Aperture's Blog, page 63

Why Do These German Citizens Dress up as Native Americans?

Here are the Indianer bodies: braid-framed German faces and shirtless, toned torsos. And here are the material goods, products of a curious labor of desire: bright canvas tipis, brain-tanned deerskin, perfectly crafted feathers, quilled and beaded clothing that mimics Karl Bodmer paintings from the 1830s. Bodies and goods join together in performances, as drums pound, legs step, and voices sing—or sometimes just yell. Document these things and you have archives—a museum stuffed with mannequins, a wall hung with moccasins, a computer full of images.

For German hobbyists who participate in the Indianer subculture, which revolves around Native Americans, their devotion culminates in annual summer camps where they show off their skills and live the Indianer life for a week. Their scene (for it is truly that) originated with the late nineteenth-century writings of the German author Karl May, whose characters—the Apache chief Winnetou and his German sidekick Old Shatterhand—inspired Europeans’ fanatical affection for North American Indians.

Into that scene, carrying a camera, steps Krista Belle Stewart, an Indigenous Syilx Nation artist based in Berlin. What Stewart enters, on visits made over a period of several years, is multiple layers of the uncanny. The hobbyists’ dedication to authentic detail seems at first to evince a deep respect for Native cultures. But the escapism also embodies a reassuring flight from compromised German histories. Stewart’s presence reminds them that there are moral quandaries surrounding history and appropriation yet to be considered. Indianer, shrinking in number and uneasy, know this to be true.

Krista Belle Stewart, Coke Finger, Grimma, Germany, 2007

What of Stewart herself, sitting with a friend in a replica of a Plains Indian lodge in a German field? “What’s weird about the experience,” she told me, “is that they are real . . . but I can’t quite believe it. Because we are real too.” She spoke of returning to her homelands after each trip, a cleansing restoration for an Indigenous sense of self pushed a touch off-kilter. After visits in 2006 and 2007, Stewart stepped back from her explorations of Indianer culture, unable to reconcile the contradictions. She returned in 2019, though, and quickly rekindled old relationships. One hobbyist, who had made Stewart a dress more than a decade earlier, retrieved it from a subsequent owner and gifted it to her.

That dress and a silver arm cuff gifted to the artist by another German enthusiast are the only two objects situated vertically in her 2019 exhibition Truth to Material, held at Nanaimo Art Gallery in British Columbia. For the rest of the installation, Stewart arranged images of four different scales in an asymmetrical grid on a vinyl-covered floor. Stewart’s bare walls reject the exotic and documentary photographic traditions associated with Indigenous subjects. Instead, viewers teeter over the images, positioned in a vertiginous uncanny.

The floor also brings viewers into an Indigenous judgment. In many Native cultures, one does not step over another’s body or belongings. To do so is a sign of disrespect, even a provocation. Such stepping is the essence of the exhibition, and for good reason. As Stewart observes, when Indigenous people contemplate Indianer life, they laugh. And then they feel anger. She is aiming for the complete package—not simply wonder, irony, and humor, but also a sense, understood but less often experienced, of Indigenous indignation.

Krista Belle Stewart, Crazy Ranch, Hohenstein-Ernstthal, Germany, 2019



Krista Belle Stewart, The Week, Geheimer Ort, Germany, 2019



Krista Belle Stewart, Letzter Tag der Woche, Geheimer Ort (Last day of the week, Secret place), Germany, 2019



Krista Belle Stewart, Heike’s Photo, Hohenstein-Ernstthal, Germany, 2019



Krista Belle Stewart, Truth to Material, 2019. Installation view at Nanaimo Art Gallery, British Columbia. Photograph by Sean Fenzl
All images courtesy the artist

This interview was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “Truth to Material.”

Two Photobooks Consider the Pervasive Fantasies of Whiteness

On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, was shot while running in a suburban neighborhood outside of Brunswick, Georgia. A video recording of the incident shows two white men following him in a pickup truck, confronting him, and firing their guns three times. Arbery was dead when police arrived. No immediate arrests were made, and for seventy-four days the men remained free. Only after the release of the video sparked public outcry were they charged with murder.

Arbery’s killing has prompted anguished talks about the peril faced by African Americans in “running while Black” or, more bleakly still, “living while Black.” But the initial reluctance of some Georgia authorities to charge the men, even with the existence of potentially damning video footage, is also a devastating illustration of what the photographer and writer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa calls “the governing equation of whiteness to innocence.”

Buck Ellison The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 1975, 2019
Courtesy the artist and Loose Joints

Being white, as Daniel C. Blight reflects in his timely and perceptive book The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization (2019), is about much more than skin color. It is a “stubborn and often invisible power structure,” a ubiquitous ideology of domination, privilege, and violence that hides in plain sight as a default “natural identity” for white people. It is also a way of seeing the world. And as Blight observes, the camera has been deeply implicated in the promulgation of the white gaze virtually since its invention in the nineteenth century. The Image of Whiteness features excerpts from projects by various artists, such as Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Hank Willis Thomas, alongside insightful dialogues with key thinkers on race, including the writer Claudia Rankine and the philosopher George Yancy. Blight aims to explore how the white imaginary is developed and perpetuated across Western culture and to also consider how photography can help reveal whiteness “for the set of representational fictions that it is.”

To those ends, the book presents Michelle Dizon and Viêt Lê’s project White Gaze (2018), which appropriates archival imagery from National Geographic, unpacking and disrupting the visual language of racial hierarchy encoded in each picture. In another contribution, Broomberg & Chanarin look to the loaded history of Kodak’s Shirley test cards and the false equivalence of whiteness with universality that they fostered.

Broomberg & Chanarin, Shirley 1, from the series How to Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, 2012
Courtesy the artists and Lisson Gallery, London and New York



Hank Willis Thomas, You Don’t Have to Try So Hard!, 1958/2015, from the series Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915–2015
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Some artists whose works appear in the book explore race through strategies of erasure. Ken Gonzales Day digitally removes the hanging bodies of Black or Brown victims from archival pictures of lynchings that took place in the United States. Nate Lewis obscures the faces of people of color from news footage of Trump rallies. The result of these works is to turn attention to the white figures in the images—the grinning spectators jeering at the (now absent) dead body, and the Trump supporters engaged in what appears to be a verbal assault on Black onlookers. Both projects offer vivid proof of Yancy’s observation that whiteness is a “parasitic” condition that survives by creating a menacing racial “other”—the Black body—on which it can assert sovereignty.

White power and privilege are also the governing themes of Buck Ellison’s recently published monograph Living Trust (2020). Ellison’s photographs, a selection of which appears in The Image of Whiteness, seem to document the habits and tastes of the white upper-middle class. There are photographs of lacrosse matches and Range Rovers, a young man in performance fleeces of various colors, and Christmas-card portraits of well-groomed families. But these are mostly artificial scenarios constructed by Ellison using paid actors and models. The images highlight how wealth has historically enabled members of the upper socioeconomic classes to present a veneer of bland respectability to the world, irrespective of their private prejudices.

Ellison devotes a section of the book to a series of family portraits purportedly showing Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s controversial secretary of education, and her brother, Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military company Blackwater. Few private pictures of the family exist in circulation, and in lieu of these, Ellison presents his own confected portfolio. A group picture, The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 1975 (2019), shows four blond siblings lounging in a 1970s-era living room decorated with mahogany furnishings and characterless paintings, the room displaying not so much wealth but the Protestant rectitude of the Prince family’s strict Calvinist beliefs. The imagined portraits strive to convey normalcy, but there’s an unsettling undercurrent to them that hints at what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator in The Great Gatsby calls the “vast carelessness” of the rich.

Buck Ellison, Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida 1990, 2019
Courtesy the artist and Loose Joints

In the image Erik with Kitty, Blackwater Training Center, Moyock, North Carolina, 1998 (2019), Erik, as a young man yet to found a security force implicated in the massacre of seventeen Iraqi civilians, sits on the grass, playing with a kitten while sporting tactical pants and a bulletproof vest. Another photograph, titled Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990 (2019), shows four men out on a manicured golf course: Two golfers haggle over the position of the ball near a hole. The third golfer has his back turned and is pissing on the green. An unnamed caddy looks on impassively.

Ellison’s photographs describe whiteness as its own paradisal domain—a world where people of color are banished from sight, and where actions have no visible consequences. It is a fantasy, albeit one that some, such as the killers of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and far too many others, seem to aspire to as a reality.

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

Who Was Richard Avedon?

Often, the individuals who are best known and most public are, in fact, the least knowable and most inscrutable. The masks that ensure their legends often obscure their tortured private lives. Among photographers, few were more conspicuously famous or notoriously private than Richard Avedon (1923–2004). Following a meteoric rise as a young fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar in the late 1940s, and later at Vogue and other magazines, the intensely driven Avedon glided through mid-century New York high society with the glamorous authority and savoir faire of a movie star. He transformed notions of style, celebrity, women’s fashion, and photography itself.

But around 1969, after nearly two decades of literally dominating the covers and glossy pages of leading fashion magazines, Avedon turned abruptly and increasingly to innovative forms of photographic portraiture—often large, minimalist, and unsparing in detail. And it was those experimental portraits, more than his groundbreaking fashion work, that ultimately won Avedon the plaudits which he so craved from art galleries and museums.

In the new book What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon, noted photography critic Philip Gefter explores the intricate backstory of Avedon’s private life and the evolution of his career to make a case for him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

Paul Himmel, Dick Avedon, Cherry Grove, ca. 1946–48
Courtesy Lizzie and Eric Himmel

Brian Wallis: You have just published a massive biography of Richard Avedon, a project that has absorbed you for over five years. Let’s talk about the project of biography in general. Does writing a biography make you end up loving or hating your subject?

Philip Gefter: I went through stages, as with any relationship. There were moments when I loved him. There were moments when I was completely annoyed by him. There were moments when he disappointed me. And then, there were moments when he was utterly redeemed. [laughs]

Wallis: After all that, what do you think is the value in tracing someone’s life? What did you learn, and what do you want to communicate to readers?

Gefter: Well, that’s a good question. In the case of Avedon, specifically, I had always felt that he was a far more significant artist than he was generally considered. In fact, it was only toward the end of his life that he was finally acknowledged as such. And I always was curious about him personally: what was the combination of qualities that formulated his unique sensibility? That was really the essential question for me, that’s what I set out to try to answer.

Wallis: In arguing for Avedon’s cultural significance, you say at one point that there were various forces arrayed against him, forces that would deny him his status as an important artist for most of his life. And you say at the very beginning of your book that your principal goal is to make a case for Avedon’s rightful place in “the pantheon of twentieth-century arts and letters.” Why is this important to do? And why now, in particular?

Gefter: From the time I went to art school at Pratt in the early 1970s, I was aware of a general prejudice against photography. It was considered a second-class medium, not much more than a graphic art. And during the ’70s, I watched with interest the elevation in stature of photography in the art world. So I always felt the need to defend photography as a medium. I studied and understood its history and was fortunate enough to meet many interesting photographers. I’ve always loved the photographic image. In the end, I truly believe that photography reflects something profoundly existential about who we are.

That said, the reception of Avedon’s work in the 1970s and ’80s seemed to me to be representative of the prevailing derogatory attitude toward photography. And his struggle to be recognized as an artist was not his alone. Like many photographers of that time, Avedon suffered a genuine artist’s quest to have his work recognized. And he had to endure a number of prejudices about the medium he chose.

In particular, he suffered the prejudice of being a commercial photographer in the art world, where there was a very distinct church-and-state divide between art and commerce. Today, of course, art is commerce. But fifty years ago, there was still some semblance of integrity about the making of art without the goal of simply making money.

Burt Glinn, Richard Avedon photographing Veruschka in his studio, 1966
Magnum Photos

Wallis: But by that time, Avedon was a very successful photographer.

Gefter: Yes, Avedon was one of the most famous photographers in the world at that time, but he was also known as a fashion photographer which, in the art world, was a joke. So, he tried various approaches to hurdle that negative reputation. For instance, there was Avedon’s show at Marlborough Gallery in 1975, which was a signal moment in his career and, even in the photography world, was a bit of a phenomenon. He showed his large, wall-size group portraits for the first time together. But art critics dismissed the show as high-style formulaic imagery that didn’t really rise to the level of Art with a capital A.

So, one issue I wanted to raise in this book was this: At what point would the critics and scholars finally acknowledge that Avedon’s approach was not merely a formula but an artist’s signature style? That was something I was intent on putting forward.

Wallis: Why was Avedon’s exhibition of portraits so controversial?

Gefter: In the 1970s, in New York in particular, street photography and new forms of documentary photography were ascendant. Nothing could have differed more from Avedon’s approach. He was a studio photographer, and his work was all set up—even the spontaneity was contrived in advance. And that whole approach to photography was thoroughly dismissed at the time. Later, in the 1980s and through the early twenty-first century, studio practices were taken seriously by artists and photographers, and given increasing stature in critical writing and thinking. But that required a substantial shift in thinking about photography as art.

One other thing: I had always believed that Avedon insinuated himself into the art world to satisfy his own ambition or ego. But I was surprised and relieved to learn that, for every single museum show he had—at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and the Met—he had always been invited by the curators or museum directors. In fact, even in the case of the Marlborough show, he was invited. He didn’t go to them. They went to him. That’s a significant shift in mind because, in fact, in some ways he was accepted by aspects of the art world and its institutions—more so than we’d thought previously.

Wallis: On the other hand, from your detailing of his relationship with John Szarkowski, the photography curator at MoMA, for instance, it’s clear that these were long-running campaigns of flattery and persuasion by Avedon, through which he attempted to capitalize on the rising interest in photography by certain curators at specific museums.

Gefter: Yes, that’s true. When Dick and John Szarkowski met in the early 1960s—I’m going to call Avedon “Dick,” if you don’t mind. I mean, everybody called him Dick. I think of him as Dick, not that I knew him.

Wallis: I think after a five-year relationship, you’re entitled to do that.

Gefter: [laughs] Yes, well . . . When Dick and John Szarkowski met in the early ’60s on the occasion of the Jacques Henri Lartigue show at MoMA, they established a very cordial relationship. In the late ’60s, Szarkowski went to Dick’s studio several times; he had come to recognize Dick’s work as being significant and, in fact, invited him to have a retrospective. Then, Dick and John began a conversation about what this retrospective would be. The problem is that Dick, because he was obsessive and self-promotional—and wanted to be in total control of everything related to his work—eventually alienated Szarkowski. Two years into this conversation about the retrospective he would have at MoMA, Dick agreed to have a retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Well, this didn’t sit well with John Szarkowski at all, because it preempted the uniqueness of his planned show at MoMA. And John was very territorial. So, understandably, that began a process of alienation. Thereafter, Dick was never really accepted at MoMA. Having spoken to the curators there going back to John’s era, I know that they basically dismissed Avedon as being too commercial. They simply dismissed his work. They didn’t acknowledge it as art.

Wallis: That dismissal must have been devastating to Avedon.

Gefter: Yes. I think he spent the rest of his career trying to get John Szarkowski’s attention. He did have a small exhibition at MoMA in 1974. Finally, John deigned to give Dick a single room on the first floor, where he exhibited a small series of portraits of his dying father. But it was nothing compared to the planned retrospective, which was supposed to be a large show covering several galleries.

Wallis: So, instead of focusing on Avedon’s incredible fashion photography, Szarkowski presented his own version of Avedon, as an incisive documentary portraitist in the mode of Diane Arbus.

Gefter: Right. That’s an interesting point. I never thought of it exactly in those terms.

Richard Avedon on the set of the CBS TV special The Fabulous Fifties, 1959
Courtesy Earl Steinbicker

Wallis: In the case of his only show at MoMA, it also seems like a punishing gesture on Szarkowski’s part, one that focused on Avedon’s own self-loathing and self-doubt by forcing him to confront the incriminating stare of his dying father.

Gefter: Well, I think Avedon was trying to work something out with his father. I mean, he hated his father. His father was autocratic and dictatorial; and he tried to teach Dick some very hard lessons as a child. Clearly, Dick was not the son that his father wanted. I mean, Dick was scrawny, unathletic, pensive, and poetic. And his father wanted a “son.” I mean he wanted a guy, a tough guy.

So, while you may perceive in Avedon’s portraits his father’s withering stare, I see it differently. I think that he was watching his father wither away, to the point where his father had no more control of himself as a person dying. That’s my take.

Wallis: That’s brutal. And an interesting take on Avedon’s portraits in general. What distinguishes his portraits as significant to you?

Gefter: Avedon was of the generation that was on alert to the profound threat of the atomic bomb. And more and more, I think he started photographing his subjects like specimens under the forensic scrutiny of his lens, trying to identify a strain of existential dread that runs through the species at the thought of our annihilation.

No one is smiling against the white nuclear backdrop in his portraits. I don’t think he was aiming for emotional contact with his subjects—as compared with, say, the psychologically embroiled approach of Diane Arbus. That was not what he was after. He was after a clearer, more clinical, more objective observation consistent with the postwar, postnuclear condition. I don’t know that he conceived it exactly the way that I’m describing it. But I think that he did bring this forensic attention to the people he photographed.

He also endured being considered a celebrity photographer for years. And it irked him, understandably, as he got older and became more intentional about his work. He would say, “Don’t think about who they are, just look at their faces.” And what he meant by that is that we are all going to die, whether by nuclear annihilation or natural causes, whether we are the former king of England or the most glamorous actress in the world.

Wallis: What, then, did Avedon mean when he said that all his portraits were self-portraits? Was that an arrogant way of describing self-expression or was it, again, a competitive way of dominating other people?

Gefter: Well, not only did he create a visual pantheon of celebrities, he also photographed the anonymous everyman in the American West, and everybody in between. So, I think he was definitely taking his own measure against the person he was photographing.

But in terms of the portrait as self-portraiture, his body of work manifested a direct, clear-eyed approach, stripping the frame to nothing but a face-to-face confrontation with his subject. The visual economy and the straightforward elegance was pure Avedon. That was his signature. That was the artist in the work—hence the self-portrait. It isn’t arrogance. In all art, you see the identifying traits of the artist. In the genre of portraiture in photography, look at Nadar, or Julia Margaret Cameron, or August Sander—each body of work is a self-portrait of that artist.

Wallis: But Avedon’s portraits often seem artificial, soulless, or even mean-spirited. How do you align that attitude with his proud description of them as self-portraits?

Gefter: Well, I think Dick struggled his entire life with his self-esteem. It was a complicated thing. He had enormous confidence in his work, in his eye, in his sensibility. But his self-esteem was constantly on a roller coaster. He endured prejudices as a child. He endured anti-Semitism, and I think he endured homophobia.

So, that mean-spiritedness some people claim to be characteristic of his work wasn’t intended to make other people look bad. Rather, I think he was searching in the faces of others for that strain of existential dread that he felt himself. Maybe it was a kind of projection onto the visages of the people he was photographing. I think that is also what he was talking about in terms of his portraits being self-portraits.

Sam Shaw, Richard Avedon with Dovima following the shoot at Cirque D’Hiver, Paris, 1955
Courtesy Sam Shaw Family Archives

Wallis: How would you compare that forensic projection in his portraiture to the seemingly light-hearted and spontaneous spirit he evoked as a fashion photographer?

Gefter: One of the key things I discovered about Avedon, which was key for me as his biographer, is that as an adolescent, he wanted to be a poet. That was a very serious pursuit for him throughout his teenage years. He was avidly writing poetry, and had his work published in newspapers and magazines. When he was seventeen, he won first place in a New York City­–wide high-school poetry contest. And he was the coeditor of his high-school literary magazine—with no less a classmate than James Baldwin. But at some point, he was swatted down by a high-school teacher who said that Dick’s poetic language was largely derivative, the result of the magazines he was reading at home. That comment affected him so profoundly and adversely that he just didn’t have the courage to stay with it.

So, I think he brought to his early fashion work this lingering poetic impulse. This is one of the unique ingredients that helped him to revolutionize the fashion photograph in the 1950s. He brought the model out of the studioand into the street—not that he was the first to do so—and he did that with élan, against the spectacular backdrop of postwar Paris. He said, “My Paris never existed. I fabricated it.” Not out of whole cloth exactly, but out of swatches of Ernst Lubitsch, the films of René Clair, the songs of Cole Porter, and the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He became a kind of impresario of the fleeting visual metaphor, as if a breeze always seemed to be blowing through the frame in his early fashion work. There’s a special kind of spontaneity he was able to achieve, in which the highly constructed and artificial image is made to appear entirely authentic. He said, “I was photographing my own elation. And it got whipped up to the point where I was able to give some emotional dimension to the couture itself.”

Wallis: Was this improvised spontaneity in fashion also the basis of what you call “the Avedon woman”?

Gefter: Yes. “The Avedon woman” is not my term. It was an actual phrase that was used, a kind of cultural trope in the ’50s. The Avedon woman was perceived as a free-spirited, imaginative, curious, provocative, slender, almost androgynous and very urbane female figure. And you can see that type being formed in the models he chose, especially Dorian Leigh, Dovima, and various others. I consider Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s to be the quintessential Avedon woman. Irving Penn famously said, “Avedon’s greatest creation has been a kind of woman. She’s a definite kind of person. I know her. I’d recognize her if she walked into this room. She’s sisterly, laughs a great deal, and has many other characteristics. . . . It’s a kind of woman I’m talking about projected through one very powerful intellect and creative genius.”

Wallis: What do you think was so appealing to Avedon about fashion photography in the late 1940s, as opposed to other applications of photography he could have pursued?

Gefter: To go back to the notion of the poetic impulse, I don’t think fashion was what Dick wanted to do, necessarily. I mean, what he really wanted was to be part of the cultural life surrounding fashion. Initially, when he was twenty-one, he made up his mind to work for Harper’s Bazaar, and he just sort of bulldozed his way in. In a way, that was very impressive for a young ambitious kid.

Harper’s Bazaar was one of the best magazines when he was growing up, and they were publishing really good literature. His parents subscribed to it. So he would be reading short stories by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Christopher Isherwood published Sally Bowles in Harper’s Bazaar in 1938.

The magazine was a way for Avedon to understand serious culture in a very direct way. He took fashion as being part of that world, and made something of it, and was being paid for it. But ultimately, that wasn’t his goal as an artist. I think portraiture was a much clearer, more direct way for him to bring his poetic observational impulses to his work, but that only came later.

Wallis: Well, that turn toward portraiture—if you want to call it that, since he never really gave up fashion—seems more evident after about 1959, which, as you note, was the year that Robert Frank’s book The Americans was published. And since you have also written a book titled Photography After Frank [Aperture, 2009], are you positing a general shift around 1959 toward a very different approach to thinking about photography as an art form?

Gefter: Yes. It’s a very good question, since both Robert Frank and Dick published books in 1959—Frank’s Americans and Avedon’s Observations. At the time, Dick was well aware of Frank. Not because Frank was prominent. In fact, nobody really knew who Frank was outside of a very small coterie of artists and Beat poets in Downtown Manhattan. But Frank had studied briefly with Dick’s mentor, Alexey Brodovitch. And Brodovitch even wrote one of the recommendations for the Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled Frank to make The Americans. And so, Dick was aware of him. But Dick was uptown and out in the world, and Robert Frank was downtown and quietly doing what he was doing. Still, Dick understood instinctively that Frank was the real thing: he was an artist and a photographer’s photographer.

When The Americans was published, it was a true artist book, authentic documentation of America as Frank was experiencing it. It was a modest publication, but it was something. And Dick recognized that.

Meanwhile, in the very same year, Dick published this very splashy coffee-table book—with a fancy slipcover, and pedigreed to the nth degree. Alexey Brodovitch designed it. Truman Capote wrote an essay. And the people Dick photographed were celebrities. So it had all the right elements to be a pop-cultural event. And it was well-received by the general public. But it was fatuous.

Installation view of Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944–1994, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1995
Courtesy the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Wallis: Ouch. Then Avedon’s second book, Nothing Personal, in 1964, was an attempt to use his photography to make a statement about the urgent and topical issue of Civil Rights. And throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Avedon kept trying to make these more socially engaged works, but they often came off as misfires. He seemed to fit the model of what Tom Wolfe called a “limousine liberal,” well-meaning but out of touch. How do you assess the meaning and value today of these quasi-political works?

Gefter: I posit in my book that Nothing Personal was Dick’s direct response to The Americans. What Dick was trying to do, the only way he knew how to do it, was to “portraitize” a set of social issues of that time. He went down South and photographed individuals who were directly involved with or who represented the Civil Rights struggles. Nothing Personal was well-intended, but as an artist, Dick had not yet come into focus. He was groping. I consider it a worthy first draft in the evolution of his more realized artistic intentions.

He was not very successful at this new, more intentional approach to photography until he began his mural portraits in the late 1960s. The first project, in 1969, was of the Chicago Seven, the antiwar protesters who were accused of conspiracy to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That panoramic portrait—of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and the others—certainly crystalized some of the key social and political conflicts in the United States at that time. In that work and other examples of his radical portraiture—including his mural of the Warhol Factory members, and his series of portraits of leading political figures, which he published as “The Family” in Rolling Stone in 1976—constituted a very systematic attempt to create a new kind of portraiture. And he did. I mean, no one had ever seen portraits like those before. They were literally larger than life; they became not only documents but monuments, in a way. I think that Dick’s portraiture became much more intentional after that.

Anyway, Dick was always looking over his shoulder at Robert Frank and wanting his approval. And Frank always considered Dick a “Sammy”—based on the character Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?, which became a film in 1959. A Sammy in Robert Frank’s day would be what a yuppie was in our day.

Wallis: It’s funny, when I read that in your book, I recalled that the photographer Louis Faurer, who was close with Robert Frank at the time, used to mock Frank by calling him a Sammy.

Gefter: I wish I had known that. [laughs]

Wallis: Avedon’s portraits of Robert Frank and June Leaf seem like the absolute antithesis, in some ways, of his fashion work. But at the same time, you see what Avedon was doing is exactly what he did in his early fashion work, which is finding fashion wherever it exists in daily life, and acknowledging the sort of disheveled nature of Frank and Leaf as the new prototype, the new beauty.

Gefter: Well, I think you’re using the word fashion in a broader sense than couture. Or style. The thing is, yeah, you’re absolutely right. That signaled a new time.

When Dick went to Nova Scotia and photographed Robert Frank in the summer of 1975, Frank was very uninterested. He told me this. He said, you know, “Ugh, Richard Avedon came to photograph me, and I had to endure it. I didn’t really wanna do it, but okay.” And you can see that in the picture. In Dick’s portrait, Frank is so very grounded. He really couldn’t be bothered. And he’s looking at Dick with a kind of obdurate animal confidence.

Interestingly, while Dick was in Nova Scotia, he made a unique self-portrait, I believe in immediate response to his portrait of Frank. It’s the only picture I have ever seen of Dick completely disheveled, or at least not put together in his normal urban style. His hair is kind of a mess. His shirt is unbuttoned. You can see the hair on his chest. He’s slightly unshaven. Talk about a self-portrait! I think that he was making a picture of himself trying to be as true and authentic as he believed Robert Frank to be.

Bassman-Himmel Studio, Doe and Dick Avedon, Cherry Grove, ca. 1946–48
Courtesy Lizzie and Eric Himmel

Wallis: Avedon is generally associated with creating a prototypical woman in his fashion photographs, yet a main part of his personal quest seems to have been to define—or obscure—his own position as a man. In some ways, the central arc of your book, which is probably also the most controversial aspect, traces Avedon’s role as a largely closeted gay man, and his coming to grips with what you call the “ickiness” of his shame about his homosexuality or his homosexual urges. Yet some people argue strongly that Avedon was not gay and never had any homosexual encounters. They point out that he was married for most of his life and had a son, et cetera. And although you paint a very nuanced picture of the rather complicated sexual dynamics of the New York cultural setting in which Avedon moved, when it comes to his own sexual life or identity, the story becomes kind of murky, relying heavily on innuendo. How do you square that?

Gefter: Well, I can square it easily. It wasn’t my intention to out him. But it became increasingly clear to me, just from my research, that he struggled with homosexual feelings.

At a certain point, Dick went into analysis to try to rid himself of those feelings. He made a choice early on that seems to me completely consistent with the culture he was living in at the time. Homosexuality, when he was coming of age—even when I was coming of age in the next generation—was like the worst taboo in our culture. You could be arrested for having sex with someone of the same sex. It could destroy your life and your career. And he was terrified of that.

Dick had a goal to live at the center of his culture, which he was able to do, in fact—the center of culture itself. And I think he made a decision tosublimate those feelings because of the general social attitudes about homosexuality. I think that as a result, he experienced bottomless shame, as many, many gay people did, and as some still do.

I think this is key to the roller coaster of his self-esteem, having these desires and feeling such shame about them, and spending a lifetime trying to keep them bottled up—trying to make them go away. He made a choice. He married Doe when he was twenty-one. And many people I spoke to who were there said that they loved each other, they had a lovely relationship, but it wasn’t really physical. It seemed more platonic. And in fact, Doe left him for another man. (Doe even told one of her sons that Dick was gay.) But because Dick wanted normalcy in his life, he then married Evelyn. And they had a child. And they lived for fifty years as Mr. and Mrs. Richard Avedon.

I don’t know what kind of sexual life he actually had. And I don’t purport to in the book. I make certain allusions, and they’re all quoted from specific people; those are suppositions. But my conclusion is that Dick just focused on his work. He was obsessed with his work. He worked all the time.

I never come out and say that he was gay. It is a very delicate subject. It’s a very personal thing. I was always trying to hew to only as much as I could verify. One thing I do have to say is that there were some revelations about his sexuality in Norma Stevens’s book [Avedon: Something Personal, 2017], which I was very careful to either corroborate or not include. The one thing I could confirm is that Dick, in his sixties, did have a clandestine relationship with a man for several years.

Wallis: This gendered, sexualized, and racialized element of cultural history is often buried or unwritten. Yet it seems to underlie your view of Avedon, and perhaps all artists and cultural producers. You mention at the very beginning of this book the triumvirate of men who you believe were responsible for elevating photography in the art world: Avedon, who you wrote about; Sam Wagstaff, who you wrote about; and John Szarkowski. So should we infer that your next biography will be about Szarkowski?

Gefter: I mean, it would seem logical. [laughs] But no. I had and have enormous respect for John, who was a serious thinker and incredibly eloquent. I have enormous respect for his writing, and also his accomplishment in establishing a kind of photographic canon. Or, at least, what used to be the canon. But no, I’m not that interested in who he was as a person.

In contrast, I was very interested in Sam Wagstaff. And I was very interested in Richard Avedon. And if we go back to this idea of Dick calling his portraits self-portraits, then in some ways, I think that the people I choose to write about reflect something about who I am.

I am very interested in what art is, and what its meaning is, and how it informs us and enlivens us, and teaches us about ourselves, and instructs us, and even tells us something about the future. And I also have this lethal attraction to glamour. [laughs] That’s just the truth. I find it completely sexual or erotic, or at least sensate. And there’s always a component of joy to that. I want to understand something about the nature of our existence. But I also love a good time.

Philip Gefter’s What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon was published by Harper in October 2020.

15 Photographers on How Imagination Shapes Their Work

How can photographs influence the social and artistic imagination? Documentary photographs take a fraction of time and suspend it—such as Dawoud Bey’s intimate moments of togetherness in the African American community, or Richard Misrach’s haunting images of California’s recently smoke-filled skies. Meanwhile, artists such as Shen Wei and Chanell Stone use staged self-portraiture to explore concepts of identity, body and landscape, and past and present.

Works of Imagination, the Magnum Square Print Sale in partnership with Aperture, brings together over one hundred images by an international group of photographers. As we near the end of a year unparalleled in recent memory, this collection of prints features works that reflect on the different ways that photographers imagine the world.

Through Sunday, October 25, you can collect these signed and estate-stamped, 6-by-6 inch, museum-quality images for $100 each. When you purchase through this link, you directly support not only the artists, but also Aperture’s programming, publishing, and operations.

Selected by Aperture’s editors, here are fifteen highlights from this year’s Magnum Square Print Sale in partnership with Aperture.

Janette Beckman, The Islington Twins, London, 1980 
Courtesy the artist

Janette Beckman

“In London in the 1980s, the Islington Twins (Chuka and Dubem Okonkwo) would meet every evening at rush hour at ‘The Bar’ with a crowd of teenage followers. ‘The Bar’ didn’t serve food or drink; there was no jukebox or seating. It was just a horizontal pole that stopped cars from entering the road to the local Highbury & Islington Tube station. Always identically and impeccably dressed, the twins played music by bands like Madness, The Specials, and Bad Manners on their boombox, and talked to the commuters and to their friends. They received a small college grant and bought pork pie hats, Crombie overcoats, Sta-Prest trousers, and loafers from a shop in East London. For them, being a mod was more than just clothes. It was the way you conducted yourself and behaved toward others. Chuka said: ‘People began to stop us in the street and ask if they could take our photographs. We had to have the photographers in our fantasy, as it was only when other people noticed us that we would really believe that we looked the way we did.’” —Janette Beckman

Dawoud Bey, The Woman in the Light, Harlem, New York, 1980
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey

“Photographs are nominally related to life as we know it, even as they are clearly not life itself. In the best cases, a photograph can elevate the experience of mundane everyday circumstance and transform it into an entirely new experience that both acknowledges and transcends what was there.” —Dawoud Bey

Matt Black, Rainstorm, York, Pennsylvania, 2015 
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Matt Black

“Pictures are facts that can overcome the fictions we are told or that we sometimes tell ourselves. Even when they are about things just beyond sight, they can help us to understand our world and our place in it.” —Matt Black

For Freedoms, Freedom of Worship, 2018
Courtesy For Freedoms

For Freedoms

“In 1943, Norman Rockwell visualized the four freedoms, articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, central to American identity—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But his paintings, while poignant, left out the richness, diversity, and reality of American life. 

This recreation by the artist collective For Freedoms updates Rockwell’s original illustration of the freedom of worship. The work is distinctly American in its inclusion of Indigenous people, immigrants, individuals of different faiths, and those of diverse ethnicities. Their collective reverence, despite different styles of prayer, imagines a nation where not only does worship mean many things, it is also not something to hide.” —Hank Willis Thomas, Emily Shur, Eric Gottesman, and Wyatt Gallery of For Freedoms

Nan Goldin, C and So competing for the Oscar, Second Tip, Bangkok, 1992
Courtesy the artist

Nan Goldin

“The trans rights movement has been a crucial part of the ongoing street protests. I feel lucky to have lived long enough to have witnessed this sea change in visibility and acceptance of trans people in our culture. In the early ’90s, I traveled to Bangkok to photograph the world of queens known as ‘ladyboys.’ Second Tip was their home and sanctuary. Every week, they held lavishly produced beauty contests, wearing showgirl costumes and lip-synching to Madonna. I wonder how today’s movement would have affected their lives.” —Nan Goldin

Proceeds from the sale of this print will benefit P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now)

KangHee Kim, Dreamer 09/30/20, from the series Street Errands, 2020
Courtesy the artist

KangHee Kim

“Street Errands is a series of collaged photographs that mix street scenes from New York and other parts of the US. They start from mundane encounters on everyday errands in New York, and by manipulating these images, I construct my own form of surreal escapism. I cannot travel abroad due to my visa status, so I build layers of photos or modify the original photographs to create new spaces. The manipulation of these scenes introduces infinite possibility, free from the limits or restraints of real life. 

I think of these collages as paintings, and I show the post-production process as a way of showing mark-making. I aim to achieve perfection by rediscovering the possibility of merging two or more images, finding their spark, but I leave flaws in my photographs. Small imperfections are human; they are what make people attractive.” —KangHee Kim

Mary Ellen Mark, Madonna the Giraffe, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1998
Courtesy the artist

Mary Ellen Mark

“The circus is a universal form of theater and a metaphor for everything that has always fascinated me visually. It is full of ironies, often humorous and sometimes sad, beautiful and ugly, loving and at times cruel, but always human.” —Mary Ellen Mark

Diana Markosian, The Arrival, from Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Diana Markosian

“I was seven when my family arrived in America. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my parents’ marriage.  In the evenings, in our tiny Moscow apartment, my family would watch Santa Barbara, the first American show broadcast on Russian state television. For my mom, Santa Barbara represented a dream. One night, she woke me up, and said we were going on a trip. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.” —Diana Markosian

Richard Misrach, View from My Front Porch (Telephone Pole), 8:12 a.m., September 9, 2020, from the series The New California (for Dorothea Lange)
Courtesy the artist, Pace Gallery (New York), Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco), and Marc Selwyn Fine Art (Los Angeles)

Richard Misrach

“In the past, I have been able to photograph the glorious skies and views of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge from my deck. During the recent spate of fires, beginning in August, I have been confined to my home, and the photographs I make are taken from the same spot as the earlier series, but as dense smoke renders the Golden Gate invisible, I have focused on my more immediate surroundings. There were days when the smoke created day for night, post-apocalyptic views right out of a sci-fi Hollywood movie. The most obvious and undeniable culprit here is climate change, whose impacts are increasing at an exponential rate. The future has arrived.

In an interview given in her last years, Dorothea Lange beckoned the next generation of photographers to document civilization’s advancing effects on California, framing it as the New California. She couldn’t have anticipated climate change, but she was worried about the detrimental consequences of settlement and growth. This series is dedicated to her remarkable foresight.” —Richard Misrach

The photographer’s proceeds from the sale of this print will benefit Aperture

Rebecca Norris Webb, Havana, 2007, from Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (2009)
Courtesy the artist

Rebecca Norris Webb

“Over the years, I’ve learned to trust images I’m drawn to in the world. In times of uncertainty and unsettling emotions, these resonant images seem like advance dispatches from the interior of the self. They know before I know. The day I made this photograph, I was heavyhearted. My beloved father-in-law was dying, and I wanted to be at his bedside. Unable to fly home for a day, I reluctantly decided to photograph. Half in a daze, I remember climbing a flight of rickety stairs to a Havana rooftop. A young man greeted me, a pigeon fancier in his late twenties. ‘I almost died,’ he softly confided to me, ‘and my birds brought me back to life.’ Kneeling on the coop’s floor, I noticed a pigeon opening its wings. I lifted the camera to my eye.” —Rebecca Norris Webb

Lise Sarfati, Eva-Claire #02, Austin, Texas, 2008
Courtesy the artist

Lise Sarfati

“This is a photograph from my Austin, Texas series, a fashion series created for a magazine and an exhibition at the Maison Rouge in Paris. I don’t normally work with fashion, but I accepted the commission to challenge myself to make the clothes disappear for the benefit of the ‘character.’ I made this series with the idea of a sequence in the life of each of the girls I photographed, which mixed exterior and interior in the idea of the ‘everyday.’ Each girl I chose had an off-beat presence in the world. The accumulation of the series made me think of short novels, and the fashion magazine had a literary approach. The more realistic a context is, the more fictional it becomes.” —Lise Sarfati

Shen Wei, Self-portrait (Quai aux Fleurs), Paris, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Shen Wei

“When creating a self-portrait, I often transform into a different persona. I’m usually naked, so it’s not about putting on a costume. Somehow, I find myself responding to the environment I’m in, sensing the past and future of that place as I perceive it.” —Shen Wei

David Benjamin Sherry, Sunrise on Mesquite Flat Dunes, Death Valley, California, 2013
Courtesy the artist

David Benjamin Sherry

“In the last decade, I’ve traveled and photographed extensively throughout the Western National Forests and National Parks. In doing so, I’ve revisited famous Western landscapes seen in the historic photographs of Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, and Ansel Adams. I discovered that many of these iconic landscapes—so crucial to our collective understanding of the American West—were deteriorating, affected by human interference. The pictures I took, which began as an homage to the legacy of grand Western landscape photography, evolved into an opportunity to build on it. 

Like my forebears, I use an 8-by-10-inch large-format film camera, which allows for an unrivaled level of detail. However, when printing this series, I’m not interested in depicting the way the landscape appears in reality, but rather in its potential for emotional resonance. For me, color is a conduit to making those feelings visible, beginning a radical, queer new chapter to the otherwise colonial, heteronormative history of the medium.” —David Benjamin Sherry

Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Ziyanda’s Clothing, Thokoza, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2014
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Lindokuhle Sobekwa

“This work is from a series about my sister, Ziyanda. I began this project after finding a family portrait in which her face had been cut out. She was a secretive, rebellious, and rough presence in my life. The day she disappeared, she was chasing me, and I was hit by a car. She only returned a decade later, suffering from illness. By that time, I had become a photographer and realized my family had no pictures of her. One day I saw this beautiful light coming in through the window, shining on her face. I lifted up the camera to catch the moment and she shot me an evil look and said, ‘Stop! If you take that picture, I’m going to kill you!’ So I lowered my camera. I still wish I had taken the shot.” —Lindokuhle Sobekwa

Chanell Stone, Garden Glow, East New York, Brooklyn, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Chanell Stone

“Garden Glow is derived from my series Natura Negra, in which I explore the Black body’s relationship to the American landscape, with a special emphasis on urban nature. Using myself as a conduit, I create verdant self-portraits to convey both personal and collective narratives of urbanized Black people. Inner-city gardens and canopies operate as sites for connection and the ‘re-naturing’ of the Black body to the natural world.” —Chanell Stone

The Magnum Square Print Sale in partnership with Aperture is available from October 19 through Sunday, October 25 at 6 p.m. ET. For one week only, collect signed and estate-stamped, 6-by-6 inch, museum-quality prints for $100 each. By using this link to make your purchase, you directly help support not only the artists but also Aperture’s programming, publishing, and operations.

The Nun Who Became a Pop Art Activist

The works of artist, educator, and social justice activist Corita Kent are packed with slogans and scripture. Her silk-screen posters from the 1960s and ’70s crackle with the energy of a time of social unrest. She pulled text and images from advertising and media, recombining them into compositions reflecting on the Civil Rights and peace movements.

“GET WITH THE ACTION,” demands a 1965 silk-screen titled for emergency use soft shoulder, its primary colors reminiscent of Wonder Bread packaging. “HOPE AROUSES AS NOTHING ELSE CAN AROUSE A PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE,” says another piece from 1969 in black block letters on a bright-yellow field. Kent’s Pop art style is often compared to that of Andy Warhol— whose paintings of soup cans she saw in 1962 at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—often as defense of her legitimate claim to be part of the canon. Yet while the more famous artist traded in a cosmopolitan deadpan, Kent’s practice reflected her Catholic beliefs and humanity.

Sister Corita Kent, a passion for the possible, 1969. Serigraph
Courtesy Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community

Kent joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles at the age of eighteen. She was a teacher and chair of the Arts Department at Immaculate Heart College until she left the order in 1968, and she continued to make art until her death from cancer in 1986. It was during the mid-sixties, on the heels of Vatican II and the modernization of the Catholic Church, that Kent’s political affinities deepened, aligning with protests against the Vietnam War and the countercultural critique of consumerism.

In 1967, Kent was on the cover of Newsweek magazine with the headline “The Nun: Going Modern,” but to reduce her to religion and aesthetics overlooks her role as an educator eager to change how people see the world. As mid-twentieth-century life around Kent’s religious community accelerated, she advocated in her teaching and practice for “slow looking,” according to Nellie Scott, executive director of the Corita Art Center (CAC), the organization that preserves Kent’s legacy. Kent’s personal papers are archived at Harvard, but the CAC manages the collection of artworks, ephemera, and objects from her time at the Immaculate Art College, which includes roughly fifteen thousand 35 mm slides of photographs taken by Kent and her camera (mostly between 1955–68).

Sister Corita Kent, Mary’s Day, 1964
Courtesy Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community

One of the most striking works in the collection is a photograph depicting a procession of nuns and students in flower garlands carrying banners and hand-painted signs. Taken in 1964, it looks like it could be a protest, but actually, it is of the Mary’s Day festival at the college.

Photography was essential to Kent’s work. She would photograph ads and newspapers, billboards and signage, then incorporate text and graphics into her silk screens using an overhead projector, which often distorted or recontextualized the image, to create stencils. “She flattens out images, because she is thinking ahead to how to translate to a screen print,” says Olivian Cha, CAC collections manager and curator.

The camera was also a part of her teaching—a way to frame and reflect.

“When I think of her photography practice and how it informed her larger body of work, I often reflect on the walks she took with her students throughout Los Angeles using a ‘viewfinder’ as a tool,” says Scott, referring to the pieces of paper punctuated with small square apertures or the blank 35 mm slides used in class. “The finders function similarly to a camera lens, to help examine details within a larger visual field. Rather than the act of trying to take in everything at once, this practice encourages the eye to appreciate the distinct parts within a whole picture. This type of assignment requires faith in being truly present and often leads to a discovery in the everyday that was previously overlooked.”

Sister Corita Kent, Mark C. Bloome gas station, ca. 1964
Courtesy Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community

Kent’s technique, however, is imperfect at times. In the CAC archive, there are pictures clearly taken out of the passenger window of a car, hasty shots of passing building signage. (Kent didn’t know how to drive.) The photographs taken through the windshield of La Brea Avenue or Sunset Boulevard have an affinity with the work of architect Denise Scott Brown—who also, at times, photographed from a moving car and trained her lens on the clutter of late-1960s signage. Both Kent and Scott Brown used photography as a means to fulfill a grander mission: for Kent, peace and social justice; for Scott Brown, research for Learning From Las Vegas (1972), the canonical text of postmodern architecture written with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour.

Both Kent and Scott Brown also share the unfortunate predicament of struggling for their own legitimacy in the canon. Scott Brown has spent the later part of her career fighting to be seen as an equal partner to Venturi. Kent, while well recognized in her time and even now compared to well-known Pop artists, is not a yet household name. The CAC is searching for funding to digitize the dozens of binders that constitute her slide archive. “It’s a large endeavor,” notes Cha, “but we are excited to be able to make those images available for scholarship.”

Sister Corita Kent, Market Basket, ca. 1964
Courtesy Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community

Kent photographed the East Hollywood neighborhood around the Immaculate Heart College, located at the corner of Franklin and Western Avenues. The serigraph studio was across the street from the school in an ordinary storefront. (That Franklin Avenue building still stands, but is currently threated by demolition, and the Corita Art Center is campaigning to designate it a historic landmark.) Behind it was the Market Basket supermarket, a seemingly favorite subject. Kent captured Brillo boxes (à la Warhol, perhaps) and stacks of Gleem toothpaste. She shot the white lines of parking-lot stripes and a rental-car advertisement plastered on a bus bench. “I don’t know if she ever considered photography an art form in itself,” says Cha. “It was a means to an end. She never printed the photographs.” Although the images were never meant to be standalone compositions, they offer insight into Kent’s methodology—her eye, her time, and her city.

In Performances and Photography, Rebecca Belmore Faces the Monumental

As a multidisciplinary artist working in performance and lens-based media, Rebecca Belmore creates scenes of aching endurance and forceful grace. Since the 1990s, Belmore’s images have probed the politics of First Nations representation in Canada, often melding the photographic with the tactile, as with her very first portraits, in which the Anishinaabe artist’s face is decoupaged onto cut wood, in sly subversion of the wooden “Indian” heads that dot many rural landscapes and settler imaginations. Whether placing subjects—often her sister, Florene—in strange architectural contortions of the body, or featuring materials as organic as a wash of clay or a strip of cloth to parse through the pain of state violence against Indigenous people, Belmore’s work definitively expands the field of conceptual photography to which artists such as Cindy Sherman, Suzy Lake, and Shelley Niro belong.

Earlier this year, the curator Wanda Nanibush, who organized the touring exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental, spoke with Belmore about the power and possibilities of visual reenactment. As Belmore notes, “The photographs re-create the performer who is being watched but refusing the gaze.”

Rebecca Belmore, Five Sisters, 1995. Photograph by Michael Beynon

Wanda Nanibush: Rebecca, how did you get started in art making?

Rebecca Belmore: Well, I went to art school in Toronto, to what was then called the Ontario College of Art. I came to the big city from Thunder Bay, which is an industrial logging town, a railway town, a blue-collar, working-class kind of city. For me, getting out of there was tough. By that I mean that it was a moment in my life when I was looking at racism head-on. It’s a town that is very much Indigenous and non-Indigenous—or, you would have said “Indian” and “white” at the time. Coming to terms with that is what drove me out, and thankfully, it drove me into the art practice that I have now.

Nanibush: You started out in sculpture and then moved into performance. Can you speak a little about the connections between them?

Belmore: My recollection of that time, in the late ’80s, was that there was a lot of appropriation going on in contemporary art. I was a young artist in the middle of this rushing river, where I thought art was a safe place. And then you realize, Oh, my God, there’s a lot of trouble here. It was a turbulent time in terms of having a better understanding of what my role would be. That’s how I gravitated toward performance art. So my practice began when I started thinking about how to be in that moment.

Nanibush: You made your first photographs, Five Sisters, in 1995. Why did you move into photography at that time? In this early photography, you used yourself as the subject. In Five Sisters, you also used a different kind of material. The images weren’t printed on paper and put in frames. The framing itself had a lot of significance for the meaning of the work.

Belmore: Yes, I decoupaged photographs onto organic cut pieces of wood, which is something that you would find in Indigenous homes—what we would call our own bric-a-brac. I was working with our own ideas of ourselves as Indians, as Native people, as Indigenous people.

At that time, I was living in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, and I had very little money. Michael Beynon, my photographer friend, helped me. I played the roles of these five sisters, which were visual representations of women I would see in my community. One of the images was taken outside of this town called Vermilion Bay on the Trans-Canada Highway. There’s a big wooden female “Indian” head along the highway. I had my profile photographed against the sculpture. I was looking at the depiction of us as Indigenous people within this remote and rural setting in northwestern Ontario.

Nanibush: Talking about the early ’90s, there was the use of humor in artwork and staging scenes you were quite in the center of all that.

Belmore: It had a lot to do with the climate of art at that moment, where it made sense to me to be the art, to be the performance artist—to wear the work, to be inside the work, to exhibit the work. It was a way for me to navigate the terrain that I was working within. I thought to be within my own skin was the most authentic thing that I could do, from my perspective as an Indigenous woman.

Nanibush: Do you feel like you had to clear out the representations of us—First Nations people—first before you could do something else?

Belmore: Absolutely. It was really a way to be subversive with humor and irony, highlighting the dark with the witty.

Rebecca Belmore, Untitled 1, 2003. Photograph by Donna Hagerman

Nanibush: You collaborate with photographers and models. And you tend to use your sister as your collaborator. Do you want to speak a bit about both sides of that collaboration, for example, in Untitled 1, 2, 3 (2003)?

Belmore: There has to be the element of trust. I trust my sister, of course. I worked with Donna Hagerman on Untitled. The photographers I’ve worked with have really stood back and tried to understand what I am trying to achieve and give me space—

Nanibush: —to think through what you want to do.

Belmore: Yes. I have to have a clear vision of what I am going to do, because photography requires having all the materials, the model, and the constructed space ready for the shoot. Everything is precise. I can direct the creation of the image I have in my mind by physically standing back during the shoot. Composing the model and what is in the frame, for me, is the beauty of it.

Rebecca Belmore, Untitled 2, 2003. Photograph by Donna Hagerman

Nanibush: Is the creation of an image a performative act?

Belmore: It’s a performative act for me because it’s live in the space. For example, with Untitled, we actually hung my sister Florene on the wall.

Nanibush: Can you speak a little more about the process of making Untitled and White Thread (2003)?

Belmore: It was hard on my sister. But she was totally dedicated, which is what you look for in collaborators. I don’t think anyone else would have done that for me. For example, with White Thread, we had my sister bend and grab her ankles, a position she had to hold for forty-five minutes. We bound her body in a long coil of fabric and then placed her on a plinth.

Nanibush: You can feel the discomfort.

Belmore: Yes. She would yell out, “Okay, I’m going to give you five more minutes!” I have a special relationship with my sister. I think, more than anyone, she understands the place where my work comes from.

Rebecca Belmore, Untitled 3, 2003. Photograph by Donna Hagerman

Nanibush: It’s a beautiful thing to witness. I was thinking also about your starting place. Because, really, you’re starting from material and an image that you want to make. At what point do meanings come into that? Or do you even worry about the meaning? Or do you just leave that for an audience to figure out?

Belmore: For White Thread, I knew I wanted to bind my sister up in that position. It was about endurance. The same with Untitled 1, 2, 3. She had to hold the poses for at least forty-five minutes. The triptych was shot in grunt gallery in Vancouver. We hung her from the wall in three different positions, which she held for the 4-by-5 camera. She had to be patient.

Nanibush: What was sparking these images of contorted and bound bodies?

Belmore: With White Thread, there was war in the Middle East, and I was thinking about women’s suffering, strength, and will to endure and survive. With Untitled 1, 2, 3, each image has different meanings for me. In Untitled 1, my sister is attached to the wall and has a kind of umbilical cord falling to the floor. I was thinking about the earth and the female body giving birth. Untitled 2 is the woman falling from the sky with her hair splayed on the floor, which could refer to Sky Woman stories. For Untitled 3, where she’s totally cocooned, I was thinking about metamorphosis.

My sister, hung on the wall, was, for me, the most shocking image—I felt it was about what Christianity has done to us as Indigenous people. But, at the same time, I saw her as a beautiful spirit. There was also a grace and a calm beauty to that moment when I saw her on the wall.

Rebecca Belmore, White Thread, 2003. Photograph by Donna Hagerman

Nanibush: Technically, you can’t see your own performances until you watch the video or see a photograph later. Whereas, here, you got to construct it from the outside.

Belmore: When I’m doing a live performance, I am working on creating something which I think looks beautiful or good. At the same time, you can leave your body in your imagination and see how things look from the audience’s perspective. I trust that if it looks good to me it must look good to the audience. But with my photographs, I’m able to look at them as an audience member.

Nanibush: Which brings me to your latest series, nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations) (2017–18), where you are looking back at your own performance practice, picking certain works and certain moments in those performances to create in photographs. Can you speak to your choices of performances and to how witness, the first of the five photographs in the series, is based on your performance Vigil (2002)?

Belmore: The photograph was made in 2017. It’s a visual reenactment of the performance piece, which took place in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, shortly after the serial killer Robert Pickton had been charged with the murder of twenty-six women. I performed in the neighborhood where women disappeared. It was really emotional. At the same time, it was really grounding, in the sense that I had an opportunity to go to that place and scream the names of these women he had murdered. witness was made in the studio with my sister, Florene, instead of me. We reenacted that moment when I hammered nails through the red dress into the pole while trying to free myself. I was thinking about how the women must have fought to free themselves.

Rebecca Belmore, mother, 2018, from the series nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations). Photograph by Henri
Robideau

Nanibush: Even if it’s a memory of a moment in the performance, the photograph is a reimagining of the previous performance. It’s still a new work in that sense, because an image evokes all kinds of meanings, all on its own.

Belmore: And it was taken fifteen years later. I’m in a different place.

Nanibush: For Freeze (2006), the work that the photograph mother from the nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations) series references, you had the surname Stonechild carved into blocks of ice. But in the photograph, it’s Florene behind the ice.

Belmore: There is this woman looking through the ice at you. The ice forms a barrier. To me, she has an expression like she’s looking for someone, and there’s a sadness in her eyes. I was thinking about Neil Stonechild and his family, especially his mother, who lost her son to this horrible death.

Nanibush: The “starlight tours,” where Native men were driven by police out to the outskirts of town and left to walk back in the freezing cold. Stonechild’s death brought this racist practice to light.

Belmore: Yes. In mother I am trying to create an image that speaks to Stonechild’s mother, but also to the experience of many mothers.

Rebecca Belmore, keeper, 2018, from the series nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations). Photograph by Henri Robideau

Nanibush: keeper, from the same series, also feels like a memory from your performance work Clay on Stone done at the AGO [Art Gallery of Ontario], in 2016. In the live performance you had “painted” Walker Court’s stone floor with clay by hand.

Belmore: In keeper, the model has one of the buckets that I used in the live performance. The photograph was shot in a place that had an old, worn linoleum floor that resembled the color of the clay. My sister is washing the floor with a clay-soaked rag. Around her, you can see the clay starting to dry and crack, which brings up ideas of not only the land but also the absence of water—a parched earth.

Nanibush: All that moisture that we could feel in the air literally came out of the clay. You could feel it, and you could smell it. Why the name keeper?

Belmore: It’s about the idea of women having the knowledge to care for the earth. We’re living in these difficult times, and we have to rethink our lives. I don’t know if it’s possible.

Nanibush: Everyone says that we’re doing it right now, but I’m not convinced.

Belmore: But at least, with the current shutdown of the economy due to the coronavirus pandemic, we have a glimpse of the potential for change and for some kind of more reasonable—

Nanibush: Equitable.

Belmore: —equitable, sane way of living.

Nanibush: We’ll have to see about that. My main thought is, the earth is getting a big break that it needs right now.

Belmore: I think that’s amazing. The earth has a moment to breathe. Everyone can understand that for a moment. But I think the understanding will recede.

Rebecca Belmore, State of Grace, 2002. Photograph by Donna Hagerman

Nanibush: Something that you’ve mastered—an aspect of your work that draws me in and I know draws other people in—is this understanding of what a moment is. Both Fringe (2007) and State of Grace (2002) have that. You’re able to capture some kind of moment right before something transforms, or right before somebody breathes. State of Grace is one of these moments.

Belmore: In the photograph State of Grace, I used a white fabric that had a sheen to it. Florene is sleeping or dreaming in this work. When I saw the print, I was troubled by it because it was too pretty. I cut the image into strips and wrapped the top around a tube so that when it hangs from the wall it can move freely. Because of the movement from the air, it could be about living and breathing.

Nanibush: When we were doing the exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental (2018), I included this work because I think people forget that you don’t just deal with the violent side. I was thinking about the fact that, in terms of representing Indigenous women, we don’t often see ourselves in states of grace.

Belmore: State of Grace and Fringe are connected: They both reference healing. In State of Grace, perhaps the woman is recuperating from an illness or simply dreaming. Then, with Fringe, the woman is reclining, and her wound is healing. I think ideas can come back, and works can haunt one another.

Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2007. Installation at Quartier Éphémère, Montreal. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux

Nanibush: Looking at Fringe, some people see the image of the scar, and they can’t get past the pain. But, for me, it’s always been a healing image. I’ve never seen it as a violent image. Because of her pose, she looks restful. A lot of your photographs have the body facing away like in Fringe, as in sister (2010) or the X series (2014). You’re looking at somebody’s back, looking at them looking somewhere.

Belmore: If the model is facing away from you, you know they’re looking to something, and you’re looking at them looking, which adds a performative aspect to the image. Because that’s what, as a performance artist, I’ve always been aware of—being watched. You create your own visual space, and then the photographs re-create the performer who is being watched but refusing the gaze.

This interview was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “All of My Relations.”

All works courtesy the artist.

The Photographer Using Space Travel to Theorize about Climate Change

COVID Economy. To speak of utopia at this moment is heartrending. COVID-19 has infected more than 38 million people and upended countless lives; it has also brutally exacerbated racial, gender, and economic inequalities in the U.S. and worldwide. At this time, I don’t know who is going to care for and educate my children for the foreseeable future during the hours I need to work, and my partner’s pandemic relief unemployment benefits have ended. Many find themselves jobless without options; the economic depression the U.S. is undergoing offers precious little safety net. Consequently, many are in even worse circumstances: hungry, or facing precarious health and housing situations with scant protection in the privatized, competitive neoliberal state. The rich sequester themselves in country homes while the masses are left vulnerable; individual wealth trumps universal human welfare.

Race. And yet. In mid-2020 the largest social protests in U.S. history were mobilized in the Black Lives Matter movement, making demands for racial and economic justice and the cessation of violence by police and white people against minorities.

Air. The ambivalence over whether we can safely hold large outdoor demonstrations after months of strict social distancing comes from a (still) partial understanding of the peculiar nature of the coronavirus; it doesn’t seem to present as great a threat of contagion in fresh air, particularly with the use of individual face masks. The epidemiology of COVID-19 is still maddeningly uncertain, and that the images of hazmat suit–clad health care workers in March and April morphed into pictures of rallies of bandana- and home-made mask–wearing crowds in May and June presented a whiplash turn of events.

Breath. George Floyd’s last words as he was killed by police in Minneapolis, like Eric Garner’s when he was killed by the NYPD in Staten Island, were “I can’t breathe.” And now we mask. Or not. Breathing has become politicized, with Trumpists having believed they were invincible to a “Chinese” virus that initially hit urban areas hardest and was therefore dismissed, while Black people continue to be deprived of their lives by white officers or white vigilantes.

Dawn DeDeaux, Grasping Nature, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Outer Space. And yet. White tech billionaires continue their race to spacestead, to colonize the moon, or Mars, creating artificial ecologies that will compel the continuous techno-engineering of synthetic air. Capsule life requires some serious PPE in the inhospitable environment of outer space. Why do the privileged not protect the air on Earth, for those who currently inhabit the planet? “NewSpace” endeavors funded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Paypal co-founder Elon Musk race to flee the planet. The so-called exit strategy of these private NewSpace exploration and colonization schemes will be limited to those who can afford a wholly simulated atmosphere shielding them from the asperity of space.

Space Clowns. From 2012 to 2016 the Louisiana-based artist Dawn DeDeaux created a series of images of astronaut-like creatures on metal panels, drawn in large part from photography sessions she conducted with first responders dressed in moderate to extreme protective equipment. DeDeaux later staged exhibitions of these digital photocollages, titled Space Clowns, in venues in New Orleans and Alabama as part of her larger MotherShip project, a work concerned with the kinship of climate change relocations and the disorientation of space travel.

Many of DeDeaux’s Space Clowns depict full-length silhouettes of figures in a kind of hybridized protective gear based on hazmat suits and diving equipment. (The original portraits were shot at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida, and the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, where DeDeaux had art residencies.) The surfaces of the works are decorated with lace, floral, or wrought-iron patterns. According to DeDeaux, these biomorphic ornamental motifs will remind future space travelers of Earth’s lost bounty: as she writes, the explorers are adorned with “colorful curvilinear patterns belonging to our place of origin, a place called Earth. . . . It is imagined that even the most manly men now wear their flower suits like a badge of honor, a symbol of identity.” The appearances of DeDeaux’s space travelers are as important as their destinations, and, like the elaborate getups of the Sun Ra Arkestra and Parliament-Funkadelic, their costumes are a pastiche of historical references; while DeDeaux combines diving bells and radiation equipment, the Arkestra drew on the geometries of the ancient Egyptian visual canon, and Parliament-Funkadelic riffed on 1970s urban street fashion styled in futuristic metallic fabrics.

Dawn DeDeaux, Red Velvet Space Clown, 2016–17
Courtesy the artist

New Orleans. DeDeaux has discussed MotherShip as a reaction to the destruction wrought by climate change and the future potential wasteland of a human-altered ecology. Though these may seem apocalyptic musings, between the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the catastrophe of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, DeDeaux’s native Louisiana has been hammered by ecological disasters that have made parts of the Mississippi River Delta Basin uninhabitable and threaten to destroy wildlife habitats throughout the Gulf Coast. The Ebola outbreak in nearby Dallas in 2014 brought a fresh fear to the region; at the time of a residency DeDeaux conducted there, Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine was among the leading combatants against the spread of the Ebola virus.

MotherShip. DeDeaux cites the architect-engineer R. Buckminster Fuller’s warnings about population expansion and reduced resources as inspiration for the project, stating, “I was in touch with Fuller in 1981 or ’82 just prior to his death to solicit an essay from him for a book I was aiming to publish titled ‘Out There: Man’s Invasion of Space.’” DeDeaux also makes no secret of the influence of Afrofuturism on the MotherShip project—it takes its name from the P-Funk Mothership, a “funk deliverance” spacecraft used as a stage prop in Parliament-Funkadelic’s large arena shows in the 1970s. The P-Funk Mothership acted in part as a heuristic object, delivering the lessons of funk bestowed by the mother, mother Africa. The mothership metaphor in the band’s mythology is powerfully joined to that of the parliament, a legislative body of government, as forming a collective’s identity. The word parliament is derived from the French parler, “to speak.” Invoking a deliberative body of governance, a parliament in this sense takes care of the Earth in anticipation of the return of the mothership. Parliament is a collection of voices, but, in every way, it cares for the Earth understood as a singular object: we have but one Earth.

As the theorist Kodwo Eshun has explained, P-Funk’s Mothership Connection is “the link between Africa as a lost continent in the past and between Africa as an alien future.” While Ra’s call to rapture Black people to Saturn with his interplanetary Arkestra, using the metaphor of the ark fleeing Earth, contested the history of slavery and its slave ship vehicles, the metaphor of the mothership, in contrast, invokes the concept of the brood, in which the big ship transports travelers to safety upon her return. It also inverts the concept of Mother Earth to instead envision technology as feminine and maternal, comforting children upon her arrival, and nourishing them with a funky party, initially the lavish P-Funk Earth Tours of 1976 and 1977.

Dawn DeDeaux, Guardian at the Levee Gate, 2012–13
Courtesy the artist

Mothership Earth. Metaphors are powerful, and Fuller’s use of the now famous “Spaceship Earth” formulation puts forward a vision of Earth as a technological ecology created by humans. The concept of Spaceship Earth seeks to supplant the biological codependency of humanity and nature with a vision of a human-authored, technologically administered planet that can find surrogates in or be replaced by other spaceships—Spaceship Mars or Spaceship Europa, moon of Jupiter, perhaps. To redirect us from the plurality and profligacy of the metaphor of the spaceship, I propose a new metaphor—that of Mothership Earth, combining the two singularities of the Mother and the Earth. For in P-Funk lore the mothership is a singular object; one can have but one biological mother, and there is pointedly not one mothership among many. We cannot build our mothers as we would a spaceship; rather, they make us.

Dawn DeDeaux, FALLOUT: Green First Responder in Headlights with Palms, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Guardians. And yet. The fascination with outer space colonization, in the time of human-driven climate change, political upheaval, and a widespread health crisis, recently brought DeDeaux back to the photographic origins of Space Clowns. What initially seemed like mere source images for the baroque Space Clowns collages now appear as harbingers of a new kind of breath regulation. These first responder portraits, which DeDeaux initially shot using Rauschenberg’s own 8-by-10 camera in Captiva, she terms Guardians. The images present an eerie foreshadowing of the protections necessary to survive in the ongoing age of deadly airborne viruses. From mustard gas to nuclear radiation, from oil spills to gas leaks, from influenza (fowl or swine origin) to coronavirus (bat origin), humans have created countless situations in which air has been made toxic and unbreathable due to alterations to ecologies and encroachments on and the destruction of wildlife habitats. In Fallout (2013), one of DeDeaux’s photographs from Guardians, a man in a neon-green cloaked hazmat suit with a clear visor gazes above the viewer’s line of sight. Photographed at an extreme horizontal angle from a perspective beneath his chin, he appears reclined, and his fixed stare lends him a preternatural stillness that is almost corpse-like. Wearing a ventilator beneath his face shield, he assumes an uncanny, cyborgian quality. As he looks upward, the blur of palms and other plants around him gives the impression that he is moving in space, plunging backward in a vertiginous fall. The isolation of his stuffy, fogged-up suit keeps him from the surrounding jungle of vegetation, a habitat on Earth that humans once traversed naturally, effortlessly, without fear of whatever hazardous condition from which he is insulated. In the Guardians series, DeDeaux is reassessing the ways in which our current moment has returned to consciousness the insecurity of ever being fully protected against often invisible threats like warming oceans and disease, or of being prepared for the unpredictable effects of the depletion of life-sustaining resources on Mothership Earth. As she states, “During the [coronavirus] quarantine I have come to value equally my straightforward photography of responders. The decorative aspects of the [Space Clowns] work went extreme future tense, imagining us already exiled from the planet, when the curvilinear lines of flora and fauna superseded the straight lines of flags in terms of conveying our place of origin, Earth, as we drifted further and further away, looking for its closest replica. It is the natural world of earth and rain, the fresh water, that shaped the aesthetic of our planet and perhaps our future wardrobe signifiers. . . . [Yet] the original portrait photos offer a greater punch of evidence for our NOW. This time of alienation is REAL, and the unadorned photo seems more poignant.”

Announcing the 2020 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards welcome a new partner in DELPIRE & CO, who has joined forces with Paris Photo and Aperture to ensure the continuity of the awards in this most unusual of years. While the international photography community will not be able to gather in celebration at the Grand Palais this year, Paris Photo and Aperture are delighted to confirm that the prize continues. The exhibition of the shortlisted books will be hosted in Paris by DELPIRE & CO from November 5–28. The final jury will take place as planned, and the winner will be announced on Friday, November 13—including the announcement of the recipient of the $10,000 cash prize in the First PhotoBook category. The shortlisted books for 2020 will also be featured in Issue 018 of The PhotoBook Review, co-published with DELPIRE & CO. Additional selections from this special issue of The PhotoBook Review, guest edited by Dr. Deborah Willis, will be presented alongside the exhibition of shortlisted books in Paris.

The 2020 shortlist jury took place over the course of three days at Mana Contemporary in New Jersey, and involved the review of more than seven hundred submissions. Our thanks to the shortlist jurors, including 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).

“Despite the fact that the usual rhythms of book perusal and discovery have been disrupted, it’s clear that the photobook community has continued to find ways to connect, and more importantly, to keep creating,” states the jury chair, Lesley Martin. Juror Oluremi Onabanjo asserts, “In 2020, the book and catalogue in contemporary photographic practice continues to evolve and unfurl in many different directions, while offering more audiences the opportunity to get involved and fall in love with books.”

The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards were founded in 2012 to celebrate the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography and comprise three major categories: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalogue of the Year. Below are the 35 books selected for the 2020 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist.

First PhotoBook

Stephen Berkman, Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years, Hat & Beard Press, Los Angeles

Judith Black, Pleasant Street, STANLEY/BARKER, Shrewsbury, United Kingdom

Soumya Sankar Bose, Where the Birds Never Sing, Red Turtle Photobook (self-published), Kolkata, India

Maryna Brodovska, My Dear Vira, Self-published, Kyiv, Ukraine

June Canedo de Souza, Mara Kuya, Small Editions (self-published), Brooklyn

Ronghui Chen, Freezing Land, Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China

Ryan Debolski, LIKE, Gnomic Book, Brooklyn

Caroline & Cyril Desroche, Los Angeles Standards, Poursuite, Paris

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

Charlie Engman, MOM, Edition Patrick Frey, Zürich

Zahara Gómez Lucini, Recetario para la memoria, Self-published, Mexico City

Jessica Ingram, Road through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

Janna Ireland, Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, Angel City Press, Santa Monica, California

Francesca Leonardi, ’O Post Mio, Postcart Edizioni, Rome

Yael Martínez, La casa que sangra, KWY Ediciones, Lima, Peru

Sara Perovic, My Father’s Legs, J&L Books, New York

Fabio Ponzio, East of Nowhere, Thames & Hudson, London

Agnieszka Sejud, HOAX, Self-published, Wrocław, Poland

Diana Tamane, Flower Smuggler, Art Paper Editions, Ghent, Belgium

Efrem Zelony-Mindell, n e w f l e s h , Gnomic Book, Brooklyn

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Stephen Berkman
Predicting the Past—Zohar Studios: The Lost Years
Hat & Beard Press, Los Angeles

Judith Black
Pleasant Street
STANLEY/BARKER, Shrewsbury, United Kingdom

Soumya Sankar Bose
Where the Birds Never Sing
Red Turtle Photobook (self-published), Kolkata, India

Maryna Brodovska
My Dear Vira
Self-published, Kyiv, Ukraine

June Canedo de Souza
Mara Kuya
Small Editions (self-published), Brooklyn

Ronghui Chen
Freezing Land
Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China

Ryan Debolski
LIKE
Gnomic Book, Brooklyn

Caroline & Cyril Desroche
Los Angeles Standards
Poursuite, Paris

Buck Ellison
Living Trust
Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France

Charlie Engman
MOM
Edition Patrick Frey, Zürich

Zahara Gómez Lucini
Recetario para la memoria
Self-published, Mexico City

Jessica Ingram
Road through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

Janna Ireland
Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View
Angel City Press, Santa Monica, California

Francesca Leonardi
’O Post Mio
Postcart Edizioni, Rome

Yael Martínez
La casa que sangra
KWY Ediciones, Lima, Peru

Sara Perovic
My Father’s Legs
J&L Books, New York

Fabio Ponzio
East of Nowhere
Thames & Hudson, London

Agnieszka Sejud
HOAX
Self-published, Wrocław, Poland

Diana Tamane
Flower Smuggler
Art Paper Editions, Ghent, Belgium

Efrem Zelony-Mindell
n e w f l e s h
Gnomic Book, Brooklyn

Photography Catalogue of the Year

Anne Turyn: Top Stories, Elena Cheprakova and Kirsten Weiss, eds., Weiss Berlin, Berlin

African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Mark Sealy, eds., Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, and FotoFest, Houston

Bill Brandt | Henry Moore, Martina Droth and Paul Messier, eds., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut

Hommage à Moï Ver, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (Schaubücher 27): 65 Pictures by M. Vorobeichic, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, ed., Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius

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

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Anne Turyn: Top Stories
Elena Cheprakova and Kirsten Weiss, eds.
Weiss Berlin, Berlin

African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other
Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Mark Sealy, eds.
Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, and FotoFest, Houston

Bill Brandt | Henry Moore
Martina Droth and Paul Messier, eds.
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut

Hommage à Moï Ver, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (Schaubücher 27): 65 Pictures by M. Vorobeichic
Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, ed.
Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius

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

PhotoBook of the Year

Carolyn Drake, Knit Club, TBW Books, Oakland, California

Samuel Fosso, Autoportrait, Walther Collection, New York, and Steidl, Göttingen, Germany

Takashi Homma, Symphony—Mushrooms from the Forest, Case Publishing, Tokyo

Thomas Kuijpers, Hoarder Order, Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Adam Lach and Dyba Lach, How to Rejuvenate an Eagle, Self-published, Warsaw

Edgar Martins, What Photography & Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase, The Moth House, Bedford, United Kingdom

Orbita, Glass Strenči, Orbita and The Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga, Latvia

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

Luis Carlos Tovar, Jardín de mi Padre, Editorial RM, Barcelona, and Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland

Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, Hayal & Hakikat: A Handbook of Forgiveness & A Handbook of Punishment, GOST Books, London, and FiLBooks, Istanbul

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Carolyn Drake
Knit Club
TBW Books, Oakland, California

Samuel Fosso
Autoportrait  
Walther Collection, New York, and Steidl, Göttingen, Germany

Takashi Homma
Symphony—Mushrooms from the Forest  
Case Publishing, Tokyo

Thomas Kuijpers
Hoarder Order
Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Adam Lach and Dyba Lach
How to Rejuvenate an Eagle  
Self-published, Warsaw

Edgar Martins
What Photography & Incarceration Have in Common with an Empty Vase
The Moth House, Bedford, United Kingdom

Orbita
Glass Strenči
Orbita and The Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga, Latvia

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

Luis Carlos Tovar
Jardín de mi Padre
Editorial RM, Barcelona, and Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland

Cemre Yeşil Gönenli
Hayal & Hakikat: A Handbook of Forgiveness & A Handbook of Punishment
GOST Books, London, and FiLBooks, Istanbul

All photographs by Daniel Salemi.

Note: Given the jurors’ extensive engagement in the scholarship and production of photography books, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBoook Awards maintain a strict policy of recusal, in which the juror in question must remove themselves from the discussion of books in which they were directly involved; those books must be unanimously voted in by the remaining jurors.

Can Photographs Provide Information When Truth Is Disrupted?

The 2020 Aperture Summer Open, Information, presents new work by fourteen photographers and lens-based artists who examine globalization, technology, and politics, and the dynamic changes to personal and social identity charted by mass media today. They consider declassified military archives and CIA conspiracy theories, stage encounters with race and memory, present evidence of incarceration and violence, and visualize the physical spaces where digital information is concealed from the public eye. While some artists interrogate the construction of images themselves, others rely on the photograph’s power to cross between dream and dystopia, fact and fable. Together, they broadcast new ways of viewing our present—and our future.

Javier Alvarez, Marco Antonio in His Room , 2016, from the series PRÉDIO

Javier Alvarez

Javier Alvarez is a documentary photographer who examines inequality and social justice. His project PRÉDIO (Portuguese for “building”) explores the Marconi building, a repurposed office tower in São Paulo. In the 1990s, workers and social activists broke into the building and began squatting there. In 2013, Alvarez started visiting the Marconi building regularly, living there off and on a few times per year for up to eight weeks at a time, and began compiling a series of photographs, video footage, interviews, archival material, and collages from a personal travel journal, all of which deal with themes of home and family (or lack thereof), social responsibility, and the power of visibility. Alvarez deftly adapts his work to match the improvised style of those living in the Marconi building: he layers short, emotional accounts on top of and around images; collages hand-colored pages; and tapes portraits into his small notebook. Toggling between images of entire buildings and close-cropped portraits, Alvarez portrays the Marconi building as a metaphor for the issues facing urban life and survival in contemporary Brazil. —Luke Bolster

Gus Aronson, Family Album, 2019, from the series Eurydice

Gus Aronson

The photographs in Gus Aronson’s series Eurydice are individual stories of engagement with obsessions and motifs found in his wanderings, yet together, they provide point and counterpoint, fact and fiction. Central to the series is an attempt to visualize the myth of Orpheus, who travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, only to lose her again when, breaking the set conditions for Eurydice’s return, he turns back to see if she’s still following behind him on their way out. While the story is often interpreted as one of love and despair, Aronson prefers to center the act of looking. Photography does not have to be a record of the past but can remain in a constant present or envision a potential future. In Eurydice, pictures of hands flipping through a photo album, or of an artist painting a facsimile, break down the temporal walls that confine old theories of photographic fact. “Don’t look back,” these pictures seem to say. “Keep moving, and see what you will find.” —Eli Cohen

Widline Cadet, Kò an Kòm yon Lokal ki Baze sou Je (The Body as a Site Based on Sight), 2019, from the series Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]appearances)

Widline Cadet

As a Haitian-born artist now based in New York, Widline Cadet’s identity is deeply rooted in duality. At the center of this duality is the self, the subject Cadet investigates most thoroughly in her project Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]appearances). Across her images, she considers how race, memory, migration, and specifically Haitian cultural identity function in the United States. With other women often serving as her doubles in “self-portraits”—flashes or scarves obscuring their faces—Cadet thinks of photography as “a means of disappearing into visibility,” a sentiment that arises from the fact that for immigrants, especially those who are undocumented, recognition or surveillance can be dangerous. For Cadet, a photograph can provide a form of camouflage, actively disrupting a viewer’s expectations and offering to her subjects—and herself—a sense of poetic visual presence. —Luke Bolster

Emma Cantor, Document Storage Facility, 2018, from the series The Production of Certainty

Emma Cantor

Emma Cantor’s series The Production of Certainty investigates the material presence of information in the digital age—the flow and protection of information through data servers and fiber-optic cables, and the destruction of information in high-security facilities. “The physical presence of information is both hidden and also, with each passing year, shrinking,” she says. Storage units, the transfer of confidential documents, and a private investigator’s inventory each represent tangible forms of information otherwise invisible and transferred online, yet a blasted hard drive or an Infoshred worker vacuuming shreds of paper dramatize destruction. The facilities where Cantor photographed, what she calls “physical spaces concerned with the material reality of digital information,” are a backdrop to illustrating the spectacular erasure of information in a time when most records of our personal and professional lives would seem, paradoxically, to have a permanent digital footprint. —Zora Gandhi

Yu-Chen Chiu, America Seen: 4. Paradise Valley, Arizona, 2017, from the series America Seen

Yu-Chen Chiu

Yu-Chen Chiu’s work focuses on notions of migration and belonging in the United States, her “second home,” as she puts it. In her project America Seen, Chiu brings an outsider’s perspective to the country’s tumultuous social and political moment. The project, she says, is “a visual poem about the social landscape of the United States during the Trump administration.” Rather than exacerbate the deeply personal and often volatile themes of race and patriotism, Chiu crafts subdued and contemplative images. Through the use of black and white, and somber subjects framed by buildings or train windows, Chiu creates images that border on memories or dreams, vaguely familiar, but just out of reach of comfortable nostalgia. Her work attempts to access the varied nature of America, “from the happy dreamers to the lonely wanderers.”—Luke Bolster

Ash Garwood, Folded and Faulted, 2020, from the series Common Fault

Ash Garwood

Theory and practice intersect in Ash Garwood’s Common Fault, a series of grandiose gelatin-silver prints, where an uncanny valley of landscape photography meets digitally constructed images. The process begins in Cinema 4D, a modeling software in which Garwood pieces together photographs with generated textures to render a negative that is then developed and printed in the darkroom. Garwood does not hide the construction, deciding instead to showcase the process as a focal point in understanding the work; when the final image hangs on the wall, it performs as both photograph and digital art. Garwood’s landscapes bring together seemingly disparate ideas about queer theory, environmental studies, and quantum physics into depictions both familiar and unrecognizable: a mountain range could look like an ocean, a rocky field like the surface of the moon. In presenting digitally created works that “pass” as landscape photographs—in a confluence of the word’s meanings—Garwood reclaims the power implicit in producing landscape imagery, a field often dominated by white, male, heteronormative, settler-colonial ideas of power. Rather than evading ideals of authority and reality, her prints invite the viewer to the feeling of uncertainty. —Eli Cohen

Evan Hume, Project Oxcart (A-12), 2019, from the series Viewing Distance

Evan Hume

Growing up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, Evan Hume spent much of his life in close proximity to the operational center of the US government. In his work, Hume transmits a version of this early familiarity to a wider audience. Through years of research and requests through the Freedom of Information Act, Hume has amassed a collection of informational photographs from agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Viewing Distance deals with the form of photography as much as with its content. Leaning into both deliberate redactions and unintentional distortions that occur after years of archival storage and repeated photocopying, Hume’s work evaluates the supposed authenticity of an image as well as its subject matter. Presenting what he calls “historical fragments in a state of flux,” Hume shows how incomplete, indeterminate, and fluid images can be, despite capturing a fixed moment in time. The line between past and present is often blurred—modern iPhones sitting on top of stacks of old, Polaroid-type photographs; or futuristic jets flying across black-and-white, grainy landscapes. These distortions probe the source of the image, and the time between its capture and the present. —Luke Bolster

Seunggu Kim, Globe Amaranth Festival, 2018, from the series Better Days

Seunggu Kim

Balancing natural and unnatural elements in the frame, Seunggu Kim highlights the societal ironies embedded in contemporary Korean life. In the large-scale images of his project Better Days, Kim shows people enjoying leisure activities in crowded scenes, the cityscape of Seoul looming in the background—people work so many hours and have so few vacation days that they’re unable to travel very far. “People are sincere, optimistic, and dynamic,” Kim says. Crowds enjoy their limited time off amongst one another, camp alongside each other, assist each other in taking group photos, maintain a watchful eye over children in a swimming pool. This enduring sense of community—possibly a fantasy, definitely a dream in the era of pandemic—reminds us: is there anything more important than living happily together? —Allie Monck

Joshua Rashaad McFadden, Avery Jackson, Morehouse College, 2017, from the series Evidence

Joshua Rashaad McFadden

Who controls the conversation around Black men in the media? This question animates the artist and photojournalist Joshua Rashaad McFadden’s project Evidence, which revolves around the seven years he lived in Atlanta. His time there exposed him to the numerous and disproportionate ways violence is enacted on Black people in the US. Transcending statistics to focus on individual lives and experiences, McFadden confronts the conventional, too-often negative representations of Black men in America by including, alongside his portraits, written testimony, historical newspapers, and conversations with and texts by playwrights, actors, and historians. Evidence is a project of disruption, what McFadden calls “an archive to reframe societal views of Black masculinity and gender identity.” As an homage to Frederick Douglass’s The North Star antislavery newspaper, McFadden’s own broadsheet, Evidence, acts as both a way of transmitting information and as a pure artistic pursuit that extends beyond the museum walls. McFadden’s work is ultimately optimistic, but nuanced, as he pushes for photographs and words to recognize Black men’s lives as a “collective story you can’t ignore.” —Luke Bolster

Daniel Mebarek, Untitled, 2020, from the series La Lucha Continua (The Struggle Continues)

Daniel Mebarek

In October 2019, protests erupted across Bolivia after a national election resulted in claims of fraud committed by then president Evo Morales, who returned with a counterclaim calling the protests a coup. Over the next month, Morales would resign, the conservative senator Jeanine Áñez would step in as an interim leader, and a new election date would be set for 2020. In the meantime, protests turned violent. Photographs of protesters and rioters circulated worldwide as people watched the unfolding events in Bolivia. Daniel Mebarek, whose family is Bolivian and Algerian, and whose uncle and grandfather were involved in Bolivian revolutionary politics—his grandfather was killed in 1971, during Hugo Banzer Suárez’s dictatorship—converges two distinct sets of photographs in his series La Lucha Continua (The Struggle Continues). One comes from archival material—pamphlets, family photographs, and identity photographs that Mebarek collected in recent years from his family members—which he has remade as cyanotypes. He pairs these with photographs he made in January in La Paz. A direct challenge to a historically linear vision of protest and progress in Latin America, La Lucha Continua seeks to define a space between archive and news, past and present, what Mebarek refers to as “the loopholes in official memory.” —Eli Cohen

Kean O’Brien from the series Mapping a Genocide, 2015–20

Kean O’Brien

Kean O’Brien’s interdisciplinary projects focus on masculinity, queer strategies for survival, and the construction of identity. His project Mapping a Genocide attempts to “develop a theoretical bridge between environmental and social justice” by documenting sites where transgender individuals were murdered, and noting how unexceptional many of these spaces appear. By using Google Maps to create images of intersections and neighborhoods, O’Brien co-opts a technology of surveillance in an effort to create a queer cartography of life and death. Mapping a Genocide asks viewers to imagine a world that is free of radicalized and gendered violence. Instead of prints, O’Brien presents the work as a slideshow, with images flickering in and out of presence, an evanescent quality that serves as a reminder, he says, that “trans people are verbs rather than nouns and are ever evolving and shifting. And so is the meaning of these landscape maps that we occupy and place ourselves within.” —Allie Monck

Florence Omotoyo, Choose Love, 2019, from the series Everywhere + Nowhere

Florence Omotoyo

Florence Omotoyo’s photography explores the impact of social surroundings on narratives of identity in the UK, often highlighting communal spaces and transit systems. For her series Everywhere + Nowhere, she stages photographs of seemingly mundane acts, such as commuting, gathering with one’s friends, and moments of solitude. “As much as we may present and embody a group or collective,” she says, “on a deeper level, we are ruled by a set of histories, perspectives, and tastes that can only be explored by first looking at the solo individual.” This framing of community is threaded throughout Everywhere + Nowhere, emphasizing the multitudes that exist in everyday spaces. Whether depictions of waiting for a train, joining a group of friends, or taking selfies in the bathroom, Omotoyo’s photographs consider “alternative ways to be away from the structures and systems that have continuously perpetuated the same story.” —Allie Monck

Rowan Renee, Evidence #16: Olympus Camera, 2019, from the series No Spirit For Me

Rowan Renee

Rowan Renee is a genderqueer artist who examines the complex and restrictive relationship that law enforcement has with queer identity, addressing intergenerational trauma, gender-based violence, and the impact of the criminal justice system. Their project No Spirit For Me is a deeply personal examination of the evidence compiled by the Florida State Attorney surrounding Renee’s father’s criminal prosecution in 2008. Renee recreates the official photographs as photolithographs, adding little alteration to the cold, factual images. The transformation from digital to print mimics the transformation that these once mundane items underwent upon their father’s prosecution—VHS tapes, cameras, and computers emerge as pastel-hued ready-mades, objects of inquiry and mystery. No Spirit For Me invokes the violence inherent in the criminal justice system, pushing the limits of photography’s “burden of proof” by showing how it uses, or misuses, imagery to enforce official narratives. —Luke Bolster

George Selley, The Simplest Local Tools. . ., 2018, from the series A Study of Assassination

George Selley

A Study of Assassination, declassified through the Freedom of Information Act in 1997, was a manual developed prior to the US-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala and details the CIA’s methods and standards for extrajudicial killings. The United Fruit Company, which had ties to the destabilization of multiple Latin American governments, was entangled in the violence and has settled class action lawsuits regarding its funding of paramilitary groups in Colombia as recently as 2018 under its current conglomerate, Chiquita Brands International. Alongside his photographic interpretations of A Study of Assassination, George Selley collages images of Chiquita bananas and military photographs together with pages from the manual—specifically, instructions on how to divert attention and operate covertly. He uses quotes from the manual as captions, the tense language often removing the agent from the act of killing. Selley’s reconstruction of the manual underscores the disturbing realities of American involvement in Latin America and the strategic alliance between capitalist enterprise and corrupt governance that continues to this day. —Eli Cohen

The 2020 Aperture Summer Open, Information, is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor of Aperture magazine, with Farah Al Qasimi, artist; Amanda Hajjar, director of exhibitions at Fotografiska; Kristen Lubben, executive director of the Magnum Foundation; and Paul Moakley, editor at large for special projects at TIME. The exhibition is on view at Fotografiska New York through October 25, 2020.

Aperture’s 2020 Virtual Gala Honors Trailblazing Women in Photography

For sixty-eight years, Aperture has chronicled, reflected, and encouraged innovation in photography. Women have played a central role since Aperture began in 1952—with Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Nancy Newhall, and Dody Weston Thompson critical to the creation of Aperture magazine—and throughout its history as a prominent thought-leader in our field. On October 20, Aperture’s first free virtual gala honors Dr. Naomi Rosenblum and Ming Smith, two legends who have played important and undersung roles in the evolution of photography.

The gala, streamed on YouTube Live, will feature entertainment and surprises by April Hunt, Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean, and Cecily, alongside tributes and special guest appearances by Derrick Adams, Chris Boot, Sherry Bronfman, Darius Himes, Cathy Kaplan, Antwaun Sargent, and Deborah Willis.

Coinciding with the gala, Aperture is partnering with Christie’s for an online auction, with live bidding October 19–28 of over sixty pieces by artists such as Sharon Core, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Benjamin Sherry, Stephen Tayo and more.

Read below to learn about this year’s Aperture Gala honorees, Dr. Naomi Rosenblum and Ming Smith, and register online for free to watch the October 20, 2020 Aperture Virtual Gala: Agents of Change on YouTube.

Left to right: Naomi Rosenblum by Paul Strand; Naomi Rosenblum at ICP Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony in 1998

The eminent photography historian, curator, and author Dr. Naomi Rosenblum is being honored for her groundbreaking writings and teachings. These include the books A World History of Photography (1984 first edition, 2019 fifth edition), a canonical and invaluable reference for art historians; and A History of Women Photographers (1994 first edition, 2010 third edition), a definitive, eye-opening chronicle of women’s accomplishments in photography—which went on to inspire one of the first comprehensive traveling exhibitions of women’s achievements in the medium.

Ming Smith, Self-portrait, ca. 1988
Courtesy the artist and Aperture

Aperture honors Ming Smith for her poetic images of twentieth-century African American life on the occasion of her first monograph, Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2020). Smith moved to New York in the 1970s, joining the Kamoinge Workshop and publishing her work in the Black Photographers Annual. Known for her lyrical, often experimental meditations on jazz, African American communities, and cultural icons—from Sun Ra and Alvin Ailey, to Gordon Parks and Grace Jones—Smith has established herself as one of the greatest artist-photographers working today.

The 2020 Aperture Virtual Gala: Agents of Change will take place on Tuesday, October 20 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Click here for full program details and to register to watch the virtual event for free.