning years of the Black Power movement, Shabazz made the decision to enlist in the army as soon as he could. In 1977, a seventeen-year-old Jamel Shabazz was assigned to a post just outside Stuttgart, Germany. He followed the lead of an older Black soldier who carried his camera with him everywhere he went. “For practically everybody who was in the military, a camera was the biggest thing to have. Because for them, they were getting away for the very first time. So it’s through that experience that they brought home photographs.” Shabazz’s Canon AE-1 became his closest companion. He snapped pictures of everything he saw and tasted as he moved through Germany. He became something of an ethnographer, translating the subversive spirit of the Black poets he was discovering—Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Amiri Baraka—as he manipulated the camera’s aperture and shutter settings.

After one tour in the army, Shabazz returned home to Brooklyn, in 1980, a changed man. “I came home a revolutionary,” he recalls. No longer enticed by the lures of street life, Shabazz wanted to create real change in his community. The 35mm camera that he had learned to use in the army would be key to his revolutionary arts ministry. Shabazz proclaims, “My journey has never been about wanting to be a photographer. The primary vision was to save our people.” His mission was to mobilize those the Black Panthers referred to as the “lumpen proletariat”—gangsters, pimps, and sex workers—who were most vulnerable to labor exploitation, drug addiction, and homelessness. Many of Shabazz’s childhood friends made up this underground economy. And now, the man who had once struggled to speak was committed to using his camera to initiate conversations with these old friends, and even strangers, across Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Jamel Shabazz, Styling & Profiling, Flatbush, Brooklyn, 1980

Those early years were less about following some industry craft standards and more about using the special relationship between photographer and subject to establish a deeper spiritual connection. Shabazz was channeling James VanDerZee’s ability to capture pure human emotion and Gordon Parks’s versatility, allowing him to blend different genres of photography. He quickly learned that one could not approach Black Americans, particularly the street-oriented folks he wanted to reach, dressed like a slouch. “I think that some might view me as sort of dapper,” he says. “And it made people more open to me when they saw me.” They could instantly see that Shabazz understood the style economy of the block, that he spoke a common language. He was an insider. This insider status granted Shabazz access to their inner selves—an intimacy reflected in his subjects’ body postures and poses—and gave him a chance to lovingly prophesy alternative possibilities for their futures.

Photography was also saving Shabazz’s life, especially once he was hired, in 1983, as a corrections officer at the infamous Rikers Island prison. Long shifts “witnessing the inhumanity that men would inflict on other men,” as he describes it, were a daily part of this job. Shabazz says of his frequent after-work photoshoots, “I had to go out on the streets and gain my balance by tapping joy, tapping into brotherhood and unity.” He would photograph around East Flatbush, often using his 28mm wide-angle lens. Then maybe he would head to the Lower East Side, where he would switch to his 50mm lens while chatting with and photographing sex workers dressed in their ’80s fly-girl fashions: gold bangles and bamboo earrings, leggings and heels. Other times, he might spend a Sunday in Harlem, catching the Masons, Eastern Stars, and church-going folk in their finery, before heading to Central Park, to Midtown, then Delancey Street. “I would cover a lot of areas. I’d even get on the train and just look at neighborhoods that were interesting, and get off, and go photograph them.” He walked so much that he repeatedly wore holes in the soles of his designer shoes. The more he photographed, the more he could distance himself from the horrors of the prison.

Related Items

Aperture 242

Shop Now[image error]

How a Museum’s Photographic Archive Honors Generations of Chinese American Lives

Learn More[image error]

Aperture Magazine Subscription

Shop Now[image error]

The subtle shift from dance music to something that sounded and looked much grittier might have been imperceptible if Shabazz had not been there to record it on film. “Can I capture your legacy?” Shabazz’s simple prompt would offer later viewers of his work a window into the burgeoning hip-hop culture of the early ’80s. To live on film was a promise of immortality that the tumultuous street life could not guarantee. One of his most iconic photographs of that era, Rude Boy (1982), is symbolic of this early hip-hop style ethos. “Kerral was a hustler,” Shabazz says of the photograph’s subject. “He was a really smooth, debonair guy who I thought had a lot of potential.” Decked out in his pinstripe suit and tons of gold jewelry, Kerral slyly posed for Shabazz’s camera—bent over slightly, hand on chin. Kerral was murdered only a couple of years after that photograph was taken. But his legacy lives on in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and on social media. That image also represents Shabazz’s pioneering approach to street-style photography. It was not about stealthily capturing a candid portrait of an unknowing subject; it was about collaborating with the person. Shabazz wanted to photograph Black and Latinx youth in a way that allowed them to shape how they wanted to be seen and understood by posterity.

Jamel Shabazz, Too Fly, Downtown Brooklyn, 1982

In the late ’90s, Shabazz’s pictures, which had been circulating around the hood and in prisons for nearly two decades, started catching the eye of hip-hop magazine editors. Vibe, The Source, and Trace were helping to translate hip-hop culture for a global audience. Their staffs of writers, editors, and creative directors—most of whom were under thirty were always looking for something that screamed “fresh,” “authentic,” “of the culture.” During his lunch breaks, Shabazz—then on the cusp of forty and working in Lower Manhattan—would make his way over to the magazines’ nearby offices to show editors his portfolio. By then, he had upgraded his equipment to a Nikon N6006 SLR. But the editors especially loved the photographs taken in the ’80s, on his old Canon. “He captured a pureness, an essence of hip-hop culture at its rawest and its best. One that was not at all negotiating its relationship to the mainstream or the white gaze,” says Joan Morgan, the program director of New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture, who was a Vibe staff writer in the mid-’90s. The Source ran a multipage spread of Shabazz’s photography in its 1998 anniversary issue featuring the greatest moments of hip-hop. “That put me on the map, and that started my fan base,” Shabazz remembers.

Seemingly overnight, Shabazz went from a modest-wage-earning city employee to a recognized professional photographer. “I started to make a transition from working in a very negative, hateful atmosphere to now doing solo art shows.” Antwaun Sargent, an art critic and the author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019), believes Shabazz’s images connect viewers to a familiar Black vernacular in ways that redefine portraiture: the street slang, the body postures, the sartorial politics, the photographs hanging on grandma’s wall. “The way that we think about Black portraiture comes through the vernacular, the local. It comes through the neighborhood photographer,” says Sargent. Some of Shabazz’s biggest influences were the family photo-albums in his childhood home, which had been passed down from generation to generation: “Those personal, intimate photo-albums really allowed me to see the power of photography.” Shabazz has exhibited this homegrown approach to Black portraiture everywhere from the Studio Museum in Harlem to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to the Addis Foto Fest in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Three of his books published by powerHouse—Back in the Days (2001), The Last Sunday in June (2003), and A Time Before Crack (2005)—are considered classics for their articulation of a Black visual vernacular.

Jamel Shabazz, The X Men, West Village, 1985
All photographs courtesy the artist

Despite now being heralded as a king of the culture by folks in the know, Shabazz has never received the same acclaim as lauded photographers who chronicled New York’s vibrant street life. “I don’t think there has been a real reckoning with these images,” says Sargent, although he believes we would not have Tyler Mitchell, Stephen Tayo, Tommy Ton, or Scott Schuman without Shabazz’s pioneering work. The truth is Shabazz was never into it for the fame and institutional recognition. It was always about building community. “You see me through my subjects. Through the eyes of my subjects, you’re seeing me,” Shabazz says. For years, he could not completely explain why he sought to establish a connective bond with the people he photographed. But now, as a veteran photographer—an alchemist—he is able to powerfully voice just how frozen bits of time can transform a community.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “The Alchemist.”

What Is the Future of Photography at MoMA?

In February 2020, New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced that Clément Chéroux would step into the shoes vacated by his compatriot Quentin Bajac two years earlier, assuming the role of the museum’s Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography. At the time of the announcement, Chéroux was senior curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Pritzker Center for Photography, a position he held for three productive years, producing two major thematic exhibitions that explored the intersection of vernacular and traditional “art” photography, including snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks (2019) and Don’t! Photography and the Art of Mistakes (2019), as well as a series of solo exhibitions by artists like Louis Stettner (2018), Carolyn Drake (2018), and Walker Evans (2017). (The latter, in fact, had been originated by Chéroux while he was still serving as chief curator of photography at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.)

In the year since Chéroux’s MoMA appointment, the social and cultural landscape of New York has been incalculably transformed by the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic; the shock waves of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police in Minneapolis; the ascendant Black Lives Matters movement; and the 2020 US presidential election and its aftermath. Aperture’s creative director, Lesley A. Martin, spoke with Chéroux by phone in January 2021, just days prior to the announcement that his colleague at MoMA, , had been named incoming executive director of Aperture Foundation. Martin and Chéroux’s conversation ranges from the radical changes on the streets of New York to the equally urgent new demands placed on institutions, artists, and curators, and their approaches to the photographic image.

Clément Chéroux. Photograph by Frederic Neema

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Iwan Baan

Lesley A. Martin: Could you narrate your arrival to New York? In what must have been quite a surreal time!

Clément Chéroux: I started working remotely for MoMA in July, and I came to New York in the beginning of September. It was a very strange time to settle in in the US. New York was not the New York that I was expecting. The city that never sleeps seems to be under a very strong narcotic. I was really looking forward to being in New York and meeting with so many artists that I appreciate and follow. So one thing that I miss the most is not being able to do artist studio visits.

Visually, what struck me during these first months in New York were the storefronts covered with plywood. In the 1920s, exactly a century ago, Eugène Atget photographed the large glass window panels, which were relatively new at the time in modern cities. Atget took these photographs in Paris, not in New York, but for a whole century, the store window was the visible face of capitalism. Something has changed in the past years thanks to the internet, with merchandise mostly stored in large warehouses in the suburbs and out of sight. Now, with all of these windows covered with plywood in recent months, and especially during election week, it’s as if we’re clearly witnessing the end of something, a kind of symbolic death of this very visible and aggressive form of capitalism.

Martin: That phenomenon seems to be in tandem with the process of our entire lives now being lived through the screen.

Chéroux: Exactly. We have very different access to objects.

Eugène Atget, Magasin, avenue des Gobelins, 1925

Martin: Your arrival also coincided with a particularly unique time politically—not just the ongoing pandemic, but Black Lives Matters protests, the election and its aftermath, and general soul-searching in relation to the nature of the American project. What are the obligations of an institution like MoMA to reflect on current events, and how do you feel this stance will impact your work?

Chéroux: This is something that my colleagues and I talk about almost every day. Personally, I was really shocked by what happened in Washington, DC, on January 6. That was a traumatizing moment. It’s important for a museum like MoMA to reflect on moments like this. Of course, we are working much more in the long term of history than in the immediacy of current events, but there is no doubt that what happened in the recent days or in the recent months will have a long-term impact on our future projects. I fully believe that an institution like MoMA must be a place where democratic principles are defended and reflected on. I also believe that photography has something to say in this debate around democracy. Photography is a democratic medium: everyone can take a photo, and everyone can have their own photo taken with the same level of detail. And of course, at the same time, you also have to understand that photography has been the tool of profoundly undemocratic systems. Photography has been used, for example, in the service of colonial power and as an instrument of domination. It’s not the medium of photography in itself that is discriminatory or racist; that responsibility lies with the individual using the photograph in a racist or an antidemocratic way. Photography is just a tool.

Aïda Muluneh, City Life, 2016. Muluneh’s work was featured in Being: New Photography 2018

Martin: In your research and your writing, you are often drawn to popular forms of photography—the postcard, paparazzi, and spirit photography, among others. I’m curious how you see the tensions between “high art,” which traditionally has not recognized those forms of photography, and your notion of photography as a democratic medium.

Chéroux: Photography is a vernacular medium, and I’ve never been able to think about photography exclusively as an art. There has always been a tension between high and low, between this democratic aspect of photography and art-making. This is what interests me about the medium. In the context of what we are living through today, this issue of photography as a democratic tool is extremely important.

We are living in a world which is marked by violence: the violence of the pandemic; the violence of climate change; the violence of civil and political unrest, which includes the violence behind building walls; the violence of systemic racism; police violence and the refusal to condemn those responsible. I’m talking about the violence that denies equal rights to members of the LGBTQ community, the violence of refusing to accept the results of a democratic election, as well as the violence that stormed the Capitol.

In this context, for me, it’s more important than ever to strengthen what is at the heart of the democratic principle, which is the plurality of different voices. We have to reaffirm the democratic principle: the necessity of plurality, equality, and diversity. This is the conversation I’ve been having with my colleagues Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister, and Lucy Gallun. We have made a commitment to focus on questions of diversity. This is going to be at the heart of our program for the coming years.

Vito Acconci, Security Zone, 1971. Photograph by Shunk‑Kender. Acconci’s work will be part of Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft
© J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Martin: I wonder if you could give some concrete examples of how you’re enacting those commitments, both for the photo department and museum-wide.

Chéroux: We have three tools as museum curators: You make acquisitions and build a collection. You make exhibitions. And you create public debates and conversations. In each of these, we will address diversity in terms of which photographers we work with and collect, but also diversity in the modes of photography.

The MoMA collection has long defined itself through the canon of the white Western male. Things had already started to change before I arrived, but we will continue to amplify diverse voices in the coming years—it will be at the heart of our acquisition program. This also goes back to my own interests: the diversification of the photographers we collect must go hand in hand with the diversification of photographic forms. MoMA’s acquisition history has had a particular emphasis on the photographic print as defined by photographers like Ansel Adams, who believed that the print was the final expression of the photographer’s visualization—Adams worked closely with Beaumont Newhall when the photography department at MoMA was founded in 1940.

Catherine Opie, Being and Having, 1991. Opie’s work was acquired for MoMA’s collection in 2020
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul 

But of course, photography exists in many other forms than just the beautiful framed print. Photography exists in public space, on screens, as installation; and photography also exists, very importantly, as books. We have to deal with that. We are into what the art historian George Baker defined in 2005 as the “expanded field” of photography. We want to do more around these questions. We want to do more in terms of public debate, acquisition, and exhibition.

In terms of exhibitions, in the spring, the French Moroccan artist Yto Barrada is working with Lucy Gallun on an “artist’s choice” exhibition—in which the artist is looking at the collection, working closely with the curator to create a selection in response to a theme chosen by the artist. Barrada’s thematic focus is the French filmmaker and ethologist Fernand Deligny, and she’s creating a fascinating program around the show. Also, in May, we will open an exhibition titled Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946­–1964, curated by Sarah Meister, focusing on São Paulo’s Foto-Cine Club Bandeirante—an amazing movement with important photographers such as Geraldo de Barros, Thomaz Farkas, and Gertrudes Altschul. The exhibition highlights the extraordinary dynamism of this Brazilian modernist scene between the forties and the sixties, and rewrites an entire chapter of the history of modernism and photography.

André Carneiro, Rails (Trilhos), 1951. Carneiro’s work will be included in Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946­–1964
© Estate of André Carneiro

Martin: Do you see this interest in amateurism as important to your concerns as well?

Chéroux: Yes—it’s another way to rethink modernism. Usually, we talk about modernism through the great white masters, like László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. This is a way to rethink that notion of modernism as taking place in European avant-garde circles; it also circulated in hobbyist photo clubs and other sites.

Martin: I think this all sounds very much in line with this proposition that you set for us at the beginning, that this is a time for thinking about plurality of both voice and form. As you know, the MoMA chief curator of photography has a reputation for having been “the judgment seat of photography”—a single perspective defining what is of importance in and to photography. Are you interested in deconstructing that idea?

Chéroux: The situation today is very different. The idea of the judgment seat also needs to be questioned in a historical context because, of course, in the sixties and the seventies, MoMA held a hegemonic position due to the fact that the program was relatively alone in the field, one of the only big museums who had a photography program. It’s not dissimilar if you compare MoMA’s position during John Szarkowski’s tenure with the position of Aperture, which was probably the main publisher of photography at the time. Whereas now, there is MACK and there is Steidl, and a lot of smaller publishers.

I’m happy to develop a program that aims to defend plurality. I’m also very aware that my voice is one among many. The previous generation of curators and historians, active from the sixties to the eighties, were trying to define the uniqueness, the singularity, the medium-specificity of photography. My generation is much more interested in the range and broad reach of photography, instead of being interested in its uniqueness. There is not just one photography but several photographies that exist in different contexts and forms, from the vernacular to art, from New York to Mexico City to Lagos. Our task is no longer about trying to define what is photography; it’s really about trying to share the most interesting photography in its different forms.

Installation view of The Family of Man, January 24, 1955–May 8, 1955. Photograph by Ezra Stoller
The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Martin: Similarly, MoMA’s curatorial vision has long been defined by these singular male voices, from Newhall to Edward Steichen, Szarkowski, and Peter Galassi—even though it’s not a secret in the field that there was a lot of heavy lifting done by curators like Susan Kismaric and Nancy Newhall, who curated the same number of shows at MoMA as her husband, Beaumont. You’ve mentioned the work by MoMA photo team members Marcoci, Meister, and Gallun. Do you see the way their contributions have been recently forefronted, as well as the role of invited curators like Barrada, as part of that ongoing effort to ensure that “the seat”—if there is one—is shared? That there are actually many seats?

Chéroux: Yes. It’s all about shared responsibilities, teamwork, and collaborations. I remember a letter from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Steichen, in which Cartier-Bresson congratulated Steichen on the Family of Man exhibition (1955). Cartier-Bresson told Steichen that he was a wonderful conductor. He used the French word chef d’orchestre. This is how I see my role as chief curator, especially over the next three years, as the calendar has already been set.

Of course, speaking of Steichen, there is a tendency to put Szarkowski in opposition to Steichen. Photo-history has always been polarized by these two figures—two different poles of photography—one very popular, and the other more conceptual. It’s as if you have to choose one side against another, rather than embrace a holistic approach to photography. I truly believe that the right position today is no longer to choose between Steichen and Szarkowski.

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1950.74, 2019. Red Star’s work was acquired for the MoMA collection in 2021
All works courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Martin: In this light, I’m really curious about what part of your training, then, as a curator in the history of photography, you think you have to forget or let go of—what ideas do you need to encourage others to let go of, in order to move forward?

Chéroux: I’m a historian—the most important thing for me today is not to forget the past. I want to work with it. It’s much more a question of unlearning, or maybe the right word, which you used previously, is deconstructing. (Of course, this a favorite word of French theory.) It’s not about forgetting, as much as trying to deconstruct the canons of a history that has been written in a model that was clearly colonial and heteropatriarchal. So it’s all about trying to find ways to deconstruct that model. This is essential—a huge part of what we have to do in the coming years. We must change the filter, and we must be much more attentive to differences. That’s the future at MoMA.

Do Blue-Chip Photographers Prop up Global Capitalism?

For nearly twenty years, Jörg Colberg has written about photography, and especially photobooks, with an admirable consistency. Through his website, Conscientious Photography Magazine, he has brought attention to scores of little-known artists and emerging publishers. This was a radical proposition in the mid-2000s, when online photography discussion, outside of technical forums, was scarce; and it remains a valuable service today. Over the years, Colberg wrote in a recent post, his “thinking has expanded from focusing on what usually is called visual literacy to looking at photography’s superstructure: the very systems that not only maintain it, but that also shape its overall messages.”

Photography’s Neoliberal Realism (2020) is one result of this expanded framework, blending a plea for visual literacy with a story about “superstructure”; it originated in a review Colberg posted to his website in 2017. That piece discusses a compendium of Annie Leibovitz’s portraits, comparing the look of her photographs to the films of Leni Riefenstahl, and both contrasting and linking their subjects to those of artist Gregory Crewdson. Colberg later expanded that essay, and this pamphlet includes both additional consideration of Leibovitz and Crewdson, and a brief discussion of German photographer Andreas Gursky.

“The approach I am going to take,” Colberg writes near the outset, “is inspired by writers, critics, and theorists Siegfried Kracauer (The Mass Ornament), Roland Barthes (Mythologies), and John Berger (Ways of Seeing): that photographs are evaluated through analysing how they show what they show, given the context in which they are embedded.” Of his main protagonists (Leibovitz, Crewdson, and Gursky), he adds: “Taken together, these three prominent photographers can be seen as the main proponents of a type of photography which has an implicit purpose of propping up global neoliberal capitalism and its consequences, namely vast inequality in increasingly fractured societies.”

This neoliberal realism, Colberg writes, is “a form of visual propaganda whose mechanisms are identical with socialist realism.” (Let the word identical be a warning flag.) The idea of linking these three photographers to socialist realism, rather than, say, expanding on his original comparison of Leibovitz to Riefenstahl, occurred to Colberg when Vanity Fair came under scrutiny for digitally removing actor James Franco from the cover of its January 2018 issue. (Franco had been accused of sexual misconduct.) On reading about the digital manipulation, Colberg “immediately thought” about the “various power struggles and purges of Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, [when] he had not only his victims . . . physically disappear, they were also made to disappear from archive photographs.” This is quite a leap, both on its face and because, as Colberg notes, these kinds of photographic manipulations have been common for so long that even the debate about them is humdrum. Such editing and compositing are neither the special preserve of Vanity Fair nor of the photographers Colberg criticizes.

That said, what are the “identical” mechanisms Colberg suggests that link these artists to their socialist-realist predecessors? Leibovitz, Crewdson, and Gursky produce a kind of capitalist propaganda that, like socialist realism, “does not aim to depict an actually existing reality but instead presents a code that can be read by its intended spectators.” Colberg derives his description of socialist realism from art historian Boris Groys, who suggests that this code entails stories about heroes, demons, transcendental events, and real-world consequences that serve the messaging needs of the powerful. In this formulation, Colberg’s neoliberal realists make images that perpetuate, or even celebrate, unjust power structures.

Andreas Gursky, Madonna 1, 2001
© CNAC/MNAM and RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY/Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY

So what bothers Colberg about these photographers? In part, it comes down to their ignorance of (or willful blindness to) the procapitalist agenda implicit in lionizing the system’s winners and demonizing its losers. But it also has to do with the amount of artifice in their pictures. The tonality of Leibovitz’s photographs, Colberg says, has rendered Black subjects’ skin unnatural, and she has perpetuated racist and sexist stereotypes. (No less an authority than celebrated historian Nell Irvin Painter has argued the opposite, writing in Aperture magazine’s 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue: “Leibovitz has captured the beauty and power within blackness that Frederick Douglass feared nonblack artists, blinded by prejudice, could never reveal.”) If Leibovitz turns to classical painting for her worshipful contrivances, as Colberg suggests, Crewdson uncritically appropriates themes from Hollywood, and his sad-sack men and sexualized-but-powerless women communicate that “regular people are failures.” For his part, Gursky’s pictures are “expressions of neoliberal capitalism’s most completely untethered id,” and insinuate that “resistance [to capitalism] is futile.” By constructing new worlds on the computer—say, of “some Arabian desert”—“it is as if Gursky wants to do even better” than the “rich investors” creating their own islands. I would offer more evidence of Colberg’s argument, but though he claims this book is “an exercise in reading photographs,” he devotes only five pages to Leibovitz, just over three pages to Crewdson, and two pages—with no individual artwork cited by title—to Gursky. These narrow readings leave out a lot, not least that these photographers have undergone some form of creative evolution in their decades-long careers. For example, Gursky only began photographing the spaces of industrial capitalism a decade after his first exhibitions, and only began completely fabricating scenes another fifteen years after that.

What prompted those changes? How has Gursky articulated his development and ambitions? Colberg gives us no evidence that these artists hold the attitudes (or ignorance) he ascribes to them; there is not a single quote by them in this essay. Nor is there a direct quote from Kracauer, Barthes, or Berger, Colberg’s guiding spirits, after invoking them in his introduction. Colberg likewise glosses over the radically different influences these artists have over the popular culture, a fact at least partly related to the primary ways their pictures circulate. Leibovitz reaches millions through her magazine covers, while Crewdson and Gursky’s gallery and museum audiences are rather smaller. This lack of attention to context is telling; it’s as if predatory capitalism is the only condition in which Colberg can see these artists at all.

As magazine covers or limited-edition fine-art objects in galleries and museums, photography is often complicit in the system’s exploitations. People should, as Colberg advocates, “look at who is represented in photographs and how this is being done.” But the level of insight between the covers of Photography’s Neoliberal Realism does not rise above what we might hear when photo fans congregate in a bar. Colberg mentions subjects about which I’d like to know more, for example West Germany’s social-market economy and the propaganda it generated. And Leibovitz, Crewdson, and Gursky are complicated figures whose artworks deserve study. The artifice in their work is perhaps its most salient component. Unfortunately, neither the promising nor the dismaying aspects of Colberg’s pamphlet offer readers enough to chew on, or even indications of where else to look. One suggestion: MACK has done photography enthusiasts a great favor by publishing the more rigorous essays of artist-theorists Allan Sekula and Victor Burgin.

Consistency, one of Colberg’s strengths, is not the same thing as growth. The ideas in Photography’s Neoliberal Realism are no more deeply explored than they were in the 2017 blog post from which they originated. In a post that comments on the book, Colberg hints at the feedback he has received on the publication, some of it pertaining to Leibovitz being “just” a commercial photographer and Gursky too “high art” for his work to be as simple as Colberg claims. “These reactions confirmed some of my suspicions that had me write the book in the first place: in photoland, we have established hierarchies of photographers and/or categories. One consequence of these hierarchies is that a lot of interesting discussions aren’t being held.” But I don’t think it’s those hierarchies that are holding us back. The challenge Photography’s Neoliberal Realism presents is that Colberg has gone out of his way to confirm his suspicions. Exploring the roles photography can play in economic and social arrangements is vital work. It should proceed, however, from photographs, from how their makers describe their intentions, and from how and where those photographs are seen. In this case, as odd as it seems to conclude about so self-serious an essay, Colberg doesn’t take photography seriously enough.

Jörg Colberg’s Photography’s Neoliberal Realism was published by MACK in November 2020.

An Audacious Gaze on the Black Queer Archive

Near the middle of singer-songwriter Moses Sumney’s second studio album, græ (2020), comes a song called “jill/jack,” in which the artist interpolates a stanza from Jill Scott’s sexy, meandering 2004 song “Cross My Mind.” Backed by icy synths, Scott recites: “He had that masculine thing down / Shoulders and back straight / Never slumping / Never round.” Sumney’s distorted voice dips in, and the lyric soon shifts, then shifts again: “(She) had that masculine thing down. . . . (He) had that (feminine) thing down. . .” These slippery, incantatory words run through my mind when I look at Alanna Fields’s work. In the mixed-media artist’s collage series As We Were (2019) and Audacity (2019–ongoing), subtle gestures—the tilt of a shoulder, a hand at the waist—become precious centerpieces of Black queer expression. Like Sumney’s song, Fields’s work is an act of lyrical interpolation: poring through photographic archives from as far back as the 1920s and as recently as the ’80s, she culls vernacular images of Black queer people and then interweaves and overlays them with strips of wax paper, trails of glitter, and other fragmented embellishments. The result is a new kind of archive, one less interested in identifying details or immaculate historical records and more keyed toward honoring the careful shifts between concealment and audacious play that is her subjects’ vital, vibrant body language.

When we spoke on the phone some weeks back, Fields had just arrived at her studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she’s continuing to build Audacity, growing her personal archive of vernacular images, and also working at a brand-new body of work, which will be on view this May at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, Fields’s first solo show. In this new series, she is continuing to retrieve and reframe gestures of desire, but this time, she is intentionally decentering amorous relationships in her images and, instead, looking at queer people at home, in nature, on their own—a way of seeing the “lushness,” as she puts it, of queerness unqualified by lovers, unbridled by landscape.

Alanna Fields, Dark Body, 2019, from the series As We Were

Nicole Acheampong: Where do you source your found images?

Alanna Fields: A couple of places. Primarily, I source them from online collectors on eBay. But I’ve also been really blessed to have some people donate photographs to me. I’ve gotten a lot of great donations. I have a really large archive of queer people in the military that I’ve just been sitting on. I got that from my mentor Allen Frame, who was also a professor of mine at Pratt.

Acheampong: When you find these photographs on eBay, or when they’re gifted to you, are there identifying details attached? It seems like a big part of your work is moving through anonymity and obscurity. Are you intentionally removing identifying details, or is that more a side effect of these archives?

Fields: Sometimes I will get names written on the back of the photographs. Sometimes there will be dates or places. In some of the photographs—you know, when you get a filmslide, there’ll be “February ’67” in the corner. In some of the pieces I keep those details, but I really want to work with the ghostly matter of these photographs, because I don’t know these people, and there’s not a lot of information or context there. A lot of it is imaginative or present in things like gesture. There’s a piece that I have, Past Tense Future Present (2019), and on one of the panels, you’ll see written across the photograph “Pals Forever,” and then below that a couple who very much seem to be lovers and have this amorous energy between them. What are we really looking at? We have a note written here that kind of denotes what the relationship is, and a photograph that exposes it. There’s that tension. I think a lot of that has to do with the dissemination of snapshots and photographs like that, and sharing them, but also having to keep that protection for yourself, so that others may not know what the nature of your relationship is. So there’s that too.

Alanna Fields, Severed Gently, 2019, from the series As We Were

Acheampong: Your captions are often pointedly enigmatic. The images are either untitled or titled things like Severed Gently, Nonchalantly, or Dreadful Funkiness. Would you say that the way you name these works is a part of aiding in that concealment? 

Fields: Yeah, I would say particularly with As We Were, I really tried to address, through different modes, the obscurity there. For example, with Dreadful Funkiness, I was thinking about the dread and funkiness associated with queerness, specifically in the Black community, and homophobia, and how something so beautiful can be seen with such disdain. With Severed Gently, you have a couple who’s cut at the neck and at the hip very intentionally. I chose to crop that photo. This couple was in San Francisco outside of an AIDS/HIV testing clinic, and I was thinking about the divide between lovers because of the virus, but also, you know, the grasping at the waist, how very tied to each other they are, even in the potential separation of the two. 

Alanna Fields, Untitled (Blue), 2019, from the series As We Were

Acheampong: I want to talk about the wax veils and the ways that they divide the subjects, but also just the materiality of the wax. The veil seems to be lifting off the work; there’s a three-dimensionality that’s captured. And throughout the series As We Were and Audacity, the wax never conceals your subjects perfectly. It’s never perfectly smoothed down. How are you working with the texture of the wax?

Fields: Initially, when I began making As We Were, I printed out these photographs at around four by five inches, some at eight by ten. I had really huge windows in my studio at Pratt, and I taped the photographs to the windowpanes. I had this tracing paper, Japanese Kozo paper. I started creating the veils with the paper, layering over specific areas that either communicated touch or had some gesture there, some point of contact, or over the face and cut at the neck. I was attracted to the fact that although the paper was obscuring the image, I still had access to what was underneath. Nothing was ever completely blocked. 

There was this persistence to be seen from underneath the veil. I wanted to play with that a bit more; I wanted to have something that would allow me to introduce color, but still have this texture that I felt was so perfect with the wax. And so, I began working with dry pigments, and mixing them in with beeswax, and dipping the papers and creating these colored veils that I was able to layer over the photographs. It expanded from Untitled (Blue) to Dark Body (both 2019), where the photograph isn’t covered in wax, but the wax is in ways moving off of it or surrounding it. I wanted to play with color and how color can heal, but also how color triggers memories and sensations, and to have that cadence, that narration through color paired with the photographs.

Alanna Fields, Past Tense Future Present, 2019, from the series As We Were

Acheampong: Are there colors that you find yourself coming to again and again? Or any that you avoid?

Fields: Avoid, I would say no, but I have used less of the pure beeswax and have added more color into it, even if it’s a soft peach or kind of beige color. Shades that allude to skin—those are things that I’m really attracted to. But I’m still working with these pops of color, these reds, these blues, these deep blacks and browns, that I feel create their own story alongside the photographs and bring more memory into them.

On the symbolism of wax, early uses of encaustics were to preserve paintings through the application of thin layers. Along with the potential to see and not see with the wax, I really love the fact that it seals the memory, it holds the memory, it holds the photograph together.

Alanna Fields, Untitled II, 2019, from the series As We Were

Acheampong: The “seeing but not seeing” is a really poignant idea throughout your work. You’re dealing constantly with this tension between hypervisibility vs. invisibility. Is there a side of that equation that you are working more toward, or do you feel like the work is constantly teetering between that visibility and invisibility?

Fields: In this new series, wax is still there, but wax is being used as a way to frame the photographs and parts of the photographs, rather than to create these moments of concealment. So it’s functioning differently. It was really important in As We Were for it to be a mode of concealing, because I was looking at the quietude of queerness that was in these photographs. It wasn’t very overt; it wasn’t audacious. If it wasn’t the touch of the hand, maybe it was the touch of the forehead, or the overlapping of a shoulder, that could be dismissed as friendly closeness. It was really important for me to honor those photographs and their history and that way of being concealed, but also to push those images to the surface, because they just haven’t been seen.

Now, I have moved away from concealment, because I’m looking at later images, images in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, where there was a bit more freedom and audacious nature to how our queerness shows up photographically. The wax will begin to frame, rather than conceal or cover.

Alanna Fields, Ain’t Studdin You, 2019, from the series Audacity

Alanna Fields, Still Ain’t Studdin You, 2019, from the series Audacity

Acheampong: In your artist statement for Audacity, you write about “looking closely at embodiments of masculinity and femininity through aesthetic posture and gesture.” How do you decide which gestures to make your centerpieces? I saw a lot of hands; I saw a lot of body parts that maybe aren’t the most obvious ones people think of when thinking through sexuality or sexual expression. 

Fields: It’s really varied in Audacity. With Ain’t Studdin You and Still Ain’t Studdin You (both 2019), I’m looking at the way that the subject is holding his mouth and the kind of nonchalance in the way that he’s holding his cigarette, the way he’s sitting in the chair and turning his body. It’s still subtle but very familiar to my queer eye, if that makes sense. Like, I see it and I’m like: [snaps] “Oh yes, I see you.”

With Miss Elijah (2020), I’m looking at the hand on the hip but also [the subject’s] very long fingernails, and this crop top, but this soft line of the waistline, and that contrasted against the hair that’s on the subject’s stomach. That tension and that dance, choreography, between masculinity and femininity was something I really wanted to bring out in Audacity.

In Come Live with Me Angel (2020): the hand on the knee, the gaze. It’s a mood I’m really trying to get after in Audacity, the feeling of the photographs. It’s less static. I feel more movement when I look at them than in the earlier images that were in As We Were. 

Alanna Fields, Distant Lover, 2020, from the series Audacity

Acheampong: There is such a long history of extremely exploitative gazes on Black bodies, queer bodies, and Black queer bodies in particular. Do you see Audacity, or any of your works, as an active remedy against that? When you talk about movement, that makes me think of the agency of your subjects, and I wonder how that agency confronts a history of objectification. 

Fields: Yeah, that’s something that I definitely always have in mind. I think that Black queer bodies and especially Black queer male bodies have been sexualized in photography, especially contemporary photography. I’m not really interested in doing that. I’m not really interested in communicating the sex, but rather the sensuality. Whether that’s through gaze, or laying on the floor and grabbing your knee and looking in the way that makes me feel like I’m supposed to come hither. It’s that type of feeling that I’m after, rather than just looking at the body.

Alanna Fields, Come Live With Me Angel, 2020, from the series Audacity

Acheampong:  And in your newest series that you mentioned, where you’re thinking of people and bodies that are not necessarily in a sexual or romantic relation, did that affect your gaze at all, the parts of the body that you decided to focus in on?

Fields: I think I started to think more about Black queer aesthetic. In As We Were, I think that in all but two of the pieces, we’re looking at interior spaces and those types of choices: choices of dress and clothing. Because we have an introduction of color there, we’re able to see more of the choice that one takes in presenting themselves and showing their queerness through style and aesthetic and the way they adorn their home. That’s something I was also really interested in: how the body moves through space, what we adorn the body with, rather than, you know, skin and form.

Acheampong: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. The anonymity of your subjects is, for the most part, a cornerstone of your works, but I did see that you have  a self-portrait series . When did that come about, and what drew you to turning the camera on yourself? Did your relationship to visibility and concealment completely shift when you were the subject?

Fields: You know, I did that self-portrait series back in 2016. I had just started grad school. It’s weird how things come full circle. I was thinking about Black queer archives without really thinking about it. I was thinking about not having seen myself in photographic history before, and I wanted to subvert the gaze. And so that has a lot to do with why you’re not experiencing my face from the front, but rather profiles or the back of my head. I was also thinking about how my queerness shows up in my aesthetic choices—in my hair, in the strength of my back and how I hold my body. That was the beginning of thinking about these expressions of queerness photographically, even before I knew that I would be doing this work. I think I’ve always been thinking in that way, in my mind and in my body and obviously, now, in my work.

Alanna Fields, Miss Elijah, 2020, from the series Audacity

Acheampong:  When did collage become a logical way for you to think through these ideas?

Fields: In my They Who See We digital collage series (2017), I was looking at documentary photographers, primarily white, who were photographing Black children in housing projects. I was thinking about hypervisibility and invisibility there. I had just moved to Brooklyn from DC, and I encountered these huge NYPD floodlights that would shine into people’s apartment windows. I started researching that. It was causing health problems; children weren’t able to sleep at night. I was thinking about how to turn that gaze and that surveillance inside out and have us gaze back at you, as a way to confront your own biases and those that were projected onto these children in these photographs.

That was my first foray into working with collage. I find it hard to go back to not working in that way. There’s such choreography in being able to bring material in with a photograph, and layering as a way to address things that aren’t so neat or regulated but are more complex and expansive and shift depending on how you look at it and where. Even the wax: I buff the wax over time, and it becomes shinier, and you’re able to see more underneath. I think it would be hard for me to break away from working in that way. It’s like, I can’t unsee it now. 

Acheampong:  And I don’t want you to! [Both laugh] Who are your key inspirations, the artists that turned you toward thinking in that way?

Fields: I love Carrie Mae Weems. I love Lorna Simpson; I really love the way Lorna Simpson has pushed past needing to have one solid medium and working in one particular way, jumping to painting and using text. Again, it all feels like choreography: we can’t just look at this image, we need to add more context to it. I’m always revisiting Weems’s and Simpson’s work. Lyle Ashton Harris’s as well. 

Alanna Fields, Gentle Woman, 2019, from the series As We Were

Acheampong:  You are also a graphic designer. How does that practice inform or interplay with your other artwork?

Fields: I think for the most part, I’ve kept them separate, but I’ve been working a lot with an herbalist on brand packaging and paying a lot of attention to texture, adding some complexity in the design. I think that my collage elements drift over into that space as well. I think it’s my language, the way I understand things: to layer materials and sit them next to one another and on top of and underneath. It’s that ecology of visual language that I think is becoming unique to my practice and how I look at art in general, how I consume things.

Acheampong:  During the COVID-19 pandemic, masks have become very quotidian. Does the way that people are much more concealed in public space factor at all into how you’re now exploring masking more figuratively in your work? 

Fields: It’s made me want to resist the mask in my work and make things more visible, and to zoom in on them and zoom out. Wearing a mask every day, I see my face—like, my whole face—in the morning and at night. But when I’m out during the day, I’m covered, and I have a hat on, so I see my eyes and that’s it. In my work, I’ve been really thinking about centering these subjects’ faces and not cropping them but seeing the fullness of their gaze, their smile, their environment, their gestures also. Just the fullness of it all. Because I feel so cropped on a daily basis, cropped and covered.

11 Photographers on Seeking the Unexpected in Their Work

The “unexpected moment” is one uniquely suited to photography. The camera has the ability to capture a split second of time, to freeze the frenetic, ever-moving world around us. Since the medium’s earliest days, photographers have embraced this quality, allowing happy accidents and unusual turns to lead to some of history’s most memorable images.

The latest edition of the Magnum Square Print Sale, The Unexpected, brings together over one hundred prints by an international group of photographers celebrating the unpredictability of life.

Through March 28, 2021, collect these signed and estate-stamped, six-by-six-inch, museum-quality images for $100 each. When you purchase through this link, you directly support Aperture’s programming, publishing, and operations. Below are highlights from The Unexpected: The Magnum Square Print Sale.

Jonas Bendiksen, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 2016
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Jonas Bendiksen

“I was in Tokyo working on a chapter of an ongoing project, and had finished photographing for the day. Tokyo is a city packed with light, movement, and intensity, so I still had my camera on me and ready, just in case. I was starving and heading to dinner but had to wait at one of these huge zebra crossings in Shinjuku. They’ve been photographed so many times before, so figuring that to make a picture I would be happy with here would require more time and effort than I had blood sugar for, I wasn’t paying much attention. Then this zebra-dressed woman placed herself right in front of me. Click. Thank you. Sometimes you get more luck than you deserve.”

Sabiha Çimen, Students having fun on an artificial lake on the weekend, Istanbul, Turkey, 2018
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Sabiha Çimen

“The Qur’an school is an ordered, structured, and predictable environment for learning, so during holidays and break times, when these girls are allowed to be led by their own whims, they seek the fresh air of the outdoors without any particular plan or direction. There, they can let the day take them away to other shores, where the wind carries their dreams on unpredictable currents of imagination.”

Ernest Cole, New York City, circa 1971
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Ernest Cole

“One of the strangest phenomena of street photography is when the photographer appears to engage in a form of cultural prophecy. The collision of today with tomorrow requires an uncanny ability to sense the future in the present.

Ernest Cole’s 1971 image of a New York hipster predicts the B-boy stylings of the mid-1980s: the dinky hat, the sportswear, the early version of a stereo beatbox. The unexpected pose of the proto-B-boy seems to leap forward decades to the pages of style magazines like the Face and i-D.

And the new culture is neatly complemented by Cole’s parallel pictures of graffiti adorning the New York streets, years before books began to collate and document that burgeoning art form. How strange it must have been for Ernest Cole to watch the development of hip-hop culture during the 1970s and 1980s—an identity that he had presciently foreseen in the late 1960s.”

Elliott Erwitt, New York City, 1955
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt

“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see, and everything to do with the way you see them.”

Bruce Gilden, New York City, 1990
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Bruce Gilden

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the expressions on the faces of these two seemingly related women, as the younger one was pushing the other along Madison Avenue in her wheelchair. Whatever the reason, her mouth was wide open. The scene spoke to me about the mother-daughter relationship; I imagined that the daughter had had enough and was perilously pushing the older woman over a cliff.”

Sohrab Hura, Yusuke, Cambodia, 2008
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Sohrab Hura

“I thought I had photographed only the dog and the man, until I processed my negatives.”

Susan Meiselas, ‘Molotov Man,’ Sandinistas at the walls of the Esteli National Guard headquarters, Esteli, Nicaragua, 1979
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas

“It was on July 17, 1979, the day before Somoza fled Nicaragua, that I photographed Sandinista Pablo ‘Bareta’ Arauz, whose name I didn’t know at that moment. He was throwing a Molotov cocktail at one of the last remaining National Guard garrisons.

Back then I was working with two cameras, one loaded with black-and-white film and the other with color. I missed the shot of Bareta’s decisive gesture in black and white, but captured him in color. The image that became known as the ‘Molotov Man’ was reproduced and painted all over the country, before appearing on matchbooks commemorating the first anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.

Twenty-five years later, Bareta’s likeness was adopted as the ‘official’ symbol of the fight against the Somoza dictatorship. In 2018, the ‘Molotov Man’ was printed on T-shirts worn by university students protesting now against the Sandinista President Daniel Ortega.

An image can have multiple lives, which in this case, neither Pablo nor I could predict or control.”

Inge Morath, Mr. Gross, one of the managers, tried to run a travel service for a while, Chelsea Hotel, 23rd Street, New York City, 1968
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Inge Morath, in Camera Austria, no. 19/20 (1985)

“Photography is a strange phenomenon. In spite of the use of that technical instrument, the camera, no two photographers, even if they were at the same place at the same time, come back with the same pictures.”

Emin Ozmen, People gather in a stadium during a large rally before the independence referendum in Erbil, Iraq, September 2017
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Emin Ozmen

“For a long time, I wanted to keep control over what my future would be made of. This feeling that I had a sense of direction reassured me. However, during my studies and throughout my career as a photographer, I have come to realize that the most important moments in my life, which had a positive impact on my destiny, were the moments I hadn’t anticipated. It’s a feeling certainly shared with many people, quite banal in itself. But I am now aware that I need to leave more room for the unexpected. It is often by chance that the most beautiful things happen: in life and in photography.”

Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Bhayi alembathwa lembathwa ngabalaziyo, 2020
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Lindokuhle Sobekwa

“The series Ezilalini (The Country) grew out of my project I carry Her photo with Me, a handmade photobook about my sister Ziyanda. As I investigated her disappearance, I traced her footprints back to Tsomo, in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, which is my ancestral home and where my sister grew up. Unexpectedly, this journey provided the opportunity to reconnect with my family, identity, and culture: engaging parts of myself and my history that I had not considered before, or perhaps had avoided thinking about. Tsomo has a deep meaning to my family, and to me personally, but I feel it is a place I don’t know very well. There is also a feeling of conflict for us there; to this day, my grandmother curses Johannesburg as a place that swallowed her children.

The title of this image is Bhayi alembathwa lembathwa ngabalaziyo, relating to the idea that only the pot knows how hot the fire is.”

Alex Webb, Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, 1993; from the book Violet Isle (2009, with Rebecca Norris Webb)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Alex Webb

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner.”

The Magnum Square Print Sale, The Unexpected, is available from March 22 to March 28 at 11:59PM PT. Collect signed and estate-stamped, six-by-six-inch, images for $100 each through Aperture’s affiliate link.

How a Museum’s Photographic Archive Honors Generations of Chinese American Lives

In late January 2020, as a fire tore through the building at 70 Mulberry Street, in New York’s Chinatown, the staff of the Museum of Chinese in America feared the worst. They watched from a park across the street as firefighters worked deep into the night to contain the blaze. This five-story corner building was once a schoolhouse; now it housed a dance center, a senior citizens’ center, a vocational training office, an athletics association, and the museum’s off-site collections. Luckily, there were no fatalities. By morning, the building was a smoldering husk, and it would be weeks before they would be allowed back inside. Many figured that if the fire hadn’t ruined the collection, then all the water surely had.

Jadin Wong wearing a qipao, ca. 1939–41
Courtesy Wally Wong

The museum, located a few blocks away on Centre Street, was started as a salvage operation of sorts. In the late 1970s, Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai began noticing all of the stuff old-timers were leaving out on the streets as junk. Luggage, clothing, personal papers, things that had outlived their usefulness. But Tchen, a historian, and Lai, a community organizer, saw these items as part of a broader history. Perhaps whoever owned this old suitcase or sheaf of menus never perceived themselves that way—as having a history, or participating in a broader story of belonging, let alone an American one. What began as Tchen’s and Lai’s dumpster diving resulted in a museum that today contains some eighty-five thousand items. They are random items, yet they collectively articulate the diverse experiences of Chinese in America.

In the months following the fire, curators and archivists were allowed to reenter 70 Mulberry. Somewhat miraculously, the bulk of the collection could be restored and saved—T-shirts, concert posters, hand-painted signs, old passports and immigration documents, paper fans, cigarette cartons. These are items which might be worthless in purely monetary or market-driven terms. Yet they are irreplaceable, indexing immigrant histories, traditions, and practices that have yet to be written. Very few of these objects were meant for archival preservation. Old signage or furniture once served a primary function for the nearby merchants who couldn’t understand why a museum would want such things. Instruments were meant to be played. Costumes were for performance. Irons and washboards were merely tools of the laundryman’s trade.

Pages of Ging Hawk Club Album, 1930s
Courtesy Alison Shue Lee

Unlike other parts of the collection, the museum’s holdings of photographic prints, slides, and negatives communicate a clear desire to leave something behind, despite the lingering possibility that the people on both sides of the camera may have regarded this U.S. chapter of their lives as a temporary, transient one. These images articulate aspirations or desires that the subjects themselves might not have felt brazen enough to speak aloud: the family looking their spiffiest for a holiday portrait; professional headshots for modeling or singing gigs; school children obediently reciting from their workbooks; the tourist measuring himself in front of a statue of some supposedly great American. There is a photograph of the Chinese Musical and Theatrical Association, which opened on Pell Street in 1931. Associations such as this one functioned as community centers and schools, ways of maintaining a tie to centuries-old traditions of storytelling and performance. In this photograph, taken at a fundraiser in 1946, the performers huddle together onstage. Some radiate pride, smiling, sitting up as straight as possible. Others look shy or uncertain; perhaps they’d prefer to have a picture taken without all this makeup on. They are flanked by performers holding Chinese and U.S. flags.

Emile Bocian, Stephen Cheng and the Dragon Seeds, ca. 1971
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America

While studying at Juilliard, Mary Mon Toy was told that an Asian could never become an opera singer. There is a studio portrait of her from the 1950s, when Mon Toy had defied expectations to become a pioneering Asian American performer on Broadway. A finger is pointed artfully toward the sky; she gazes far past the photographer. Where will her vision take her? I’m particularly drawn to a photograph of Stephen Cheng, an idealistic singer who, in the 1960s and 1970s, sought to connect the United States and China through a fusion of jazz, rock, and Chinese traditional music. He even dabbled in reggae. In one of the only surviving photographs of his band, the Dragon Seeds, from a 1971 concert at the Museum of Modern Art, Cheng appears to be swaying to a groove, eyes and wide smile conveying a sense of bliss, as his band plays behind him.

In the United States, whites first encountered Chinatowns in major cities in the mid-1800s and early 1900s as an exotic, potentially dangerous portal into other worlds. In the early twentieth century, there were best-selling guidebooks about the savagery and old-world quirks of Chinatown in San Francisco and New York, as well as “slumming tours” that brought daring tourists down dark alleyways, past knife-wielding gangsters, and into opium dens. Some of the most famous images of San Francisco’s Chinatown, from the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century, were taken by Arnold Genthe, a German-born photographer who lived and worked there at that time. He often hid his camera from sight as he took photographs so as not to be noticed by the locals. Yet his work presented a skewed version of immigrant life. He frequently cropped out the presence of Western culture, such as white people or English-language signs or advertisements, in order to preserve an alien, inscrutable quality in Chinatown.

Emile Bocian, Marcie (left) and Maureen “Peanut” Louie (right) at the U.S. Open at Forest Hills Stadium, 1977
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America

Miss Qwong Yee Wo in the Miss Chinatown Pageant, October 10, 1971
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America

As various waves of immigrants slowly adjusted to life in the United States, the reality was often more mundane than those sensationalistic representations from the past. In the early 1980s, Bud Glick began taking pictures around Chinatown as part of the New York Chinatown History Project. His images document the neighborhood’s shifting generations, as the old-timers were passing on, and younger folks, horsing around with Black and brown neighbors, or posing in their punk-rock T-shirts, were beginning to explore new identities. In one of Glick’s pictures, a middle-aged woman at a laundry stares off into the distance, a moment’s reprieve during the busy workday. She leans on the counter and looks as though she is in a trance. Is this the life in the United States she once dreamed of? Among the collection’s newest acquisitions is a portfolio of 2020 images from Mengyu Dong documenting Chinese American communities participating in Black Lives Matter protests. Dong follows a group of young activists at a march in Washington, D.C. Their bilingual signs blend into the broader landscape of protest that these images depict. But they hint at how this community will continue to change and evolve from within.

Related Items

Aperture 242

Shop Now[image error]

Aperture Magazine Subscription

Shop Now[image error]

Irina Rozovsky’s Majestic Photographs of Prospect Park

Learn More[image error]

There is a photograph of the Chinese American tennis player Marcie Louie at the U.S. Open in 1977. It’s unclear whether she’s competed yet. She hugs her racket and smiles. She is with her younger sister, Maureen, who will eventually become a tennis pro too. But Maureen’s arms are folded, and her grin is a bit harder to read. She looks impatient. Perhaps she is tired of being photographed. Maybe she’s just not accustomed to it yet. It reminds me of how tedious it felt to pose for my parents’ pictures when I was a child. I couldn’t understand why we needed so many pictures.

A few years ago, I began collecting photographs of Asian American life. As with any excursion into found materials, I was drawn by the storytelling questions that emanated from these scenes of mustached teens waiting for a movie; kids on a playground beating up a peer; a seemingly generic family portrait, only the father is dressed like a greaser. Who were these people? Where did they live? Did they get along with their neighbors? What did they imagine, if they allowed themselves that privilege? My collection involves an element of fantasy, too, a naive hope that I would reconnect with honeymoon photographs my parents lost when they were new to this country.

Kitty Katz, Onlookers at a Lunar New Year Celebration, 1992
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America

Kitty Katz, Four performers standing on a stage with costumes, 1993
Courtesy the Museum of Chinese in America

For those from the Chinese diaspora who came to the United States in the twentieth century, photography was a tool for imagination and self-fashioning. It holds a special status in the inventory of immigrant things—a way of stopping time, commemorating one’s presence, perhaps capturing a snippet of one’s new life that can be mailed back to everyone across the sea. Especially in the predigital age, photography recorded a sense of acculturation, expressing a desire to register your presence in front of a national landmark or a momentous scene. A sense that you would someday look back, once you had the time. Perhaps it becomes art or a statement about history only to the later generation. In the moment, it’s just a desire to stand in front of the statue or totem that everyone else is standing in front of.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” under the title “Voices & Memories.”

The Photographer Who Embraces South Africa’s Lavish Colors

Every spring, the aging jacaranda trees lining the suburban avenues of Johannesburg, one of the most wooded cities in the world, produce intense violet blooms. The Colombia–born artist Juan Orrantia’s photobook Like Stains of Red Dirt (2020), his first about South Africa since settling in the country in 2008, opens with a flash-lit photo of the underside of this subtropical tree with long arching branches. The tree’s spring profusion of purple-blue flowers feebly registers in his photograph, partly because of his vantage point, but primarily due to Orrantia’s chromatic interference with the scene: the grey-brown branches of the tall tree are a dirty pink on the page in his book.

This formula, of quotidian scenes obliquely seen and strangely colored, is reiterated throughout Like Stains of Red Dirt. The book includes lavish spreads depicting, among other things, an evening thunderstorm rendered in volcanic tones, and an unidentified patch of dirt that may as well be on Mars. Most of the images were taken in and around the photographer’s apartment in the leafy neighborhood of Killarney, and they feature his partner, anthropologist Pamila Gupta, and their nine-year-old adopted daughter, Padma, in a mix of candid and staged poses. These portraits are juxtaposed with domestic still lifes, close-up botanical studies, and urban landscapes that together suggest a life of unassuming suburban privilege.

Juan Orrantia, The scramble for Africa, 2017–19

Orrantia’s photographs achieve their punch through a seven-color printing process known as heptachrome. He was introduced to this process—which adds orange, green, and violet to the traditional color printing model of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—by Artes Gráficas Palermo, a Madrid prepress and printer, which suggested heptachrome to translate Orrantia’s in-camera and digital postproduction experiments with color into print. (In 2019, Orrantia’s mock-up of Like Stains of Red Dirt won the Fiebre PhotoBook Festival’s Dummy Award.)

“I was really shocked when I saw on paper what I had previously only seen on screen,” says Orrantia of the first printer’s proofs he received. “Some of those colors are hectic to get on paper.”

Color is integral to Orrantia’s book about family, home, and the difficult process of integrating into an alien culture. What does it mean to belong? Is belonging even possible? Orrantia raises these questions in his opening image of a South American tree that, loved as it is in South Africa for its annual outburst of color, is nonetheless classified as an invasive species. In a country where settler and immigrant identities are hotly contested, and the ethics of representation is central to public debates about photography, especially portraiture, Orrantia found a liberating subject in his hometown’s floral abundance.

“When I wake up every morning, I look out from my balcony in Killarney and I see all of these plants that have nothing to do with the place, but are completely about the place,” he says of the subjects that allowed him to overcome his hesitation in taking photographs in South Africa. As Orrantia explains, the jacarandas were introduced as both ornamental plants and barriers to filter the dust that once swept off the profuse tailings from the city’s now-defunct gold mines. Similarly, the foreignness of the garden city created by waves of white settlers in Johannesburg has, over time, become normalized. Interested in playing with the natural-artificial binary, Orrantia’s pimped botanical photographs of rose bushes and palm trees render these naturalized aliens as strange and other again. “But, you know, it’s not the plant’s fault,” Orrantia recalls an academic supervisor jokingly remarking of his photographs and their links to South Africa’s colonial history.

Juan Orrantia, Red hair (or finger to the pencil test), 2017–19

Juan Orrantia, A garden here is not just a garden #1, 2017–19

Like Stains of Red Dirt had its genesis in the University of Hartford’s MFA in photography program, which has a strong emphasis on photobooks. Orrantia entered the program after a substantial detour—a visual anthropologist by training, he has a PhD from Yale University. Orrantia visited Johannesburg in 2008, intending to connect with his supervisor, who was on a research sabbatical there. Orrantia had no connection to South Africa and anticipated a short stay. He shortly met two influential people at the University of Witwatersrand: Gupta and the photographer Jo Ractliffe, then a lecturer at the Wits School of Arts.

Orrantia’s introduction to Ractliffe—the subject of a career survey currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago—was perhaps inevitable. Orrantia’s doctoral work, which photographically explored issues of memory and violence in Colombia, dovetailed with Ractliffe’s work examining the aftermath of South Africa’s Cold War­–era conflict with Angola for her book Terreno Ocupado (2008). A friendship quickly developed. “I remember Jo always telling me that I was asking too much of a photo,” Orrantia says of Ractliffe’s influence. “I had these ideas in my head, and I slowly learnt how to photographically express them, to not force them into the photograph.”

Juan Orrantia, Predictable cathedrals of thunderclouds in summer, 2017–19

A supportive mentor, Ractliffe also directed Orrantia to the Market Photo Workshop, a photography school established by David Goldblatt in 1989. The rigor of the discussions at the photography school, especially around issues of history and representation, proved bracing, and concretized Orrantia’s resistance to making photographs in South Africa. After completing his doctorate, Orrantia began photographing in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony neighboring South Africa that was wracked by civil war throughout the 1970s and ’80s. “I did not know much about Mozambique at all, but I had this idea, some sort of imagined familiarity, that their history was closer to where I was from.” (Orrantia’s black-and-white photographs from Mozambique are compiled in a limited-edition book, There was heat that smelled of bread and dead fish [2018], and reveal his ongoing quest to visualize quietude.)

Orrantia subsequently photographed in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa, and Colombia, where he explored the vestiges of the violent drug trade in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range. In 2017, he enrolled in Hartford’s international, limited-residency program, and a year later began tentatively making photographs in and around his Johannesburg home; he also visited Tokyo to participate in a remote MFA meeting. He met Japanese photographers Yurie Nagashima and Mikiko Hara. “Seeing the work of Hara and having that conversation with her really opened up my thinking to what a color photograph can do,” he offers by way of an extended rebuttal to my question about the influence—possible or not—of Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen.

So what can a color photograph do? As Edward Steichen ventured in a press release announcing the Museum of Modern Art’s first-ever color photography show in 1950: “For the perennial experimenters, the seekers for greater freedom from the discipline of the purely descriptive photographic technique, new horizons of abundant promise are indicated, provided the ‘coloriferous’ is not mistaken for the colorful.” For Orrantia, color is not simply about vivid hues and sparkling luminosity. Color is about cognition. “Color,” he says, “allowed me to think.” It also enabled him to embrace his home.

Juan Orrantia, Baobab study (hand and wax print at sunset), 2017–19Juan Orrantia, Jacaranda, 2017–19Juan Orrantia, Still life of dried Proteas and plastic flowers, 2017–19Juan Orrantia, Aloe and palm, 2017–19Juan Orrantia, Moths (in the bush), 2017–19Juan Orrantia, Red dirt with tree stumps, 2017–19Juan Orrantia, Christmas lights, 2017–19
All photographs from the book Like Stains of Red Dirt (Dalpine, 2020). Courtesy the artist

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

The Glamorous World of LA’s Vanished Queer Underground

If the photographer Reynaldo Rivera didn’t exist, a Hollywood more interested in queer and Latinx people might have invented him. As detailed in Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City (2020), Semiotext(e)’s marvelous new monograph, Rivera sidestepped tragedy through talent and will. He made transformational photographs of subjects transforming themselves, many now dead in places now shuttered or, worse, disappeared. What separates Rivera’s work from that of his peers—the loving slums of Nan Goldin, the horny social-butterfly lepidopterarium of Christopher Makos, Alvin Baltrop’s formal observations, the personality crises of Peter Hujar—might be a rejection, or perhaps disinterest, in distance. Rivera’s photographs of trans women and drag artists, of artists and scenesters and lovers and friends, in and out of LA’s legendary Latino bars and party houses, thrill with presence without flaunting their access. “If people are busy living out myths you don’t like,” Samuel R. Delany writes in his wild epic novel Dhalgren (1974), “leave them to it.” Rivera’s subjects were busy. They were living. He clearly loved them. He made real myths with them.

Reynaldo Rivera, Richard Villegas Jr., friend, and Enrique, Miracle Mile, 1996

In Rivera’s photograph Richard Villegas Jr., friend, and Enrique, Miracle Mile (1996), two men embrace each other in a well-lit bathroom—while another man nearby pisses into a urinal—all so busy in their joy. Another shows off the pride of a patron at the Silverlake Lounge in 1995, his cowboy drag as white and spotless as the toilet seat his boot rests on, at least in Rivera’s frame. There’s an image of “Vanessa” cross-legged and offering an expression of feeling herself so supernatural it transcends place and time, and so natural it could only come from a person truly at home. The run of photographs of Tatiana Volty, her story lovingly recounted by Luis Bauz, is tale-ready for its close-up.

Such intimacy arose from estrangement. Rivera’s mother was born in Mexico and left for Stockton, California, when she was sixteen and pregnant, where she met his father, also Mexican-born and two decades older. They quickly married and separated; Reynaldo and his older sister, Herminia, shuttled between houses and Southern California border towns. Their father kidnapped them when Rivera was five and ditched them with his family in Guanajuato, in a small house with no running water and an abusive grandmother. After four violent years, they returned to their mother and the American racism of Glendale, California, in the 1970s.

Reynaldo Rivera, Gaby, Reynaldo, and Angela, La Plaza, 1993

Rivera’s father occasionally interfered with his reintegration by hijacking his adolescent son for extended stays in the San Joaquin Valley, where he worked seasonally at a Campbell’s Soup cannery or picking cherries. Rivera stayed in the rundown SROs with him, worked the fields, befriended homeless people in town and robbed stores with them, and found himself spellbound by the photography books he uncovered at thrift stores. In sixth grade, back at home with this mother and beguiled by the lives and work of Golden Age glamour girls like Lucha Reyes, he was arrested for selling drugs; by fourteen, he’d left high school and returned to Mexicali. He worked at his father’s liquor store until his father shot a gangster, who died in the street, prompting his father to disappear with Rivera’s green card. Fortune reunited them at a bus station in Calexico, and they returned together to the Stockton cannery. Rivera’s dad had a side hustle fencing stolen goods, including a Yashica that Rivera stumbled on one summer day. “And then the genie came out of the bottle,” he said. “I thought if I could capture these moments, keep them on file, I could find some kind of order. … It was a kind of alchemy. It became my thing.”

He got a Pentax K1000 and took pictures of Herminia; he returned to Mexico City in 1983, went to the bedroom in which someone had killed his step-grandfather with a machete, and photographed the blood stains across his sheets and framed pictures of saints for a series that empathically struggles against making a crime scene into a still life. Back in Los Angeles, he found worlds of people building lives for themselves by whipping up their own orders of alchemy. He photographed the icons Siouxsie Sioux and Sade and Annie Lennox, sometimes selling his work to the LA Weekly.

Reynaldo Rivera, Girls, El Conquistador, 1997

On La Brea, Miss Alex lip-synched for tips at the Latino drag bar La Plaza; in Mexico City, she authored a highly fictionalized newspaper column detailing her exploits among the Hollywood elite. Through Rivera’s lens, she inhabits both worlds at once.

Tina, the face of the artsier bar Club Mugy’s, sometimes impersonated Michael Jackson (thus, in Chris Kraus’s formulation in her perceptive essay for the monograph, working as “a man, dressed as a woman, impersonating a man”), and sometimes called on her Thai identity to showcase pan-Asian displays of femininity, from dragon lady to geisha. Such indeterminacy could get performers canceled today, but in the late ’80s and early ’90s, artists on the outskirts looked everywhere they could for a reflection. They developed a visibility, almost photosynthetic in how it distilled nutrition from flashes of recognition. Rivera photographed them in dramatic black and white, often straight ahead and center-framed, with the photographer in their mirrors’ reflections. Rivera’s subjects display the fruits of their labor—their glittering gowns, their tits, themselves—in dusky arrangements that call to mind LA noir and Hollywood screen tests, but mostly, embrace shadows as just another kind of light.

Reynaldo Rivera, Vanessa, Silverlake Lounge, 1995
All photographs courtesy the artist

In a riotous back-and-forth at the close of the book, Rivera and international treasure Vaginal Davis carry on and gossip about the stars of these demimondes, the party people of pregentrified Silver Lake and Echo Park, like Alice Bag and Taquila Mockingbird, and all the dead and deadly serious and drop-dead glamourous. (The pair deserves a genius grant to host double-decker tours of Los Angeles.) There’s sometimes a rush of ruin porn when it comes to these matters: all the wreckage from AIDS and crack and America’s lethal relationship with its transgender family members, all the bars lost to landlords’ greed and our refusal to see nightlife as anything other than a source of “urban revitalization.” Self-invention and self-harm so often fit together, like a hand in a white silk glove. These photographs demand resistance to all that. They marvel at what was made, not how cinematic it looked in destruction.

 “We were all thought to be superficial,” Rivera writes of the people around him. “The majority of the city was not white and was not here to be a star or to be in the industry, the majority of us were either born into this dream world or ended up here for other reasons.” Those reasons are all over the faces of the people Rivera photographed—people making the myths that really power Los Angeles. They still exist and must endure.

Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City was published by Semiotext(e) in December 2020.