Aperture's Blog, page 59

After a Revolution, a Chilean Photographer Mourns the Martyrs

One afternoon a few months ago, an old couple drank a cup of coffee at a dinner table while the setting sun entered through a small window, highlighting their wrinkles. Their eyes, looking down, express more exhaustion than relaxation. Behind the man is a portrait of the couple’s daughter, a beaming woman dressed all in white and sitting on green grass. Her name was Paula Lorca. She was in her mid-forties when her body was found burned in a supermarket on the periphery of Santiago de Chile on the night of October 19, 2019. The market had been looted that night after a series of events her parents are still trying to make sense of. They do not know who was responsible for her death. “What I want most is justice,” her father, Ramón, told the photographer Javier Álvarez. “We are poor, and we might not get it, and that’s what angers me the most.”

Álvarez, born and raised in Chile, and currently based in New York, took a photograph of the couple at their dinner table last fall, after reaching out to the families of men and women killed during the historic nationwide protests that started in October 2019 and continued for months. (According to Chile’s National Institute for Human Rights, law-enforcement officers injured more than four hundred protesters—leaving many partly or completely blind—and more than thirty people died during the unrest.) Álvarez’s research turned into a striking new series, Paisaje Invisible (Invisible Landscape) (2020)—a close-up of the empty corner where a man was shot months before, or the ashes of the supermarket where Paula Lorca’s body was burned. “I wanted to focus on the invisible,” Álvarez says. “On what is left that nobody thinks about.”

Javier Álvarez, San Bernardo, Santiago, Chile, 2020. Paula Lorca’s parents, Ramón and Maria, drink coffee with the family. Just before she died, Paula had dinner at this table with her parents.

Álvarez asked the families what he should photograph, or which anecdotes needed foregrounding. “I was looking for a way to expand the limits of documenting,” he explains. “The families chose through which door I could enter [their memories] or leave them, and I had no idea where they would take me.” One man wanted to show him the old soccer shoes he once got for his little brother, who was killed. A father displayed the tattoo he got on his left arm in memory of his son. Most of the people he met, Álvarez says, came from working-class families struggling to make ends meet.

At the time of Paula Lorca’s death, a few months before the global COVID-19 pandemic exposed unconscionable economic disparities in much of the world, Chileans were already engaged in an urgent conversation about inequality. In response to the government raising metro fares, and callously advising students and the working public to wake up earlier to avoid the peak-hour prices, a group of high-school students sparked el estallido social (the social explosion). Civil unrest against the unpopular right-wing government spread far and wide across the country, in protest of not only the subway hike, but also the broader politics of austerity that left more than half the country’s wealth in the hands of the richest 5 percent. Demonstrators set fire to subway stations, toppled statues, and clashed with the police. Chileans united under a single cry, demanding reforms to the private education and pension systems, and an end to the authoritarian constitution that General Augusto Pinochet had put in place in the early eighties. The protesters also renamed Santiago’s main square, Plaza Italia, where they stood vigil day and night for months. They called it “Dignity’s Plaza.”

Balarama Heller’s Search for Radiant Simplicity

At the center of any spiritual life lie clarity, simplicity, and devotion. We may see and hear the members of, say, the Hare Krishna movement parading through our streets in a jangle of bells and dance, and that seems a vibrant expression of their gratitude, their sense of community, the love they share. But at the heart of every individual life is what happens in silence and solitude, when nobody else is around and one can focus so undistractedly on a single point that the world explodes into color.

Every time I look at Balarama Heller’s work from his 2019 series Sacred Place, I’m pierced by something as haunting as a single plucked note in the dark. It’s as if he’s freed the inner life of all its clutter and discovered the one pure detail that can carry the spirit into a clearer, more elevated world.

I’m also, of course, intrigued by the artist’s name, which I don’t know where to place; it’s as universal in its way as the lamp, the fire, the boat, the joined arms he gives us in these portraits of what I take to be radiant simplicity. Heller, I gather, grew up across the United States in the 1980s, as part of the Hare Krishna movement, a blue-eyed American boy bearing an exotic foreign name and raised among the parallel realities of the counterculture. While his contemporaries were growing fluent in TV and the NFL, he was coming of age in the thick of collective devotion, with all its trials (and its stubborn sense of something better).

Balarama Heller, Purity and Ego, 2019

Days before he was born, his young mother fled a commune in a Volkswagen bus, not knowing how to drive. One of his ex-stepfathers served time in prison for robbing seven banks, another as an accomplice to murder. Balarama arrived in elementary school with a shaven head and a determination to change his first name (for a while) to Paul. Yet one result of this itinerant life is that this white-skinned American who was raised within Hinduism can find something in an Indian place of worship that someone like myself, born of two Hindu parents from India, with an Italian first name and little knowledge of the culture and customs of my forebears, might never see.

On Heller’s second trip to Vrndavana, a place of pilgrimage for the Hare Krishna movement southeast of Delhi—by now he’d left the faith himself—what he caught was not the particulars of one tradition but the tonalities, the shadows (the beauty) of them all. This city of temples is a center of worship of the god Krishna, who is said to have grown up there. But what Heller gives us is something much more penetrating and transporting and truer to his own spiritual location now: a portrait of the devotion that lies beyond every name and destination.

Balarama Heller, Reign, 2019

Many of his images were taken between three and six o’clock in the morning, when the devout get up to pray because the boundaries between material and spiritual worlds are said to be especially porous; having been trained to access ecstatic trance states through chant, amid elaborate rituals designed to illuminate the divine within everything, this photographer gives us a tree, a foot that seems to glow with the poetry of something beyond. We all find places—in love, in nature, in sleep—where, as Heller quotes Joseph Campbell, “Eternity shines through time.” This work speaks to me of a soul that has broken free of a single doctrine so as to be responsive to one and all.

In Japan, where I live, and where people likewise gravitate toward an undisturbed attention that allows even the smallest detail to open up a universe, they say that poems, texts, and images of the spirit resemble a finger pointing at the moon. I look again at the ladder, the bell, the flames, even the plastic bag that Heller (who was once embedded with a Sufi order in Istanbul) observes with the exquisite care of a classical miniaturist, and I realize: even everyday objects acquire an almost numinous power when seen clearly and alone in the dark. In the quiet rapture Heller passes on to us, at once mysterious and transparent, I see both the finger and the heavenly bodies to which every soul at its most fortunate returns.

Balarama Heller, All is One, 2019

Balarama Heller, Empathy Test, 2019

Balarama Heller, Offer Nothing, 2019

Balarama Heller, Wrath of Sorrows, 2019

Balarama Heller, Dilation, 2019. All photographs from the series Sacred Place
Courtesy the artist

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 241, “Utopia,” Winter 2020, under the title “Sacred Place.” Read more or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue. An online exhibition of Balarama Heller’s Sacred Place will be on view on Artsy through March 10, 2021.

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Published on January 27, 2021 10:34

A Three-Volume Book Becomes a Testament to Mary Ellen Mark’s Career

“Mary Ellen would never have made this book,” Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark’s husband and collaborator of more than thirty years, writes in an essay accompanying The Book of Everything, the three-volume collection of the photographer’s life’s work recently published by Steidl.

After Mark died at age seventy-five, in 2015, Bell imagined a book that would truly encompass the “everything” of her tremendous output, including her photographs of children in China, Chicago, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and North Carolina; of circus performers and teenage runaways; of sex workers in Mumbai; and of film sets and drag queens and coal-mining families and twins and celebrities. The result is an affecting testament to the vast scope of Mark’s vision and to the immersive devotion with which she approached the people she photographed.

Mary Ellen Mark, Couple kissing at Pro–Vietnam War demonstration, New York, 1968

“It was a mystery to see how unsure she was about her work,” Bell said of the times when Mark would emerge from hours of solo editing and ask for his take on the grease-penciled selects on her contact sheets. “Even when we were working out on the street or in a room, I’d often see her take a great frame and say so. But she would always say, ‘Oh! I don’t know.’ I think she spent her life wondering if she would ever get the elusive iconic frame.”

In 2016, Bell began to pore over more than two million images, a process that turned up resonant and thrilling discoveries, some dating to the early 1960s, when Mark was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and traveled to New York, sleeping at a Bowery hotel where some of the seasonal Santas she photographed also stayed, and others from her 1965 travels to Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. Bell recognized flashes of her “wicked sense of humor” in pictures of British workers on holiday at Brighton Beach. And how, in frames of a teenage beauty contest in Fort Lee, New Jersey, or of a couple at a Rhode Island diner, Mark’s seemingly simple photographs inevitably produce the epiphanic effect of short fiction—fixed on their protagonists, surrounded by a concise arrangement of minor, yet telling details. Mark was an “angel of truth,” her friend the writer Isabel Allende once observed.

Mary Ellen Mark, Bride and groom, Lafayette, Louisiana, 1972

Bell was struck by two photographs he’d never seen, of a young bride and groom on their wedding day in Louisiana, 1972, the groom appearing suddenly much older in the second image as he takes a deep drag of a cigarette. “The sparse table with paper cups and straws. The electrical outlet on the wall. A dollar bill in her veil. The bride looking directly at Mary Ellen,” he noted, describing an indelible exchange that “is replicated throughout her life’s work. It is a caught moment that tells a story.”

Mark’s ability to instantly establish those relationships is evident in the many fragmented interviews, letters, and journals that are included in The Book of Everything. “When you had Mary Ellen, she was yours,” says Justin Reed Early, one of the teenagers in Mark’s Streetwise photographs of Seattle runaways in the 1980s. “She was your focus, you were her focus, and that was something that was very special about her. When you engaged with her it was real.” Portraits of Mark by Peter Beard, Jack Garofalo, and others, which emphasize her commitment to the exchange between photographer and subject, are also interspersed throughout the volumes.

Even when she was on the other side of the camera, Mark gave genuinely of herself. It was this expressiveness that caught Bell’s eye in 1980. He and Mark met on the set of Miloš Forman’s film Ragtime (1981), where Mark was hired to make photographs. Almost immediately, Mark and Bell became partners in life and work. In 1983, they began a pivotal series of works: Mark’s haunting book Streetwise (Aperture, 1988), a raw and empathetic portrait of the thirteen-year-old Tiny and her fellow teen sex workers and drug addicts on the streets of Seattle; the follow-up, Tiny: Streetwise Revisited (Aperture, 2016); and Bell’s accompanying films.

Mary Ellen Mark, Dispensary, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, Kolkata, India, 1981
All photographs © Mary Ellen Mark

One of the more unusual discoveries Bell unearthed is the recurring appearance of Mark’s own hand, which Mark photographed again and again, in the foreground of streets and scenes all over the world. Bell initially noticed it in one of a ferry terminal in Turkey in 1965. “At first, I thought it was an accident,” Bell said. “I marked the frame as it was unlike anything I had seen on her contact sheets. “I later came across more frames—some accidental, others I thought intentional. In these it became clear to me this was a deliberate frame to mark this moment in her life.”

Bell and Sonya Dyakova, the book’s designer, used some of these photographs of Mark’s hand throughout the book to illustrate the passage of time, reflecting the chronological sequence. In the opening pages of The Book of Everything, there is a picture from Yugoslavia, made in 1975, in which Mark’s hand, covered in silver rings, reaches toward a black cat that is lazing on a street but visibly drawn to the photographer, as were nearly all the people and animals Mark encountered. In one of the book’s last images, from 2011, Mark’s hand appears in focus against a blurred swimming pool. Her skin is lined and wrinkled with age, and her hand is so thin the stacks of rings are loose on her fingers. Yet here is evidence of the artist considering her own place in the worlds she photographed—the impression they made on her, the deep imprint she left behind.

“Her life’s work is a force to be reckoned with,” Bell said. “Mary Ellen brought to us what she saw along the way.”

Mary Ellen Mark: The Book of Everything was published by Steidl in 2020. This article was originally published in Aperture, issue 241, “Utopia,” under the column “Backstory.”

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Published on January 26, 2021 08:16

How Alice Rose George Shaped a Pivotal Era in Photography

Perhaps the clearest picture of Alice Rose George, beloved editor, curator, teacher, and poet, who died on December 22, 2020, in Los Angeles at the age of seventy-six, can be seen through her own eye, connecting—as she so innovatively did in the books and magazines where she made her mark—all the seeming and revelatory contrasts of her life.

George’s mother was an accomplished pianist who taught her daughter to play Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin; her father, who called her “Sweetie Pie,” liked to sing her the 1919 song “Alice Blue Gown,” about a girl heading to town in her silk dress. After George left rural Mississippi in the 1960s, she whittled her nickname down to “Pi,” got a job in the photo department at Time and, eventually, landed the extremely New York City address of 1 Fifth Avenue—“It was impressive, and so were the drinks, which were stiff,” recalled Jim Goldberg, one of the many photographers she either mentored, taught, edited, or otherwise worked with in her lifetime.

George helped shape a pivotal visual era in publishing. “It was the eighties, a time when magazines were king,” said Catherine Chermayeff, now director of special projects at Magnum Photos, whom George hired when she worked at Fortune. “I didn’t have women as role models who had important jobs. Alice was magical to me; she had a very confident eye, which I respected and copied.”

Mitch Epstein was among the unlikely photographers George commissioned to shoot business stories at Fortune—along with Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Duane Michals, and Gilles Peress—prioritizing art over technical expertise. George sent Epstein to shoot a story on nuclear power plant control rooms. “It didn’t matter to her that I had no experience shooting industrial environments, and no lighting prowess,” he said. “She was the rare picture editor who appreciated photographers for their idiosyncratic sensibilities.”

Just prior to her job at Fortune, George was photo editor at the short-lived but influential Geo; she would go on to work for Magnum Photos and Details, and as publisher of the literary magazine Granta, and she was an instrumental consultant for other publications, including Aperture magazine. She curated a series of books for Damiani, consulted for private collections, and edited or coedited five books of photography, among them Hope Photographs (1998) and Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs (2002), an 864-page celebration of the city which grew out of a grassroots exhibition George organized with Peress after the 9/11 attacks.

I must have met Alice Rose George around 1999. This was at DoubleTake, another short-lived but deeply influential magazine, a literary and photographic quarterly housed at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. At DoubleTake, words and images were seen as collaborative equals—neither existing to literally depict the other. Even as a young intern, this was exciting to me; and while I was officially working with the fiction editor, I wanted to learn about everything. When Alice came to town, I was allowed to sit in on a couple of her marathon editing sessions—Polaroids of various sequences, prints spread all over the floor of the photo office, lunches ordered in, as Alice, soundtracking these scenes with her infectious laughter, unearthed incongruous, perfect connections in work by both famous and almost totally unknown photographers. In those brief encounters and in the pages that emerged, I witnessed how Alice, the poet, was able to see photographs as texts, words as pictures.

In the last year of George’s life, her partner, Jim Belson, witnessed those same layouts on the table at home in New York and, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, in Los Angeles. Photographers continued, as they had always done, to send her their work. “She had this uncanny vision about sequences,” Belson told me. He and George had first fallen for each other in 1975 at a reading on the Upper West Side, reconnected in the mid-’90s, but they lived on opposite coasts and lost touch. Eight years ago, on a trip to New York, Belson was sitting in Washington Square Park, when he impulsively looked up George online and sent her an email, unaware that she was still living half a block away. “Now I know why I created that website,” she said when they were finally reunited.

George was a writer first and a raw and visceral poet always, even and especially when it came to photography. George’s poems—collected in Ceiling of the World (1995) and Two Eyes (2015)—appeared in Bomb, the Paris Review, and the Atlantic. In “What Is Beautiful,” the title’s question turns explicitly to the relationship between words and images:

Later, pages turned down, she said,
“It is words.” The most beautiful
thing in the world. “But they aren’t visual.”
“Yes they are.” Without meaning to
he slammed the book shut, started a fire.
They sat face to face.

Here, friends and colleagues, editors and photographers remember Alice Rose George.

Alice Rose George and Jörg Colberg at the Camera Club of New York, December 8, 2011
Photograph by Daniel Reuter

Melissa Harris, editor-at-large at Aperture Foundation

Alice was remarkably generous. She was generous with young photographers, and she was generous with her colleagues and collaborators.

We met sometime in the 1990s, a few years after I joined Aperture, but it wasn’t until later, when we became neighbors in the Village, that we really got to know each other. Over long dinners at the Knickerbocker, we discussed photography, but also her first love, poetry, as well as music, and her Mississippi roots. There was something charmingly Southern belle-ish about Alice—the grace in her gestures, the lilt in her voice—which became wonderfully apparent to me when I once saw her bantering with William Eggleston. And she had street smarts along with a full-throttle laugh. Occasionally, we ran into each other in Washington Square Park—Alice walking her Shiba Inu, Iko, and me walking my Lhasa Apso, Ella. Sometimes, the two of us would see Mary Ellen Mark on her regular walk around the park with her husband, Martin Bell. Given Mary Ellen’s over-the-moon-ness for dogs, those serendipitous occasions were especially festive.

Alice went out of her way to help emerging photographers, and to advance the medium in which she had invested so much of her heart, mind, and time. Countless photographers went to her for her fine eye, and she helped edit and sequence their projects. Because of her open spirit, how much work she saw and, most importantly, how much I respected her sensibility, when I became Aperture magazine’s editor-in-chief, I invited her to join the editorial advisory board (which later evolved into a stellar group of contributing editors). It was largely because of Alice’s involvement with us, and with Howard Stein’s remarkable organization Joy of Giving Something, that Aperture was able, for the very first time, to commission large-scale photographic stories. We published the first of three commissions—British photographer Jason Florio’s exploration of the “new” Libya—in 2004. Supporting a photographer’s dream project was something we’d always hoped to do, but had never had the means to until then. Without Alice, this unique opportunity would not have been possible. We will always be grateful to her.

Mitch Epstein, Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant, Pennsylvania, 1983
Courtesy the artist

Susan Meiselas, photographer and president of Magnum Foundation

Alice had what I called an “authored eye.” She challenged the kind of old magazine photojournalistic framework that meant hiring people to illustrate the ideas of the world as the powers that be wanted to present it. Early on, she understood this shift. You see an expression of it in her work at Geo and Granta, for instance, and in so many books and exhibitions, and her work in supporting collectors.

Fred Ritchin, dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography School, New York

Being a picture editor could be somewhat of a grim business due to the pressure of deadlines and the harrowing photos one often had to look at. Being a picture editor in the 1970s, when I first met Alice, was an extraordinary and impactful position, given the renaissance in photojournalism that occurred in the years after the weekly Life magazine went out of business. Alice was prominent in the field, a major force and a leader, empathetic and open to new ideas.

In 1978, she and I both applied for picture editor positions at Geo and the New York Times Magazine. She got the job with Geo, and I went to the Times. Our paths crossed and we remained friends. She held many positions at major publications, but I remember her especially for her continuing generosity with photographers, helping them to edit their personal projects, often, as I understood it, simply out of friendship. She continued to write poetry, and she began to teach, finding a new equilibrium, even as the industry in which she had played so much a part had constricted. I will miss her laughter, her energy, her warmth, and her discerning eye. She helped to define an era.

Fortune magazine photography department, 1983. From left: Philip Gefter, Alice Rose George (seated), Janice Pikey, Elizabeth Krist, Catherine Chermayeff, and Maureen Benziger. Photograph by George Lange

Philip Gefter, author and photography critic

I worked with Alice at Fortune in the 1980s. Fortune had a tradition of using photographers well—including Margaret Bourke-White in the 1930s, and Walker Evans as picture editor in the 1950s. I felt a kinship with Alice, as we shared a similar visual sensibility and a mutual intention to advance that august tradition in photojournalism in a way that would take the history of photography forward.

Alice established a periodic photographic feature called the Fortune Portfolio, a platform for visual documentation and storytelling and an opportunity to allow photographers to do in-depth picture essays. The range was broad and a lot more fun than one would expect from a sober business publication: one, for example, was about the construction of satellites that were being sent into orbit at the beginning of the technological revolution; another chronicled the shoot for the first MTV video with Madonna in Venice. Alice would go to battle with the editors to secure ten pages for the pictures, if necessary. She was a champion of photography. She had imagination, spirit, commitment, and a vision.

Nan Goldin, photographer

I can’t imagine the photo world without Alice. She was one of the pillars. She gave me my first commercial job at Fortune in the ’80s, photographing Paul Newman at the Detroit Grand Prix. She was shocked that I didn’t have a credit card or a driver’s license, but she understood my lifestyle. We always had fun together in and out of bars. She’ll be much missed.

Jim Goldberg, spread from the maquette of Raised By Wolves, 1995
Courtesy the artist

Jim Goldberg, photographer

Alice was part of a group of people I would send maquettes to when I was working on what would become the book Raised by Wolves (1995). She would talk about picture relationships and how images could elicit thoughts and memories and stories, and the way I was using text in combination with photographs. I think she felt aligned with that, and also with this idea of playing with truth and playing with documentary. I think that’s what she liked about words—that they could be open and not didactic.

Alec Soth, photographer

Every year, I looked forward to seeing Alice as a fellow faculty member in the University of Hartford MFA program. Alice was worldly and cosmopolitan, but her Mississippi roots ensured she was equally warm and easygoing. She was also funny as hell. She never let me forget the time I managed to get us wildly lost in Connecticut while attempting to bring her back to her hotel in downtown Hartford. Recently, I spent time with Hope Photographs, a book Alice edited in 1998 along with Lee Marks. It feels appropriate to mark Alice’s passing with this book’s spirit of hope and gratitude.

Alex Harris, Camposanto, El Valle, New Mexico, 1986
Courtesy the artist

Alex Harris, photographer

Alice entered our lives at just the right moment in 1995, here in North Carolina, to help us create and launch DoubleTake magazine and to edit books under the DoubleTake imprint. It is one thing to edit a monograph, but another altogether to create a mosaic of disparate voices—this was Alice’s specialty—to delight us and engage our imaginations.

For a magazine devoted equally to the written word and visual image, where writers and photographers had equal weight to wander and wonder, it made sense that DoubleTake would turn to Alice, who brought her poet’s eye to her work as our photography editor. As a poet, Alice believed in the power and necessity of words, but she also knew the world is more complicated than anything you can say about it. That’s where Alice—and photography—came in.

Alexa Dilworth, publishing and awards director and senior editor of CDS Books at the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University

I liked Alice a lot; she was dry and easygoing and smart and irreverent. I was the managing editor of DoubleTake, and I was working from home and both of my kids were with me (they were maybe two and four—some deeply needy age), and I must have been on a landline with a very long cord, as I was in the bathroom with the door locked talking to Alice about page proofs. I had gotten into the bathtub and had pulled the shower curtain across (like that would help with muffling sounds!). The kids were banging on the door and screaming for me to come out—it was one of those standard working-mother squeeze plays. I was going to go check on them, and had asked Alice to hold, when she said, “Wait. If they’re knocking down the door, we know they’re alive, so let’s keep working until they go quiet.” We both laughed pretty hard at that. We kept going through the pages with a nonstop din in the background.

Lisa Kereszi, Amelia Undressing, New Orleans, 2001, from the book Fantasies (2008)
Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery

Lisa Kereszi, photographer and critic and director of undergraduate studies at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut

We met two years after I graduated from college in the late ’90s, when I had begun working as Nan Goldin’s assistant. I don’t see how I would have had any monographs published without her steadfast support. She understood what I was trying to do with the joining of two bodies of work (strip-club interiors and New Burlesque dancers) in the book Fantasies (2008), and understood that it was not a documentary project, but a poetry of juxtaposition offered up to the viewer. I otherwise would have felt a bit off-base or just plain wrong in combining the two, but she felt strongly that it worked on many levels, which gave me the confidence to proceed.

Nelson Chan, Carl Wooley, Tim Carpenter, and J Carrier of TIS books

Alice was our teacher. More than anything, working with her made you tough. Her particular gift was for making a book work, more as a partner than as an editor, through close reading of the pictures. Alice would pore through stacks of prints as if putting together a puzzle; she had a formidable memory for many rounds of edits, the placement of a single picture. Her insistences were gentle but unambiguous.

We are publishers, in part, because of the example of Alice Rose George, but far more importantly, she’s the reason we want to be better in everything we do.

Inscription on Alice Rose George, Ceiling of the World (1996)
Courtesy Elizabeth Krist

Elizabeth Krist, former photography editor at National Geographic

Dear Alice,

Do you remember?

My first story at Fortune, when you had me send Gilles Peress to Oklahoma to photograph a piece of farm equipment called the Ditch Witch?

When I brought you my recently cut hair to Garrison as ammunition for your endless battles with the deer?

Asking me to read aloud your letter mourning our friend Ethan Hoffman at his memorial in New York, when you were living in Paris?

That I kept a photocopy of one of your published poems on the back of my office door for a year?

Our trip to Greece, when we were at the beach, and you and Gary desperately tried to distract Anna, who was seven, from turning around and seeing a fisherman killing an octopus behind her?

Cooking for me when I stayed with you at 1 Fifth that week I was supposed to be taking care of you after your surgery?

How excited I was to meet Jim, finally, when he came back into your life?

Do you remember?

Chris Killip, Girl with Hoop, 1987. Killipʼs photograph was included in Alice Rose Georgeʼs book Hope Photographs (1998)
© Chris Killip Photography Trust

Duane Michals, photographer

In her sweet little Alice blue gown, the belle of Mississippi floated into town.

Alice was a poet, the real thing, which meant she was vulnerable, felt deeply, and loved deeply. When I look at the blue sky, I think of Alice.

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Published on January 22, 2021 09:54

A Blazing Suburban Gothic Imagines the American West on the Brink

The first time I moved to California was in late summer 1998, when I was young and romantic enough to refer to the place by its nickname, “the Golden State,” and to believe that this was what people there called it. (They didn’t, it turns out.) Then fall began, ushering in the ban on the use of affirmative action in admissions at all campuses of the University of California; the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and the tule fog, which engulfed the Oakland Hills like a fuzzy grey mold. I left within the year, but not before I experienced my first earthquake and learned that the empty white skies in nineteenth-century photographs of Yosemite were casualties of overexposure—reminders of information lost more than records of light.

The second time I moved to California was in 2011, when I was old enough to recognize that its bounty and boom were largely the result of sunshine that casts noir shadows. On my departure from the East Coast, friends gave me a copy of James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia (1987), which I received as a portent rather than a gift. I started to second-guess my decision to move. By the end of my first year in LA, Southern California had descended into the driest period in its history. But I stayed. Every catastrophe I’ve since witnessed here affirms what historian Bernard DeVoto wrote in his 1947 essay “The West against Itself”: “The West has always been a society living under threat of destruction by natural cataclysm and here it is, bright against the sky, inviting such cataclysm.”

This line would be a fitting epigraph to Mimi Plumb’s new photobook, The White Sky (Stanley/Barker, 2020). Its title was chosen, in part, because it simultaneously conjures an assortment of threats—aridity, extreme heat, unease, malaise—that conditioned Plumb’s early life in California. Born in Berkeley and raised about twenty miles east, in Walnut Creek, Plumb has described her adolescence in Northern California suburbia as a kind of purgatory. Intellectually stifling and insulated from the prevailing counterculture movement of the 1960s, Walnut Creek felt physically inhospitable as well, a place susceptible to drought and fire.

“I remember the summers there,” Plumb told me. “Being outside was just so hard for me as a redhead. My tolerance for sun wasn’t good. I would get sick.” She escaped Walnut Creek at age seventeen, moving across the bay to San Francisco, where she enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and studied with Henry “Hank” Wessel. Work that she generated for photo classes, however, almost immediately drew her back to the Bay Area’s suburban enclaves. It was there, between 1972 and 1978, that Plumb made the photographs compiled in The White Sky.

“I wasn’t seeing my experience,” Plumb said, when I asked her what motivated this particular group of pictures. None of the popular depictions of suburbia available in the 1970s squared with her upbringing. Born into a progressive household and raised in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, she didn’t relate to sitcoms premised on benign middle-class family dramas, such as Leave It to Beaver. Plumb’s interest in suburbanization aligned her with several photographers associated with New Topographics—a term coined around 1975 that encompassed conceptual work concerned with the built environment and its increasing impact on the (primarily Western) US landscape at the time. But the cool, formal approach and banal aesthetic that characterized that movement doesn’t correspond to Plumb’s way of seeing. Much of her imagery, by contrast, could be considered “hot”—a word that Larry Sultan, her teacher in graduate school, was known to employ when assessing student work. Warmth and affection radiate from her photographs of adolescents, whom she catches sneaking cigarettes, hanging out at the Walnut Festival, and killing time. Plumb was a teenager when she began making these portraits; she worked in close proximity to the kids, gained their trust, and portrayed them in tightly composed close-ups. She clearly identifies and sympathizes with their existence in the innermost circle of hell that is suburbia.

Plumb compounds the oppressiveness of California’s cul-de-sac ecosystem with allusions to the relentless, unforgiving sun. Expansive, bleached-out skies dominate images selected for the book’s front and back covers. The persistent cycle of droughts, wildfires, and heat waves is also on display, signified in ecological devastation—cracked earth, barren trees, dry hillsides devoid of vegetation. Forget the well-worn myth of California as Eden, Plumb’s work seems to say. This is the land of smoke and fire.

“For some kinds of people, the West is something of a paradise,” DeVoto wrote in his 1946 essay “The Anxious West.” “Even they, however, show symptoms of psychic insecurity.” The publishers Gregory and Rachel Barker keyed into this idea as they edited The White Sky in concert with Plumb, whose work possesses what Gregory described as a “psychic weight.” The observation that several unusual, unnerving themes emerged among the photographs Plumb shared with them, combined with Plumb’s reverence for books with a cinematic feel—Gregory told me that Plumb cited Mark Steinmetz’s languid Past K-Ville (Stanley/Barker, 2018) as a touchstone—ultimately led the Barkers to conceive of The White Sky as a suburban gothic in the style of Stephen King.

Premised on a stranger who gets stuck in a small town where an ominous incident takes place (its mysterious details never revealed), the imagined, unwritten plot of The White Sky hinges on the stranger’s realization that something is amiss in these new surroundings. Adults vanish over time, children form feral gangs and overtake the streets, and the land that surrounds this town appears increasingly uninhabitable. Design choices reinforce that storyline and sometimes operate like fear cues, devices that build suspense in films: the broken-down Pontiac gracing the book’s cover, for example, presages the arrival of the stranger and explains how he ends up stranded in the town. Bold intertitles that open the plate sequence impart a sense of drama, which crescendos with images of people standing around in a parking lot, staring up at a blank sky for reasons unknown. The calculated deployment of variant images and the repetition of certain subjects, from lit cigarettes to kids in Halloween costumes, produce a narrative as circular as the “loops and lollipops” patterns of cul-de-sacs.

In the middle of the book, an enviable backyard pool transforms into a remnant of civilized suburban life when alternate views reveal that a fire has claimed the surrounding property, leaving only the pool—complete with submerged patio furniture—and a chimney intact. Adding to these unsettling moments, the book was released in 2020, a year that played like a horror film: the largest wildfire season on record in California’s history took place, while the global COVID-19 pandemic broke out and prompted a mass exodus of city dwellers, many of whom fled to the suburbs. Plumb’s brand of horror seems derived from her eerily prescient vision as a photographer. In her mind’s eye, the future is a nightmare.

But the past is no less disturbing for Plumb. Her first monograph, Landfall (TBW Books, 2018), opens with a succinct statement that posits the consequential relationship between memory and fear: “I remember having insomnia for a time when I was 9 years old. My mother told me there might be nuclear war.” Recurring events—the frequent duck-and-cover drills at school, countless nights spent worrying about her inability to sleep—helped perpetuate the terror she felt at the time. This fear resurfaced while Plumb was in graduate school at SFAI in the 1980s, prompting her to ask a question that propelled her: “How do you photograph a fear?” By then, her concerns had expanded to encompass the wars in Central America, the AIDS epidemic, and the danger that the Reagan administration posed for democracy. She ultimately identified the threat of climate change as the inspiration for Dark Days, a body of work made between 1984 and 1990 that, years later, was published, albeit fractionally, as Landfall.

Plumb characterized her earliest efforts to document the effects of climate change on the landscape in the 1980s as like “trying to describe something that really hadn’t happened.” Plumb began to “people the landscape,” as she put it. She photographed children cavalierly playing with military-grade weaponry. She depicted her then-husband building model tanks in a bunker-like room. Other figures, many of them engaged in equally mysterious and foreboding activities, appear in Landfall, but everyone remains unidentified and, therefore, anonymous; Plumb frequently photographed individuals from behind, protecting their identities and heightening the strangeness of their presence. She also amplifies the anxiety coursing through these images with her calculated use of flash, which punches like a chord progression in a post-punk Clash track, while also gesturing toward a nuclear meltdown. (Plumb told me the nihilistic punk slogan “No future” aligned with her worldview back then.) Did Plumb succeed in photographing fear, or at least in capturing its timbre? Stephen King, when asked if fear was the subject of his fiction in 2006, said, “What I do is like a crack in the mirror. … an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life.” If the threat of nuclear devastation constituted the point of origin for Plumb’s fear, then perhaps Landfall was the fracture that grew from it, an attempt to synthesize the chaos of feeling that had haunted her for years.

What she delivers in the space of that book is an imagined fallout: a molten globe discovered after a nearby house fire; a pier that has burst into flames; the charred remains of a lamp. Such images of conflagration and its aftermath present the American West as we expect it to look in the end, so it stands to reason that the work is sometimes described as “apocalyptic” or “postapocalyptic.” However, these terms obfuscate Plumb’s prelapsarian vantage point—she might anticipate the Fall, but it hasn’t necessarily taken place. Susan Sontag speaks to this idea in Illness as Metaphor (1978), declaring the apocalypse an “unreality,” and explaining it as “a permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms … and it doesn’t occur.”

Living, as we do, in this state of suspended Armageddon, it’s worth asking what Plumb’s books have to tell us on their belated publication, decades after the photographs they feature were made. Things look different now than they did in the early 1970s, when Plumb started photographing suburbanization, and the adverse ecological impact of sprawl remained relatively invisible. Walnut Creek and other so-called “edge cities”—urban centers that radiate outward from the metropolitan area—in Plumb’s native Contra Costa County hadn’t yet been fully developed, let alone transformed into “economic atom bombs” (to invoke a term used by the writer Mike Davis) with the potential to devastate the economies of “inner-ring suburbs” closer to San Francisco. To document the threat posed by suburbia and the myth of the American dream, as Plumb did in the 1970s and published in 2020 in The White Sky, is to recognize American exceptionalism itself as a catastrophe revealed in slow motion.

The photographer Janet Delaney, who has known Plumb and lived in the Bay Area for decades, told me that Plumb’s photographs in The White Sky “were more like notes, a memoir that you recreate … by working with the images that you have at hand.” As Plumb tells it, she began to revisit her archive and scan old negatives only after her retirement in 2014 from San Jose State University, where she taught photography for nearly thirty years. But another indisputable factor involves Plumb’s age and gender—she is part of a generation of women photographers in the Bay Area (Delaney among them) whose work didn’t garner much attention until recently, and who didn’t necessarily seek out publication opportunities over the years. In 2018, the release of Landfall offered a welcome introduction to Plumb’s work, though its contents reveal, as the California Sunday Magazine photography director Jacqueline Bates (who published Plumb’s work the same year) noted, “Mimi’s California isn’t a welcome place for new beginnings.”

People “come to California to die,” Nathanael West wrote in his 1939 novel The Day of the Locust. To live in California is to believe that disasters are not only probable—they are inevitable. California’s seasons have names (“fire,” “dry,” “fog,” “wet,” even “mudslide”) that correspond to severe weather conditions with the potential to devastate the land. Its tectonic spine, the San Andreas Fault, could produce “the big one” at any moment, keeping Californians in perpetual suspense. Its extreme heat, the result of a harsh desert ecosystem and the reason for new climate catastrophes like hot drought, fuels the extreme fires of the Anthropocene that, according to Mike Davis, have “become the environmental equivalent of nuclear war.” There may be a perceived ease to life in California, but it belies a deep-seated unease. Residents here are instilled with an awareness of our precariousness—“beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent,” Joan Didion wrote in 1965. With Plumb’s books and the imagination of disaster they reflect, she shows us how to inhabit that edge, time and again.

Mimi Plumb’s The White Sky was published by Stanley/Barker in September 2020.

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Published on January 22, 2021 09:19

The Belated Celebration of the Kamoinge Workshop

In 2016, on the occasion of an exhibition of the photographs of Louis Draper at Steven Kasher Gallery, Hyperallergic critic John Yau asked, “Does the Museum of Modern Art Even Know about This Great Photographer?” Apparently, they didn’t. Although Draper, who had died in 2002, was a prominent Black photographer and one-time president of the Kamoinge Workshop, there was little evidence that New York’s august Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had paid much attention. MoMA’s communications director tersely informed Yau that the museum did, indeed, own photographs by Draper and other members of the Kamoinge Workshop. But they had been consigned to what was unceremoniously called the “study collection”—work deemed “not appropriate for acquisition to the Collection.”

Much has changed since that time five years ago. But much has not.

Shawn Walker, Easter Sunday, Harlem (125th Street), 1972
© the artist and courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Going to see the exhibition Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I was reminded once again of the segregated histories of American cultural institutions, and of the ongoing struggle by people of color and other marginalized communities to achieve visibility and social justice. In recent years, museums have become battlegrounds over political representation and cultural narratives, and none more so than the Whitney. In 2017, Black artists protested the museum’s insensitive display of a white artist’s painting of the slain Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial. Then, beginning in 2018, Decolonize This Place and other activist artists staged demonstrations at the museum over the continued presence on the Whitney’s board of directors of Warren B. Kanders, owner of Safariland, a munitions firm that manufactures body armor for police and tear gas used against migrants and protesters. (Kanders has since resigned from the Whitney’s board.) In the last year, amid massive national protests organized by individuals and groups like Black Lives Matter over the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, the Whitney announced an exhibition titled Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change, which would have included works by Black photographers and activist artists. Unfortunately, the Whitney was forced to cancel the exhibition when it was revealed that the museum had scooped up the donated works cheaply at fundraising benefits.

James “Jimmie” Mannas, No Way Out, Harlem, NYC, 1964
© the artist and courtesy the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Given this heated context, it is easy to understand why all-too-white art museums are suddenly scrambling to stage exhibitions by Black artists. Still, whatever the backpedaling cause, it is a revelatory thrill to see a full-scale museum presentation of work by artists associated with the rarely exhibited Kamoinge Workshop, an extraordinary collective of Black New York photographers started in 1963 as an active part of the Civil Right struggle and the emerging Black Arts Movement. The 140 black-and-white photographs shown in Working Together at the Whitney feature a muted, slow-burn politics. The small pictures are quiet, almost meditative, and they deliberately sidestep the confrontational images often associated with Black struggles for political and psychic freedoms. Instead, these various images, by a range of photographers with individual differences in style and approach, focus on one thing: capturing affirmative representations of African American people in all aspects of daily life.

Organized by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, following that museum’s acquisition of the Louis Draper archive, this meticulously researched exhibition examines the ideas and visual themes of the long-running Kamoinge Workshop, a group of photographers who have been largely overlooked by museums until recently but are absolutely crucial to understanding postwar American photography. Working Together highlights the fourteen members of Kamoinge who formed the nucleus of the group between 1963 and 1980: Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Daniel Dawson, Louis Draper, Albert Fennar, Ray Francis, Herman Howard, James Mannas, Herbert Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Shawn Walker, and Calvin Wilson. (These fourteen photographers are shown in a wonderful group portrait made by Barboza in 1973—enlarged to mural size at the entrance to the exhibition—and in a mesmerizing series of filmed interviews recorded last year and viewable at the exhibition or online).

Herbert Randall, Untitled (Palmers Crossing, Mississippi), 1964
© the artist and courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

The Kamoinge Workshop was founded in 1963 by Roy DeCarava, one of the most prominent Black American photographers at the time. He had won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, collaborated with poet Langston Hughes on the much-acclaimed book The Sweet Flypaper of Life in 1955, and was included in the landmark 1955 MoMA exhibition The Family of Man. But he was also not afraid to object to what he regarded as art-world racism. In 1971, DeCarava was one of fifteen artists who boycotted the Whitney show Contemporary Black Artists in America, a substantial national survey exhibition planned to respond to protests against the museum’s biases and to highlight the exemplary achievements of Black artists. He later told the New York Times, “One of the things that got to me was that I felt that black people were not being portrayed in a serious and in an artistic way.”

DeCarava was a generation older than most of the other Kamoinge photographers, and he only led the group briefly, but he was instrumental in forming the collective’s aesthetics and political ideals. As the handful of photographs by DeCarava in Working Together demonstrate, he was unparalleled in his ability to make dark, luminous prints and to draw serious attention to the most inauspicious moments of African American street life. DeCarava directly influenced Louis Draper’s subtle photographic approach—as did W. Eugene Smith, for whom Draper worked as an assistant. Adopting DeCarava’s and Smith’s intense blacks and rich shadows, Draper was able to create extraordinary portraits, such as his extreme close-up of political activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1971. In Draper’s John Henry from the 1960s, a picture of a man confronting others on a stoop with his back to the camera becomes a powerful everyday drama delineated in black and gray tones.

Louis Draper, Untitled (Santos), 1968
Courtesy the Louis H. Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee

Draper was also Kamoinge’s spiritual and philosophical leader. In a brief history of the group written in 1972, Draper included the famous credo, “We speak of our lives as only we can.” This Black collective drew from their own cultural histories and life experiences. The group name, Kamoinge, emphasized what Draper called the “emerging African consciousness exploding within us.” In the anti-colonialist writing of future Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta, the photographers discovered the Gikuyu word kamoinge, defined as “a group of people acting together.” For the young artists, the word signaled their collective ambition and linked them to the global Pan-African movement, devoted to liberation struggles in colonized countries and to connecting widely dispersed communities of the Black diaspora. As many images in Working Together show, the ardently Pan-Africanist Kamoinge members traveled to newly liberated African countries, as well as to Guyana, Cuba, Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil.

Anthony Barboza, Pensacola, Florida, 1966
© the artist and courtesy the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

At home, most of the Kamoinge members were active politically, as suggested by views of demonstrations and portraits of leaders like Malcolm X, Pork Chop Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr. Some images, like the many that show American flags, or Barboza’s “Liberty” sign in Pensacola, Florida (1966)—in which the neon word has a falling letter E and a skewed R—seem to reach for relevance. But most Kamoinge photographers fashioned a form of political coverage that differed from mainstream photojournalism: they avoided images of racist clashes and stereotypes of Black poverty, drugs, and violence. Typical is Herbert Randall, who bravely traveled to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for Freedom Summer in 1964, a movement constantly threatened by vicious white mobs. “There will always be a need to document the struggle,” Randall says in the Whitney video. But, he adds, “Certain things I was going to do and certain things I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to do dogs growling.” So, he took hundreds of images of Black folks just hanging out, and voter registration drives led by white college students. One image depicts a young Black kid in sneakers, idling on a wooden staircase, simply staring dreamily into the distance.

Ming Smith, Sun Ra Space II, New York, 1978
Courtesy the artist

What is striking visually in the exhibition is the variety of approaches among the various photographers as to style and subject matter. Although Kamoinge members met regularly and reviewed each other’s work, the group was more collective than collaborative; they were fourteen individuals, and there was no group style, no “Black aesthetic.” Some works are near-abstractions, while others exemplify social documentary realism; some use seriality and conceptualism; many explore new approaches to portraiture and street photography. If there is one common stylistic feature, it is this ability to eke out an image from an almost all-black setting. This is particularly clear in the group’s many portraits of great jazz musicians in their darkened haunts, including Herb Robinson’s nearly opaque 1961 shot of Miles Davis, his features reduced to a few slashes of light. Ming Smith, the only woman in the group and one of its most inventive artists, was married to jazz saxophonist David Murray, for whom she made record album cover art; she also made dramatic pictures of Sun Ra performances in 1978.

While seeking acceptance from white institutions like MoMA, the Kamoinge photographers deliberately set their own rules. In Working Together’s substantial exhibition catalogue, art historian John Edwin Mason argues that this separatist impulse echoed the Black nationalist call by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam for African American people to “Do for Self.” This meant that as a minority within a white cultural sphere, Black people would have to establish their own institutions and artistic practices. Kamoinge industriously engaged in a wide range of outreach, distribution, and education as crucial aspects of their work to spotlight and encourage all Black photographers. They produced exhibitions, lectures, films, publications, and two portfolios of original prints (one was gifted to MoMA); much of this prodigious program is detailed through ephemera in Working Together’s display cases. Chief among these public efforts was the expansive Black Photographers Annual, a publication issued four times between 1973 and 1980 which focused on both contemporary and historic Black photographers. In 2017, Mason called it “a book that changed the history of photography in America.”

Adger Cowans, Footsteps, 1960
© the artist and courtesy the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

But why did most museums fail to recognize or validate the efforts and achievements of the industrious Kamoinge Workshop? One thought is that, in judging these photographs, white curators and critics were wielding normative cultural values and aesthetic criteria that simply did not apply. What is significant about the Kamoinge photographers is that they don’t fit in the received models and storylines of museum-based art history. What the Kamoinge photographers were doing was a striking counterweight, not only to prevailing tenets of photojournalism, but also to the ironic street photography of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand that MoMA celebrated (and canonized) in the New Documents exhibition of 1967. And, as the recent Brooklyn Museum exhibitions We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017) and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2019) have shown, there was a broad and complex movement by other Black artists at the time that was also largely ignored by white art institutions.

The Kamoinge Workshop photographs require a different way of looking, and adjusting any understanding of their meaning to consider their particular social context. As a group, these photographers created a visual and social model that was unique. Through their interests in alternative political and spiritual philosophies, their sensitivity to global artistic influences, their appreciation of the small moments of everyday life, and their willingness to explore different visual strategies to address political conditions, the photographers of Kamoinge forged a more nuanced and positive image of Black life, one that defied the conventions encouraged by mainstream publications and art museums. The works may appear more humanist than activist, but their point may be to dissolve that distinction. As Barboza told journalist Miss Rosen in 2020, “We were Black, photographing Black people and making statements about what goes on between society and Black people.”

Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through March 28, 2021. The exhibition will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and to the Cincinnati Art Museum.

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Published on January 14, 2021 12:17

The Counterculture Collective Who Wanted to Save the Earth

For more than a decade, the filmmaker Matt Wolf has won acclaim for his meticulously crafted documentaries that reveal lost histories through deep dives into media archives. His focus is often on radical outsiders whose projects range from the quixotic to the paranoiac. His first film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), is an exploration of the life and work of an avant-garde cellist and disco producer, while Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019) examines the fascinating obsession of its subject, who recorded live television news continuously from 1979 until her death in 2012.

Wolf’s latest film, Spaceship Earth (2020), traces the activities of a counterculture collective known as the Synergists from the 1969 founding of a sustainable ranch in New Mexico through the 1991 launch of Biosphere 2, a staggeringly ambitious attempt to pave the way for human life on Mars and to learn about how to live more sustainably on Earth by building a completely self-enclosed ecosystem inside a glass pyramid in the Arizona desert. Last summer, Wolf spoke to the architect and critic Julian Rose about the uncanny resonance of the Synergists’ efforts to give form to the future.

Biospherian candidates, 1990

Julian Rose: One of the fascinating things about Spaceship Earth is that the protagonists were obsessively documenting their own work as it progressed, producing countless hours of film and video that captured the projects they pursued. How did you first become aware of all that archival material, and how did your film evolve out of it?

Matt Wolf: My creative process involves searching for archives because I’m drawn toward hidden histories. Most of the preliminary research I do begins on the Internet. In this case, I came across these striking images of eight people in bright-red jumpsuits, looking like the band Devo, standing in front of a glowing glass pyramid, and I genuinely thought they were stills from a ’90s science-fiction film. But I quickly realized that, in fact, this structure was real—it was Biosphere 2—and that those people lived sealed inside of it for two years. And the more I looked into the history of the project, the more byzantine the story became. I learned that it had been the brainchild of this countercultural group called the Synergists, and I went to their commune-ranch in New Mexico called Synergia Ranch. When I arrived, I was brought into this temperature-controlled closet that had hundreds of 16mm films and analog videotapes and thousands of images. I learned that this group had been documenting their activity for nearly half a century, and that the material had never been used or seen.

Rose: The term archival usually suggests material that’s raw or unprocessed, but when I watched the film, I was struck by how highly authored, even artistic, much of the footage is—some of it looks like it could be experimental film or video art. Did that level of authorship complicate your own role as a filmmaker?

Wolf: My filmmaking involves working with personal archives—personal in the sense that they are outside established institutions or are even anti-institutional. I’m often looking at people who pursued complex and multifaceted projects, and they didn’t necessarily represent and explain those projects in ways that were accessible. I want to reappraise their legacies and act as a translator, helping to find the logic and coherence and vision behind this idiosyncratic activity, and to explore how it is often incredibly relevant to the broader world. For this film, the archival footage was literally shot from the perspective of my subjects, so I had a unique opportunity to visually translate their story beyond the flattened coverage in the news media.

Performance still from Spaceship Earth, 1990

Performance still, Theater of All Possibilities of Synergia Ranch, featuring Biospherians Mark Nelson and Jane Poynter, ca. 1990

Rose: There’s a fascinating tension that emerges between the footage shot by the subjects themselves and all the contemporary media coverage that you have woven into the film. At the time of the original experiment, Biosphere 2 was widely regarded as a spectacular failure, largely because of the way it was covered in the media. There were tremendous controversies about various technical problems and the ways they were solved—questions about secretly bringing materials into the structure and even pumping oxygen inside.

Do you think the project was seen as a failure because the vision it presented was too radical, too utopian, or simply because the Synergists couldn’t navigate the transition from their own personal documentation of the project to its depiction in the mass media?

Wolf: Well, there are two prongs to that question, one dealing with utopia and one dealing with the media’s impact on the project. The Synergists actually rejected the idea of utopia, primarily because it has historically been so associated with the imaginary and the impractical with failure. In his autobiography, John Allen, who coalesced the group, expresses how, in so many senses, the Synergists tried to create a place that doesn’t yet exist. So what I would say is that the underlying impulse behind this group was futurist rather than utopian.

Rose: But then that vision of the future couldn’t handle all the attention it attracted? The ethos of the project didn’t seem to survive translation into a kind of media spectacle.

Wolf: The title Spaceship Earth is a nod to the theatricality of the project as well as its ambitions. It’s obviously a reference to Buckminster Fuller’s seminal counterculture book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969). Fuller was hugely influential for the Synergists. But it is also a nod to the Epcot amusement-park ride called Spaceship Earth, which is a kind of cartoonish sci-fi architecture with animatronic vignettes that depict progress and the future. Biosphere 2 was really this potent mix of countercultural sustainability and theme-park theatrics.

When you pursue a project as ambitious and big as Biosphere 2, it’s inevitable that it is going to attract attention. It became a real mainstream, pop-culture phenomenon. I don’t think this group was equipped with the public-relations skills to manage that. And the experimental dimension of the project, with the eight inhabitants, called the Biospherians, sealed inside of the structure for two years, also stoked the voyeuristic tendencies of the public that later found their expression in reality television shows such as Big Brother and The Real World, and ultimately, of course, Survivor. You can’t separate the way Biosphere 2 was treated in the media from those broader cultural trends. In fact, when The Real World was released, in 1992, the New York Times even called it something like “MTV’s answer to Biosphere 2.”

Biosphere 2, 1991

Rose: Visually, the physical structure of Biosphere 2 is absolutely stunning— this vast, futuristic complex of crystalline glass prisms rising up out of the empty desert. But was the architecture part of the problem precisely because it was so spectacular, so monumental, and so symbolic? You have some beautiful passages in your interviews with the Synergists where they talk about Fuller’s key architectural invention, the geodesic dome, as a perfect model for their group because the struts individually are very light and not very strong, but you put them together and they become incredibly powerful—the sum is greater than the parts. The symbolism is almost too good.

Wolf: That’s like the motto of this film: the symbolism is almost too good.

Rose: A great subtitle if it’s not too late! But you see where I’m going. Did the architecture place an impossible burden on the project?

Wolf: There is a kind of Emerald City aspect to the complex, but I don’t think it’s all theatrical, or that it’s responsible for the demise of the project. I find the architecture to be inspiring and bizarre and futuristic and speculative in terms of science fiction. To me, the aesthetics of it is what makes the project magnificent. That’s one of the words that Linda Leigh, one of the Biospherians, uses. Part of the Biospherians’ perspective is that they fell in love with the biosphere that they had created. There is an intoxicating appeal to the architecture as well as the ecological design inside, and if they fall in love with Biosphere 2, it’s instructive in the sense that we all have to fall in love with the biosphere. That’s what needs to happen for us to create a sustainable future.

Rose: I like the rejoinder that an aesthetic dimension is ultimately what makes it an inspiring project, which might suggest a way of rethinking the fate of utopia as a concept in architecture, where it has almost become a bad word. The thinking goes that modernism did not succeed in large part because it had utopian aspirations that were utterly misguided, and that because of those misguided aspirations, the movement has to be rejected wholesale. Modernism set out to transform the world for the better, and instead it left many things the same and made some things much worse. So when you hear someone describe modernism as utopian, that’s almost a coded reference to its failure. But, as your film shows, there is still so much that can be learned from a subtle, contradictory, and complex project—these projects are still worth studying, and we shouldn’t collapse our understanding of them into a binary of success or failure.

Wolf: The kernel of utopian aspiration is meaningful, and we shouldn’t shut down that aspiration because it is an engine of change. I think it’s quite cynical to dismiss the project of utopia wholesale even if it’s historically proven to fail in empirical terms. And again, I think that the architecture of Biosphere 2 did constitute an achievement in many ways. From a technical perspective, it was incredibly sophisticated—it was perhaps the most airtight structure ever built at that time. The architecture of Biosphere 2 is really the ultimate expression of ecotechnics—to use the Synergists’ term for the combination of ecology and technology— because to make it, engineers and ecologists and architects and experts from a wide variety of fields had to work together to create a system that could support life.

The Counterculture Collective Who Wanted Save the Earth