Aperture's Blog, page 60
December 28, 2020
Aperture’s Best Photography Features of 2020
This year, we revisited Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, considered how Native artists challenge the story of America today, and asked what it means to be a photographer in the age of COVID-19. Here are some of this year’s highlights in photography and ideas.
The Many Faces of Home in Japanese Photography
Messy, minimal, or melancholic? From Aperture magazine’s “House & Home” issue, these images show the myriad forms of longing for home.
The Inside Story of How Nan Goldin Edited “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”
From Aperture magazine’s “Ballads” issue, Elle Pérez speaks with Marvin Heiferman about the making of an iconic photobook.
11 Photographers on How to Finish a Body of Work
When should you bring a photographic project to an end? LaToya Ruby Frazier, Justine Kurland, Alec Soth, and more reflect on how to know when a series of work is complete.
Dorothea Lange and the Afterlife of Photographs
An exhibition reveals how Lange’s concern for the dispossessed has never been more relevant.
A Portrait of an Iranian Surfer Reveals Western Fantasies of the Middle East
The Italian photographer Giulia Frigieri wanted to profile a young Iranian surfer. But there was more to the story than her images revealed.
What “Greater New York” Got Right about Photography in the Age of Instagram
In 2010, photography was at a turning point. How did an ambitious survey at MoMA PS1 anticipate a generation of artists who define the field today?
How to Be a Photographer Right Now
Three artists confront how COVID-19 has changed their lives and work—and how they see the world.
The Queer Black Artists Building Worlds of Desire
From Aperture magazine’s “Utopia” issue, in these photographs, queer acts and communal yearning flourish beyond the confines of mainstream gay culture.
Deborah Willis Thinks the Photobook Can Be Transformative
In Issue #018 of The PhotoBook Review, the renowned scholar speaks about her early career in photography, confronting racism in publishing, and why books about Black life are vital.
What Can Artists and Communities Learn from Historic Collections of Native Photography?
From Aperture magazine’s “Native America” issue, Wendy Red Star and Emily Moazami on images, ancestors, and the archives of the National Museum of the American Indian.
Yurie Nagashima’s Self-Portraits Interrogate the Male Gaze
In her latest photobook, the Japanese photographer discusses self-portraiture as a radical feminist gesture.
Why Photo Editors Need to Hire Black Photographers Every Day
How can we commit to making photography more Black, far into the future?
Subscribe to Aperture magazine and never miss an issue.
December 22, 2020
The Queens Photographer Building a Legacy for His Friends
In one of Dean Majd’s photographs, a young man slowly spits into an empty film cannister. The photograph is drenched in ruby red. The shot is close, close enough to make you squirm at the sight of the gob unspooling. The spit makes the photo harsh, but the red makes it soft, bleeding the subject into the surrounding environment in a hazy wash of neon light. It’s an image that is crude, an image that is beautiful. Majd’s ongoing series Hard Feelings doggedly walks this line between two sensations.
Majd started Hard Feelings in 2016. The arena is the skateboarding and graffiti scene in Queens, and the photographs are mostly of men. Men sprawled on cluttered beds or clutching a bloodied hand; men who have hurt themselves; men softening into a pool of water or a pool of light. “There’s something about the men that I photograph—there’s both a sensitivity and a hardness,” Majd tells me during a call over FaceTime. “As men, we’re not supposed to express our feelings, we’re not supposed to act a certain way.” But he and his friends are the opposite, they “do all that.” Majd’s friends cry with their faces in full view of the camera.
Dean Majd, karim (reborn), 2018He met many of these men several years ago, after he had become disconnected from the skateboarding scene, focusing on his studies in international relations and creative writing at City College of New York, in Upper Manhattan. He’d reunited with an old friend, James, at his local skatepark in Astoria. A week later, James suddenly passed away. Majd was the last person to photograph him. In the wake of this loss, Majd met James’s friends, a tightknit community of skaters and artists. “It just happened naturally that we all became super close,” he says. “And they were willing to be photographed.”
Traces of loss flit through Hard Feelings. James, he says, is always “hovering over the images.” In the ruby-drenched portrait spit (2017), the subject is shirtless. On his lower abdomen is a just-visible tattoo of the letters “DE” in bubbled graffiti styling. The full word is “DECE,” in homage to James’s nickname and graffiti tag, the art he used to mark his place.
Majd used his father’s hand-me-down Olympus point-and-shoot as a kid, photographing parties and concerts. But he didn’t think of becoming a professional photographer. His parents are immigrants from Palestine, and Majd’s imagined career choices were shaped by the classic first-gen decree: doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Still, his passion for photography persisted, and at around age eighteen, he came across Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture, 1986). “That was the book for me,” he said. “That opened everything.” Majd fell in love with Goldin’s breathtakingly unguarded shots of her New York community. Spending time with Goldin’s work has sharpened his own artistic purpose: “to build a legacy for my friends, for Queens.”
Dean Majd, bohemian rhapsody, 2017Since then, Majd has stayed steady with his photographic origins: his camera, almost always, is a point-and-shoot. Compact, fast, discrete. “If someone is off guard,” he says, “in order to keep it as authentic as possible, I need to be quick with it.” Unmediated moments are critical, and Majd catches his friends in visceral, vulnerable flashes. In bobby and caleb (bear hug) (2018), one young man clutches another, his expression riveted by private sadness. A glaze of green tones covers the photograph, underscoring the unease that likely prompted the embrace. rissa (2018) is an arresting departure, in which Majd turns his lens on one of the women in his friend group; her black eye is painful to witness, but the camera’s gaze is one of care, and her own is both candid and trusting. self-mutilation (2018), a photograph of a friend’s arm lined with self-inflicted cuts, is bathed in warm hues. Majd’s documentation is uncensored and frank, but never cold or stark.
As with those early rolls, Majd seldom appears in the frame, but self-portraiture is a difficult muscle he is committed to working. “There are instances where I’ve been with people in the darkest times of their lives,” he tells me. “It would be disingenuous to not do the same. If someone is offering themselves, in every aspect, to be photographed, I can only counter that by saying, I’m doing the same with myself.”
In one such self-portrait, the ruby-red lighting returns. Majd photographs his face from below, framed against graffiti-covered interior walls—perhaps he’s at a concert. Blurred, out-of-focus, his silhouette appears ghostly, intentionally indistinct from the constellation of graffiti tags that, one can imagine, different members of Majd’s community have inscribed over different seasons.
“This work began with a death,” Majd says. At the end of October, another loss: one of Majd’s close friends died unexpectedly. “He was someone that I photographed all the time.” Majd photographed him less than a week before his passing, just like he had James. Now, when Majd looks through Hard Feelings, he greets griefs past and present. “It’s hard to even call the people in my images ‘subjects,’ because this goes beyond a photographic relationship,” Majd says. “The people in my images are my family, my blood. I don’t know what my life would be without them. I love them deeply, and through that love, these images are made.” Born of hurt, laden with tenderness, Hard Feelings is a remembrance, a gathering place, a legacy for those he loves.
Dean Majd, freddy (hyper dark), 2019
Dean Majd, rissa, 2018
Dean Majd, dylan (baptism), 2019
Dean Majd, self-portrait (hard feelings), 2017
Dean Majd, blowout (zeke’s birthday), 2019
Dean Majd, spit, 2017
Dean Majd, self-mutilation, 2018
Dean Majd, dylan and eli (silhouette kiss), 2017
Dean Majd, self-portrait (acid tongue), 2019
Dean Majd, jacob (red ecstasy), 2019All photographs courtesy the artist
Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.
An Exhibition in Tucson Looks at the Things We Leave Behind
Where one artist collects, another deliberately erases and alters. On Halloween in downtown Tucson, Arizona, Etherton Gallery’s opening of El Sueño, an exhibition of Tom Kiefer’s photographs of migrants’ seized belongings and Alejandro Cartagena’s reconfigured found prints, was extended for seven hours—ten people at a time, maximum, a COVID-era measure that prompted small waves of drifting viewers. The exhibition takes its title from a larger presentation of Kiefer’s work earlier this year at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles (El Sueño Americano/The American Dream); it is given new context here, in the company of Cartagena’s work and a small selection of Mexican folk retablos, vernacular paintings on tin representing the trials of Catholic saints. Perhaps particularly for a visitor to the city—I was working just outside Tucson for several weeks, close to the Sonoran Desert, hyperaware of my own temporary existence there—the exhibition felt attuned to the paths we travel, the things we carry, the impressions we leave behind.
Cartagena’s slashed, cutout, altered, and recollaged found photographs suggest the images we discard, and those that remain. In other series of works, Cartagena—born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico—has often focused on hidden and unseen lives and the wide disparity between reality and myth. In Carpoolers (2011–12), he photographed workers riding in the backs of trucks to and from work. In A Small Guide to Homeownership (2005–20; featured in the “House and Home” issue of Aperture magazine and recently published as a photobook by The Velvet Cell), he placed images from previous series, including Carpoolers and Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities (2005–10), with found texts from guidebooks for potential homeowners, highlighting the profound gap between blithe propaganda and reality.
Alejandro Cartagena, Dismembered #30, 2019In Cartagena’s Dismembered and Faces series, from his larger project Photographic Structures (2017–19), rather than compounding images, he removes and alters them. He mines landfills and flea markets in Mexico City for snapshots and family photographs, which he then transforms with a sharp blade, slicing and discarding crucial elements of the picture. Faces become empty voids; entire bodies disappear from group photos. Elsewhere, white oval-shaped space hovers above groups of well-dressed people, impressions of souls. Sometimes, he manipulates the cut fragments, juxtaposing an outline of a face against a larger silhouette, like an eclipse.
We are in a world now where many of us have become somewhat accustomed to seeing only aspects of each other, whether on Zoom calls, or out in the world, faces partially obscured by masks. Cartagena’s reconfigurations remove what we think of as the most definitive physical identifiers (eyes, nose, and mouth, for instance); his rearranged leftovers resemble a dissection model of all the empty pieces that exist within us. In one reconstruction, a jaggedly cut-out head leaves a comet-like trail. Cartagena’s restructured photographs call into question their original constructs: how much a picture can tell us, and how lasting are the impressions we leave. As with all found photographs, part of the fascination is the mystery of why they ended up in a stranger’s hands. Why do we hold onto images? Why do we let them go? Seeing them torn apart and remade again, defaced and reincarnated, endows them with a mystic quality. Cartagena renders their absence visible.
Tom Kiefer, Billfolds and Wallets, 2014Tom Kiefer’s El Sueño Americano (2007–ongoing), centered on evidence rather than absence, occupies the larger gallery, bringing Kiefer’s project, which began in Southern Arizona, closer to its origins. Born in Wichita, Kansas, and raised mostly in Seattle, Kiefer worked as a graphic designer and, later, as an antiques dealer in Los Angeles. In December 2001, he moved to Ajo, Arizona, for a cheaper cost of living that he hoped would allow him to focus on his photographic work.
Ajo is a former copper-mining town, forty miles from the state’s border with Mexico—one of the most dangerous and deadly stretches for migrants coming north, a crossing through the Sonoran Desert that typically takes seven days on foot. Most of these journeys are necessarily invisible, but their stories play out vividly and painfully in Kiefer’s pictures. El Sueño translates to “the dream”—materialized in these taxonomic photographs of the objects carried by migrants and asylum-seekers from Mexico and Central America. Bibles and pocket knives. Water bottles and Snickers bars. Condoms and shoelaces. Floral handkerchiefs, backpacks, cans of tuna fish. Toothbrushes, gloves. A Mickey Mouse hoodie. Photographs, ostensibly of loved ones left behind.
Tom Kiefer, Water Bottles, 2015In 2003, Kiefer took a part-time job as a janitor at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility. He had no contact with the people who were taken there, he told me, but when he was given permission to transport the food items and donate them to a local food bank, he was astounded at all the other seized objects he discovered. Plastic hair combs. Wallets. Cell phones. A Hello Kitty backpack. An E.T. doll. A love letter—“Bianca quiero que sepas que te amado desde que tu, Conoci.” (“Bianca, I want you to know that I have loved you since I met you.”) All the things that agents had deemed either nonessential or “potentially lethal” were taken away from migrants and asylum-seekers about to be detained. Kiefer was haunted by them all.
With no way of finding the owners, he began collecting these items. Rosaries. Medication for depression. CDs. Baby shoes. Makeup compacts. For several years, he ferried them to a warehouse, cataloguing them, boxes and boxes, looking and thinking. “I knew I wanted to photograph them,” Kiefer told me, “but for a long time, I wasn’t sure how. A friend’s suggestion to depict them in the Sonoran landscape felt too heavy-handed.” Kiefer, whose artistic heroes include Walker Evans, was inclined to a straightforward approach. Instinctively, he began placing arrangements of similar objects against different colored backgrounds. Photographed collectively or singly, the compositions are graphically appealing. Then you draw close. The hopefulness of so many makeup compacts. The handwritten inscriptions in those Bibles. The Mötley Crüe card tucked in a wallet. The dirt and sweat stains on a T-shirt lettered “Blood Donor U.S.A.”
Tom Kiefer, Blood Donor, 2015All works courtesy the artists and Etherton Gallery, Tucson
Kiefer’s photographs of seized shoelaces and gloves disturbingly reminded me of exhibitions of shoes and gloves taken from Holocaust victims at Auschwitz. Kiefer was right to photograph these items simply. Within them is the mingled terror and desperation and hope embedded in the journeys of their unknown owners. (Eventually, he hopes an institution will collect these historical documents.) In 2014, Kiefer quit his job to begin photographing the items full-time, a process many years in the making. “I see them as sacred,” he said.
Leaving the exhibition, I again passed the wall of Mexican folk retablos near the entrance. In the nineteenth century, works like these were common in central Mexico. Here, they are shown in low light, as innocuous as they must have been in their original homes, talismans and guardians of the way in—and of the way out.
El Sueño: Tom Kiefer, Alejandro Cartagena, and a Selection of Mexican Folk Retablos is on view at Etherton Gallery, Tucson, Arizona, through February 6, 2021.
December 10, 2020
Dawoud Bey on the Photography World, Past and Present
Dawoud Bey is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. The subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, scheduled for April 2021, and a new monograph to be published by MACK, Bey began his career in New York in the 1970s, making evocative portraits in Harlem and Brooklyn. In the context of the Aperture Forward winter campaign, Bey spoke with Chris Boot, who is approaching the end of a ten-year term as executive director of Aperture Foundation, about the changes in the world of photography over the decade since the rise of Instagram and the iPhone.
Dawoud Bey, A Couple at a Main Street Bus Stop, Rochester, New York, 1989Chris Boot: Dawoud, I’m writing you on November 8, thirty hours or so after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris declared victory in the U.S. elections. It’s been an amazing couple of days; there has been such an explosion of joy and relief during these sublime, warm fall days here on the East Coast. I will never forget how yesterday and today felt. This is very British of me to ask, but how is the weather in Chicago? Is it all joy there too?
Dawoud Bey: Having this conversation at this moment feels like when the reset button has been hit, and just in the nick of time! With the pandemic now going into its ninth month unabated, and with no structure in place to mitigate it, it was feeling like an endless march over a cliff. Fortunately, that reign of gratuitous horror has come to an end, though there will be much work ahead—and the lingering fact that almost half the country voted to continue down that path to contend with.
It has been relatively balmy here in Chicago for this time of the year, with temperatures in the high sixties to mid-seventies, and the sun seemed to be shining just a little brighter after the election results came in. Folks were dancing in the streets in every neighborhood except one in Chicago, with forty-nine of fifty wards going for Biden. And of course, having Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president–elect brings an extraordinary air of expectation and possibility back to the country. So, things are good here for the moment, and we should all enjoy it, before getting back to the work of making the democratic project work for everyone.
Dawoud Bey, Odalys, Chadsey High School, Detroit, 2003Boot: Photography has always been dynamic, continuing to reinvent itself, artistically and in terms of its social role. Given the events of this year, do you think that 2020 might turn out to be a particular moment of transformation in our field and its story?
Bey: When I think about how to answer that, I think about the two primary ways in which I engage with photography, through my own practice as an artist and through teaching, both of which I’ve been engaged in for over four decades. My own practice is rooted in the moment that I came to photography, which goes back to the 1970s, when I started going out to look at photographs in an art context for the first time. And at that time, that meant going to see the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon at Marlborough Gallery, and encountering the photographs of Mike Disfarmer in a small exhibition at MoMA. I happened upon a Harry Callahan exhibition at the Met around the same time. I had previously encountered Roy DeCarava’s photographs in a copy of The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), but hadn’t yet seen those pictures on a wall, so their full impact hadn’t yet hit me, though they were on my radar.
I found all of these exhibitions by scouring the New York Times exhibition listings on Sundays, when my dad brought home the Sunday paper. I have no idea how I would have found this information otherwise. Exhibitions of photographs were not even ubiquitous at that time, so there were never more than two or three exhibitions listed on any given week. And as a very young Black man, I was acutely aware that I never encountered another Black person in any of the spaces where I was seeing these photographs.
Boot: What has changed since then?
Bey: Well, fast-forward to my young students today and the ways they both find out about photographers and how they make their own pictures visible in the world. Inevitably, it’s through the use of the computer or their phones, through Instagram and whatever other platforms they are looking at and using. For the most part, they never even see these pictures in the physical form of an actual photographic print. With the millions of photographs being posted on Instagram, I don’t even know how you find a particular photographer that you find interesting in that glut of online images.
My son works in the music industry, and he routinely finds artists and photographers that he wants to work with for different projects on Instagram. Again, I’m mystified as to how one navigates that platform with intention. So that’s one huge difference that I’m seeing. And yes, I do have my own IG page. Funny thing is, the first time I posted a picture on it, I got a text from my son in a matter of minutes telling me, “take it down . . . now!” Apparently, I was posting the “wrong” kind of picture on the page, and not using it the “right” way. I had to have my son—who is twenty-nine now—break down for me how I should be using Instagram and the relationship between IG and other social-media platforms. He lives and works in that space every day, so I never questioned his advice.
At this moment of the pandemic and online teaching, I’m teaching students online who are making work that I will likely never see physically, and—from what they tell me—will never exist as physical prints anyway. As much as I thought I was going to absolutely hate teaching online, I’m actually getting comfortable with it. Of course, one of the reasons I teach is to be able to remain current and have a conversation with what a younger generation of photographers are doing, and how they are thinking about their work and the field. They are still passionate about visualizing the world in pictures—which I now use as distinct from “photographs” which, to me, remain a description of a physical object—the world they are inhabiting, regardless of the tool.
Dawoud Bey, Four Children at Lenox Avenue, Harlem, 1977Boot: It’s fascinating that your son guides you—a great photographer of our time—in how to communicate on Instagram!
Bey: Well, it makes sense. He’s more the demographic for users of IG than I am. And in his case, as a director of online and social-media content at a major label, he works in social media for a Iiving, so his understanding of it is infinitely more sharply honed than mine. I suspect that my peers who are my age (who are photographers or “art and culture workers”) make up a less than a tiny percentage of the over one billion users in the IG space.
Boot: I feel like, as a result of the rise of the iPhone, above all, the beginning of the 2010s was characterized in our field by the question: what is photography now, what is it becoming? I recall the sense of opportunity for photography, above all, but it was threatening too. The question became a thread at Aperture, while we tried to understand this new landscape. We explored it with projects like the issue we used to launch the new design of Aperture magazine, “Hello, Photography” (Spring 2013), an optimistic assertion of the value of photography; the Aperture magazine issue we did with Magnum Foundation, “Documentary, Expanded” (Spring 2014); and Charlotte Cotton’s book Photography Is Magic (2015), among others. I think Photography Is Magic was the apotheosis of a distinct ontological moment in photography.
Bey: It’s an interesting issue, because the present never completely supplants the past, it drives it in unanticipated directions; like, history doesn’t implode, it expands. The “Hello, Photography” issue of Aperture magazine, for all of its heralding of a new moment of just what constituted photography, kind of hedged its bets with the inclusion of some decidedly conventional work (by Garry Winogrand, for example, and a few others), in addition to work that did begin to really reshape the picture-making discourse—formally, conceptually, and materially.
I still recall the uproar within the field in 2010 when Damon Winter’s iPhone pictures, made while he was embedded with troops in Afghanistan, appeared in the New York Times Magazine, setting off a debate about the veracity of the photographs, along with debates around the ethical use of the Hipstamatic app that Winter used with his iPhone. The field didn’t yet seem ready to accept the possibility of the iPhone as a serious picture-making tool. Those arguments seem quaint now, of course.
I think Photography Is Magic pushed the envelope even further by advancing work that, in some cases, challenged the notion of a photograph as a particular kind of material object. As an artist, I have to admit I was not always terribly interested in some of that work, but Aperture, long an important voice in the field, certainly did the necessary thing in trying to track these changes, and to help the photography-interested public make sense of these changes as they were taking place. It was also important to document this reshaping of the field and its expanding discourses on the printed and published page.
But we can look elsewhere, at that same historical moment, and find photographers setting up their tripods and loading film into their cameras to make work about that piece of the world that mattered to them, and making photographs that resonate for the viewer. So it’s a kind of elasticity, I think, that keeps expanding, without really snapping and losing its shape completely. One thing we do know is that, unlike other expressive mediums—say, painting, for instance—photography’s evolution has always been tied to the evolution of its particular technologies.
The two covers of Aperture, issue 223, “Vision & Justice,” Summer 2016. Photographs by Richard Avedon (left) and Awol Erizku (right)
Boot: I remember thinking at Aperture, in the mid-2010s, Now we can see the new shape of photography, we don’t need to keep asking what it is. So, what next? This was around the time of the early Black Lives Matter demonstrations. And because photography was so central to them—Black Lives Matter mobilized via evidence of police killings caught on cell-phone cameras and distributed virally on social media—at Aperture, we felt we had some responsibility to speak to issues of inequality in the U.S. By then, Aperture magazine had published the “Queer” issue (Spring 2015), so we had already begun looking at the evolving role of photography in society, and inviting a more diverse group of authors to feature centrally into the story. But it was “Vision & Justice” (Summer 2016), guest-edited by Sarah Lewis—which includes selections from your Birmingham Project (2012–13)—that became the most conspicuous landmark in our own evolution. (The issue is now in its fourth printing.) That was the start of a journey, and there was never any going back.
Since then, we have made part of our purpose to serve as a platform for more diverse voices and their contributions to our social imagination. I know we are just a small corner of this, and I don’t want to be overdramatic about it, but it feels like the effect of Black Lives Matter on photography in America has been absolutely huge, perhaps as big an influence as the launch of the iPhone.
Bey: Well, the field has never been monolithic, so I think it depends on which segment of the field you’re looking at. Certainly, the fact that everyone who has a phone is now a producer of images has been hugely impactful, and has created a major cultural shift in the past two decades. And in the hands of citizens who are witnessing—or are sometimes the very victims of—police violence, it has created a means for exponentially amplifying this type of racist violence in conjunction with social media, since it is social media that allows these images to become visible, even ubiquitous.
I would say it goes both ways. Photography has had a huge impact on the Black Lives Matter movement as a mass mobilization tool, through which huge numbers of people can see these acts of violence against the Black body on their phone or computer screens. What really amplified the effects of that fact was the COVID-19 pandemic, which basically forced everyone into confined social isolation in a way that much of their interaction with the world was, in fact, taking place on social media. Under these circumstances, with few of the day-to-day distractions that normally crowd our lives, these images became magnified tenfold, first with the harassment of a Black birder, Christian Cooper, in Central Park, threatened by a white female citizen; quickly followed by the images of a white father and son in a pickup truck on the back roads of Georgia hunting down Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, and then killing him while their friend, who followed in his own truck, filmed the entire incident for sport.
And then, finally, all of America got to see, on their screens while isolated at home, the images of George Floyd being killed in broad daylight, while a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, Darnella Frazier, filmed the footage on her phone. The extraordinary extent to which that brave young Black woman was able to stop, lift her phone, compose with a steady hand, and not flinch or shake, even as the police officer killing Floyd looked right into the lens of her phone suggests, to me, the ways in which people have been primed by the prevalence of images to be sophisticated producers of those images.
So, I think photography, and camera phones, has made people even more aware of the power of images which, in turn, has caused them to become more engaged producers, viewers, and responders to these images. The Black Lives Matter movement expanded exponentially during the pandemic, when that footage of Floyd’s killing was front and center on everyone’s screens in a way that was inextricable and undeniable. Frazier knew exactly how to make that footage go viral via social media. As a consequence, even more people—particularly non-Blacks—were forced to respond viscerally to these images by taking to the streets, demanding the police be held accountable and that Black Lives indeed do matter. So, yes, images are very much prevalent and much more catalytic to the Black Lives Matters movement.
Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012, from The Birmingham ProjectBoot: Our interests coincided with the rise of new work and new attitudes—by Black, women, queer, and transgender photographers—taking photography by the scruff of the neck and giving it a good shake. It felt like a professional viewing class telling the stories of others was being displaced by photographers telling their own stories and shaping new identities in pictures. The energy of photography now is at that spot where great picture-making meets passionate argument around issues of representation and social justice.
Bey: I think Aperture and Aperture magazine have done very well in continuing to be an organization and publication that has a place in those foundational histories (as biased as they may have been), while also increasingly and forcefully remaking itself as a publication that is also reflective of the broader social conversations that have been taking place within various marginalized and excluded communities and populations, making the publication a place for a more representational kind of inclusion, as opposed to a more insular and exclusive platform for a particular kind of photographic practice.
Earlier publications may have included work about some of those communities, but through images that were seldom—if ever—made by those who are actually producing work from inside those populations. That has been a very important shift—that these communities are the producers and authors of work that reflects their experiences and are, in fact, the authors of their own cultures. The old model was usually that a white photographer, like Bruce Davidson (with East 100th Street, 1970) or Eugene Richards (with Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, 1994), was the visual authorial voice of those Black and Brown communities. In an earlier time, Paul Strand photographed in Mexico and Ghana, without most people having a broader awareness that the African continent and Mexico also had their own rich traditions of photography.
It’s also important to note, in the more recent inclusion of diverse voices in Aperture magazine, that work coming out of those communities does not subscribe to any orthodoxy, that it is as conceptually rich and varied as work being produced anywhere else. In the end, Aperture magazine has become a platform for redefining the notion of image-making in a more inclusive America, and then placing that alongside a global conversation.
Dawoud Bey, A Young Woman Between Carrolburg Place and Half Street, Washington, D.C., 1989Boot: What does the arc of your career over the same period look like?
Bey: For me, as an artist working inside of the medium whose own work stems from my coming of age during the social tumult of the late 1960s, a lot of the issues that have again come to the forefront over this past decade have actually been present for a very long time. The year 2020, in a way, feels like 1969 redux. Only now, the struggle around these issues of institutional access, police violence (which also sparked rebellions in Black urban communities across the country in the 1960s) have been joined by a much more diverse population. So, I see the arc as much longer than a decade, and these issues of representation and social justice are ones that have been embodied in my own work for over four decades. As I told a young Black photographer recently, each generation gets to inherit the struggle and find their own terms of engagement. It’s been good to see Aperture take on the role of an inheritor of that struggle as well. I hope, as it continues forward, that Aperture does not retreat. We all have a role to play in being active and engaged citizens in our respective fields.
Kwame Brathwaite, Sikolo Brathwaite, African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Harlem, ca. 1968Courtesy the artist and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles
Boot: I feel there has been a distinct arc to our work over this period, and I like the way our arc spawned subsidiary arcs too! The way that the “Vision & Justice” issue led to a thread of projects about race, gender, sexuality, and the idea of beauty: from the magazine’s “Elements of Style” issue (Fall 2017), to the book and exhibition Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (2019) and the book and exhibition The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (2019). All these projects are in conversation with each other.
Meanwhile, I would say Aperture editors are very aware of our past, our institutional history, and the endeavors of those who built it—aware of the points when we have had a positive impact on the story of photography, often when we were boldest in presenting photographers who act as cultural agents of change. And aware, too, of what we didn’t do that we should have.
Given the depths of your engagement with photography over several decades, what have you made of Aperture over the years before 2010? There are many wonderful photographers around, whose story about Aperture is knocking at our door and not being let in; I hope that isn’t yours.
Bey: I’ve been making photographs seriously since the mid-1970s, and started going to galleries to look at work almost from the outset. So it didn’t take too long for Aperture to come on my radar, since I certainly knew and admired the work of Paul Strand, and knew the work of Minor White, and also had something of a front-row seat to the A. D. Coleman vs. Minor White contretemps from regularly reading the Village Voice—which, for anyone interested in progressive politics, along with art and culture, was mandatory weekly reading. And certainly by that time, I had a more passing knowledge of Beaumont Newhall, another Aperture founder, through his History of Photography (1949).
So when Aperture opened in the townhouse on East 23rd Street in 1985, a visit seemed in order, now that they were not just a publication and an organization, but had a publicly accessible space. Visiting that space in 1984 felt very much like my early visits to Marlborough Gallery in the mid-1970s, like I was crossing a social and cultural divide. I was acutely aware that I never saw another Black person in the gallery space while I was there. As it was, it almost felt like entering someone’s home, since one had to be buzzed in and then proceed up the stately, narrow staircase to the second-floor gallery. After those initial visits, I started attending openings, again always feeling that I had momentarily crossed over into another world, but focusing my attention on the photographs, which is what I had come to see. And at the openings, I usually saw only one other Black person, and it was the same one each time, someone whom I eventually came to know and am still friends with. But back then, we would catch sight of each other at those openings with the same mixed feelings of mild discomfort and feigned nonchalance. And yet, our interest in photography kept us coming back.
Boot: What other institutions or spaces were important to you at the time?
Bey: It was pretty clear that the communities that I had become very much a part of—the Studio Museum in Harlem (where I had my first solo museum exhibition in 1979), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Just Above Midtown, and the Cinque Gallery, to name a few—did not intersect or overlap at all with the community that frequented Aperture. Those African American centered institutions formed a network of support that sustained artists of color in New York at all levels, from the emerging to the established, at a time when they were shut out of the mainstream. The Studio Museum, in particular, was the center of my community, the place where we all found each other. But I was determined that that milieu was not going to be the extent of my engagement with photography. And so, in spite of hardly ever seeing anyone that looked like me in that space, I continued to frequent Aperture.
Dawoud Bey, Hillary and Taro, Chicago, 1992All photographs by Dawoud Bey © the artist
Boot: How did you finally connect with Aperture?
Bey: I was surprised, one day, to get an email from one of the editorial staff at Aperture saying that someone (a mutual friend, whom I knew from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s administration) had told them they should take a look at my work. The email went on to ask, “What kind of work do you do, landscapes?” I was, to put it mildly, bemused, since my entire thirty-year output at that point had been spent making work that was almost entirely portrait-based, and I’d had a number of both mainstream museum and gallery exhibitions. But I set a date for a meeting to show them the project I was in the midst of, Class Pictures (2002–6), which they were immediately interested in and committed to publishing at that first meeting. Class Pictures was then published some two years later, after I spent an additional year making the work.
So no, I wasn’t turned away, nor had I been knocking on Aperture’s door. But it was certainly an auspicious beginning. What I hadn’t given much thought to, before other Black photographer colleagues pointed it out to me, including those who were “not let in when they knocked at the door,” was that with the 2007 publication of my book Class Pictures, I became only the second Black photographer to have a book published by Aperture. The publication of the “Vision & Justice” issue of the magazine, and the subsequent publication of books by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kwame Brathwaite, Deana Lawson, and now Ming Smith (along with the publication of The New Black Vanguard), was a moment for me when, finally, those two communities that I’ve long navigated between found some significant common ground. It’s a breakthrough moment for Aperture—a little late in the day, for sure, but hopefully, the organization will continue to move forcefully forward in reflecting the true diversity of the field in a way that its history has not always reflected. It’s not only good cultural citizenship; it’s good business, too, as the runaway success of “Vision & Justice” made clear.
2020 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist: PhotoBook of the Year
Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation, in partnership with DELPIRE & CO, are pleased to present the shortlisted books for the 2020 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award.
The PhotoBook of the Year category highlights excellence in bookmaking, and this year’s shortlist includes a wide range of topics and photographic styles—from Samuel Fosso’s long-awaited monograph of self-portraits, and an arresting collaboration between Dyba and Adam Lach, to this year’s winner, Gloria Oyarzabal’s exploration of colonialism and white feminism in West Africa.
This year’s shortlist was selected by a jury comprised of Joshua Chuang (New York Public Library), Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Foundation), Sarah Hermanson Meister (MoMA), Susan Meiselas (photographer, Magnum Foundation), and Oluremi C. Onabanjo (independent curator and historian).
Carolyn Drake from Knit Club (2020)Courtesy the artist and TBW Books
Knit Club by Carolyn Drake (TBW Books, Oakland, California, 2020)
The mystique that shrouds Magnum photographer Carolyn Drake’s Knit Club is first encountered via its worn-looking cover and musty green-tinted edges; it’s easily mistakable for an old family album. Tucked inside is a series of richly reproduced images that invite you into a community of women with whom Drake embedded herself, developing familial bonds through shared time, wisdom, and secrets. Sarah Meister says, “The seductiveness of the images and the different modes of picture making and subjects makes for a gratifying photobook experience.” Alluding to the Southern Gothic literary form of William Faulkner, Drake weaves together a series of domestic still lifes and portraits into an alluring narrative that both illuminates and obscures. Meister confirms, “The secret parts of being a woman in the world, that men can never understand, are rendered in such a way that only heightens the mystery.”
Samuel Fosso, SM17, from the series 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and JM Patras, Paris
Autoportrait by Samuel Fosso (Walther Collection and Steidl, New York, and Göttingen, Germany, 2020)
Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait is the long-awaited and overdue career survey of one of the most unique figures in African photography. Fosso’s conceptual self-portraiture raises themes of sexuality, gender, and self-representation, as the artist inhabits and pays tribute to political icons such as Angela Davis and Martin Luther King Jr., among other Black personas. Autoportrait captures the multitude of his self-expression in what Joshua Chuang describes as a “cohesive, convincing, and definitive volume of Fosso’s most significant work.” Edited by the late Okwui Enwezor—a preeminent curator, critic, and scholar of African photography—this book brims with generously presented images that draw full attention and magnitude to Fosso’s work. Autoportrait “fills a significant gap,” according to Chuang, presenting the artist’s most striking images in a refreshing and comprehensive volume. This landmark monograph exemplifies the full range of the photographic medium in relation to self-presentation, archetypes, and visual culture at large.
Takashi Homma, Chernobyl #9, 2017Courtesy the artist
Symphony—Mushrooms from the Forest by Takashi Homma (Case Publishing, Tokyo, 2019)
In 2011, just six months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Japanese photographer Takashi Homma began a series photographing radioactive mushrooms gathered in the forests of Fukushima, before expanding the series to Scandinavia, Chernobyl, and Stony Point, New York. Symphony—Mushrooms from the Forest compiles previously published and new selections from this project. Homma’s primary subjects are photographed against plain white backdrops; interspersed among these are details and landscapes of the various forests in which they were found. “The book is beautifully executed and, for me, revealed something new with each reading,” Chuang says. The work provides “a quiet counterpoint to the sea of visually and emotionally raw imagery that emerged from the tragedy in Fukushima.” Oversized, tactile, and handsomely designed, Symphony—Mushrooms from the Forest is an “oblique and subtle treatment of a freighted subtext through the unexpectedly expressive form of freshly foraged mushrooms,” Chuang praises.
Thomas Kuijpers from Hoarder Order (2020)Courtesy the artist
Hoarder Order by Thomas Kuijpers (Fw:Books, Amsterdam, 2020)
In 2014, Thomas Kuijpers purchased a painting depicting the iconic pre-9/11 Twin Towers in New York City, inspiring him to begin collecting images and objects of the towers in an effort to trace the visual representation of politics via this landmark scene. Hoarder Order gathersa range of materials depicting “before” and “after,” now infused with alternate meanings—tourist memorabilia, newspaper clippings, screenshots, movie posters, postcards, and other vernacular material—in a small yet densely elegant 560-page book. Each object is isolated on a page or fills the spread, taking the viewer through a visual timeline of events that resonate outward from the semaphore of these now iconic buildings. The images are printed on Bible-thin paper that allows the viewer to experience a layering of signs, creating a visual metaphor for both what comes next and what has already happened. Susan Meiselas states, “These are the pages of our destiny unfolding, and we can go back and forth—wishing we could return to a different time.”
Adam Lach, Poland For Poles the family is sacred, Wegierki, Poland, June 14, 2009Courtesy the artist
How to Rejuvenate an Eagle by Adam Lach and Dyba Lach (Self-published, Warsaw, 2020)
A collaborative project between journalist Dyba Lach and photographer Adam Lach, How to Rejuvenate an Eagle examines contemporary Polish history and culture. For three and a half years, the duo traveled extensively throughout the country, conducting over seventy interviews and photographing people and landscapes. Throughout the resulting sequence of black-and-white photographs, excerpts from these interviews are interspersed via quarter-page, red tip-ins. “These textual interventions offer a really elegant interpretation of how one can incorporate multiple voices and perspectives into the making of a contemporary photobook,” Oluremi C. Onabanjo comments. Adam Lach’s arresting photographs are dynamically sequenced and depict a nation deeply conscious of its own historical, geopolitical, and economic transformations—while also struggling with the profound divisions and stereotypes rooted in longstanding cultural schisms.
Edgar Martins from
What Photography & Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase
(2020)Courtesy the artist
What Photography & Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase is a two-part photobook by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins, created in collaboration with inmates at a prison in England’s Midlands region. In this densely packed project, Martins wrestles with crucial questions about the representation of the experience of incarceration. The two volumes are packaged together in a plastic police evidence bag. One is a facsimile of pages from an incarcerated person’s diary; handwritten entries express the frustrations and anxieties of undergoing trial and daily life in prison, occasionally layered with a photograph or drawing by either the author or Martins. “The complementary volume sets up an uneasy juxtaposition,” Meister cautions—opening up questions of truth and fiction, or the equivalencies between shooting a camera and a gun. Martins brings together a heady mix of studio and archival images, documents, and other interventions “to complicate or render impossible any simple read of the subject,” Meister observes.
Strenči Studio Archive from Glass Strenči (2020)Courtesy of the Latvian Museum of Photography
Glass Strenči by Orbita (Orbita and the Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga, 2019)
In 1909, Dāvis Spunde began a photography workshop in the Latvian village of Strenči that he and his successors continued through 1950, producing almost 13,000 glass-plate negatives now housed in the Latvian Museum of Photography in Riga. From this archive, editor Anna Volkova and designer Alexey Murashko, members of the creative collective Orbita, selected almost one hundred images, taken between 1930 and 1950. Group portraits of families and laborers, picnics and parades, hospitals, farmlands, and newly installed utility poles, immerse the viewer in the evolving rhythms of life before, during, and after the wars. Each image is presented full-bleed, with an occasional gatefold, luminously printed on a velveteen, uncoated paper. “In the accompanying essay, historian Kirill Kobrin describes the glimpses of life in this village as ‘fragile, strange, attractive, painful, and damned,’” notes Lesley Martin, “which perfectly captures the atmosphere evoked in this mesmerizing selection and presentation of archival images.”
Gloria Oyarzabal from Woman Go No’Gree (2020)Courtesy Editorial RM
In Woman Go No’Gree, Gloria Oyarzabal asks, “Can we assume social relations in all societies are organized around biological sexual differences?” Oyarzabal tackles this question by exploring colonialism and white feminism in West Africa through the use of found imagery, archives, and her own photography. Inspired by the texts of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Ifi Amadiume, Oyarzabal raises questions about the effects of the Western framework of gender and feminism, but not without addressing her own whiteness and privilege—implicating herself in bold green text on the front cover. “What is striking about the declaration on the cover is an acknowledgment of her whiteness, privilege, and mental colonization,” notes Susan Meiselas. “She dares to draw together archival imagery with a contemporary eye, leaving us with layers to unpeel and codes to decipher via extended captions.” In this beautifully and thoughtfully crafted book, Oyarzabal challenges the viewer to engage with their own biases and assumptions.
Luis Carlos Tovar from
Jardín de mi Padre
(2020)Courtesy Editorial RM
In 1980, Luis Carlos Tovar’s father, Jaime Tovar, was abducted by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The only evidence that he was still alive was a “proof of life” Polaroid sent by the group to Tovar’s family. That Polaroid acts as a prompt for his book Jardín de mi Padre, which offers a poetic, in-depth reflection on memory and the legacy of the past. Rather than a specific narrative rooted in photographic logic, the book weaves together a mixture of photographs, cyanotypes, and archival ephemera to create a disorienting but riveting visual essay that unfurls the medium in a generative and powerful way. “The journey one takes—whether in regard to memory, family, state violence, or trauma—is one that complicates and collapses our understanding of the past and present,” states Oluremi Onabanjo, “which is important for our understanding of what photobooks can do in 2020.”
Untitled from Hayal & Hakikat (2020)Courtesy the artist and Istanbul University Library of Rare Books and Special Collections
Hayal & Hakikat (Dreams & fact) is a reissue of a previously self-published artist book, a compelling intervention into a series of portraits of prisoners found in the archives of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II. The book is uniquely bound via a triple-hinged spine that allows the viewer to unfold and compare the individual sets of images contained within. Each set of top-bound pages presents a detail of prisoners’ hands—classified according to those that are chained and those that are not. Faces are cropped; the focus remains on the hands, echoing a theory that the sultan commissioned these photographs to establish a prisoner’s guilt, believing this could be determined by the length of their thumb joints. “Centering the work on this arbitrary and idiosyncratic means of determining an inmate’s fate speaks obliquely to the current uncertain state of the individual in Turkish politics,” Martin proposes. “It’s also a poetic example of how archives can be reinterpreted and reinfused with both fact and fiction.”
These text were originally published in Issue #18 of The PhotoBook Review.
The 2020 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Exhibition will be on view at DELPIRE & CO through December 24, 2020. Read more about the 2020 PhotoBook Award Winners here.
2020 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist: First PhotoBook
Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation, in partnership with DELPIRE & CO, are pleased to present the shortlisted books for the 2020 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award.
The First PhotoBook category highlights the creativity and commitment to bookmaking by photographers publishing for the first time. This year’s shortlist includes a wide range of publications—from June Canedo de Souza’s self-published title about family separation, and Efrem Zelony-Mindell’s expansive look at queerness in relation to the body, to this year’s winner, Buck Ellison’s thoughtfully crafted book about the visual language of privilege.
This year’s shortlist was selected by a jury comprised of Joshua Chuang (New York Public Library), Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Foundation), Sarah Hermanson Meister (MoMA), Susan Meiselas (photographer, Magnum Foundation), and Oluremi C. Onabanjo (independent curator and historian).
Stephen Berkman, Humboldt’s Parrot, 2020Courtesy the artist
Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years is a rare example of where more actually is more. “Absurd—just completely over the top,” says Sarah Meister. “This book has plenty of signals why it is not what it purports to be from the start.” Its oversized scale and heft resembles a compendium publication for a nineteenth-century studio photographer’s lifetime achievement, precisely what the artist Stephen Berkman aims to evoke with his antiquated glass-plate work and the fictive Zohar Studios—similar to artist Joan Fontcuberta’s elaborate trickster approach. Meister notes, “The minute you realize that what you’re looking at is constructed and new, you find incredible humor.” With images like a man selling a trunkful of merkin samples, Berkman’s wit seems inexhaustible. Meister concludes, “If the immense ambition and scale of this work were anything less, it would not achieve the same impact.”
Judith Black, Johanna and Laura, June 5, 1983Courtesy the artist
Pleasant Street by Judith Black (STANLEY/BARKER, Shrewsbury, United Kingdom, 2020)
In 1979, Judith Black moved with her children to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she knew no one. She began to turn her lens toward her children and the dilapidated apartment they shared. Pleasant Street is “a gentle chronicle of a family over two decades,” says Susan Meiselas, one that takes the viewer through Black’s life as a mother watching her children grow up. Organized chronologically, we watch through Black’s eyes as her children grow older, become taller, change hairstyles, learn to express themselves, and eventually, become adults. In some cases, Black turns the camera on herself, documenting her own changes alongside her children’s. “The balance of the family members not only looking at themselves, but at each other, seems quite perfect,” Meiselas concludes. The book is full of photographic gems underscored by the rich black-and-white reproductions of each image, presented with a generous border and without titles; handwritten captions appear at the back of the book.
Maryna Brodovska from My Dear Vira (2020)Courtesy the artist
My Dear Vira by Maryna Brodovska (Self-published, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2020)
Maryna Brodovska’s My Dear Vira acts as a letter addressed to her childhood friend, who emigrated to the United States from Ukraine more than eight years earlier. The book feels like a Tumblr account in book form: candid snapshots from the friends’ lives together and apart are mixed together with screen captures from their social-media correspondence—sometimes with direct intervention from Brodovska in the form of collage or vividly colored scribbles, personal notes, and even a page of stickers. The book tells the story of their friendship and life-long bond in a playful, nostalgic, deeply intimate way. The story operates on multiple levels, considering not only their shifting relationship over time, but also the changing geopolitical relationship between their two countries. “The conflation of popular-culture reference points, embrace of bright colors, and dizzying design formats across spreads give a sense of confusion at moments—but in the best way,” Oluremi C. Onabanjo comments. “It’s a really loving, enjoyably strange rendition.”
June Canedo de Souza, me deixa em pas, 2018Courtesy the artist
Mara Kuya by June Canedo de Souza (Small Editions, Self-Published, Brooklyn, 2020)
June Canedo de Souza’s Mara Kuya tells the story of a family separated by citizenship status. Taken over the course of seven years between Brazil and South Carolina, Canedo’s photographs present a striking, yet tender look into her family’s life and experiences, while also considering the often overlooked emotional and psychological toll caused by migration and separation. Encased in a bright yellow cover, Canedo’s lush and colorful photographs are interwoven with her own short written reflections. The resulting narrative and sequence unfold with a poetic impressionism, offering a deeply personal and nuanced perspective of this global experience. Onabanjo comments, “Mara Kuya considers the depths of what an intimate story can convey to us over the course of a photobook, as disclosed from the specific position of a Brazilian American woman, artist, and photographer.”
Ronghiu Chen from Freezing Land (2020)Courtesy the artist
Freezing Land by Ronghui Chen (Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China, 2020)
Chinese photographer Ronghui Chen documents the uncertainty and isolation of young people amid the colorful but derelict landscape of China’s northeast region in Freezing Land, which investigates the once prosperous northeast region and the burdens and hopes of its youth. Chen used a video-sharing mobile app, Kuaishou, to find people willing to tell their stories. The resulting portraits—informed by photographers such as Alec Soth, Joel Sternfeld, and Zhang Kechun—capture a tangible mixture of hesitation, loneliness, and hope. Softcover and printed on uncoated paper, the book’s overall design feels suitably spare; the accompanying text appears in both Chinese and English. “Freezing Land is a standout debut by a promising contemporary Chinese photographer,” juror Joshua Chuang states. “Chen shows a side of the modern Chinese story that eludes cliché and helps round out our understanding of the country as a whole.”
Ryan Debolski, Untitled, Oman, 2015Courtesy the artist
2020 Juror’s Special Mention: LIKE by Ryan Debolski (Gnomic Book, Brooklyn, 2020)
LIKE explores the experiences and relationships of migrant workers in Oman. But rather than focusing on the defining public image of poor working conditions, photographer Ryan Debolski depicts men finding agency and connection to the landscape of the beach and companionship in each other—they are as playful as they are introspective. A running dialogue of conversations via text message weaves together details of infrastructure and landscape and highlights the men’s digital communications with one another. LIKE refuses to dehumanize or mystify the laborer, and an accompanying essay by Jason Koxvold, “Raw Material: Capital and Exploitation at the Neoliberal Frontier,” contextualizes the work in the history of representation of labor in art. “The editing of this book is superb,” Chuang acclaims, “a compelling entrée into the roster of photobooks about lives otherwise lived out anonymously.”
Caroline and Cryil Desroche from Los Angeles Standards (2020)Courtesy the artists and Poursuite
Los Angeles Standards by Caroline and Cyril Desroche (Poursuite, Arles, France, 2020)
Los Angeles Standards is a photographic portrait of Los Angeles, an iconic city in continuous flux and an experimental laboratory for twentieth-century architecture. Boasting 1,300 photographs taken between 2008 and 2012 by French architects Caroline and Cyril Desroche, the book is divided into fifteen typologies that compare and contrast defining archetypes of the city’s sprawling urban landscape—minimalls, billboards, freeways, parking lots, microarchitectures, and stilt houses, among others. This chunky brick of a book presents the work via a rigorous design that Chuang calls “a pleasure to flip through again and again.” The Desroches nod to the likes of Ed Ruscha, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Los Angeles Standards both records and deconstructs the fragmented urbanism of Los Angeles—reflecting on its history and present identity, which, as Chuang states, “in its totality and density, gets to the heart of what makes Los Angeles distinct.”
Buck Ellison, Sierra, Gymnastics Routine, 2015Courtesy the artist and Loose Joints
Buck Ellison’s Living Trust investigates the visual language of privilege. Organized into chapters named by subject—such as “Daughters,” “Still Lifes,” and “Performance Fleece”—the book also includes two text contributions by Lucy Ives and Brooke Harrington. Photographs range from overtly staged Christmas cards and portraits, to still lifes of food and flowers and upper-middle-class activities, such as lacrosse, rowing, and golf. Taken together, these series offer a sustained, almost anthropological examination of the ways whiteness and privilege are both recapitulated and broadcast. “Living Trust emerged in our conversations as something that focuses really well on what many take for granted,” Onabanjo comments. “It is important to consider and make visible the silent violence and security of whiteness as it is continually maintained. This book does that precisely.”
Charlie Engman from MOM (2020)Courtesy Edition Patrick Frey
MOM by Charlie Engman (Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich, 2020)
MOM is an intense collaboration between photographer Charlie Engman and his mother, Kathleen McCain Engman, who has been posing for her son since 2009. Containing a decade’s worth of portraits—and rich with fashion, art, and photo-history references—MOM possesses what Chuang calls “a strange magnetism and delirious complexity.” Through an exhaustive array of personas and performative situations, Engman and his mother experiment with discomfort, artifice, vulnerability, and familiarity. “Engman’s project has shades of the conceptual masquerade of Cindy Sherman, the outrageousness of Juergen Teller, and the critique of Boris Mikhailov,” Chuang says. MOM tests boundaries in a rigorous display of creative control, collaboration, and deep trust.
Zahara Gomez Lucini, Ana Griselda Montes Zapodaca prepares a Cheese Soup for his missing brother, Roberto, Los Mochis, Sinaloa, 2020
Courtesy the artist
Shimmel Zohar, Pork Pozole for Roberto, prepared by his mother Yolanda Zapodaca Buelna. Roberto disappeared on July 10th of 2014, 2020
Courtesy the artist
Recetario para la memoria by Zahara Gómez Lucini (Self-published, Mexico City, 2020)
Can cooking be a form of activism? And can a recipe-driven cookbook also be considered a compelling photobook? Recetario para la memoria (Memory recipe book) stronglymakes the case that the answer is yes. Author Zahara Gómez Lucini serves as the project coordinator and photographer, working with Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte, a group of Sinaloense women dedicated to finding their missing loved ones. The book presents a series of recipes for the favorite dishes of various disappeared family members, interspersed with photos of the dishes and of the women midpreparation, and with recollections of those who are missing. “Recetario para la memoria proposes an unexpected interpretation of the photobook, in the process, tapping into questions of memory, state violence, and familial connectedness,” Onabanjo states. “Ultimately, it offers a portal for remembrance while engaging with an important element that people share with their loved ones who are no longer there—the food that brought them together.”
Jessica Ingram, Memorial for Vernon Dahmer Sr. erected by his wife, Ellie, at the side of his store and home, Kelly Settlement, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 2009Courtesy the artist
Road through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial, by Jessica Ingram, is a deeply researched body of work that brings together photographs, oral histories, newspapers, FBI files, and other ephemera to tell the stories of individuals who were victims of racial violence in the American South. Released at a time of ongoing civil unrest, Ingram’s book is a stark reminder of America’s long racist history and an indication that what is happening today is not so different from the past. The photographs depict seemingly ordinary spaces—neighborhood sidewalks, motels, unmarked dirt roads—but, in the manner of Joel Sterneld’s On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (Chronicle Books, 1996), depict places where heinous crimes against Black Americans took place. Ingram “looks to uncover and reveal the history of violence while searching to relearn histories that are buried and obscured,” notes Meiselas. No plaques or monuments mark these spaces; instead, Ingram “brings greater visibility to what is left for us to revisit and learn.”
Janna Ireland, Hillside Memorial Park Mausoleum, 2019Courtesy the artist
Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View is a visual duet between architect Paul R. Williams and Los Angeles–based photographer Janna Ireland. Popularly known as “Hollywood’s architect,” Williams designed buildings in his native Los Angeles with versatile range. His achievements broke racial boundaries: in 1923, as the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects; and in 2017, posthumously, as the first Black recipient of the prestigious AIA Gold Medal. Meister observes, “Ireland works in black and white, which softens but doesn’t erase the passage of time.” She is also sensitive to this past, approaching the creation of a lyrical photographic record of Williams’s achievements as both a personal and restorative tribute. “This book is a real discovery and delight,” says Meister, reflecting on the omission of Black artists’ and architects’ work in institutional collections, “a loving photographic tribute to the legacy of this important architect and an entry point into both Ireland’s and Williams’s work.”
Francesca Leonardi, Villaggio Coppola, from ‘O Post Mio (2020)Courtesy the artist
’O Post Mio by Francesca Leonardi (Postcart Edizioni, Rome, 2020)
’O Post Mio follows the life of Claudia and her two daughters, who live in Saraceno Park, an illegal building complex in the village of Coppola, near Naples, Italy. For eight years, Francesca Leonardi has photographed Claudia, capturing intimate family moments, struggles, and growth among a crumbling landscape. Leonardi beautifully captures Claudia’s struggle to be the mother she never had. The work is a lyrical, if unflinching journey into motherhood. “The photographer’s eye remains focused on the small moments—everydayness and the banal. Moments that are harsh but telling,” Meiselas notes. The book is intimate in scale, with a deep red cover and bound-in pink pages that include text by Claudia about her estranged mother. “The book intrigued me the moment I opened it and discovered two different kinds of readings—phrases and fragments, and a strong visual narrative,” states Meiselas.
Yael Martínez, Self portrait with my daught and a presence of a hanging man, Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, 2013Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos
La casa que sangra by Yael Martínez (KWY Ediciones, Lima, Peru, 2019)
Based in Guerrero, Mexico, Yael Martínez has spent a considerable amount of his career thinking about and documenting the impact narco trafficking has had on his community and region. This project, however, brings home the violence and its effects in a personal and harrowing way, focusing on the murder of three of his brothers-in-law and the lives of their extended families as they struggle with these losses. “The work is threaded together with a profound sense of melancholia and loss,” notes Martin. The story is told bilingually from Martínez’s perspective, who speaks of nightmares and nausea in the aftermath of each murder, one of which was initially passed off as a suicide in jail. “These bite-size narratives hit hard,” Martin observes. “The book is rigorously constructed: from the carefully controlled and muted palette, to the interwoven text elements connecting personal traumas, to larger stories of endemic violence, corruption, and the increasing dominance of organized crime in the photographer’s homeland.”
Sara Perovic from My Father’s Legs (2020)Courtesy J&L Books
My Father’s Legs by Sara Perovic (J&L Books, New York, 2020)
In My Father’s Legs, Sara Perovic presents what Martin calls “a charmingly obsessive photographic meditation on the arbitrariness of what makes us fall in love.” For Perovic’s mother, it was her spouse’s tennis-sturdy legs, photographs of which appear intermittently throughout the book, reproduced in exaggerated, blue halftone on pink paper. Tennis may have made her father’s legs beautiful, but—as a singular line of text explains—as a child, the artist also felt that the sport took her father’s attention away from her. The rest of the book comprises photos the artist took of her boyfriend’s legs, crouched in a similar, ready-to-serve pose. “It’s a lighthearted riff on the typological, fetishistic way that photographs can be used to both commemorate and exorcise a personal fixation,” Martin suggests, “a mesmerizing little book that showcases how a simple conceptual project can be effectively framed via a rigorous design treatment.”
Fabio Ponzio, Romania, 1992Courtesy the artist
East of Nowhere by Fabio Ponzio (Thames & Hudson, London, 2020)
East of Nowhere is a collection of photographs made by Fabio Ponzio over two decades throughout Central and Eastern Europe, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although Ponzio’s photographs depict countries on the brink of radical transformation and individuals struggling to survive, they are also filled with a vibrant, timeless energy. Meiselas observes that in these photographs, “elegance frames a respect for seeing time pass—the stillness, the waiting—hoping to be filled with the promise of an unknown future.” The book is an expansive documentation of turbulent times, yet sprinkled throughout are moments of joy and pleasure—a couple celebrating on their wedding day, a group of men enjoying a drink together. With sumptuous reproductions that showcase the richness of his photographs, Ponzio’s book leaves a lasting impression.
Soumya Sankar Bose from Where the Birds Never Sing (2020)Courtesy the artist
Where the Birds Never Sing is a riveting story told in fits and starts, gathering together a series of images, documents, and textual commentary to address the 1979 massacre of Bengali refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, West Bengal. Soumya Sankar Bose has worked with survivors of this traumatic event to recall and, at times, reenact memories of their survival for his camera. Their stories and the resulting images are buttressed by a number of small-scale facsimiles of various governmental reports tipped into the pages of the book—rare fragments of documentation that have survived an effort to destroy official evidence of the incident, one of the many violent repercussions that continue to follow, decades later, in the wake of Indian independence and partition. The results, per Martin, form a “strong example of book making in the subjective documentary mode.”
Agnieszka Sejud from HOAX (2020)Courtesy the artist
HOAX by Agnieszka Sejud (Self-published, Wrocław, Poland, 2020)
HOAX, a crowdfunded book by Polish photographer Agnieszka Sejud, is an extraordinarily vivid barrage of wildly patterned, digitally tweaked street scenes and details. What’s “real” and what’s been tampered with is called into question on every page. The images are printed full-bleed on thick, hyperglossy paper. The spreads come nestled together in a clear vinyl envelope, and the unbound pages, like the images themselves, feel tantalizingly on the verge of falling into creative chaos. The sequence weaves together photographs of religious and national iconography with acid-color scenes of everyday consumerism—a mash-up of the sacred and the kitsch that is simultaneously seductive and seditious. “While this is more a thrilling short story than a novel,” comments Martin, “it effectively delivers a sly and visceral critique of the manipulation of contemporary values in Poland (and elsewhere) today.”
Diana Tamane, flower smuggler, 2020Courtesy the artist
Flower Smuggler by Diana Tamane (Art Paper Editions, Ghent, Belgium, 2019)
In Flower Smuggler, Diana Tamane edits together multiple suites of deceptively ordinary and eclectic photographs to describe her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. “This book hits all the right notes about the ways in which life and photography can intersect,” praises Meister. The artist collects colloquial images from her family and works with her relatives to jointly stage and create some of the images. In doing so, Tamane suggests how the meaning of photographs, their significance as artifacts of daily life and memory, can change profoundly over time. The concluding series, arguably the most poignant, is of rephotographed drugstore prints that were used by her great-grandmother to record her daily heart rate and blood pressure, with notations made on the back—and even the front—of the pictures. “This final statement in the book enriches Tamane’s endeavor while raising vital questions about why photographs matter today and to whom,” Meister notes.
Dillion DeWaters, Refractory Mass, 2013Courtesy the artist
n e w f l e s h by Efrem Zelony-Mindell (Gnomic Book, Brooklyn, 2019)
n e w f l e s h is a curatorial exploration by Efrem Zelony-Mindell, both intimate and deeply expansive, that recasts concepts of queerness in relation to the body. This compilation encompasses a diverse set of practices, including abstract, studio-constructed, and digitally manipulated images by artists of various backgrounds and levels of experience. Meister explains, “Parts of the work might be seen as obliquely interested in questions of queerness, while others are more direct. Combined, they represent a truly personal perspective.” Zelony-Mindell’s first book in the role of curator as artist, n e w f l e s h draws parallels between bodily experience and photography—and their shared transformative potential to render forms of sexuality and identity free from societal constructs or physical limits. In its modest scale, the book is inviting as an object, with thoughtful binding choices that complement its vision: softcover, with an exposed and printed spine, and a reflective bronze shape on the cover that evokes a shimmering fleshy feel.
These text were originally were published in Issue #18 of The PhotoBook Review.
The 2020 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Exhibition will be on view at DELPIRE & CO through December 24, 2020. Read more about the 2020 PhotoBook Award Winners here.
2020 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist: Catalogue of the Year
Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation, in partnership with DELPIRE & CO, are pleased to present the shortlisted books for the 2020 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photography Catalogue of the Year Award.
Each year, the Photography Catalogue of the Year category brings together a robust roster of books published by institutions around the world. This year’s list includes both classic exhibition catalogues and new interpretations—from the Yale Center for British Art’s beautifully crafted Bill Brandt | Henry Moore, and Weiss Berlin’s reimagined chapbook series by Anne Turyn, to this year’s winner, the Walther Collection and Steidl’s comprehensive account of the origins and significance of vernacular photography.
This year’s shortlist was selected by a jury comprised of Joshua Chuang (New York Public Library), Lesley A. Martin (Aperture Foundation), Sarah Hermanson Meister (MoMA), Susan Meiselas (photographer, Magnum Foundation), and Oluremi C. Onabanjo (independent curator and historian).
Rahima Gambo Rukkaya and Hadiza, Maiduguri, Nigeria, 2016, juxtaposed with a connect-the-dots style illustration from a school book, from the series Education is Forbidden, 2015–16Courtesy of Rahima Gambo and Open Society Foundation
African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other offers a capacious and considered view of contemporary practices across the African continent and diaspora. Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at FotoFest Biennial 2020 in Houston, the catalogue weaves together an inclusive group of thirty-two artists, spanning across four decades of photographic practice, whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation. Edited by Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Mark Sealy, this handsome and readerly volume features an iconic photo by Rotimi Fani-Kayode across the front and back, and bronze-gilded pages. In addition to each artist’s portfolio is a selection of essays, ranging from epistolary interviews to critical examinations of contemporary exhibition practices around African photography and artists. Reflecting on the combination of essays and selected artists, juror Oluremi C. Onabanjo states, “It offers a rich entry point for someone who is trying to understand contemporary photographic practice and critical discourse surrounding the African continent and diaspora.”
Anne Turyn, Waiting #2 (Federal Building, New York City, 1990s)Courtesy the artist
Anne Turyn: Top Stories, Elena Cheprakova and Kirsten Weiss, eds. (Weiss Berlin, Berlin, 2020)
Top Stories, a prose periodical was a chapbook series created by Anne Turyn in the late 1970s. A student of linguistics, Turyn conceived of it as a literary series but welcomed the combination of text and image—a trademark of her own photographic practice. Each issue focused on a single artist, mostly women, some of whom Turyn met through readings and performances—such as Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Constance DeJong, and Pati Hill—and embraced the permeable creativity of the time in blending literary works with art and music. Top Stories and other work are encapsulated in the small, two-toned-cloth softcover book that accompanied Turyn’s exhibition at Weiss Berlin earlier this year. The unassuming format, halftone imagery, and raw typesetting all complement the improvised feeling of the chapbooks. Juror Sarah Meister describes the book as “the perfect marriage of form to content, taking an artist whose career has been flying slightly below the radar and helping to give texture and context to Turyn’s work, while also respecting the original format in which it circulated.”
Bill Brandt, Normandy, 1959Courtesy the artist/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.
According to juror Susan Meiselas, Bill Brandt | Henry Moore is a “masterful work of scholarship.” Accompanying an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, UK, this large-scale, richly illustrated book is a thoughtful examination of the interplay between two brillianttwentieth-century artists: Bill Brandt and Henry Moore, brought together while both creating work depicting civilians taking shelter in the London Underground during the Blitz. The book takes the viewer beyond their first encounter and through the artists’ postwar period, sequencing works together to show their intersecting paths. “I love the mix of materials—Moore’s illustrations, drawings, and sculptures in counterpoint to Brandt’s photographs—which highlights the interconnections of each man’s craft,” notes Meiselas. The catalogue makes clear the immediate influence the artists had on one another and “leads the viewer to resee Brandt’s nudes as sculptural form, abstracted into stone by Moore.”
Moi Ver (Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic), Self-portrait, Yport, Seine-Maritime, France, 1931Courtesy the artist
Hommage à Moï Ver offers what juror Lesley Martin calls a “double delight” in the facsimile reprint of a modernist photobook classic, slipcased together with a second volume that offers curatorial insight and rich historical context alongside the original publication. “This is a great way to present the original artifact of the book as it was published, alongside new scholarship and commentary,” Martin concludes. Moï Ver is best known for his canonic 1931 photobook Paris, which buzzes with the vertiginous energy of the eponymous city. That same year, the Lithuanian-born photographer, whose given name was Moses Vorobeichic, published The Ghetto Lane in Wilna. To the contemporary viewer, the subjects might seem dramatically different—the modernist urban center of early twentieth-century art and literature versus the stolid if bustling Jewish quarters of Vilnius, Lithuania (Wilna in German; tragically the city would later be destroyed by Nazi forces). But both were vibrant European capitals in their day, and Ver applied the same avant-garde approaches of images collaged, double exposed, cropped, and placed on the page with idiosyncratic, constructivist verve.
Unidentified photographer (American), Camielle and Tina, ca. 1970 (Detail)Courtesy the Walther Collection
Imagining Everyday Life—a new, comprehensive account of the origins and features of vernacular photography—evolved from a two-day landmark symposium organized by the Walther Collection and held at Columbia University in 2018. With leading scholars and critics from a variety of disciplines and regional perspectives reevaluating ordinary images through the lenses of power, identity, political participation, and ideology, new narratives that have been largely ignored or erased are inserted into the traditional read of the vernacular. In redefining vernacular photography by its social function rather than its aesthetic features, and examining the agency of its makers, Imagining Everyday Life proposes a much deeper and wider discourse around vernacular photography’s history and role. Richly illustrated and supported by texts that are “rigorous without being ponderous,” juror Joshua Chuang states that Imagining Everyday Life “provides a multifaceted snapshot of thought around the problematics of vernacular photography,” and is truly “an essential reconsideration of the topic.”
These text were originally published in Issue #18 of The PhotoBook Review.
The 2020 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Exhibition will be on view at DELPIRE & CO through December 24, 2020. Read more about the 2020 PhotoBook Award Winners here.
December 8, 2020
Tyler Mitchell’s Love for a Common Way of Life
“In nature, nothing is perfect. . . . Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”
—Alice Walker
Two bare-chested young Black men on playground swings. Staring slightly down at the camera, the first young man, with twisted hair and striped boxers peeking out of his jeans, clasps the swing’s chains. Next to him, another young man, swinging in his ripped denim, with his eyes closed. His hands grab the chains in preparation for flight or, perhaps, a return to rest.
In Tyler Mitchell’s photobook I Can Make You Feel Good (2020), a debut monograph based on his first solo exhibition at Foam, in Amsterdam, in 2019, and at the International Center of Photography, in New York, in 2020, the depiction of these young men, partly naturally lit and in leisure themes, is in many ways a definitive aspect of his aesthetic.
Recently Mitchell has photographed a wide range of Black subjects, from the hip-hop artist Vince Staples to skaters in Havana, to take on an even more ambitious project: Black utopia. “People say utopia is never achievable,” he states in the foreword to his book, “but I love photography’s possibility of allowing me to dream and make that dream become very real.”
Tyler Mitchell, Still from Idyllic Space, 2019The result: young Black men in bright blue jeans, with dark brown to even deeper and richer brown skin tones, taking center stage with a beauty so brilliantly lit by the sun and caught by Mitchell’s eye that the allée of trees behind them all but disappears. Their freeness is intriguing, mainly because it depends on their being outside, making the outdoor backdrop relevant for what is there and what is not. Absent are those racial tragedies that inform my seeing and exist just beyond the photograph’s frame. Rekia Boyd: shot in the head by a white off -duty police officer in Chicago’s Douglas Park in 2012. Tamir Rice: shot in the chest by a white police officer at a Cleveland playground in 2014. Walter Scott: shot in the back while fleeing a white police officer in a North Charleston park in 2015. Among those calamities and, of course, our more recent ones, Mitchell’s insistence on seeing Black people at peace and in play in public is a profoundly radical act.
In this moment of Black Lives Matter, Mitchell’s films and photographs provide counternarratives to those viral recordings, such as Darnella Frazier’s ten-minute video of George Floyd’s murder. But, as his work reminds us of the long history of racism in the United States, it also reveals an alternative. “The African-American ties to this land, unfairly seized from Indigenous people, are ugly and thick,” the historian Tiya Miles wrote in her 2019 New York Times essay on race and environmental justice. “But even in that long, dark tunnel of suffering, African-Americans recognized the capacity of nature to function as a resource—better still, an ally—in the fight for physical and psychological freedom.”
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Warm Embrace), 2019By showing us Black life as leisure, as repose, as outdoor play, Mitchell continually expands our visual vocabulary of race and space. I search his photographs for more geographic clues. Yet with those young men on the swings, their hairstyles and sartorial details convey only their nowness, not their place. The playground swings tell me something, but not enough. The trees, blurred into a lush mise-en-scène, could be a field, a forest, a farm, or a park. Each potential site has its own racial history, each choice would pose different types of threats for their swinging Black bodies. But in Mitchell’s freedom dreaming, these trees are not used for harm.
With their heads and chests arched forward, their loosely picked-out coils, and the way their jeans hang just so, his Black male models use the trees as a canvas onto which they, not us, can project the artist’s versions of themselves far into the future.
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Family Time in the Park), 2019When Mitchell and I spoke on Zoom this August, a week after his book’s release, he was in London, while I chatted from Newark. He was backdropped by potted plants and arching trees that transformed the backyard patio where he sat into a small garden. Knowing that he spent the majority of New York’s pandemic lockdown in his Brooklyn apartment, I thought that any attempt he made to establish a temporary life in another country, and in fresh air, was well-earned.
And yet nature has a way of interrupting our best intentions. Not long into our conversation, a bee started circling him, eventually disturbing him, so that he had to go back inside. Looking back, Mitchell’s desire to remain outside was not just happenstance but fundamental to his autobiography, his aesthetic, and his redefining of Black life.
Two young Black men sitting on the grass. The one at left in a rose T-shirt, eyes down, smile bright. Beside him, his friend, or lover, cousin, or brother, an ambiguity suggested by the unknowable meaning of their near touch. What is clear are their smiles. The young man in the unbuttoned, blue shirt, revealing his bare chest, is mid-turn, hands clutched underneath the ball about to drop. Another man, in a pink, blue, and white striped shirt, zips by them. We see only his back and legs in stride, and his locks swaying, trailed by his matching kite.
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Boy in Blue Jacket on Horse), 2019Another image. A young Black boy, dressed up in a royal-blue military jacket, his dusty-brown skin quieting the gold braids and buttons adorning the uniform. The white sheet that hangs as a backdrop is reminiscent of Mitchell’s famed September 2018 cover for Vogue, when, at twenty-three years old, he became the first African American artist to shoot the magazine’s cover in its 125-year history, photographing a minimally made-up Beyoncé outside, with only white sheets as backdrops and props. While his clothing and fancy rocking chair intimate an aristocratic flair, the white sheet and outdoor pavement indicate everydayness. Here, these stylized juxtapositions work together to convey Mitchell’s refusal of spatial and sartorial hierarchies.
Inspired by Spike Jonze’s skate videos, Mitchell, in his early work, used his friends and fellow skateboarders as subjects. He documented their aerials and slide tricks with a digital SLR Canon, whose flip switch enabled him to toggle between photography and video. As a result, play was inseparable from the visual languages he was teaching himself. “Of course, there’s the surface level cool and rebel spirit about skateboarding,” Mitchell told Vogue in 2018, “but the thing that makes skaters like artists runs deeper than that: It’s not a sport that’s built on competition, it’s one that thrives on community.”
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Park Frivolity), 2019Much has been made about how Jonze’s work, along with the casual snapshot style of Ryan McGinley and the gritty youth-culture focus of Larry Clark, has informed Mitchell’s approach. In his own narration, he mentions them, but he also speaks about how Tumblr not only introduced him to creative photography but helped to shape an egalitarian aesthetic. “I think the link for me to Tumblr growing up was a lot more significant than even I realize, in a way,” he tells me. “There, images come to you in a swarm of decontextualization. One thing is next to the next, and they might have nothing to do with one another, but your mind creates a link between two images.” He goes on, “It could be a Rococo painting next to a highly conceptual image of a performance artist. And then it could be next to a very chic modern interior.”
After reading as much as I could about Mitchell, I noticed one crucial aspect of his life that he returns to but that most writers overlook: the role that growing up in the Black South has played in birthing his sense of place and play. “Atlanta, and being from Georgia, frames how I approach my own autobiographical ideas of utopia,” he muses. “Being middle-class, having leisure time in the summers, gave me the opportunity to think about it as a site of utopia, or a potential utopia.” Mitchell notes his aesthetic came out of “that free time and those memories of playing in fields or in parks in Georgia.”
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Curls), 2019In other words, Mitchell’s Black utopianism comes from his nondifferentiation. Taking Tumblr, with its nonhierarchical format, as a political and photographic practice, Mitchell not only toggles between visual mediums but normalizes the celebrity and exalts the everyday citizen. “One of the biggest things I’ve been reflecting on these days is the whole idea of the hierarchy between photographer and subject. I have a tool and a camera that I’m using to convey something or someone,” Mitchell says to me. “And inherent to photography, especially when you think of it historically, is a strong hierarchy, where the photographer is the one with all the power, the one who is seeing. And the person being seen has almost no power. So, for me personally as a photographer, I ask myself, ‘What are the things I can do to lessen these inherent hierarchies in the photography-shoot structure of seeing and being seen?’”
At the same time, his radical flattening of divisions is also a reflection of his expansive worldview, much like the poetry and novels of his fellow Georgia native Alice Walker that seek to celebrate and canonize the diversity innate to nature. “When you see an aerial shot of Atlanta, which I’m really interested in, it’s full of trees,” he says about growing up right outside Atlanta, a city with more green space per resident than any other U.S. metropolis. “You’re in a city whose skyline is really weird. That’s what I grew up around, being surrounded by nature constantly, and near a city with a Black core. A strong Black inner core.”
Tyler Mitchell, Still from Chasing Pink, Found Red, 2019All works by Tyler Mitchell © the artist
Another image. In the book it is fixed, but it is an excerpt from his 2019 film Chasing Pink, Found Red. Here, young Black men and women, eyes closed, bodies dressed in whites, khakis, and browns, nearly touch as they lie together on a red-and-white-checkered picnic blanket. Their stillness recalls the 2015 die-in protests in the early years of Black Lives Matter; their stillness also insists that they rest among each other as a form of self-care and self-protection. While Mitchell’s extolling of Black leisure might be new to some, it is familiar to those of us who have turned to play as both a testament to our humanity and a form of resistance in a world in which our Black lives still don’t matter.
In this way, Mitchell is a student, as he quite earnestly told me, of Earlie Hudnall Jr., a Mississippi-born African American photographer who has spent the majority of his career documenting Houston’s historically Black Third Ward neighborhood. Hudnall’s black-and-white photograph Flipping Boy, 4th Ward (1983), featuring a young Black boy, mid-backflip, in the middle of a Houston street, anticipated Mitchell’s own skateboard montages and Hula-Hoop close-ups. Hudnall’s Cooling Down, 3rd Ward (1997) of a little Black boy gleefully splashing himself with a hose conjures up the joy seen in Mitchell’s images of young Black men flying kites or on swings. And, finally, his Rascals, 3rd Ward (1991), depicting a group of little Black boys proudly standing in front of their bikes, made four years before Mitchell was born, reminds me of the pride of Mitchell’s own regal portrait of the young boy on a play horse.
Earlie Hudnall Jr., Cooling Down, 3rd Ward, Houston, Texas, 1997
Courtesy the artist and PDNB Gallery, Dallas
Earlie Hudnall Jr., Flipping Boy, 4th Ward,, Houston, Texas, 1983
In a statement about his work, Hudnall said that, in addition to his father, who was an amateur photographer, it was his grandmother’s use of a photo-album to record their community’s history that inspired his own interest in documenting quotidian moments rarely seen outside the community. “The love for this common way of life and the memories of those times,” Hudnall recalled, “provided me with the inspiration to become a photographer, just as Grandmother used the photo-album and the family Bible.” Crisscrossing fashion, art photography, and avant-garde filmmaking, Mitchell offers us a Black utopia in which the couture and the common sit next to each other, and in which Black people in London, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and throughout the African diaspora find one another, as relief and community. And therein lies Mitchell’s gift and genius, to reimagine our world with the possibilities and agency of Black life. “My images are made all over the place,” Mitchell says. “The subjects and the geography just support this aesthetic universe of a utopia. It’s not meant to be pinned down.”
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 241, “Utopia,” Winter 2020, under the title “Tyler Mitchell: Love for a Common Way of Life.”
The Queer Black Artists Building Worlds of Desire
It is the picture of rebirth, an image of the unease of transition. Profusely the sweat gathers, beading across Prince Luxury’s face and chest. His almond-shaped eyes are shut as his tongue reaches across gold grills capped onto his teeth, licking away moisture from his upper lip. His body is there in the frame, but his mind is elsewhere. Looking at the artist Shikeith’s image titled Prince (2019), you want to see what the figure sees, but you can’t. Luxury’s gaze is hidden behind his eyelids; like an awning, they provide cover. What vision is he masking? An action of his own making? An imagined destination where the sweat of his labor marks him of value? A place where he is the center of his own desire? Of this image, Shikeith has noted that he seems to have caught Luxury in the middle of “an act of deviance.” What is captured is an autoerotic freedom.
Utopia is not a word that has been widely considered in the contemporary photographic works of Black queer artists. Much of their art has been flattened into the politics of representation. But Shikeith’s impression of ecstasy is an ideal, a warm depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world. This work has roots in earlier art that explores subjectivities and social spaces beyond cultural and sexual limitations. Alvin Baltrop snapped black-and-white pictures while cruising New York’s collapsing Hudson River piers in the 1970s and ’80s. Those images reveal a secret world—in the liminal post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS space—that existed outside of that era’s dominant sexual appetite and presaged today’s wide embrace of dating apps such as Grindr and Tinder, and casual sex-worker sites like OnlyFans. Shikeith’s portrait of desire also recalls Lyle Ashton Harris’s images that parse gay male subjectivity and want. Harris’s early 1990s performances of masculinity transgressed the binaries of gender and race that governed how a Black man should act. In a self-portrait, Snow Queen #1 (1990), Harris appears in a platinum blond wig; white powder covers his face. His body does not yet exist as normal; there is no place where his body can feel affirmed and complete without the possibility of harm.
Davion Alston, stepping on the ant bed, 2020© and courtesy the artist
While utopia often denotes otherworldly fantasy, unrestricted escapism, or sublime positivity, the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz, in his 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, offered the idea of a queer utopia, one constructed with verisimilitude and operating against a history of lack and discrimination. Queerness belongs to the future, Muñoz claims in his study of performance, writing, and contemporary art, noting that it “allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” Utopia is the search for safe space in counternarratives where queer acts, longings, and urges fulfill personal and communal yearning—and where desire flourishes beyond the confines of mainstream white, gay culture. Such acts offer care and delight, a way out of the margins. As Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini write in their foreword to the 2019 edition of Cruising Utopia, “For utopia, though it bears many positive qualities, also bears negation, as originating from the Greek for ‘no place’ or ‘not place.’” They add, “Queer utopia is the impossible performance of the negation of the negation.”
“When idealizing what utopia looks like I immediately think of the use of photography,” the photographer Davion Alston explains to me. “This tool mastered the recording of truth, the reflection of what or who could be.” Alston’s recent series stepping on the ant bed (2020) documents the protests in Georgia against the killing of unarmed Black people such as Rayshard Brooks and Breonna Taylor by the police. He describes the work as a way for him to explore “desiring utopia in dystopia.” These black-and-white images capture protesters as they shut down southbound lanes of the I-75/I-85 highway. In the photographer’s prints, faces are intentionally obscured with blue, red, yellow, and green stickers. “Through this covering of faces,” he says, “I am able to think about the protection of identity due to surveillance and speculation as well as redefining what the landscape looks like in 2020.” The images allow for new imaginings of the expressions of the Black body beyond what is sanctioned. Amid the twin pandemics of racism and coronavirus, the pictures offer a look at seeking safety in protest, a way of gathering against governmental failure.
D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Elysian, 2018Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures Generation, New York
“I made the image knowing I wanted to talk about not giving a fuck,” the photographer D’Angelo Lovell Williams says of Nah (2018). It’s a self-portrait of the artist in a white dress, swimming in a lake, away from the camera, a gesture that refuses capture, finitude. The image is part of a growing oeuvre in which Williams creates scenes of aspiration and connection. “When I think about the formal,” he explains, “I think about themes of class, race, and social hierarchies that don’t allow Black and queer people to explore beauty and desire of each other’s bodies.” His aim is to reframe that censorship, visualizing what Muñoz addresses as a queer performativity that “is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future.” In Elysian (2018), a figure obscured by parched foliage is seen tenderly pulling a lover into another world, where a moment of intimacy is possible. There is a radical physicality present that explores themes of surreal dualities, kinship, and discovery as a way to transgress the taboo. “I know our history with the natural landscape, and it’s lacking in regard to visual representation,” Williams says. “When themes about my work come up, I hear, ‘Oh, well, your work is sexually explicit.’ The gestures are about rejecting the labels that have been placed on us. I don’t have to abide by censorship on my own body or people’s bodies.” He adds, “It’s about going beyond a sense of the now.”
Photographers such as Daniel Obasi, Nydia Blas, and Naima Green also use the camera to exceed the present precarious conditions of racism, homophobia, and anti-trans violence. In Green’s portrait Diamond, Brower Park (2016), the subject’s eyes are closed. “That gesture offers a different way of thinking into oneself, the landscape, and creating a utopia in really blocking out everything and just being there and taking a deep breath in the moment,” Green explains. The image is from a series of portraits, called Jewels from the Hinterland (2013 ongoing), that captures creatives from across the African diaspora in urban idylls. Hinterland: an area lying beyond what is visible or known. This idea of a private space, only reachable by those in the know, was essential to Green’s pursuit to “create an alternative present” and “reclaim lively, lush urban space as Black space.”
Naima Green, Diamond, Brower Park, 2016, from the series Jewels from the HinterlandCourtesy the artist
Reclaiming urban space as Black space is also at play in Lauren Halsey’s digital collages that present queer Afrofuturist alternative realms. On social media, she borrows the name of the Black ready-to-wear label FUBU (For Us By Us) that, in the 1990s, represented cool urban self-realization, and hashtags her visions #fubuarchitecture. For the artist it seems to be shorthand for what an inclusive and self-reliant Black community could be. Her work thang (2020) zeroes in on South Central, Los Angeles, where Halsey is from. She remakes her neighborhood in her own image. Stylish Black women and men appear, cut from found materials, as do pyramids, unicorns, statues, a Louis Vuitton–monogrammed California bungalow, and advertisements for local businesses such as Urban Books & Thangs. There are statements of empowerment against gentrification: we still here, there (2018) and the sprawling collage work gotta get over the hump? (2010), in which emblems of Black mysticism and informal communion collide. Halsey’s visual world-building sits in a history of queering the medium of collage that has long manufactured dreams, manifesting them through the construction of new material realities.
Lauren Halsey, gotta get over the hump?, 2010Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Like Mickalene Thomas, with her vibrant, collaged living-room tableaux, Halsey, who also draws on the Black cultural aesthetics of the 1970s, has used her collages as sketches for architectural installations such as Kingdom Splurge (2015), which she describes as an “endless becoming that entails liberation through Funk, fantasy architecture, and the experimental development of space.” A similar impulse is at play in Sadie Barnette’s New Eagle Creek Salon (2019). The project pays homage to and reimagines the San Francisco bar her father, Rodney Barnette, opened, in 1990, to serve a multiracial queer community marginalized by the city’s gay nightlife scene. The installation’s bar (activated as a social space), sculpture, and found party photographs of patrons and bartenders are glittering documents of history. Memory here is used in the service of futurity—or, as Barnette writes, the project is meant to “offer space for connection and new energies, to dance and dream.”
Sadie Barnette, Untitled (For Sammy), 2019, from the series New Eagle Creek SalonCourtesy the artist
Muñoz opens Cruising Utopia with a provocation: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer.” It announces that queer people are not yet fully themselves in the world, and the process of trying to get there is the hard work of hope. The violence of the state routinely smashes the self, controlling what is possible—sexually, politically. Given this enduring reality, some queer artists dream in images, in defiance of the straight imagination. Their eyes desire narratives of longing and pleasure, free of trauma, with illuminations of relief. Through their pictures, other ways of existing are possible.
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 241, “Utopia,” Winter 2020, under the title “The Future Will See You Now.”
What Does Utopia Look Like in Photography Today?
This winter, in the wake of a pandemic, global protest movements, and a dramatic presidential election in the United States, Aperture magazine’s new issue, “Utopia,” shows that other ways of living are possible—when the collective will exists.
In “Utopia,” artists, photographers, and writers envision a world without prisons, document visionary architecture, honor queer space and creativity, and dream of liberty through spiritual self-expression. The issue features compelling portfolios by David Benjamin Sherry, Allen Frame, and Balarama Heller—whose respective works span time and geography, from bohemian New York to a Hare Krishna retreat in India—and writing by Antwaun Sargent on Black queer artists’ representations of desire, Sara Knelman on the freeing possibilities of feminist collage, and Salamishah Tillet on Tyler Mitchell’s visions of Black utopia. They all show us that utopia is not a far-fetched scheme, but rather a way of reshaping our future.
In conjunction with the release of “Utopia,” Aperture launches a series of digital programming in partnership with London-based fashion brand JW Anderson. See below for the full schedule.
Tyler Mitchell and Salamishah Tillet on Black Utopia
December 10, 7:00 p.m. ET
Tyler Mitchell’s iconic photographs of Black individuals playing and at ease in public are what Salamishah Tillet calls a “profoundly radical act.” Blurring the line between art and fashion photography, Mitchell’s images capture a Black utopia filled with community, love, and tenderness. In this conversation, Mitchell and Tillet consider what Black utopia looks like in today’s world. See here to register.
Matt Wolf on Creating “Spaceship Earth”
January 21, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ET
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. In this conversation, Wolf will discuss his latest film, Spaceship Earth (2020), which traces the activities of a counterculture collective known as the Synergists, who spent two years inside Biosphere 2, a self-enclosed ecosystem in the Arizona desert. See here to register.
Feminist Futures with Sara Knelman
February 4, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ET
From the Dada movement to today, artists have deployed the visual collisions of collage to critique, challenge, provoke, and invent their own idyllic realms. In this conversation, writer Sara Knelman speaks with Alanna Fields and others about the freeing, utopian nature of feminist collage. See here to register.
Antwaun Sargent on Black Queer Utopia
February 18, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ET
Antwaun Sargent, artist Shikeith, and others discuss the ways Black queer artists are redefining the notion of utopia. As Sargent explains in his essay “The Future Will See You Now,” Black queer artists are using photography in defiance of the “straight imagination,” and in doing so, creating their own narratives of desire and relief. See here to register.
Read more from Aperture, issue 241, “Utopia,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.
Through December 14, as part of the Aperture Magazine Collectors’ Edition, collect a signed print by David Benjamin Sherry for $200.
Aperture's Blog
- Aperture's profile
- 21 followers
