Aperture's Blog, page 61

Announcing the Winners of the 2020 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation, in partnership with DELPIRE & CO, are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. From the thirty-five shortlisted, a final jury in Paris comprising of Damarice Amao (Centre Pompidou), Lucy Conticello (M le magazine du Monde), Laurel Parker (Laurel Parker Book), Nicolas Poillot (creative director and image consultant), and Stéphanie Solinas (artist) selected this year’s winning titles.

An exhibition of the thirty-five books shortlisted for the 2020 PhotoBook Awards, as well as installations drawn from Issue 018 of The PhotoBook Review guest edited by Dr. Deborah Willis is on view at the DELPIRE & CO bookshop until December 24, 2020.

Coinciding with this year’s winner announcement, a weekend of online conversations with artists and publishers from this year’s shortlist, as well as members of the jury, in discussions of their work and the critical role of photobooks, will take place on December 5 and 6, 2020. See here to register.

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography
Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis, eds.
Walther Collection and Steidl, New York and Göttingen, Germany, 2020

Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, edited by Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis (Walther Collection, New York, and Steidl, Göttingen, Germany), winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year, “provides a multifaceted snapshot of thought around the problematics of vernacular photography” and is “an essential reconsideration of the topic,” according to shortlist juror Joshua Chuang. Final juror Lucy Conticello added, “The heft and the depth of the research, its striking and insightful contributions sourced from a great number of archives and collections, and fantastic reproductions make this a reference book on vernacular photography that will be around for a long time.”

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Gloria Oyarzabal
Woman Go No’Gree
Editorial RM and Images Vevey, Barcelona and Vevey, Switzerland, 2020

In Woman Go No’Gree by Gloria Oyarzabal the artist explores colonialism and white feminism in West Africa through the use of found imagery, archives, and her own photography. “Both substance and form of the book are compelling. The artist advances an excellent dialogue around deconstructing the idea of the gaze and ‘the other,’” states final juror Damarice Amao. “The layout and the intelligent, inventive—even destabilizing—graphic design serve her purpose very well.” In this beautifully and thoughtfully crafted book, Oyarzabal challenges the viewer to engage with their own biases and assumptions.

Winner of First PhotoBook ($10,000 prize)

Buck Ellison
Living Trust
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France, 2020

Living Trust by Buck Ellison was praised for its investigation of the visual language of privilege. Taken together, the series in the book 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,” shortlist juror Oluremi C. Onabanjo commented. “The book is carefully shaped in relation to the subject, in its form as much as in the artist’s approach to white privilege—a very contemporary subject—and addressed with very personal writing,” concluded Nicolas Poillot, who served as part of the final jury. 

Juror’s Special Mention

Ryan Debolski
LIKE
Gnomic Book, Brooklyn, 2020

LIKE by Ryan Debolski explores the experiences and relationships of migrant workers in Oman. But rather than focusing on the defining public image of poor working conditions, 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. “The position this work takes is very singular,” juror Stéphanie Solinas affirms, “a book on migrant workers in Oman, where we find a great presence of bodies with a form of sensuality where we expected to find brick walls and deserts. The weave between text and image, bodies and architecture offers a new, unexpected entry into the topic.” 

The 2020 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Exhibition will be on view at DELPIRE & CO through December 24, 2020.

Why Deborah Willis Thinks the Photobook Can Be Transformative

In 1973, Dr. Deborah Willis, then an undergraduate photography student at the Philadelphia College of Art (UArts), submitted an independent research proposal about the contributions of Black photographers to the history of American photography from 1840 to 1940. Willis had sent fifty letters to various collections and libraries, seeking information about photographers such as Gordon Parks and James Van Der Zee. “Is a photographer primarily a creative artist rather than a mere recorder?” she asked. “Could these black photographers receive the same recognition their white colleagues received?” Across her prolific career as an archivist, historian, professor, and photographer, Willis has answered these questions about recognition through her groundbreaking studies of Black photographers, her contribution to numerous photobooks, and her support over the years of artists and writers seeking to make space for an expanded, more inclusive history of the medium.

But, for all of the publishers who supported her quest enthusiastically, Willis, the guest editor of Issue 018 of The PhotoBook Review, also encountered editors who clung to dated narratives about photography and race. No one said changing minds would be easy, yet Willis was determined. She would go on to win Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, and become a revered professor at New York University, where she is now chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts. Willis recently spoke with Brendan Embser, her former graduate student at NYU and editor of Aperture monographs on Deana Lawson and Ming Smith, about her earliest encounters with photobooks and how the photobook as a medium continues to be transformative.

Deborah Willis, Untitled, 2010
Courtesy the artist

Brendan Embser: When we were launching Deana Lawson’s Aperture monograph two years ago, she gave this beautiful speech. She said she hoped that one day, a young woman would come to the library in Rochester, New York, where she grew up, and discover her book. Her vision was about sharing. That moment, which I found so moving, reminded me of you and your stories about growing up in your mother’s beauty shop in Philadelphia and sharing magazines like Jet. When it comes to photobooks, did you have an experience of going to the library or bookshop and feeling transported by a single book?

Deborah Willis: Yes, I was seven years old. It was Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life [Simon & Schuster, 1955]. We had to pick a library book every week growing up, and I just discovered that book visually. I saw it on the shelf and I took it home. I was so fascinated with the beauty of the light in the photographs. I could see that the lighting and the woman were so beautiful. The bare bulbs in the kitchen. It was intimate; it looked like love. That’s how I grew up, with my family. It was always about love.

Embser: Did you think of the book as a distinct experience visually from the magazines that you were looking at?

Willis: Then, I didn’t. But the connection for me with that book, and with magazines—Black magazines—was the experience of seeing Black people in print. We had National Geographic, which was a different way of seeing Black people, mainly in Africa. But to see Ebony magazine, and Jet, and Bronze, and Hue, and all of the magazines that my parents subscribed to—this was a part of the spectrum, the experience.

Cover and spread from Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 (Random House, 1968)

Embser: Do you remember the first photobook you ever bought for yourself?

Willis: The first photobook I bought was the catalogue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Harlem on My Mind [Random House, 1968]. The second book was The Black Photographers Annual [1973–80]. That was really major for me. I was an undergraduate student, looking for a way to examine the history of Black photographers, but also trying to recognize that there was more than what I found in my photo-history books.

Embser: When you worked as an archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, did the Schomburg make a point of collecting photobooks at that time?

Willis: I was conducting research at the Schomburg Center in the mid-’70s, and they didn’t collect photobooks specifically; however, there were numerous pictorials on Black life in the collection. And, there was The Black Book [Random House, 1974] by Toni Morrison, which had photographs in it. I discovered that at the Schomburg. Five years later, when I was hired to be the photo specialist and then became the photo curator there, I saw the gap. I noticed that there was something that I needed to do with organizing and creating the “bio-bibliography,” which would eventually be the first book that I did, Black Photographers 1840–1940: An Illustrated Bio-bibliography [Garland, 1985].

Embser: Were you also acquiring books and objects for the Schomburg? And did you make a point of collecting artists’ monographs, or would that have been the library’s job?

Willis: Yes, I was lucky enough to work with Ruth Ann Stewart, and with Jean Blackwell Hutson—both headed the Schomburg. Ruth was helpful in guiding me through, allowing me to create books that could be used in the archives, where photos were held, but also for the general library, which researches used.

Spread from The Black Photographer’s Annual, Vol. 1 (1973), with photographs by Ming Smith

Embser: How were you able to find publishers for your own books?

Willis: I had an angel. His name was Richard Newman and he worked at Garland Publishing, which created books on African American histories. Within a month of starting at the Schomburg, Dick called me up and asked me if I would like to do a book on Black photographers. And I said, “Well, I have an undergraduate research paper.” And he said, “Send it to me.” He told me we should create a book that was a resource list of photographers. In the end, I had over three hundred names in there. And that was the beginning—the bio-bibliography from 1840 to 1940. And it was so successful that he asked if I wanted to do another one, and I did, extending that history from 1940 to 1988.

Embser: In addition to these historical studies, you’ve also worked on artists’ monographs. Do you have a favorite from your early career?

Willis: In the early 1990s, Andy Grundberg, at the Friends of Photography in San Francisco, called me and said, “I’d like you to do a book on any photographer. Who would you like to do it on?” I said, “Lorna Simpson.” I was really excited to have that opportunity to meet with Lorna, interview her, create that book at a crucial time in both of our careers and lives. That was Lorna Simpson [Friends of Photography, 1992].

Embser: It sounds like you had key supporters at the beginning of your career. But did you get pushback too?

Willis: Sometimes, publishers battled with me and didn’t believe the history. For my book on Van Der Zee [VanDerZee: Photographer, 1886–1983, Abrams/National Portrait Gallery, 1993], I saved the letters that they sent to me, where they said I was inflating his contributions to the field.

Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)

Embser: What exactly would they say?

Willis: Here’s one: “On pages 3/4—Here I feel she inflates Van Der Zee’s achievement. Certainly, others of his time with not much more sophistication or training, accomplished similar technical results. Moreover, such earlier photographers as O. G. Reijlander (to whom she refers later on) used combined-image printing, so Van Der Zee cannot be credited with innovation here. The superlatives (‘astonishing’) need to be toned down.” Or this: “No evidence is given that Van Der Zee possessed issues of Camera Work or otherwise acquainted himself with the work of Strand, Stieglitz, and the photo secessionists. Therefore, it is dangerous to associate his work with new developments in photographic aesthetics, except insofar as it shares a spirit. The problem for me is that I do not find this shared spirit in Van Der Zee’s work . . . One of the unique and potentially most valuable aspects of Deborah’s approach to Van Der Zee’s work is that she deals with it in terms of ethnic consciousness.” [Laughs]

Embser: The word dangerous—I mean, what is that about?

Willis: I know, it’s amazing. The battles I’ve had in publishing had a lot to do with the narratives that people wanted to hold onto. Here is another: “I do not consider Van Der Zee’s photographs radical cultural intervention. Van Der Zee’s photographs didn’t change the way things were: they recorded it. What was surprising, I think, to many white viewers who grew up in a segregated world is that there is this strong, mainstream, upper-middle class tradition that has deep roots in the nineteenth century. It is more about being upper-middle class, irrespective of color.” I could go on and on.

Embser: When you look at the contemporary art world and art publishing right now, after all the work you’ve done, what do you think that publishers can do to better support Black artists and the range of visions that they have for publishing?

Willis: I think the dialogue is really important, what’s happening now. And that discussion increases when we have editors who are sensitive not only to Black photographers in the West, but also look through the lens of African photography, through Asian photography, Latinx, Native American, with a much more critical eye, and to know that there are vital books that need to be encountered.

Sergeant Andrew Martin Chandler of the Forty-Fourth Mississippi Infantry Regiment, Company F, and Silas Chandler, servant, with Bowie knives, revolvers, pepper-box, shotgun, and canteen, ca. 1861–63
Courtesy the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, and NYU Press

Embser: Do you want to say something about your new project The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship [New York University Press, 2021]?

Willis: I’ve been working on this for the past seven years, looking at the experiences of personal memory and public memory, and how photography shaped the history of the presence of Black Civil War soldiers. I wanted to find photographs, letters, and diary pages of Black people who were teachers, preachers, women who were teachers and nurses, Black soldiers who were part of the fight for their own freedom. When I was in school, we didn’t have that discussion. We didn’t talk about Black Civil War soldiers. We didn’t know who fought. And the fact was, there was a strong history that basically was ignored.

I write that the notion of resistance and recovering stories is key to the image of Black soldiers. Cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg wrote that the role of African Americans in the struggle against slavery has been long repressed by guardians of official “privileged versions” of the American past. Racial prejudice has been the major cause of the expunging and erasure of the role of Blacks in determining their own future—and this erasure remains in the interest of some groups invested in continuing and preserving racial inequality.

I wanted to respond to the question of how Black male identity is formed through the photographic image. I found an amazing collection of images at Yale, in Boston, in DC, and here in New York. These collections are available, the photographs are there. Now, there’s an opportunity for people to see that there was a Black presence in the war.

Carrie Mae Weems, While Sitting upon the Ruins of Your Remains, I Pondered the Course of History, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Embser: One last question for you. This is like a variation on the BBC Radio program Desert Island Discs. So you have three books, and you’re going off to the desert island: one for your granddaughter, Zenzi; one for your son, Hank Willis Thomas; and one for yourself. What are they?

Willis: For my granddaughter to read with her mother, Rujeko, I really love this book called My Mommy Medicine by Edwidge Danticat [2019]. It has pictures, illustrations, text. The narrative is about a child in need of comfort and assurance. I would definitely give Hank, Gordon Parks’s Collected Works: Study Edition [Steidl, 2017]. And I would take with me Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video [Yale University Press, 2012]. It has all of what I love, and it gives the opportunity of seeing, witnessing the Sea Islands, Africa, Europe, experiencing performance, but also looking at folklore and memory. I would spend my time with that on an island, encouraged to create more work, and I would just love that moment.

This piece originally was published in Issue 018 of The PhotoBook Review.

Inside an Archive of African Photobooks

I first met Ben Krewinkel in Lagos, Nigeria, when he attended the 2015 edition of the LagosPhoto festival as an exhibiting artist. Guest curator Cristina de Middel had selected his body of work Looking for M. (f0.23 publishing, 2013), a thoughtful and cleverly edited publication that juxtaposes archival images concerning Mozambique’s revolutionary Marxist–Leninist ideology with contemporary capitalist realities found in the cityscapes and on the advertising billboards of Maputo. At this stage in 2015, Krewinkel’s online archive of photobooks on Africa was still in its early stages and only available on Facebook.

In August 2020, I found myself in Amsterdam and eager to see how this recognized archive had evolved from a Facebook page into an important visual reference that problematizes the discourse of visual representations on Africa over time and in print form. I made an appointment to drive to Krewinkel’s home in Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam, where the archive is housed.

Krewinkel studied history in Amsterdam and was an exchange student at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He specialized in modern Africa, writing a thesis on the role women played in the liberation struggle of Mozambique. He subsequently studied documentary photography at The Photo Academy, Amsterdam, and photographic studies at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, where he wrote a further thesis on the depiction of the so-called “poor whites” in South Africa. He views photographs as fragile historical objects and source material, in much the same way an archeologist views fossilized remains. We had an hour scheduled for our interview but ended up spending nearly three hours, interrupted only once—by the postman, delivering more photobooks.

Spread from Joana Choumali, Hââbré: The Last Generation (Fourthwall Books, 2016)

Azu Nwagbogu: Why is the name of the collection “Africa in the Photobook”?

Ben Krewinkel: When I started collecting, my main focus was on books dealing with the struggle in Southern Africa—so in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola. Some of the books were issued by the liberation movements, but even more by Western and Japanese photographers who were associated with supportive organizations. When the collection grew, I noticed that only a very small percentage of all the books was actually “African” in its entirety. For instance, even House of Bondage by Ernest Cole [Random House, 1967], which is excellent, was published and designed in North America and Great Britain. Nevertheless, I would consider it an African photobook, given the subject and the photographer’s origin.

I am aware that there is something really monolithic in the title, but the collection spans the whole continent and covers a timeframe of almost 150 years. The largest section consists of books by European photographers, designers, and publishers. So a title such as “African Photobooks” doesn’t do it justice. We are dealing with books by both outsiders and Africans, from and about the continent. Africa in the Photobook follows the changing visual representations of the continent through this print medium and, hopefully, offers some historical perspective on various themes in African history.

Spread from Álbum de familia (InforCongo, 1958)

Nwagbogu: You aim to “decolonize” these books. How can you achieve this?

Krewinkel: Most of the books in my collection are problematic in some kind of way. I consider photographs as historical sources, and I am aware that many photographs in the past were used in a propagandistic way. The majority were produced by Europeans and were political in aim. Over 150 years, photobooks have expressed constantly changing visual representations of Africa but have also been part of the construction and circulation of ideas and fantasies about the continent and its inhabitants. Books followed the narrow, colonial, and repetitive thematic patterns that often perpetuated the binary oppositions of “self” versus “other.” Most publications produced before the 1960s were there to legitimize and promote the colonial endeavor. But colonial books are nevertheless complex and ambivalent too. One needs to ascertain why certain publications were produced and what the thinking and motives behind them were. To properly study this, you actually need to have access to the archives of photographers or publishers. More important, you want to have information on the sitters and the way they felt about the encounters with the photographer, to learn about the power dynamics between photographer and sitter which, in my opinion, defines whether a work is problematic or not.

Nwagbogu: How does one deal with such contentious material and archives?

Krewinkel: I’m aware that I have to treat the books and their contents very carefully. The cultural theorist Mieke Bal rightly addressed the problem of thoughtlessly republishing problematic, voyeuristic, and even painful content in many of her books. I’m still considering how to deal with this material, but it definitely needs to be contextualized. I also feel that some spreads, however problematic, need to be shown to an audience, so one can learn how these books were used and distributed, and played a role in shaping perspectives on Africa. One has to stress the fact that spreads from such books exemplify the colonial narrative but may not always represent the original intention of the photographers, some of whom were African.

Zanele Muholi, Tumi Nkopane, KwaThema, Johannesburg, 2013, from Faces and Phases: 2006–2014 (Steidl/The Walther Collection, 2014)
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson, New York

Nwagbogu: Do books on contemporary photography reflect an image of Africa that is more nuanced?

Krewinkel: For sure, but not all of them. There are still Western photographers who nostalgically recycle the old narrative and thematic patterns, and it irritates me when they claim to show me the “real Africa.” Even the Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin and South African Peter Magubane have published books full of landscapes, wildlife, and “vanishing peoples.” Fortunately, the last decades show a growth in beautiful and nuanced books from both African and European photographers—such as Yto Barrada, A Life Full of Holes. The Strait Project [Autograph ABP, 2005]; Bruno Boudjelal, Disquiet Days [Autograph ABP, 2009]; Zanele Muholi, Faces and Phases [Prestel, 2010]; Georges Senga, Une vie après la mort [Editions du Garages Dialogues, 2013]; Terry Kurgan, Hotel Yeoville [Fourthwall Books, 2013]; John Kiyaya, Tanzania Photographer and People of Lake Tanganyika [Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd., 2013]; and Crossing Strangers by Andile Buka [MNK Press, 2015]. Then,there are good contemporary books based on archives—such as Jacob Nzudie, Supermarket [Le Bec en l’air, 2012]; Gulu Real Art Studio [Steidl, 2013] edited by Martina Bacigalupo; Commonplace by Tamsyn Adamsand Sophie Feyder [Fourthwall Books, 2016]; and theproject Ebifananyi [YdocPublishing, 2014–17], initiatedand edited by Andrea Stultiens in collaboration with African photographers and artists. And we should not forget Santu Mofokeng’s groundbreaking Black Photo Album/Look at Me 1890–1950 [Steidl, 2013] and his recently published immense box of books, Stories [Steidl, 2019].

Spread from Kleine Reise zu schwarzen Menschen (Brehm Verlag, 1931)

Nwagbogu: Let’s discuss the most contentious photobooks in your archive.

Krewinkel: Wow, where to start? All of the books published before World War II (and many published in the decades following) are contentious in one way or another. The most demeaning photobooks are some of the tourist albums from Algeria, Egypt, or South Africa that show women posing in a supposedly erotic fashion. Also, Frauen des Morgenlandes [Orell Füssli Verlag, 1929] and Negertypen des schwarzen Erdteils [Orell Füssli Verlag, 1930], which were originally published in Switzerland—the latter republished in English as Negro Types [George Routledge & Sons, 1930]—are really difficult to look at because of the ignorance and racist ideology that comes through in both the texts and the photographs. Racist missionary books, such as William Taylor’s Africa Illustrated: Scenes from Daily Life on the Dark Continent [Illustrated Africa, 1895], portrayed Africans as backward, childish, and evil. There is a lot of colonial propaganda in the collection, but the driving force behind the content was dictated by the authors or initiators. The books about the Congo Free State and Belgian Congo, for example, reflect the trinity of the colonial authorities, industry, and the church. Still very racist and grounded on the binary opposition of “us” vs. “them,” even though the books left out explicitly eroticized portraits and, for the most part, deliberately excluded explicit and degrading images of Congolese suffering. Nevertheless, traces of violence are always present.

Nwagbogu: How can photography remediate and decolonize the historiography of Africa?

Krewinkel: I think it is very important to critically revisit old colonial books. By studying them closely, we notice the endless recycling of stereotypes, dominant tropes, and thematic patterns derived from generalized ideas about the continent. However, one must realize that even these books can be easily oversimplified. For instance, from today’s perspective, one can characterize a book like Kleine Reise zu schwarzen Menschen [Brehm Verlag, 1931] as a racist colonial book. Yet it is also a book made by an independent, autonomous young Jewish woman. More important, unlike her contemporaries, Lotte Errell portrayed the Ewe people in a dignified manner, using an informal style. New work can also help to reevaluate and re-address colonial photography. In Joana Choumali’s Hââbré: The Last Generation [Fourthwall Books, 2016], she subtly addresses themes, like scarification and polished teeth, that had been the main subjects of colonial photobooks as well. Hââbré goes beyond representation and gives voice and authorship to the subjects photographed. They relate the effect of scarification on their daily lives.

Retrospectively, we can discover important aspects that were unintentionally included in the books, for example, the small book Álbum de familia [InforCongo, 1958], which was distributed at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, where the Belgian Congo played a major role in the propagandist efforts of the colonial authorities. It was produced by the photographers of InforCongo, who were European as well as Congolese—as in the case of Joseph Makula. The book consists of a systematic juxtaposition of nearly identical scenes capturing Black Africans in the Congo and white Belgians in the metropole. Following a hypocritical humanistic narrative, the book insists on the closeness of everyday life in Belgium and in the Congo and stresses the Family of Man vision of “familial” ties between the Belgians and the Congolese. In reality, the Congolese depicted were part of an elite called the évolués, which constituted an extremely small section of the Congolese population. The world’s fair, and this book, marked the beginning of independence and the decolonization process in Belgian Congo.

Spreads from Du twist à cocody, ou l’art de la natte (Éditions Dalfoz, 1972)

Nwagbogu: One of my favorite books and definitely a discovery for me in your collection is Du twist à cocody, ou l’art de la natte by Diby Yao Christophe [Éditions Dalfoz, 1972]. What a beautiful volume, and the poem at the end is really telling and poignant. It’s a book that speaks to the value of your collection as one that also highlights and revives largely unknown African voices. What have you learned about this remarkable book?

Krewinkel: Yes, indeed. Du twist à cocody, ou l’art de la natte is a great book from the Ivory Coast. The bookwas printed in France and the text is bilingual, but I’mnot sure who Christophe’s audience was, nor do I knowanything about the photographer. This book deals withhairstyles and reminds me very much of the work by J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, but the photographic style is moreinformal. The women portrayed are much more at easethan women portrayed by colonials. It is a refreshing takeon the topic, and I think you can consider this book as areaction to colonialism and neocolonialism. The authorwrites: “Why do some of our stylish women prefere [sic]bleached hair or wigs to genuine African creations? [. . .]I meet many of you who pretend to be European, tryingto dress and act like white women. Oh, my Black sisters, why are you trying to forget that you are African?”

This piece was originally published under the title “Africa in the PhotoBook” in Issue 018 of The PhotoBook Review.

The Photographer Who Erased Time

Widline Cadet has been sitting in the light for three seasons. Before the pandemic, she always had something else to do (working away at her MFA at Syracuse University, where she graduated this past spring; and fielding commissions for publications such as California Sunday Magazine), or she had somewhere else to be (residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine or Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island in New York). The demands of social distancing, however, brought an abrupt, ecstatic stillness to her routine; suddenly, she had time to follow the movements of the sun.

“Our living room had this magical light, where I would wake up at seven in the morning, every morning, to just watch the light,” Cadet says of the home in Syracuse she’s recently moved away from. “I spent most of the early spring and summer going to the backyard and watching the sunset, too, for a while.” This fall, stationed in New York City as an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Cadet still tracks the light. In a new body of work, You Won’t Be Here Forever, a burnt-orange glow undulates across photographs taken both Upstate and in the city, flickering in and out of her camera’s gaze.

“I try to erase time as much as I can,” Cadet says of these enigmatic images of unnamed outdoor spaces, strangers, and friends. “I try to be ambiguous about where these pictures were taken, or when, or what’s happening.” Cadet refuses explicit reference to the painful frenzies of 2020. Nonetheless, the aesthetics of social distancing permeate the work: she made most of these photographs on her solitary walks through her former and current cities of residence.

In these images, human subjects are conspicuously distant from the camera. Shoulders slant away, backs are firmly turned, or nature intervenes to shroud them. In one, a profusion of tree branches nearly claims a man as its own, so that his stance—balanced on one leg, the other leg pulled back into a stretch—becomes a kind of sprouting. Even in a rare instance of physical proximity, a portrait of a person in a satin slip and Western hat, the subject looks away from the camera in favor of the trees. Their brown skin and brown hat are beautifully congruent with the lush green of the firs, both where they are sun-dappled and where they are in shadow.

In the absence of interpersonal touch, Cadet’s photographs cultivate a type of alternative intimacy. Disparate textures meet and kiss. A fuzzy, silhouetted head greets crisp, looming bridge beams. A stocky bush caresses the stone wall and wire window grate of a building’s side. Cadet considers these contact points inherently optimistic—signs of natural life and familiar landscapes still converging, even through another season of unnatural isolation. “There’s this serious hopefulness that I have that I try to put into pictures in some way,” she says, and indeed, her gaze on these daily joys feels serious, carefully measured—the inflections of warm, bright light all the more invigorating for the solemnity and solitude that spurred their documentation.

Still, her optimism emanates unbridled. In one photograph, a pair of hands cradles berries from a tree, the palms cupped so patiently they could be outstretched in benediction. This moment joins a constellation of images Cadet has made of Black people in communion with nature. In an ongoing body of work she started in 2017, Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]appearances), “most of the photographs,” Cadet says, “are of Black women and greenery and these abstract landscapes.” In her series Soft (2017) and Home Bodies (2013–ongoing), as well, the surrounding flora often frames her subjects. Cadet calls this mediation of greenery “a way of hiding myself and hiding the figures,” but her hiding practice is less like masking, more like tucking her subjects into a landscape where they can be carefully held. Those subjects are a mixture of Cadet’s loved ones, total strangers, and herself, and Cadet’s avoidance in telling the viewer the difference serves as another way of hiding, holding back her relationship to the figures, so that they may all be ambiguously loved.

In You Won’t Be Here Forever, some amendments needed to be made. “I include my siblings randomly in every body of work that I do. Except for this one,” says Cadet. (She hasn’t been able to see much of her family during the pandemic.) And unlike in Seremoni Disparisyon, Cadet does not explicitly appear alongside her other subjects here. She’s found a new way to hide. In a photograph of her old living room in Syracuse, taken just before she moved out and during one of her seven AM sessions in the morning sunlight, a print of a 2018 portrait, San Tit (Untitled), leans against a wall, turned upside down. It’s partially, perhaps intentionally, obscured by a separate wooden frame and other objects, left last to be packed away before Cadet left the apartment that was her home for three years and her solace for three lonesome months in quarantine.

There’s a painstaking quality to the way San Tit (Untitled) is tucked away, and cut from view is the other young Black woman in the original portrait, on whose stomach the artist gently rests her head. But she is still there. Cadet would like to erase time in her photographs; this one keeps her held in perpetual light, embraced, without distance, by another.

How an Irreverent and Joyful Interiors Magazine Redefined the Idea of Home

It began with photographs of Farrah Fawcett. Raymond Donahue, a young showroom decorator for IKEA, had plastered the walls and ceiling of his bedroom in the small New Jersey bungalow he shared with his mother with black-and-white photocopies of Fawcett’s magazine covers: High Society, Vogue, Good Housekeeping. Nest, a new shelter magazine, sent the photographer Jason Schmidt to capture the room, which made the cover of the debut issue, dated Fall 1997. “I love Warhol’s use of repetition, so I photocopied magazine covers and made wallpaper out of them,” Donahue said to the curator Valerie Steele, who conducted the accompanying interview. “Nest offers its own definitions in celebrating human self-invention at home,” Joseph Holtzman wrote in the issue’s Dear Reader letter. “Our focus will never be on focus groups. We’d love an authentic chunk of your mind, though.”

Nest magazine ran quarterly for twenty-six issues. It was heady, odd, acerbic—sardonic about conformity and corporate America, yet, when it came to decorating, never overly goading or insincere. All tastes were welcome, provided they delighted, or intrigued, or tickled Holtzman, a decorator from Baltimore whose family money afforded him the opportunity to launch such an ambitious magazine.

Spread from Nest 4, Spring 1999, with photographs by Antoine Bootz

“Nest—I could not resist that title. I said ‘Yes’ based only on that, I remember clearly,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, who profiled the Italian twentieth-century design dealer Fulvio Ferrari for Nest’s first issue. “It was clear he loved other human beings,” she said of Holtzman. “We were all tired of exclusive, staged, rich, haughty, and glossy. We longed for intimate, messy, illicit, stolen, and generous—we wanted to find out how real people lived.”

Nest was seldom cozy. Each issue clashed the refined with the banal or makeshift or extreme; a story on a luxury swimming pool could be followed by a piece on tents in Kosovo, or igloos, or the women confined to the State Correctional Facility near Grants, New Mexico.

In the debut issue, Jan Groover’s photographs of the bathroom at Manhattan’s Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, painted by Keith Haring in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis, appeared a few pages away from David Levinthal’s images of Barbie’s Dream House and Derry Moore’s pictures of Longleat, the home of the Marquess of Bath, who made paintings of all the women he slept with and hung them up his stairs. (Moore, a celebrated interiors photographer and the 12th Earl of Drogheda, and thus a regular at castles and manors, fulfilled Holtzman’s obsession with English aristocratic taste.) The Fall 1998 issue featured a story on the Turin home where Carlo Mollino spent the last fourteen years of his life, pictured alongside his Polaroids of the prostitutes who visited him. Summer 1999 saw stories by Robert Polidori on beehive-shaped mud houses in the al-Shilo village in Syria and Mitch Epstein on the ape house at the Philadelphia Zoo. For Fall 1999–2000, Nan Goldin photographed the artist Nayland Blake in his mother’s bedroom, which he’d wallpapered with over four hundred pounds of gingerbread. The roll call of photographers was impressive—David Armstrong, Martin Parr, Jim Goldberg, Richard Barnes, and Terence Donovan, among others, all made work for Nest—yet only a handful of the image makers, such as Moore, were particularly known for classic interiors photography.

Spread from Nest 7, Winter 1999–2000, with photographs by Philip Kwame Apagya

“I subscribe to a number of shelter magazines—World of Interiors, House & Garden (RIP), Elle Decor (before its recent decline)—but Nest was different,” says the critic and magazine collector Vince Aletti. “When the second issue came out, I’m embarrassed to report that I wrote a fan letter to the magazine advising it to be more appealing to potential readers—not put them off with the sort of abstract design and weird graphics on the cover of the Fall 1998 issue, which no one would have recognized as a shelter mag.” That issue featured a black-and-brown striped cover and a hand-applied cutting of flocked wallpaper, the pattern of which resembled random stains, by the artist Rosemarie Trockel. “It was obvious Nest couldn’t care less about the general audience,” Aletti says. “You liked it or you left it, and most of its core readers loved it. I don’t think I would have called it beautiful at any point, because it was not afraid to get a little ugly, and it went beyond mere beauty.”

The design was “almost baroque,” according to Tom Beckham, who joined Nest ahead of the second issue as design technician, and stayed to the end, quickly becoming graphics director. At points, it veered toward the unhinged—one issue came with four holes drilled straight through it, as if the reader was hanging a particularly hefty picture; while others arrived with scalloped edges or scratch-and-sniff patches. Photographers’ images would often be placed on top of florid, graphic patterns or framed with shouty borders. The magazine was “another iteration of Joe’s interior design,” says Beckham.

Cover of Nest 9, Summer 2000, with photographs by Nathaniel Goldberg (cover) and Manny Rubio (logo)

Before launching Nest, Holtzman had considered starting a magazine that was severe and serious. But after Wallpaper launched in 1996, Nest went in the opposite direction. Holtzman took to thumbing his nose at other, less playful titles. The Summer 1999 cover was photoshopped to resemble a comic strip; a thought bubble above the head of a handsome man, nude save for a towel and reclining in a chair, reads, “Hang me. I thought Wallpaper was shooting my apartment.” Behind him, his decorator, clad in a fur stole, is shown thinking, “God willing, my next assignment will be for Architectural Digest.”

“Nest questioned the concept of conventional beauty and redefined the importance of decoration in a world in which minimal aesthetics dominated,” says Christoph Radl, creative director of Cabana magazine. Indeed, Nest came along at a relatively flaccid period within interior publications. House & Garden, once known for photographic commissions by the likes of Irving Penn and Horst P. Horst in the 1940s and ’50s, when it was art-directed by Alexander Liberman, was floundering by the ’90s; it closed in 1993 and briefly reemerged in 1995 before closing again in 2007. New launches, such as Martha Stewart Living, which began in 1990, were decidedly pleasant and sanitized. But Nest ignored the increasingly recognizable format of the tidy, symmetrical interiors photograph. “Nest’s photographic approach preferred individual perspectives compared to a canonical narrative of the interiors,” says Radl.

Spread from Nest 5, Summer 1999, with photograph by Catherine Opie
———



Spread from Nest 4, Fall 1999–2000, with photograph by Nan Goldin

“They were really looking for photographers from more of an art background than an Architectural Digest background, because they didn’t want the spaces to be overwrought with that idea of how we view what space does and how it exists,” says Catherine Opie, who shot regular stories for Nest. She once turned down a feature on a woman who collected vacuum cleaners. “I still kick myself,” she says. “Being a part of Nest informed my work later on. I don’t know if I would have made 700 Nimes Road”—Opie’s celebrated 2015 series about the home and possessions of Elizabeth Taylor—“without my experience of years of photographing for Nest, in which an environment became a portrait.”

With Nest, the question was not just how do we decorate our homes, but also what is home. It took a conceptual approach to things like ownership, value, luxury, comfort—many of its stories seem pointedly relevant now. In one feature, Eileen Myles spent a week sleeping in a cardboard “homeless box,” invented after a 1993 spike in homelessness in Rotterdam. Much airtime was given to those worried about climate change, including those who’d fashioned elaborate bunkers, and time was taken to document the living arrangements of people with mental-health illnesses or disabilities. Holtzman seemed particularly intrigued by the complex worlds of children. “The Squeeze Machine,” a story in Summer 1999, focuses on eleven-year old Matthew from Alaska, who is autistic and derives comfort from being held tightly. “Nest was always political,” Beckham says. One particular concern was “how being gay gets represented in culture—the idea of the gay decorator.” Nest is “especially legendary among the gays,” says Jop van Bennekom, founder of the adored gay magazine BUTT and, later, Fantastic Man. “It was a bit too opulent to me and the design was a bit too ‘decorative’ for my Protestant taste, but of course, there was joy that splattered from every page.”

Cover of Nest 4, Spring 1999, with photograph byLangdon Clay
Courtesy the collections of Vince Aletti and Donna Ghelerter

Nest is, indeed, joyful. It billed itself as ambivalent to fusty norms but celebratory about style. Impressively, given how closely the magazine revolved around Holtzman’s singular vision, it was never gushing or dictatorial. Through both the sometimes haphazard, whimsical tastes of the subjects profiled and its own eclectic gaze, Nest embraced and encouraged contradictions. One could be radically political while still having good chairs. One could be queer while still worshipping relics of tradition. Nest cared enough about the march of capitalism to mock the unquestioning stuffiness of other titles, but not quite enough to turn down advertising from Calvin Klein or Diesel, or to cease from swooning at some truly extravagant pile, shot by Moore. It needled the status quo without asking its readers to change even slightly; the best you could be, according to Nest, was yourself.

Though briefly courted by Si Newhouse at Condé Nast, Nest folded in 2004. “A Champion of the Quirky Writes Finis,” read the New York Times announcement by Fred A. Bernstein, which recalls how Nest was never afraid to shock: “Holtzman wrote one of his editor’s letters from what he called a ‘small, well-proportioned room’: in a psychiatric hospital. Furniture coverage included close-ups of electric chairs.” Holtzman revealed that he’d ploughed between four million and six million dollars into Nest—he sold a Matisse bronze to support it. The final issue featured one of his own paintings on the cover, nodding to his new plans for life as an artist.

“We at the magazine think that we have at the very least demonstrated that a shelter magazine can march to a different drummer,” Holtzman wrote in his final Dear Reader letter. He expressed hope for the future. “I do believe that the young people coming of age will make a big contribution to design and decoration. The time has come to do more than mix and manipulate the givens of our creative legacy, and I know that this generation is not afraid to stand up to the past.”

This piece was originally published in Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” Spring 2020, under the title “Interior Life.”

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The Parade of Life on the Streets of New York

Photographs are always present tense. The best photographers understand this fact so deeply that its effect resonates through their photographs long after that present moment has become the past. What is this opening in the flow of time, that so entrances photographers that they develop an insatiable hunger for it? And has this idea of the momentary always been so?

Certainly, the photographers and cameras of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries dealt with their present moment in longer fractions of time, taking in the whole of life at an easy pace. It was a pace that was more like life itself: lived in promenade tempo on wide boulevards, where horses clopped along and people sauntered and took pleasure in looking at each other. One could say that distraction, back then, was looking at other people—what they wore, who they were, what they brought to the parade of life on the streets.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, 42nd Street, 2019

That is not the tempo of the twenty-first century. Today, time is often measured in thousandths of a second, and the present is whittled down to an individual’s fleeting gasp of recognition: that moment—out at the edges of our vision—that the photographer might barely understand, yet intuitively recognizes as having meaning, or at the very least, the possibility of being of interest.

Our pace really began picking up somewhere around the debut of the smartphone. Not that life wasn’t already going faster before that, but the personal distraction endowed by this digital device changed the way we all live and changed our sense of time, as well as the public’s sense of its movement en masse. And this is where a photographer like Melissa O’Shaughnessy enters the frame.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Fifth Avenue, 2018

Just as the young Jacques Henri Lartigue was fascinated by the new motorcars, airplanes, cyclists, fashionable people, and chance itself—as measured by his camera, his revelations show us, today, his immediate present and our past—so O’Shaughnessy takes us along on her daily rounds looking at contemporary life in New York City. What she selects is hers alone, yet the consistency of her attraction to certain moments of time and the people caught in them, and her curious and quirky rendering of these moments, present us with a time capsule of the now. We see her present tense, her reading of meaning, her judgment of what might be of importance to readers of history a hundred years from now—just as we see Lartigue’s works today—when the present tense is truly the past.

Who is this innocent-seeming yet ninja-like sprite, darting, feinting, melding, and slip-sliding her way through the crowds in her favorite city? You’ll find her almost daily on Fifth Avenue, between 42nd and 57th Streets; in the Financial District or Chinatown; or anywhere else impulse sends her. O’Shaughnessy is not a native New Yorker, although by now, she deserves an honorary sash for bravery and determination among its crowds. It is as if she’s learned the secret slang of New York’s streets, and accomplished it by throwing her Midwestern self—body and mind—into the mix to come up with a vocabulary all her own.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Broadway, 2018



Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Seventh Avenue, 2017

Her photographs segue between honest, clear observation, and layered, nuanced, and fragmented combinations that make the viewer scan the frame for the hook that pulls us in, only to realize that there are several hooks pulling in different directions, and that these hooks lead us to inevitable discoveries in the sequence of subjects and threads that tie her ideas, and this book, together in unexpected ways.

Witness O’Shaughnessy’s awareness of weather in the many photographs in which sudden gusts of wind blow through the canyons and corners of the city’s streets— sending men’s coats flying and updrafting women’s carefully coiffed hair, swirling it around their faces and tossing it up and out like a donkey’s ears. Her awareness of this caprice overturns the careful efforts people make to go through their daily lives looking just so, and I wonder if there isn’t some impish pleasure she takes in watching all that effort blown away. After all, her reflex toward this messing up is always an unhesitating, “Yes!” But beyond that single, nominal gesture of the flying hair or windblown coat, she develops a more intricate and layered way of looking as she sees the play of human activity going on around it: the intersection of businessmen and tourists, shoppers and grand dames; the creaking elderly; the miserable children, all jockeying for a bit of turf on the glittering sidewalks of New York City, whose locales and subjects Minneapolis-born O’Shaughnessy might never have imagined would become her obsession.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Times Square, 2014

Obsession or hunger—whatever we call it—is the driving energy behind street photography. It is pure adrenaline. Exotic. Lavishly generous. A magic lantern of possibilities. This passion to be out there seeing is what opens the mind to new subjects in what would appear to be a fairly consistent parade of people doing the same to-and-fro-ing day after day in the urban wild.

Look carefully at the variety that O’Shaughnessy has invented for herself. This—the inventing of subject—is the part of street photography that most people don’t understand. All these subjects are out there for the taking, but no one sees them the same way. The people, the light, the buildings, stoppings, crossings, shopping, gazing, lurking, canoodling, arguing, crying, and laughing, for sure; all this goes on around us every single day, but how to make something out of it? That is the street photographer’s quest.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Washington Street, 2015

Street photographers, at their best, invent their ideas of the street and what it means to them on any given day. Observe the works of Lartigue, Helen Levitt, Roy DeCarava, Rebecca Lepkoff, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand, to name just a few, and you’ll see their particular identities in every frame they make, because they understood that the way you move your frame across the chaos of the street reveals deeper meanings. Life goes on in 360 degrees, up, down, and sideways, but it is what you choose to put in the frame, the connections that you see between all the unrelated and unknowing passersby, that becomes your invention, your instantaneous understanding of the present tense you live in. All great photographs are acts of consciousness and timing, like a combination of poetry and dance, and while some are gratefully taken as a gift, most are made by the artist in moments of incandescent revelation.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Fifth Avenue, 2018

O’Shaughnessy has almost infallible good fortune (and great timing) in seeing twins, and twin-like combinations happen in front of her again and again. It could be redheads, or dogs wearing booties, or young girls in tutus passing by a pair of women in matching Levi’s jackets, seen as twins only by the shout of branding. The invention of subject happens right there. Through O’Shaughnessy’s eyes, we witness women of all ages and shapes, as abundantly female as the goddess Artemis of Ephesus, or as proud as a figurehead on an ancient sailing vessel; some as lithe as sprinters, others painted, furred, glossed, mysterious, impenetrable, fearsome, dreamy. We witness her keen attention to families and their dynamics. There are exhausted children soured by too much shopping, and families frozen in confusion, wonder, pain, frustration, sometimes even joy. They appear as small solar systems about to fly apart, but pulled close by their own special gravity. Also woven into her cast of characters are the lonely, the lost, the soulful, the broken, and the proud. O’Shaughnessy has fallen for them all—perfect strangers. And they, blind to her stealth, continue to live on in her work, just for us, even after they themselves have moved on and disappeared from sight.

Melissa O’Shaughnessy, Mott Street, 2018

Now, at the time of this writing, cities everywhere have been emptied of street life. This present moment is a historic marker of our time. Everything will now be seen as before or after the coronavirus pandemic. O’Shaughnessy’s work has quickly, brutally, been torn from our ongoing present and will forever serve as one of the lasting impressions of what life looked like just before the fear of the unseen microbe took away our uninhibited freedom of movement.

For a street shooter, paying attention to chance unfolding in front of you is the only frame of mind to be in. Otherwise, we might miss the instantaneous and elevated state of joy that comes from being a modern-day flaneur in the city. And what do we, as observers of this work, gain from it? I would say that we are reminded over and over of how powerful a fleeting impression can be, and how much there is to learn about life as we enter and expand what is on offer to us here, through the quicksilver tenderness, compassion, and wit of Melissa O’Shaughnessy.

This essay was originally published in Perfect Strangers: New York City Street Photographs (Aperture, 2020) under the title “Being Present.”

Arrivals and Departures Along the Trans-Siberian Railway

Fierce eyed in their filmy black dresses and off-the-shoulder numbers, the girls of Ulaanbaatar were strutting down the corridors of the gleaming new Shangri-La Hotel last August as if in Bangkok or Shanghai. Some were carrying bags from the shiny Vuitton outlet down the street; others had no doubt been pastoralists on the grasslands just years before. Every time the branch train of the Trans-Siberian Railway stops in the Mongolian capital, fresh faces—new thoughts of faraway worlds—flood out to transform a world of horses and heart-stopping emptiness. “You know,” a Mongolian friend said to me just before heading to the bar Naadam, “Genghis Khan was the WTO of the thirteenth century.” What he didn’t need to say was that what used to be a trade of spices and tea is now very often one of promises and dreams.

As I sauntered among the Thai massage joints and “Vegas” nightclubs of Ulaanbaatar last summer, I might have been in the stark and sometimes unsettling world that Jacob Aue Sobol has made his own. Since 2012, on one month-long trip after another, the Danish wanderer has been opening up a boldly contemporary Asia, as he rides the Trans-Siberian and its branch lines, taking us into Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian lives. At every stage, we feel not just the textures of societies in transition, but something inward and very private on the far side of the tracks. The mixed feelings of a traveler slipping out after a quickie, the unease of arriving in a place that is itself on the move (or even, in Mongolia, on the hunt). The view not through the window of the celebrated train, but from within a shuttered room, looking back.

It’s easy—perhaps too easy—to say that the tourist wants to go somewhere while the traveler likes to linger. The tourist hopes to catch something through his lens, while the traveler seeks to surrender, even to be claimed by a surprise in very real life. Yet Sobol’s work goes even deeper than most travelers, by seeing what is left behind when the train pulls out, and by seeking out the shadows, the unintended consequences, of a journey that leads not just to discovery but confrontation. Though the title of his ongoing series is Arrivals and Departures, he clearly has little interest in the names and times listed on railway-station announcement boards. Destinations are less important to him than those feelings—of guilt, of disquiet, of wanderlust—that arise whenever a wayfarer draws close enough to a local to feel (or impart) real hurt. I think of Jackson Browne’s haunting line about running for a morning flight “through the whispered promises and the changing light / Of the bed where we both lie.” With the emphasis on “lie.”

As a traveler through the alleyways of contemporary urban Asia for the past thirty-two years, I’ve always sought out those scenes that can’t be caught on any screen. I’ve been interested in why, a few miles from the wind-whipped silences of Mongolia, a “Luxury Nail Spa” is opening amid crowds of Dubai-worthy glass towers, and why Mongolian Airlines is showing Two Night Stand, of all Hollywood comedies, as we fly into the land of Genghis Khan. But looking at Sobol’s work, I’m reminded of how we writers will always lag behind: it’s not so much that a picture is worth a thousand words as that it can grasp a thousand silences. The unspoken moment; the impenitent stare; every murmur or grunt or tremor that no words can begin to transcribe. In the age of the selfie, Sobol’s camera looks out—and finds a brazenness that conceals at least as much as reticence does.

In China, bullet trains are being built to travel over 300 miles per hour; coming in from the airport in Shanghai, I rode a Maglev train that whisks passengers past avenues of skyscrapers at 268 miles per hour. In Russia, the ghostly gray monuments of Leninism have given way, almost overnight, to over-the-top dance clubs and, in Moscow alone, eight separate Rolex outlets. Even in Mongolia, I found last summer, the memory of the worldly conquerors known as the Golden Horde is being trumped by the prospect of hoarded gold. Yes, Sobol’s inky black-and-whites take us past the glitter of the twenty-first-century Silk Road into more uncertain moments that recall the elemental, even predatory street poetry of Daido Moriyama or Jack Kerouac. This comes from having the patience to step off the train and walk slowly into the lives and bewildering landscapes all around.

These images stay with me in part because they give back so little, and what they do give back is not consoling. They’re antisnapshots of a kind about the displacing truth of travel—that places are often resistant to our gaze, and the deeper we enter them, the more we lose all sense of where we are. In this context, the stress on Trans-Siberian Railway falls emphatically on “Trans”—the sense of movement, of crossing frontiers, of stepping toward a human contact that will always remain out of reach. Less transcendence, you might say, than transgression. And—as in the most memorable trips—no answers, but questions that keep on turning inside of you, forever.

This article was originally published in Aperture, issue 222, “Odyssey,” Spring 2016.

Aperture’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide

From the best-selling Aperture photobooks The New Black Vanguard and PhotoWork; to new monographs by Ming Smith, Josef Koudelka, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya; to essay and activity books to inspire readers, we’ve rounded up titles for everyone on your list.

Must-Haves for Photography Lovers

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion

In The New Black Vanguard, curator and critic Antwaun Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in art and fashion today, highlighting the work of fifteen contemporary Black photographers rethinking the possibilities of representation.

Josef Koudelka: Ruins
For more than twenty years, Josef Koudelka has traveled throughout the Mediterranean, photographing over two hundred archaeological sites. With its stark and mesmerizing panoramic images, Ruins is a monument to architectural and cultural history, as well as to civilizations long past.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Nan Goldin’s iconic visual diary chronicles the struggle for intimacy and understanding between her friends, family, and lovers in the 1970s and ’80s. Goldin’s candid, visceral photographs captured a world seething with life—and challenged censorship, disrupted gender stereotypes, and brought crucial visibility and awareness to the AIDS crisis. Over thirty years after it was first published, the influence of The Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms can still be felt, firmly establishing it as a contemporary classic.

Aperture Magazine Subscription

Leading the conversation on contemporary photography with thought-provoking commentary and visually immersive portfolios, Aperture is required reading for everyone seriously interested in photography. With thematic issues ranging from “Vision & Justice” to “Future Gender,” “Native America,” and more, Aperture has been the essential guide to photography since 1952. This year, gift a subscription and receive four issues of Aperture and a copy of The PhotoBook Review.

Give the Gift of Inspiration

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice

How does a photographic project or series evolve? How important are “style” and “genre”? What comes first—the photographs or a concept? PhotoWork is a collection of interviews by forty photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained a body of work. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, editor Sasha Wolf’s interviews provide essential insights and advice from both emerging and established photographers—including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Todd Hido, Alec Soth, Rinko Kawauchi, and more—while also revealing that there is no single path in photography.

Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present

What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between esteemed photographers and artists, critics, curators, and editors since 1985.

Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities

In the latest from our Photography Workshop Series, Dawoud Bey offers insights into portrait photography. Through images and words, he shares his own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues—from how he approaches strangers and establishes relationships, to how he sensitively represents communities.

The Photographer’s Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas

The best way to learn is by doing. The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals. Whether you’re looking for exercises to improve your craft, or just interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with photographic processes.

Photobooks Celebrating Black Artists

Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

Kwame Brathwaite’s photographs from the ’50s and ’60s transformed how we define Blackness. Using his photography to popularize the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” Brathwaite challenged mainstream beauty standards of the time that excluded women of color. Born in Brooklyn and part of the second-wave Harlem Renaissance, Brathwaite and his brother Elombe were responsible for creating the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models. Until now, Brathwaite has been under-recognized, and Black Is Beautiful is the first-ever monograph dedicated to his remarkable career.

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

Over the last ten years, Deana Lawson has portrayed the personal and the powerful in her large-scale, dramatic portraits of people in the US, Caribbean, and Africa. One of the most compelling photographers working today, Lawson’s An Aperture Monograph is the long-awaited first photobook by the visionary artist. “Outside a Deana Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling,” writes Zadie Smith in the book’s essay. “But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is the first widely released publication of one of the most celebrated up-and-coming photographers working today. Sepuya’s photographs challenge and deconstruct traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, and mirror imagery, all through the perspective of a Black, queer gaze.

Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph

One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Ming Smith’s poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith’s work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, and dynamic street scenes, alongside a range of illuminating essays and interviews.

For the True New Yorker

Danny Lyon: The Destruction of Lower Manhattan

First published in 1969, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan is a lasting document of nearly sixty acres of downtown New York architecture before its destruction in a wave of urban development. In 1966, Danny Lyon settled into a downtown loft, becoming one of the few artists to document the dramatic changes taking place. More than fifty years later, his striking photographs still appeal to our emotions, capturing this singular period of time.

Perfect Strangers: New York City Street Photographs by Melissa O’Shaughnessy

Over the last seven years, Melissa O’Shaughnessy has photographed daily on the streets of New York, capturing the fleeting moments when light, people, and the chaos of the city collide in surprising, poignant, and humorous ways. Brought together in her first book, featuring an introduction by Joel Meyerowitz, Perfect Strangers offers a refreshing addition to the tradition of street photography.

Brooklyn: The City Within by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb have been photographing this New York City borough for the past five years, creating a profound and vibrant portrait. The two artists took individual approaches to capturing the borough: Alex photographed across the various neighborhoods; and Rebecca focused on three major green spaces in the heart of Brooklyn—the “green city within the city”—in both images and words. Together, their photographs of Brooklyn tell a larger American story, one that touches on immigration, identity, and home.

Ethan James Green: Young New York

Ethan James Green’s first monograph presents a selection of striking portraits of New York’s Millennial scene-makers, a gloriously diverse cast of models, artists, nightlife icons, queer youth, and gender binary–flouting muses of the fashion world and beyond. Young New York showcases a bright young talent who is redefining beauty and identity for a new generation.

Photobooks for the Armchair Traveler

Gail Albert Halaban: Italian Views

Through Gail Albert Halaban’s lens, the viewer is welcomed into the private lives of ordinary Italians. Her photographs explore the conventions and tensions of urban lifestyles, feelings of isolation in the city, and the intimacies of home and daily life. Francine Prose’s wonderful essay discusses the curious thrill of being a viewer. This invitation to imagine the lives of neighbors across windows renders the characters and settings personal and mysterious.

Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown

Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, Joel Meyerowitz spent his summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a safe haven for the queer community and a getaway for artists. Provincetown collects one hundred exquisite, sharply observed portraits—most never before published—of families, couples, children, artists, and other denizens of the progressive community.

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs of the tender cadences of everyday living have begun to swing further afield from her earlier work. In Halo, Kawauchi expands her inquiry, photographing three main themes—Lunar New Year celebrations in Hebei province in China (where a five-hundred-year-old tradition calls for molten iron hurled in lieu of fireworks), the southern coastal region of Izumo in Japan, and an ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. The resulting images knit together a mesmerizing exploration of the spirituality of the natural world.

Uncommon Places: The Complete Works by Stephen Shore

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years.

Children’s Activity and Educational Books

This Equals That by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin

This clever and surprising picture book by artists Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin takes young viewers on a whimsical journey while teaching them associative thinking and visual language, as well as colors, shapes, and numbers. Through a simple narrative and a rhythmic sequence of photographs, the book generates multiple meanings, making the experience of reading it interactive—with everyday scenes transformed into a game of pairs, enjoyable for adults and children alike.

Seeing Things by Joel Meyerowitz

Seeing Things is a wonderful introduction to photography that asks how photographers transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. Joel Meyerowitz introduces young readers to the power and magic of photography, exploring key concepts in photography—from light, gesture, and composition, through the work of master photographers such as William Eggleston, Mary Ellen Mark, Helen Levitt, Martin Parr, and more.

Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids

Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations and build their own visual language. Indoors or outdoors, from a half-hour to a whole day, there is a photo activity for all occasions—and some don’t even require a camera!

For the Collector

Daniel Gordon: Houseplants

This highly collectible, limited-edition pop-up book is a work of art in itself, rendering Daniel Gordon’s sculptural forms into a new layer of materiality and animating them in a pop-up performance. The book consists of six works in pop-up form, some featuring simple plants, others unfolding more elaborate tableaux.

Vik Muniz: Postcards from Nowhere

Vik Muniz’s two-volume Postcards from Nowhere grapples with how, through photographs, we have come to “see” and understand distant yet iconic sites we may never actually view with our own eyes, while also serving as an homage to the quasi-obsolete artifact of the picture postcard. Volume I includes thirty-two single postcards displaying each of the images in the series; while Volume II presents a series of thirty-six postcards that, when assembled, can be viewed as a single, large-scale work of thirty-by-forty inches.

Gregory Halpern: Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Limited Edition)

In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, Gregory Halpern presents a thoughtful and visually striking depiction of the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history. Featuring texts by Clément Chéroux and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, the book offers a poetic examination of Guadeloupe’s natural beauty and troubling history side by side. This limited-edition box set features a signed print and special version of the book, with artist proceeds donated to Locust Street Art (Buffalo, New York) and the Pan American Health Organization.

Gregory Crewdson: An Eclipse of Moths

This limited-edition, slipcased volume expands on Gregory Crewdson’s obsessive exploration of the small-town, postindustrial American landscape. Featuring sixteen never-before-published photographs, An Eclipse of Moths is luxuriously produced at a scale that offers an immersive experience of each of Crewdson’s carefully crafted scenes.

Shop Aperture’s Holiday Sale and save up to 35% off books, magazines, and prints, as well as newly released signed books by Antwaun Sargent, Justine Kurland, Ming Smith, and more.

Dannielle Bowman Finds History in the Shadows

If ever a sentence begins with the colloquialism “What had happened was . . . ,” know that a rich story is to follow. It’s a clearing-of-the-throat kind of expression that sets up a fantastical plot twist in a gripping narrative, leaving listeners begging for more. If you’re not totally familiar with the phrase, I suppose that’s the point. For Black Americans, it’s a benchmark expression of our parlance, AAVE, or African American Vernacular English, a sociolinguistic continuum that tracks our inhabitance of the United States from slavery to the Great Migration to the post–civil rights era and the present. Black folks of any generation are fluent in its varieties.

When the photographer Dannielle Bowman named her 2020 exhibition, held at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, What Had Happened, the gesture was telling: something most certainly did happen, and it was decidedly Black. Adrift in the shadows that only the Los Angeles sun can create, Bowman captures in black-and-white images the African American, middle-class families of her native community—Baldwin Hills, Inglewood, and Crenshaw—by nestling her lens deep within the interior of their homes and inner emotional lives.

Zooming in on the plush, yet worn, carpeted stairs of her aunt and uncle’s Hollywood Hills home, Bowman underscores a signifier of suburban decor, but suggests a childlike wonder through her eye-level perspective. She transports us to a well-appointed living room, where we see two family portraits of young Black men, perched on the mantel of a fireplace. Sons, brothers, or cousins—there is a line of familial resemblance that runs straight through them. Their high-top fades age the photographs—these were not taken recently. She clocks other details, from a woman’s elegant hand fixing the slats of her vertical blinds, to the throwback bump-and-curl coiffure of a mysterious woman in her garden, festooned in a grass sweeping gown, whose back is turned to the camera. She could be anyone’s auntie tending to her plants.

Dannielle Bowman, Vision (Bump’N’Curl), 2019



Dannielle Bowman, Faces, 2019

What Had Happened is about the subtext that lies within the objects, events, and locations that make up the worlds of Black folks. It’s like “a Black noir,” Bowman told me earlier this year. “Something did happen, and we have to get to the bottom of it.” That thing being the Great Migration, which Bowman explores throughout her work. Maya Deren’s experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was also an influence: Deren’s use of repetition, shadows, and the home as a site of emotional and domestic interiority moved Bowman to infuse images with shadows and mystery.

But Bowman is also digging, unearthing a personal history that she had previously distanced from her work. “I think for years I have resisted any kind of urge to make explicitly Black art,” she explains. Growing up, Bowman had never been situated within predominantly Black environments, having attended a tony all-girls high school in Brentwood, California; the Cooper Union for undergraduate; and later Yale University, where she earned her MFA in photography in 2018. She worked hard to fit in with her mostly white classmates.

Dannielle Bowman, Vision (Garage), 2019



Dannielle Bowman, Upkeep, 2018

What Had Happened is a corrective, Bowman says, allowing her to embrace her personal narrative publicly for the first time. “It is important that I acknowledge who I am. And it is important that the faces and the hands and hints of people in the images are brown, because that’s the world I’m coming from. I don’t have to try hard to photograph Black homes, because I grew up in them. And I don’t think that I understood the wealth that was right in front of me.” Bowman is not alone in this internal battle—Black artists have long wrestled with the significance of identity politics within their work but overcoming that conflict ultimately proved freeing for the photographer. She landed upon the “pleasure principle,” a guiding force that pushes her work forward.

As Bowman was working on What Had Happened, she was tapped by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and the director of photography for The New York Times Magazine, Kathy Ryan, for the 1619 Project, an ambitious initiative that seeks to survey the legacy of transatlantic slavery. For the assignment, Bowman set off to photograph landmarks of slave auctions across the country. Her haunting and reverential imagery unearths sites of racial violence that were hiding in plain sight, from her iconic cover image of rippling waves near Hampton, Virginia, the first recorded point of entry for ships carrying enslaved Africans to colonial America, to abandoned train tracks outside Savannah, cast in an early morning haze, that were once the site of the United States’ largest slave auction in 1859. It’s a placid scene that belies the atrocities committed there.

Dannielle Bowman, Weeping Time Landscape, Savannah, Georgia, 2019, for The New York Times Magazine

“I was not allowing myself to be overcome with emotion because I really felt like I had a sacred job to do. And all of this history was kind of on my shoulders, Bowman says. “While working, I just had to work.” Bowman was a Black woman traveling in the South, alone. Following brushes with danger, she was left feeling vulnerable and worried for her safety, but also concerned about doing the story justice: the 1619 Project was, for her, an “act of service, a memorial, a sacrifice.” And perhaps that fraught emotional experience can be felt within Bowman’s images. Hannah-Jones earned a Pulitzer Prize for her essay in the 1619 Project issue, and Bowman finished What Had Happened with a newfound selflessness, that “pleasure principle.” “It allowed me to really prioritize my desires.”

Dannielle Bowman is the winner of the 2020 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her solo exhibition will be copresented by Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York from January 6 to February 4, 2021.

This article was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the column “Spotlight.”

How a Chinese Photographer Navigates Queer Identity and Resilience

Mengwen Cao doesn’t want to drift. When the Chinese-born, New York–based photographer speaks about their life, they like to place themselves in metaphors of natural forces. “Some people swim far into the ocean. Others try to ride the waves,” Cao says. “But I realize my favorite is to see the wave, and right before it comes, I jump in.”

Cao’s work tackles the forces that have, at times, unmoored their life. Their first project to receive wide recognition, Here We Are (2016), includes a recording of the FaceTime conversation in which Cao looked on as their parents viewed a video-letter they had made to come out as queer. “Twenty-two to twenty-five seems to be my belated adolescence, yet I try to follow my heart in everything I do,” Cao recites in the video, as their mother leans her head onto her husband’s shoulder, glancing at Cao, who is nervously covering their face on the other side of the screen.

Using the website design and UX skills they had acquired while studying education technology at the University of Texas at Austin, Cao created a digital portal where their video could be shared alongside the stories of other Chinese LGBTQ people in New York City. Here We Are was widely circulated and landed two features in the New York Times.

Mengwen Cao, Yellow Jackets Collective, 2019

After several years in the United States, Cao’s experience of their shifting identity as a Chinese person inspired a second digital project, I Stand Between (2017­­–18). Turning their attention to the ambiguities and tensions of diasporic identity, Cao combined photography and audio interviews to build a digital platform about the experiences of transracial and transnational Asian American adoptees.

“I was trying to research alternative family structures, and wanted to talk about more nuanced forms of racism. Everyone I interviewed had very different experiences within loving families, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have problems,” Cao says. “So, how do you navigate the situation where someone who loves you still hurts you in ways that they might not even recognize? And how do you heal from that?”

In the interviews, Cao makes sure to include the touching pauses and reiterations in the voices of the people they spoke with—carefully tending to the gentle ambivalence of their subjects’ accounts as they make sense of the discrimination and imperfect modes of caring wound into their upbringings.

The questions of how to navigate family, acknowledge pain, and seek healing are persistently probed by Cao’s work. But with time, these are questions that Cao has learned to explore in collective settings, as they have become part of a community of queer, New York–based artists/activists enmeshed through the rhizomatic networks of Yellow Jackets Collective, Authority Collective, and BUFU.

Mengwen Cao, Sueann, 2019

Cao’s newest photographic series, Liminal Space (2017–ongoing), documents the queer friends/chosen family in their life that have been part of this process. Made over the course of the past three years, the series emerged from Cao’s disidentification from the world of images that gamify queer life into spectacularized visions of violence and/or glamour. Instead, the photographs in this series linger on the privacies and agencies that are perhaps too soft and silent to draw the eye of anyone other than a devoted friend—scenes that Cao refers to as “quiet moments.”

Reflecting on what “quiet moments” might mean, Cao describes a meditation technique that they’ve recently learned: listening “for the three layers of a song” and finding “the silence in between.” There is a kinship between this exercise and the way Cao has opted to capture queer life in Liminal Space. By documenting friends relaxing, cooking, or seeking out moments of privacy, Liminal Space enshrines the reprieves where queer people rest and make room for ecologies that better support their needs: the silence that structures queer noise/music/life. Choosing to work with natural light, Cao is skilled in capturing the glimmers, streaks, and shades that illuminate the rich inner landscapes tucked behind the quotidian intimacy of their portraits.

By anchoring queer life in everyday spaces, Cao’s work refuses to see exploitation as the driving force of queer survival, and instead acknowledges the interior and exterior worlds that queer people have continually built to protect themselves and each other: “When I say I am marginalized, I don’t actually believe it anymore. For me, this is my world. I’m gradually cultivating this community that I call family and friends. And we are the majority.”

Mengwen Cao, Grace, 2019



Mengwen Cao, Sonia, 2017



Mengwen Cao, Luke, 2018



Mengwen Cao, Sandy, 2018



Mengwen Cao, Jazmin and Yeelen, 2018
All photographs courtesy the artist

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

A previous version of this article misstated the title and scope of Mengwen Cao’s project Here We Are (2016). The original headline misidentified Cao as Chinese American; they are Chinese, not American. We apologize for the errors.

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