Aperture's Blog, page 64

How Indigenous Filmmakers Are Shaping the Future of Cinema

In the most iconic scene of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, a 2001 film by the Inuk writer, director, and producer Zacharias Kunuk, the titular character sprints butt naked across the spring ice and toward the camera, bounding through frigid puddles and leaping between floes—his nemesis, the wicked Oki, and Oki’s two followers are in hot pursuit and out for blood.

A close-up shows Atanarjuat panting, but determined, shoulder checking Oki every few strides. The unclothed protagonist has put some distance between himself and his attackers, but as he runs away from land, the puddles become more frequent. The harsh Arctic environment appears to have set another trap. Suddenly, Atanarjuat slips and plunges headfirst into a puddle. He stops and collects himself before continuing on. But then, the ghost of the deceased camp leader, Kumaglak, appears. “This way!” he calls to Atanarjuat. “Over here!” Atanarjuat sprints toward a gap in the ice, leaps across the water, and lands on both feet. In a twist of fortune, Oki slides through a hole in the ice. His henchmen have to call off the chase to pull him from the water. “I won’t sleep till you’re dead!” cries Oki, panting. His revenge against Atanarjuat for marrying Atuat, the woman to whom Oki was promised, has been foiled. The camera cuts to Atanarjuat, still bounding across the ice, his body shrinking to a tiny speck against the Arctic sunset.

When the credits roll, a behind the-scenes clip reveals the labor that went into making this scene: a camera mounted on a sled is dragged by a crew running ahead of Natar Ungalaaq, the actor who plays Atanarjuat. In a 2017 interview for the CBC show The Filmmakers, Ungalaaq said he kept warm while shooting the scene by huddling near a stove inside a tent and making coffee between takes. “In my mind, nobody wanted to get that role—naked in front of camera,” Ungalaaq recalled.

Still from Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, 2001
Courtesy Igloolik Isuma Productions

And that was to shoot just one scene. The entire film was produced with a budget of 1.9 million Canadian dollars. Kunuk started by gathering eight elders’ retellings of the Atanarjuat legend. Then, Kunuk and five writers synthesized these versions of the story into a script in both Inuktitut and English, consulting with Inuit elders to maintain cultural integrity. They trained Inuit locals from the Canadian territory of Nunavut in all the on-set jobs needed to make a feature film: makeup, sound, stunts, special effects. For a community with an unemployment rate around 50 percent when the film was made, Atanarjuat created economic opportunity. All the while, Kunuk endeavored to have the story pull the audience into the emotionally rich and socially complex interior of Inuit life. “The goal of Atanarjuat is to make the viewer feel inside the action, looking out, rather than outside looking in,” reads a post labeled “Filmmaking Inuit Style” on the website for Isuma, the Inuit production company that made the film. “Our objective was not to impose southern filmmaking conventions on our unique story, but to let the story shape the filmmaking process in an Inuit way.”

Based on an ancient Inuit folktale and set in the village of Igloolik, in what is now the Canadian territory of Nunavut, Atanarjuat was the first feature-length film made entirely in the Inuktitut language. It was also the first Canadian motion picture to win the Caméra d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and it was ranked the best Canadian film of all time in a 2015 poll conducted by the Toronto International Film Festival.

I first saw Atanarjuat at the San Francisco American Indian Film Festival when I was eight years old. And I was confused for at least half the movie because I was under the impression that it was about another fast runner: the legendary Native American athlete Jim Thorpe. (I recall whispering to my mom during the ice chase, “When are they going to the Olympics?”) Though I was disappointed that Atanarjuat wasn’t a sports movie, the film left an impression on me and on many other Native people. To this day, it is still unusual to make a film where Indigenous people are in front of the camera, much less one where they’re behind it. A generation of Native filmmakers now cites Atanarjuat as a work that inspired them. Kunuk and Isuma have helped other Indigenous communities, directors, and actors tell their own stories on-screen—producing not only Indigenous narratives but also an Indigenous gaze.

Allakariallak as Nanook in Nanook of the North, 1922
© Pathé Exchange Inc. and courtesy Pathé/Photofest

Despite the accolades, Kunuk’s and the Inuit’s contributions to the history and future of film remain largely unheralded. To fully appreciate the significance of Atanarjuat, you first have to understand the film it is in conversation with: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Released in 1922, Nanook of the North was a pathbreaking film that some consider to be the first documentary ever made. This designation, however, comes with a heavy asterisk.

Flaherty filmed Nanook of the North between 1920 and 1922. His intention was to portray Inuit culture to white audiences before what was left of traditional life was obliterated by Western modernization. The film follows a celebrated hunter, framing scenes of Inuit labor as though they were dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History. There are scenes of Nanook rowing a kayak, traversing ice floes in search of game, trapping Arctic fox, building an igloo, teaching his son to hunt with bow and arrow, eating raw seal meat, glazing the runners of his sled, harpooning a walrus, and fighting a seal, among many other events. There’s even a part early on where Nanook visits a trading post owned by a white merchant who shows the Inuit a gramophone. Nanook, apparently ignorant of the technology, attempts to bite the record, adding a moment of comic relief undoubtedly designed to make white audiences laugh at him.

Like an anthropologist, Flaherty plays the role of informant, homing in on the Inuit mode of production. But like an artist, he pauses to admire the austere beauty of the Arctic and the Inuit’s ingenuity in living amid it. Every so often, the silent film pauses to interject Flaherty’s written narration, which oscillates between these registers. In the final scenes of the film, Flaherty seems to push beyond these self-imposed limits. His camera captures Nanook savoring a bite of raw seal meat as his wife, Nyla, swaddles their child before leaning in to rub noses with the babe: an “Eskimo kiss.” “The shrill piping of the wind, the rasp and hiss of driving snow, the mournful howls of Nanook’s master dog typify the melancholy spirit of the North,” reads Flaherty’s narration as his camera captures nightfall on the windswept landscape outside Nanook’s igloo.

But here’s the thing: it’s all staged. Nanook is actually a guy named Allakariallak, a veteran hunter from the Itivimuit Inuit whom Flaherty had befriended. The seal Nanook fights on-screen is actually already dead. And by the time Flaherty arrived, many Inuit were well adapted to Western technology. Although Flaherty insisted Allakariallak and the cast wear traditional clothing, the Inuit usually wore a hybrid of Western and Inuit attire. While Flaherty’s Nanook hunted with a harpoon, Allakariallak preferred the firepower of a gun. And while Allakariallak played dumb around the gramophone on screen, in real life, he was well aware of the technology and how it worked.

Hand-colored lobby card from Nanook of the North, 1922
© Pathé Exchange Inc. and courtesy Pathé/Photofest

It’s tempting to call Flaherty a fraud and leave it at that. But on the set of Nanook of the North, the Inuit weren’t just paid actors; they were consultants and production staff. Nyla, Nanook’s young wife, was actually Flaherty’s common-law wife; they had a child together. In Inukjuak and Grise Fiord, in Nunavut, there is still a thriving clan of Inuit with the last name Flaherty. Jay Ruby, an anthropologist, has argued that Flaherty collaborated with the Inuit on set. “The Inuit performed for the camera, reviewed and criticized their performance and were able to offer suggestions for additional scenes in the film—a way of making films that, when tried today, is thought to be ‘innovative and original,’” writes Ruby.

Faye Ginsburg, an anthropology professor at New York University, and Fatimah Tobing Rony, a professor of media studies at the University of California, Irvine, have gone even further, claiming that the Inuit served as camera operators. The Akeley cameras Flaherty used were hefty sixty-pound, hand-cranked devices that required a fifteen-pound tripod—all of which, along with massive quantities of 35mm film, needed to be lugged across snowbanks, ice floes, and Arctic waters. And as the film critic Roger Ebert pointed out in a four-star review for the Chicago Sun-Times: “If you stage a walrus hunt, it still involves hunting a walrus, and the walrus hasn’t seen the script.”

These facts would seem to cast Nanook of the North, and perhaps even the whole early history of documentary and nonfiction film, in a different light. If the Inuit were behind the camera—and not merely prehistoric stock characters in the national imaginary—then we must consider the possibility that the prodigious body of work inspired by Nanook of the North was inspired not just by Flaherty’s artistic talents but also by those of his Inuit collaborators. Indeed, many Inuit have long been proud of the work, perhaps aware of their peoples’ contributions to it. And it is perfectly understandable that Inuit audiences would take some pride in seeing their culture—which, like many Indigenous cultures, has been battered by colonization—celebrated on-screen.

In fact, after watching and researching the film, I started to wonder if the paradigm of salvage anthropology was actually an appropriation of the deeply Indigenous desire to preserve and remember the beauty of Native life before the cataclysm of colonization. “The film excited great pride in the strength and dignity of their ancestors, and they want to share this with their elders and children,” Lyndsay Green, operations manager of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (now called the Inuit Tapirisat Kanatami), the national governing body representing Inuit in Canada, said of Nanook of the North, which the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation screened into the 1970s. But then, we must also consider the dismissiveness with which Flaherty later addressed his Inuit actors, collaborators, and lovers. “I don’t think you can make a good film of the love affairs of the Eskimo,” he said in a 1949 interview with the BBC, “because they never show much feeling in their faces, but you can make a very good film of Eskimos spearing a walrus.”

Still from SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife), 2018

© Igloolik Isuma Productions and courtesy Niijang Xyaalas Productions

The greatest achievements in creative and intellectual pursuits often entail killing the master: to Plato’s ideals, Aristotle responded with empirics; to Richard Wright’s Native Son, James Baldwin responded with a vicious takedown of his friend and mentor’s novel, collected in Notes of a Native Son; to Jay-Z’s “Takeover,” Nas responded with “Ether.” And for Nanook of the North, there’s Kunuk’s Atanarjuat.

A close examination reveals that Kunuk co-opted many of Flaherty’s creative ticks. Atanarjuat was made with a desire to preserve Inuit culture—but Kunuk does it for an Inuit audience, while Flaherty did it for a white one. And Kunuk’s camera moves in a way curiously similar to Flaherty’s. Kunuk shoots his subjects up close, taking time to pause and let the labor and land of the Inuit unfold for the viewer—inviting the audience to move to the rhythm of Inuit life. In one of the first scenes, where the village is cursed by Tungajuaq, a shaman from the north, the polar bear necklace of the shaman is brought right up to the camera, as though the lens is the viewer’s neck. But instead of narration, Kunuk turns to shamanic fortune and fate to explain the twists and turns of his narrative. It’s not a stretch to view Tungajuaq—a strange and evil outsider—as a metaphor for European colonization.

And yet, in this narrative, Europeans are even denied the right to intrude. Kunuk reclaims many of Flaherty’s conventions—perhaps the same ones that could more accurately be attributed to his Inuit collaborators—to produce what I might describe as an Inuit gaze: a visual style and sensibility particular to his Inuk viewpoint. Like the shaman in his story, he playfully wags a finger at Flaherty at every turn. He even does the very thing Flaherty said the Inuit couldn’t do: make a movie about love. Indeed, the central drama of Atanarjuat—the thing that sets Oki at the protagonist’s throat—is the passion between Atuat and Atanarjuat. This is what makes Kunuk’s film a triumph in the fullest sense: like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Kunuk has slain a white giant, for all to see.

Still from SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife), 2018

© Igloolik Isuma Productions and courtesy Niijang Xyaalas Productions

Over the past twenty years, Kunuk and his production company, Isuma, have schooled many Indigenous filmmakers, such as the brothers Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw, who cowrote the 2018 film SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the Knife), the first movie made entirely in the Haida language. And like Kunuk and the Inuit, the Edenshaws and the Haida were drawn to film as a tool to preserve their endangered language and culture. With their cameras, this new generation of filmmakers is capturing Indigenous worlds imperiled but resilient. Like the Inuit who worked with Flaherty a century ago, these filmmakers are asking some of the biggest and most important questions: What is the responsibility of the filmmaker to his or her community? How do we tell stories about worlds collapsing under the weight of colonization, resource extraction, mass extinction, and climate change? And who has the right perspective to tell those stories? This spring’s unseasonably warm weather—the warmest on record since at least 1958—brought an early melt season to the Arctic. The location where Natar Ungalaaq once bounded across the ice as Atanarjuat will soon be unfit to film such a scene, and likely unrecognizable to Kunuk, the Inuit, and all who have come to properly appreciate their films as well as their monumental contributions to art on this shattered earth.

This essay originally was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “The Indigenous Gaze.”

For Alan Michelson, History Is Always Present

“My work is very much grounded in the local, in place, and place can be fraught when you’re Indigenous,” says the New York–based artist Alan Michelson.

Michelson, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, has, for more than thirty years, produced evocative, influential works that excavate colonial histories of invasion and eviction. After an early engagement with photography and painting, he gradually shifted to an expanded approach. Video and installation allowed him to abandon a single perspective in favor of unfixed points of view, creating dynamic spaces of visual and auditory immersion. For Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation, his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, he deployed the panoramic form, which he likens to wampum belts—beaded sashes used by Native nations in diplomacy. The show parsed history with references to maps and other archival materials, and to Indigenous geography and philosophy, challenging viewers, via augmented reality, to reconsider the museum’s location, once a Lenape site where tobacco was grown for ceremonial use. For Michelson, history is always present, unfinished business demanding our attention and redress.

This spring, during the city’s shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he spoke with the curator Chrissie Iles about his artistic development, the power of contemporary Indigenous art, and the historical echoes of our public health crisis.

Alan Michelson, Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), 2018. HD video and bondedstone Houdon replica bust, with sound by members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory

Chrissie Iles: In all your work, whether in photography or the moving image, you subvert the camera’s history as an instrument of colonialism by transforming the colonial gaze. What is your relationship to the camera?

Alan Michelson: I got a Nikon camera in my early twenties, at that exciting time in the mid 1970s when Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) was current. I was always very visual, always drew and painted, and soon became absorbed in that heightened mode of seeing through a viewfinder. I was living in coastal New Hampshire and would go for long walks and take pictures.

The color in the world was really attracting my eye, moody colors and motifs with implicit references to landscape painting and abstract painting. Later, at the Boston Museum School, many of my teachers were from the generation of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, when artists had turned away from external representation to an internal set of coordinates, where color and gesture were more important.

Iles: How did your work develop after art school?

Michelson: After art school, I gradually moved away from the vertically oriented pictorial space of painting to the receptive, horizontally oriented space that Robert Rauschenberg opened up, Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane,” where photographic imagery could become palette and two-dimensional imagery could coexist with objects. The kind of space that when applied to a room became installation. And I was fascinated by the possibilities of site specificity, because I’ve always been attracted to history as much as to form. I cycled through all of that to installation, and started really thinking about how history had treated Native people.

Alan Michelson, Still from Mespat, 2001. Video, turkey feathers, monofilament, and steel, with original soundtrack by Michael J. Schumacher

Iles: How did Indigenous knowledge systems, survivance, and a resurfacing of suppressed histories become the substance of your work?

Michelson: I would say that some of my recent work has its roots in my first video, Mespat, which was made in 2001. Valerie Smith invited me to participate in Crossing the Line at the Queens Museum and make work based on the borough of Queens. I was interested in looking at its shoreline from a boat, from the viewpoint of the early explorers, as well as of my ancestors, because waterways were really the highways in those days. It’s not a view that you often see. And I also wanted to reference moving panoramas of the nineteenth century, the ones that simulated marine travel.

So I mounted a camera on a boat and sailed up Newtown Creek, an industrial waterway contaminated by more than a century of oil spills, chemicals, and sewage, a Superfund site. The marine mount enabled a smooth, continuous dolly shot of more than three miles of its shoreline, including scrapyards, bridges, and refineries. I was aware of Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), and like those films, there was a banal aspect to it. I was just observing what was there. And what was there was a stark catalog of industrial life and death, with the hopeful exception of a white egret.

Iles: You described your engagement with photography in the ’70s, at a moment when photography was an important conceptual medium, especially for Land art and Land artists. What do you think about the ways in which Land art often ignored Native American history and presence?

Michelson: Well, colonists assumed the identity of “Americans.” For Euro-Americans, that meant an entitled legacy, to imagine that the land was American land and no longer Native land with a history. The dearth of historical context in Land art seems to reflect that sense of entitlement, as does its unacknowledged but obvious  debt to Native mounds and its sheer grandiosity. However, there’s also a dystopian undercurrent in Land art that can even be seen in the work of Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole. My favorite work of his is The Course of Empire series (1833–36), in which he painted an imagined landscape and charted its evolution from “The Savage State” to its own self-destruction.

Alan Michelson, Still from Mespat, 2001. Video, turkey feathers, monofilament, and steel, with original soundtrack by Michael J. Schumacher

Iles: Do you think there’s a relationship between that moment and today?

Michelson: Yes, in this current mess that we’re in with COVID-19, Cole’s allegory has never rung truer. This pandemic is coming from the cross-species migration of a viral infection from animals to humans. Eurasian farming resulted in humans living intimately with animals for thousands of years, during which time those large mammals had viral infections that they passed to human beings, the source of epidemics to which European and Asian people eventually built up immunity.

But conditions here on Turtle Island, our name for North America, were very diff erent, and there were really no domesticated mammals here besides the dog. So, our people had no immunity. To them, the diseases that came over with the colonizers—smallpox, measles, the flu—were deadly, novel viruses. The entire world is now experiencing what our ancestors experienced when European colonizers invaded.

Iles: How does this manifest in Mespat?

Michelson: I was interested in the way that the colonial gaze became an American gaze that didn’t acknowledge itself as colonial; it conceived of itself as entitled. And that colonial sense of entitlement is present not only in landscape painting but in off shoots like panoramas, which offered virtual means of touring “exotic” places minus the expense or risk. Mespat is a counterpanorama, in video pixels and feathers instead of paint, of colonial displacement and destruction.

Iles: Clémence White points out in her essay “Alan Michelson: Site Readings” for the 2019 Whitney exhibition Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation that the horizontality in your work “centers Haudenosaunee culture through its relationship to the wampum belt,” and “Haudenosaunee theology, which proposes that the ‘interconnectedness of all life is sacred and key to human freedom and survival.’” Panoramic photography was very popular in the nineteenth century as part of opening up the world and, at its root, is colonial. You use this perspective as a form of resistance by applying it back to a kind of ethical and social interconnectedness of Native American philosophy and spirituality.

Michelson: Extreme horizontality, extension in space, is always extension in time. Viewing panoramic work entails movement and perspectival shifts, the experience of multiple vantage points rather than a single fixed one, which is consonant with the egalitarianism of Native communities. Also, immersive work becomes interactive, a dynamic environment that activates a dialogue, or a set of relations, reflective of our relational epistemology. My appropriation of colonial formats is informed by those ethics. What do they call it when people restage Civil War battles?

Iles: Reenactments.

Michelson: Yes! Then you could say that my sailing up Newtown Creek, retracing the route taken by the first colonists of what became Queens, was a reenactment. If you can keep 1641 [the year before the colonists displaced the Mespeatches] in mind in 2001, it sets up a dialectic between what you see in 2001 and what was there in 1641.

I’ve also been fascinated with wampum belts, a powerful Haudenosaunee and Eastern Woodlands cultural institution, belts made up of hundreds of shell beads, purple and white, that were used to seal agreements. They were documents, codes, even, but they also embodied the natural world because they were made of the shells of animals. They were also collective works, originating in shellfish gathered by the people as food, recycled as beads, and then woven into patterns that carried messages. I based a four-channel video piece, TwoRow II (2005), on a key wampum belt, the Kaswentha, also known as the Two-Row Wampum. In 1613, we made a trading agreement with the Dutch symbolized in the belt by two rows of purple beads separated by three rows of white. The purple rows represented the parallel courses of two vessels on a river, our canoe and their sailing ship, and the white rows peace, friendship, and mutual respect. In my piece, filmed from a tour boat on the Grand River at Six Nations Reserve, there are two rows of panoramic video moving in opposite directions, one of the non Native townships on the east bank and the other of the reserve on the west, with a soundtrack featuring conflicting narratives about the river—that of a Canadian tour-boat captain and those of Six Nations elders.

Alan Michelson, Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), 2018. HD video and bondedstone Houdon replica bust, with sound by members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory

Iles: For your works Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) (2018) and Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World) (2019), which Zuecca Projects showed in Venice last year, you combine the photographic image with maps, drawings, and sound in a form of collage that operates as a resistance to surveillance and a single viewpoint. How do you use the photographic image and the archive to resurface memory and history?

Michelson: Photographic imagery and its documentary aspect are important in my work, both in its moving and still form. I like to use the archive against itself, to challenge the colonial narratives it usually serves. Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer) is a projection onto an iconic bust of George Washington by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. In 2018, the approaching 240th anniversary of Washington’s 1779 destruction of Iroquoia—our extensive homelands in what is now New York State—prompted me to get a life-size replica bust and project archival imagery onto it to tell the story of invasion and forced eviction. The imagery includes historical maps and New York State historic markers, which seem to celebrate genocide, commemorating, for example, “Site of Catherine’s Town, destroyed 1779 by General Sullivan.” My video pans over the map of the campaign, pausing at the places where Washington’s armies destroyed Iroquois villages, all of it playing out over his face. One of my goals is to defeat American amnesia and denial.

Iles: You use three-dimensional surface and form to deepen and trouble the storytelling of the projected image. How did this work in your Venice piece Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World)?

Michelson: Well, the exhibition was about Venice’s role in the early exploration of the Americas.

I had the idea of projecting archival material onto a globe, because that’s essentially what European exploration was—global projections of European power and avidity.

Then I had the idea of doing four of them, referencing the Four Directions and a chart from Andreas Cellarius’s 1660 celestial atlas, Scenographia Systematis Copernicani, depicting four hemispheric globes illuminated by a central sun. I thought, Well, I could do something like that by projecting video onto four spheres.

The first surface I projected onto, in Mespat, was the shallow convex surface of white turkey feathers. The second was the more complex dimensionality and iconography of the bust of Washington. The third was an ideal form, the sphere, but also the form of the world. I’m getting more grandiose as I progress.

Alan Michelson, Still from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), 2019. Four-channel video installation with marine buoys

Iles: This progression is creating what could be described as an Indigenous cinematic. You are rewriting the parameters of the Western history of cinema—a single rectangular screen with a fixed frontal viewpoint and fixed seating—by inscribing Indigenous value systems of horizontal power, shared space, and cyclical time into the projective space. Your use of diff erent material forms as projective surfaces also reframes the cinematographic as something that’s not defined by the West or by American and European—

Michelson: Rectilinearity.

Iles: Yes.

Michelson: Western architecture’s basic program. And of the grid system settlers applied to land, the checkerboards visible from airplanes.

Iles: Last October, during your exhibition at the Whitney, we organized a panel on contemporary Indigenous art in a global context, in which we considered Indigenous communities as the first global communities and discussed their relationships to one another.

Michelson: Both of my fellow speakers at that panel, the Australian Aboriginal artist Richard Bell and the Anishinaabe curator Wanda Nanibush, had previously participated in a 2017 initiative called “Indigenous New York” that I founded and curated with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, which opened up space for contemporary Indigenous art in New York. The vitality of global Indigenous art was not registering on New York’s radar, and we were trying to save New York from self-fossilizing! Certainly in other places, including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, Indigenous art was more visible. We hosted some seminal discussions between Indigenous curators, critics, and artists, and their non- Indigenous counterparts. Contemporary Indigenous art is on the rise these days. It has the power not only of aesthetic beauty but of ethics and calling for justice, which are also beautiful.

Alan Michelson, Stills from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), 2019. Four-channel video installation with marine buoys

Iles: Those discussions underline the powerful role photography and the moving image can play as forms of witnessing. The use of the camera as a witness obliges you to think about who is behind the camera, and how that operates in an environment in which democratic image making and the circulation of images through social media challenge official versions of whatever the truth might be. The vertical perspective of drones, which takes the camera away from the eye and the body, into a disembodied space of surveillance—

Michelson: Which can also be a military space.

Iles: Exactly. It seems that the ethics of the photographic or cinematographic image are even more compelling than ever.

Do you think the current COVID-19 crisis will change us all forever and the world forever? How do you see it affecting your work and your thinking?

Michelson: I think this crisis is brushing back a lot of the sense of entitlement that people have, maybe making them think more about the planet and our interconnectedness. It’s laying bare gross folly and injustice. I’m agitated by the fact that another raging pandemic is devastating Native people, descendants of the victims of so many previous epidemics of deadly diseases brought to Turtle Island, and that once again the federal government is not delivering on its treaty obligations.

Iles: That shared space can be both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, which seems even more important in relation to what you posted about Indigenous communities not being recognized in government statistics about COVID-19.

Michelson: Yes, even in New York, a liberal city with the highest population of Native people in the country. Right now, in May, the infection rate of the Navajo Nation has surpassed that of New York and New Jersey. Due to the ongoing effects of colonization, Native people are a hugely high-risk group, and they’re not getting direly needed supplies in Indian country.

Alan Michelson, Still from  Wolf Nation, 2018. HD video, with sound by Laura Ortman

Iles: Which means that the communities are effectively absent, and therefore don’t exist, and cannot get the support they need to fight the virus. The pandemic is exposing, in stark terms, the economic and political realities of inequity.

Michelson: I’m amazed, Chrissie, how the nineteenth-century trope of the “vanishing Indian” persists, and how government policy continues to reflect that.

Iles: Yes.

Michelson: In times of crisis like this, will doors that have been recently opening close again, and will there just be a reassertion of privilege by those who are most privileged? That can happen on so many levels beyond the art world.

Iles: Yes. This situation is a dress rehearsal for what’s coming in terms of climate change.

Michelson: The signature work in my Wolf Nation exhibition was my 2018 video of that title, which I made for the Indicators: Artists on Climate Change exhibition at Storm King Art Center. People wonder about when and how wolves became dogs. I was thinking about the wolves of Turtle Island, and how we have wolf clans and a profound sense of kinship with animals. Through the cooperative model of the wolf pack, wolves may have taught human beings how to hunt, which is a huge thing, if you think about it. And yet, wolves, like Native people, were themselves hunted and removed. As is clear from converging crises, we urgently need to confront our tortured history and our disastrous leadership, and rethink our current political, economic, social, and environmental models. Indigenous models, including those of survivance, active presence, and resistance, provide an alternative.

Iles: Absolutely. Your work embeds a new social ethics of survivance in the screen, the camera, and the projective space. The old social, political, and cultural models don’t work and are disintegrating. We are entering a new reality, and culture is changing fast. Your work is a map that can help us navigate a different kind of future.

This essay originally was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “History is Present.”

All works courtesy the artist.

Daido Moriyama on the Unending Newness of Photographs

Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama has been at the forefront of the medium for more than fifty years, first rising to prominence through his contributions to Provoke—a magazine founded by art critic Koji Taki, photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanshi, and poet Takahiko Okada, which published from 1968–69 and fundamentally reshaped postwar Japanese photography. Moriyama has since become one of the world’s most recognized photographers, inspiring generations of image-makers.

Shooting predominantly on the streets of Tokyo with a small, handheld camera, Moriyama’s signature grainy and blurry black-and-white photographs explore themes of urban street life, intimacy, pattern, and light. Throughout his career, Moriyama has published over 150 books—including Labyrinth (Aperture, 2012) and Printing Show—TKY (Aperture, 2011), a performative, DIY book, created live at Aperture Gallery in New York.

Now, for two weeks only, Aperture is pleased to offer three exclusive, 8-by-10-inch, gelatin-silver prints by the legendary photographer, each sold in an edition of 150 for $275.

“Photographs are a medium opened to everyone. However, at present day, original prints are sold upon request of the art market, often produced as a limited edition while eventually just few pieces are purchased. I think that this is the opposite of the original essence of photography. For all these reasons I usually don’t add editions to my works. The value of a photograph is not higher if produced in a limited edition and lower if produced in larger quantities. No matter how many copies of an amazing photo are printed, its artistic value won’t be diminished. On the contrary printing and distributing around the world large numbers of photos isn’t rather the best way to show the potential of photography?” Moriyama states. “That said, as I am not a straightforward person, it rarely happens that I issue a special edition of a photobook or any edition for a specific purpose. The purpose of this sale is to support Aperture, which is why I decided to limit the edition and offer these prints at a lower price than usual.”

Read more from Moriyama below, in an interview with Ivan Vartanian from Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (2018); and shop the prints, available exclusively through Aperture through October 8, 2020.

—The Editors

Daido Moriyama, Eros or Something other then Eros, 1969

Ivan Vartanian: Could you speak about your thoughts on the connection between image and language?

Daido Moriyama: Language is a direct medium and communicates meaning and intention straight. A photograph, on the other hand, is subject to the viewer’s memory, aesthetics, and feelings—all of which affect how the photograph is seen. It isn’t conclusive the way language is. But that’s what makes photography interesting. There’s no point in taking photographs that use language in an expository way. Taking photographs for the purpose of language is for the most part meaningless for me. Rather, photography provokes language. It recasts language; within it, various gradations outline a new language. It provokes the world of language: looking at images leads to the discovery of a new language.

That is what I am about. Certainly, photographers—in particular photographers like me, who take street snaps—don’t shuttle back to words with each shot. The outside world is suffused with language. I don’t carry language and apply it to the outside world; instead, messages come in from the outside. That is what provokes me and what I react to. That is the nature of the connection, I think.  That said, I cannot explain every image that I have taken. If I tried to, it would be a sham and boring; it would come across as trivial. That’s not the intention. Each photograph is felt, but there isn’t just one reason for releasing the shutter— there are several reasons, even with a single exposure. The act of photographing is a physiological and concrete response but there is definitely some awareness present. When I take snapshots, I am always guided by feeling, so even in that moment when I’m taking a photograph it is impossible to explain the reason for the exposure. Something might, for example, seem erotic to me. That in itself is a gradation that contains a multiplicity of elements.

Vartanian: In your early magazine work, your photographs are often accompanied by texts you’ve written in an “editorial voice” of sorts.

Moriyama: When I was young, I used to write accompanying texts for my images. Those writings had something of a didactic relationship with the images. In the end, the language with which the viewer sees the photograph changes the image’s content. Even if I chose a word or language with which to take an image, it would be impossible to have everyone feel the same way. Perhaps by chance, a viewer may have a similar feeling.

In working with my older photographs, I treat them as if they are something new—if I didn’t, presenting older work would be pointless. What I photographed at a certain point may have been vivid at the time, but with the passage of years, its luster weathers with it. All work is subject to format, ways of looking, editorial style—all of which influence and alter the work. That process of alteration is one of the things I love about photography. In essence, through the process of recomposing the work, the photograph is revitalized as something that is contemporary—now. This can be done countless times with any image. In a way, this is like saying that within each image, there is a multitude of possibilities. A single photograph contains different images.

I happen to have produced many books of photographs. I work with others on them—people I trust to a certain extent—and I leave it to them to do the recomposition (as, for example, with Shashin yo, Sayonara [Farewell Photography, 1972]). The work becomes more vivid than when I do it myself. If I do it myself, I cannot avoid being influenced by memory; I strain to stave off that impulse and inadvertently create a palpable tension—and the outcome is often odd! Whereas when I work with a third party—or even someone more removed—filtering the images through their eyes, the photographs come alive, I think. Photographs that I’ve taken ten years ago even now seem vivid. If an image is good, it is brought back to life by the feelings of the viewer.

Daido Moriyama, EROS, from the series Provoke 2, 1969

Vartanian: What about the function of the photograph as information? Your work, especially from the 1970s, has so much to do with destabilizing this aspect of photography.

Moriyama: Photographs of any generation are in a basic sense, at that moment, information. Photography is underpinned by information. No matter how conceptual a photograph may be, it contains information at its most fundamental level. But the means by which information is communicated is specific to each generation. A recently shot photograph is just as viable to me as one shot ten years ago.

Vartanian: Do you make a distinction between the different media in which your work appears—magazines and books, exhibitions?

Moriyama: I don’t generally make a distinction between them. A magazine has a particular objective, namely it is about the now. In that sense, it uses the information aspect of photographs. And depending on the editorial direction, the photographs may radically change. So if the editorial direction of a particular magazine doesn’t sit well with me, I don’t allow my photographs to be used in it. But in principle, whether a photograph is framed and mounted as part of an exhibition or shown in a photobook or magazine—these are just different modalities of the same image. Each is interesting in its way. For that reason, I don’t place a lower ranking on magazines. At times, in fact, the magazine reproduction has been the best format for an image, trumping other forms. Again, what interests me is seeing my photographs in a manner that makes them seem different. And in the magazine context, if the photograph doesn’t come alive, it doesn’t necessarily mean there was something wrong with the editorial direction; it probably means the photographs aren’t that strong. There are two sides of a coin.

Vartanian: Your work is largely black and white. How do you think of color in relation to black-and-white work?

Moriyama: There isn’t much difference between photographing in color or black and white. I am someone who has been making black-and-white photographs forever— and to be honest I still prefer black and white. But part of what makes color photography interesting to me are digital cameras. With film cameras, your choice is made once the film is loaded. With digital, on the other hand, something that is shot in color can be converted to black and white. So for the time being I am shooting in color.

Monochromatic photography is conventionally thought of as having more symbolic, abstract, dreamlike qualities. But I don’t necessarily think that just because an image is in color it is closer to reality. Recently, many people have been asking me why I’m photographing in color. It is tantamount to asking me why I am using digital to shoot. What difference does it make? Particularly outside of Japan, there is an eagerness to have a clear-cut reason behind every choice, I find. (The same goes for explanations about the images themselves.) But there isn’t any real need to provide these answers. Making a definitive declaration of intent or meaning kills the photograph. Whether I want to print something in color or make it black and white all has to do with what I am feeling at the time.

One distinction I can make—I’ve written about this in my essays: black-and- white photography has an erotic edge for me, in a broad sense. Color doesn’t have that same erotic charge. It doesn’t have so much to do with what is being photographed; in any black-and-white image there is some variety of eroticism.If I am out wandering and I see photographs hung on the walls of a restaurant, say, if they are black and white, I get a rush! It’s really a visceral response. I haven’t yet seen a color photograph that has given me shivers. That is the difference between the two.

But my interest in color is increasing. Sometimes when I see one of my black-and-white photographs, I think to myself: “That’s a Daido Moriyama image.” Whereas color work seems wholly different to me—still, there is something good about it. So what interests me is seeing my own work differently: the new, vague feeling of accepting the color work as my own. That is where I am now. At that vague, flickering stage.

Daido Moriyama, Yokosuka, A Japanese Town, 1971

Vartanian: There is a tendency now to think of photography in terms of themes or concepts.

Moriyama: There are no themes in my work. It may be difficult for this to be understood outside of Japan—and indeed, often my work is understood as having a theme. Even if I were to construct a theme (and it’s not as if I’ve never done so), I can’t really think about it as I’m working. It is too limiting, and the camera work becomes restricted. Within that constraint the photograph becomes a fabricated image, and for me that is meaningless. The work I am shooting now is being done in Tokyo, but I don’t necessarily think of it as having a theme that is “Tokyo.” With a predetermined theme, possibilities are reduced, and the conversation then becomes one of form. That’s not something that I am capable of doing, really.

Vartanian: Many of your early writings about your photography discussed the sensation of taking photographs, which you often describe sometimes as “haziness” but mostly as a sort of “stimulation.” Has this changed for you? What’s the sensation of taking photographs now?

Moriyama: Nothing is really different. The passing decades change how we see—but basically I have always been shooting for exactly the same reason. The shock that comes from the outside world. That’s why imposing a theme drains photography of its spark. The outside world is extremely fluid and mixed up. Wrestling it into a “theme” is an impossibility. That mix in its totality cannot be photographed. Within a thin sliver of this world, only the thinnest of segments can be recorded with the photograph—but I keep photographing. There is nothing else.

With conceptual photography or with a prescribed theme, it is more or less apparent if the photograph is a success or not. When the object of the photograph is the city, it’s far from clear whether the photograph is working.

In one way, it is a very naive way of thinking. But to shoot images is to receive shocks from the outside world. I don’t maintain that awareness for extended periods while shooting, but through the outside world my own consciousness changes.

So, in relation to the city, I face the world and with this tiny camera I take photographs. Whatever the city—not only Tokyo—it is suffused with art; it is overflowing with the stuff. With that, I get a jolt of adrenaline. Once you experience that actuality you are unable to take any other kind of photographs.

Having said that, there are also instances when I work with assigned subjects, like the photographs I am taking now at the University Museum at the University of Tokyo. It’s not a subject I chose myself but it is interesting to me. Looking for the bizarre and fantastic within that cordoned-off area intrigues me—partly precisely because I don’t usually take photographs like this. Say I am asked to photograph a singer; my camera work really isn’t well suited for such work, but somewhere in the course of making the image, it becomes interesting. And from that session, one of the shots might make it into my printed work, and it is then entirely detached from its original meaning. There are no hard and fast rules with what and how I shoot.

It may seem strange to say, but I believe in the outside world of the city more than I believe in myself. I think it is through it that change happens. I have been this way since I was young. Feeling the world to be a threat. It’s a continual anxiety— but there’s nothing to be done about it. There are times when I am by myself at home at night, and I start thinking about the city’s Shinjuku area at night, and how interesting it must be—it becomes difficult for me to sit still.

Photography never reaches a state of completion. That is what makes it interesting—amazing. When I was young I made projects like Farewell Photography. It was all fiction. Although, for me at that time, it was a form of reality. It was excessive. Pop, cheap junk, scandal, accident, somewhere in the day-in-day-out, there is something extraordinary. There is a ton of it. That is what I am interested in. That is what I respond to.

Through October 13 during our special print sale, collect three exclusive silver-gelatin 8-by-10-inch prints by Daido Moriyama for $275 each.

This interview was originally published in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018). All images courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and Akio Nagasawa Gallery.

7 Essential Japanese Photobooks

The photobook has become central to the development of Japanese photography, particularly in its postwar phase. Today, influential volumes by artists such as Masahisa Fukase, Eikoh Hosoe, Rinko Kawauchi, and more continue to inspire generations of artists and book makers.

Coinciding with the release of new limited-edition prints by Daido Moriyama, we have gathered these seven essential volumes, both new and classic, by Japanese photographers.

Naoya Hatakeyama, #0909, 2008, from the series Yamate Dori
Courtesy the artist

Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City, 2018

For the past thirty years, Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape—from limestone quarried by explosive blasts, to the evolution of a city from a bird’s-eye view, to the recovery and reconstruction of the artist’s tsunami-swept hometown in northeastern Japan—capturing the phases of creation, change, and destruction over time in Japan’s contemporary topographies. Mapping the growth and expansion of these sites, Hatakeyama’s photographs hauntingly embody the death and rebirth of cities, not just creating a record of their past and present, but also providing a possibility of imagining and projecting their future.

Eikoh Hosoe, from Kamaitachi (Aperture, 2009)
Courtesy the artist

Eikoh Hosoe: Kamaitachi, 2009

Eikoh Hosoe’s groundbreaking Kamaitachi was originally released in 1969 as a limited-edition photobook of one thousand copies. A collaboration with Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of ankoku butoh dance, the volume documents their visit to a farming village in northern Japan, in which they created an improvisational performance with local villagers inspired by the legend of Kamaitachi, a weasel-like demon who haunts rice fields and slashes people with a sickle. The resulting photographs document Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and people they encountered, combining performance and photography in a personal and symbolic investigation of Japanese society during a time of massive upheaval. In 2005, Aperture collaborated with Hosoe to release a limited-edition facsimile of the original book, before releasing a new edition reworked by original designer Ikko Tanaka in 2009, featuring never-before-published photographs alongside texts by Donald Keene and Suzo Takiguchi.

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitlted, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo, 2017

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs of tender cadences of everyday living have begun to swing further afield. In Halo, Kawauchi expands her previous inquiry of spirituality, photographing three main themes: Lunar New Year celebrations in China (where a five-hundred-year-old tradition calls for molten iron hurled in lieu of fireworks), the southern coastal region of Izumo, and her ongoing fascination with the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. The resulting images knit together a mesmerizing exploration of the spirituality of the natural world, contemplating cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature and human ritual, and the larger spiritual forces at play.

Hiroji Kubota, Anshan Steel Mill, Liaoning, China, 1981
Courtesy Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos

Hiroji Kubota Photographer, 2015

From his coverage of the Black Panther Party in the mid-1960s to his incomparable access to North Korea, Hiroji Kubota has prolifically captured the histories of diverse cultures for over fifty years. Rooted in his experience of a Japan ravaged by destruction and famine at the end of World War II, Kubota’s photographs are characterized by a desire to find beauty and honor in human experience. “The fine quality of Hiroji Kubota’s photographs is that they are single-minded and immediate, and need no interpretation,” Elliott Erwitt writes. “His skill is observation without artifice, documentation without judgement.” Hiroji Kubota Photographer is the first comprehensive survey for the veteran artist, featuring over four hundred photographs from his many extended trips throughout China, Burma, the US, North and South Korea, and his home country of Japan.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, El Capitan, Hollywood, 1993
Courtesy the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Black Box, 2016

Since the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto has explored ideas of time, empiricism, and metaphysics through surreal and formalistic photographs. A self-described “habitual self-interlocutor,” Sugimoto uses the camera as a bridge between abstract questions and the quiet, comical nature of modern everyday life—with subjects ranging from Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, to wildlife scenes at the American Museum of Natural History, to two-hour-long exposures of film screens in movie theaters. “Despite being contemporary, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images seem archetypal and atemporal,” Iran do Espírito Santo reflects, “curious qualities to find in photographic images, since they normally record a fleeting instant.”

Shomei Tomatsu, Yokosuka, 1959
Courtesy Shomei Tomatsu-Interface

Shomei Tomatsu: Chewing Gum and Chocolate, 2014

Shomei Tomatsu’s Chewing Gum and Chocolate is a defining portrait of postwar Japan by one of the country’s foremost twentieth-century photographers. Beginning in the late 1950s, Tomatsu committed to photographing as many of the American military bases in Japan as possible, focusing on the seismic impact of the American victory and occupation: uninformed American soldiers in the red-light districts, foreign children at play in seedy landscapes, and the emerging protests and counterculture formed in response to the ongoing American military presence. Tomatsu originally named the series Occupation, later changing it to Chewing Gum and Chocolate to reflect the handouts given to Japanese kids by the soldiers—sugary and addictive, but ultimately lacking in nutritional value.

Cover and interior spread of Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (Aperture, 2009)

Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s, 2009

During the 1960s and ’70s in Japan, the photobook overtook prints as a popular mode of artistic dissemination. This process has expanded to an extent where any discussion of Japanese photography now has to include the book. Today, the most famous of works—such as Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens (1986) and Eikoh Hosoe’s Man and Woman (1961)—continue to inspire generations of artists. Featuring forty definitive publications from the era (both iconic works and forgotten gems), this volume examines the distinct character and influence of the Japanese photobook, placing it within a larger sociological context.

As part of our special print sale with Daido Moriyama, expand your photobook library and save 30% off these Japanese photobooks through October 13 at midnight ET.

Gus Aronson’s Tokens of New York in the Age of Isolation

It’s a phrase you don’t hear too much anymore, and no one quite agrees on its origins. It’s a warning to the wide-eyed against being swindled. It’s a reference, perhaps, to the tokens at a fairground, whose value disappears when the lights go off. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” Ann cautions her husband, Peter, in Edward Albee’s play At Home in the Zoo (2004), but Peter doesn’t know the old adage. He meets an unhinged man in a park, someone who thinks differently and suffers from too much solitude, and the encounter doesn’t end well. During the Great Depression, a bank in Washington state ran out of money and issued wooden nickels. In 2004, during the Iraq War, a retired US Air Force sergeant manufactured wooden nickels to support the troops. You couldn’t use them in a vending machine, but that wasn’t the point. Their value was patriotic, mystical. You had to believe, and if you did, you were all the richer.

Not long ago, Gus Aronson, a twenty-two-year-old photographer and filmmaker, was in Highbridge Park, in Upper Manhattan, photographing skaters at a skate park, when he met a man dressed in sequins and carrying two slabs of drywall. The man wore a spectacular necklace, and when Aronson asked him about it, the man said it was a symbol of recovery. “We had a conversation about COVID, about the future,” Aronson said recently. “He thinks that everything’s about the number six in society. The mask is a sixth sense. You have to be six feet apart. But then he says, ‘Three is the future.’” The man thinks there should be a three-party system in government. He wants homelessness to be written into the US Constitution. He wants to form a skate team in Washington Heights, and he’s been talking to school principals about coaching it. Was he peddling wooden nickels? “He’s very adamant that people need to respect each other and love each other more,” Aronson said.

Aronson grew up in Riverdale, a Bronx neighborhood west of Van Cortlandt Park along the Hudson River. He graduated from Bard College in May, and like a lot of students and postgraduates in our age of pandemic, he has returned to living in his childhood bedroom—above the door, there’s a sign that reads, “Sanctuary.” Aronson took most of the photographs in his new series Tokens from an Unled Life (2020) in and around Yonkers, Upper Manhattan, and the Upper West Side. He was searching for a way to accept the present, to allow opposite and contradictory phenomena to coexist; like the photographers Tim Davis and Torbjørn Rødland, Aronson has an eye for vivid color and ambiguous narrative. There’s an echo of Albee’s play in Aronson’s chance meeting with a skate park prophet, but he drew his series title instead from Joan Silber’s shrewd 2017 novel, Improvement, which traces how the subtlest, most impulsive decisions can have a devastating effect, setting in motion a course of events that might remain concealed from you forever. In one scene in rural Turkey, Dieter, a young German who raids archaeological digs for treasures to sell abroad, gives an American named Kiki a tarnished Ottoman coin: “‘Not so valuable,’ he said, looking into her eyes. ‘Only good to look at.’ Kiki still had it, a token from an unled life.”

Throughout Aronson’s peripatetic wanderings in New York’s emptied-out streetscape, he found tokens and totems, signs that could be taken for wonders. In Yonkers, outside a police recreation center, a man’s face has been ripped from a banner, leaving only a bodily shape in military fatigues and an American flag with a gaping hole. A bottle of Lexapro, the antianxiety medication, becomes a portal to another world; the bottle maker’s slogan, raised in amber plastic, is “Safe & Friendly.” In the window of an Upper West Side shop, Aronson found a painted tableau of US presidents—Johnson, Obama, Clinton, Kennedy, and Truman are all there, cheerfully playing pool—that appears to slide, like a double-exposure, beneath a glass-reflected street scene. (The painting, Callin’ the Red, is by Andy Thomas and strangely, it appears duplicate, in a frame on the wall behind Obama’s smiling face.) One delicate image in Tokens of an Unled Life is a grid of headshots of firefighters. Their names, like some of their impressive moustaches, reveal only the slightest biographical detail. In this year’s fever dream of sirens and statistics, Aronson’s picture seems to ask: Are these men still with us? Who have they helped (or harmed)? Who have they loved?

“I began to see objects as vessels and people as fortune-tellers,” Aronson said. “Photographing in a world so divided and isolated, it was important to remind myself that we are, in many ways, still connected.” The coin that Dieter gives Kiki in Improvement is a bid for connection—an intersection, as Aronson noted, “between a factual past and a fictional present.” Kiki never does show up to meet Dieter, and one day in Berlin, Dieter meets a woman named Gisela, who would become his wife, “his greatest stroke of luck.” But is love, like street photography—that album of decisive moments—about luck, or something else, something random or willful? A golden coin or a wooden nickel? In a token Aronson found on a summer afternoon, in the crystalline light of a turquoise pool, a hand touches a knee—an impossibly tender gesture at a time of enforced distance. But maybe it was a chance encounter. “People always went for the most romantic interpretation; you couldn’t blame them for that,” Silber writes toward the end of Improvement. “What they felt most strongly seemed most true.”

All photographs from the series Tokens of an Unled Life, 2020, for Aperture. Courtesy the artist.

In Berlin, a Retrospective of One of Germany’s Most Influential Photographers

“Waffenruhe is a real ass-kicker,” the American artist Lewis Baltz wrote in a letter to Michael Schmidt and his wife Karin in 1987. According to Baltz, the series of haunting black-and-white photographs that Schmidt took in the years between 1985 and 1987, in proximity of the Berlin Wall and combined with still lifes and portraits of young adults, is a “masterpiece.” The work, which conveys a lingering hopelessness and feeling of entrapment, marked a turning point in Schmidt’s career. It also takes center stage in Schmidt’s retrospective Photographs 1965–2014, currently on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, showcasing Schmidt’s five-decade-long career.

Michael Schmidt, Untitled, from the series Waffenruhe (Ceasefire), 1985–87

Born in Berlin in 1945, just a few months after the fall of the Nazi regime, Schmidt remained living in the city’s Kreuzberg district after the Berlin Wall was erected along its perimeter in 1961. And as with Waffenruhe, Schmidt dedicated a great deal of his work to the city—or more precisely, to West Berlin, its history, and its citizens. Schmidt began to photograph in the mid-1960s, when he was still working for the West Berlin police force as chief patrol officer. By the time he published his first book, Berlin Kreuzberg (1973)—which was commissioned by the Berlin senate and includes photos Schmidt had taken of his neighborhood throughout the four preceding years—he had quit his job in order to become a professional photographer. While he sold some of his pictures to photo agencies and received further funding from the city for socially engaged projects about working women in Kreuzberg, the disadvantaged, and the elderly, Schmidt struggled to depart from the conventions of documentary photography to develop a more distinctive artistic position.

Berlin Wedding (1976–78), another project on a Berlin district, would eventually become a breakthrough in that regard. While his Berlin Kreuzberg photos depicted everyday life in Kreuzberg, the streets of Wedding in Schmidt’s photos appear mostly deserted. These pictures are more rigorously composed and consistent in style. Arranged as a coherent series of urban scenes, they are paired with a group of portraits that show Wedding residents at work and in their apartments. The urban scenes of Berlin Wedding leave an almost eerie impression, yet the portraits seem somewhat comical in their reserved stiffness.

Michael Schmidt, City Inspector at the Wedding District Office, from the series Berlin Wedding, 1976–78

Unlike artists such as Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, or Jeff Wall—who, by the 1960s, had begun to capture cityscapes and suburbia to critique the notion of objective documentary photography—Schmidt’s approach was less conceptually driven, less tongue-in-cheek and more concerned with technical and formal aspects. He never really broke with the documentary tradition but rather gave it a highly subjective and personal twist. His following series gained an essayistic quality verging on the poetic. Their aesthetic is closer—and Waffenruhe is a prime example of this—to that of the topographic ventures of John Gossage and Lewis Baltz. (Schmidt became friends with the two artists after he invited them to take part in an exhibition at Werkstatt für Photographie, a photography workshop at the adult education center in Kreuzberg, which he had founded in 1976.)

In the following years, Schmidt continued to present his work both in books and exhibitions. After Waffenruhe (and the reunification of Germany in 1990), Schmidt, however, focused increasingly on subjects larger than Berlin, and he explored different modes of photography and display. In Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) (1991–94), for example, which was first presented publicly in 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—the first solo show of a German photographer in several decades at the museum—Schmidt combined reproductions of found historical photographs with his own. Originally 163 photographs in total, the exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof includes only a selection of the black-and-white images, all of identical size and arranged in a sequence without any indication of their origin or subject. Some are familiar, some enigmatic. Schmidt conceived of each as an ambiguous fragment of Germany’s history between 1933 and 1989. And so, the picture of a Nazi rally appears next to the portrait of a teenager wearing a baseball cap, next to a close-up of a bottle of liquid Diazepam, next to a portrait of Lenin, next to a cropped image from an East German Socialist Party publication.

Michael Schmidt, Untitled, from the series Ein-Heit (U-ni-ty), 1991–94

Compared to the fixed sequence of a photobook, the presentation of Schmidt’s work in exhibitions has always given the artist the opportunity to try new variations and constellations. How far this site-specific aspect of his work will be realized throughout the next iterations of the exhibition remains to be seen. (After Berlin, the retrospective will travel to Paris, Madrid, and Vienna.) The show in Berlin provides a great occasion to dig deeper into Schmidt’s captivating work and related archival material. However, the retrospective format is a bit too formulaic and didactically implemented: the display of Schmidt’s lifework follows a rigid chronological order, reproducing the old trope of the artist finding himself and his “voice.” Consequently, the institutional effort to immortalize and cement Schmidt—an artist who checks all the boxes of privilege: straight, white, male—into the canon of art history becomes generic. This is something the other exhibition venues should consider balancing out, applying a more self-reflective curatorial stance and a vision that might better reflect Schmidt’s constant eagerness to overcome stale conventions.

Michael Schmidt – Retrospective: Photographs 1965–2014 is on view at Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, through January 17, 2021. All photographs © Stiftung für Fotografie and Medienkunst with Archiv Michael Schmidt.

Searching for an Indigenous Fashion Star, Martine Gutierrez Casts Herself

“No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own,” recounts Martine Gutierrez, speaking about her 2018 project Indigenous Woman, which takes the form of a 124-page magazine. In a series of spreads that encapsulates high-fashion glamour, as well as humor and the absurd, the artist is the project’s featured model, photographer, stylist, creative director, and editor in chief. However, Gutierrez is enacting not simply the “artist as muse” but rather the “artist as media mogul,” staging a guerrilla-style seizure and colonization of space in an image-based world to which she had previously been denied access.

Martine Gutierrez, Neo-Indio, Legendary Cakchiquel, 2018

The concept of an artist’s book is not new. Since the nineteenth century, following the inception of the photographic medium, artists have engaged the format through the sequencing of images combined with the use of text. In the late twentieth century, the artist’s book took on new meanings. A cultural vehicle associated with the production and dissemination of knowledge was usurped and used to put forth polemical correctives to mainstream ideas about everything ranging from war and immigration to incarceration. But a fashion magazine rests in a decidedly different realm of popular culture. It is less precious, more pedestrian and unassuming. Any linearity dissolves in our casual method of flipping through pages, jumping around between images and spreads. Gutierrez was drawn to this aspect of magazines, and how they offered an opportunity to subvert white, Western standards of beauty: “What better way to do that than in a format we all understand?”

Indeed, appropriation is a thread that runs throughout the entire project. Not only does the artist appropriate the format, but there is a revolving roster of identities that she puts on and takes off as interchangeably as a hairstyle, a mask, or a pair of shoes. In a bilingual, psychedelic advertisement for “Identity Boots,” Gutierrez poses nude in go-go boots, covered in gender symbols that gesture toward glyphs or pictograms. In other images, she appears in Indigenous textiles—some belonging to her Mayan grandmother—against a stark white background, with jewelry, bananas, or the ubiquitous handmade muñecas, a type of doll peddled in markets throughout Mexico and Central America. In each case, makeup, props, and costumes become part of the masquerade that Gutierrez employs as a challenge to stable notions of gender and cultural markers, resulting in a foregrounding of the performative aspects of identity. Within the artist’s critical appropriation of the fashion magazine format, identity itself is put forth as commodity or currency, an item to be formed, expressed, weighed, and exchanged.

Throughout Indigenous Woman, indigeneity becomes a medium to reflect on gender, heritage, and narrative. As a trans artist, Gutierrez mobilizes the concept of indigeneity to question the birth origins of gender—what makes a “Native-born” woman, and what contributes to the stability of this identity? For Gutierrez, who is of Mayan heritage, the title evokes the facets of cultural identity and her family’s Indigenous roots. As a result, the artist deftly avoids being categorized at the same moment that her image is repeated. She is carefully poised within the tension between indigeneity and popular culture. Such sincere investment in both makes the project equal parts impressive and enthralling. Gutierrez states, “Affirming my life is an ongoing project; it’s about identity at large.”

Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, That Girl was Me, Now She’s a Somebody, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Ad, Identity Boots, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Neo-Indio, Kekchí Snatch, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Dear Diary, No Signal During VH1’s Fiercest Divas, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Neo-Indio, Mam Going Bananas, 2018

This essay originally was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “Indigenous Woman.”

All works from the series Indigenous Woman, 2018. Courtesy the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

Searching for an Indigenous Fashion Star, Martine Gutierrez Cast Herself

“No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own,” recounts Martine Gutierrez, speaking about her 2018 project Indigenous Woman, which takes the form of a 124-page magazine. In a series of spreads that encapsulates high-fashion glamour, as well as humor and the absurd, the artist is the project’s featured model, photographer, stylist, creative director, and editor in chief. However, Gutierrez is enacting not simply the “artist as muse” but rather the “artist as media mogul,” staging a guerrilla-style seizure and colonization of space in an image-based world to which she had previously been denied access.

Martine Gutierrez, Neo-Indio, Legendary Cakchiquel, 2018

The concept of an artist’s book is not new. Since the nineteenth century, following the inception of the photographic medium, artists have engaged the format through the sequencing of images combined with the use of text. In the late twentieth century, the artist’s book took on new meanings. A cultural vehicle associated with the production and dissemination of knowledge was usurped and used to put forth polemical correctives to mainstream ideas about everything ranging from war and immigration to incarceration. But a fashion magazine rests in a decidedly different realm of popular culture. It is less precious, more pedestrian and unassuming. Any linearity dissolves in our casual method of flipping through pages, jumping around between images and spreads. Gutierrez was drawn to this aspect of magazines, and how they offered an opportunity to subvert white, Western standards of beauty: “What better way to do that than in a format we all understand?”

Indeed, appropriation is a thread that runs throughout the entire project. Not only does the artist appropriate the format, but there is a revolving roster of identities that she puts on and takes off as interchangeably as a hairstyle, a mask, or a pair of shoes. In a bilingual, psychedelic advertisement for “Identity Boots,” Gutierrez poses nude in go-go boots, covered in gender symbols that gesture toward glyphs or pictograms. In other images, she appears in Indigenous textiles—some belonging to her Mayan grandmother—against a stark white background, with jewelry, bananas, or the ubiquitous handmade muñecas, a type of doll peddled in markets throughout Mexico and Central America. In each case, makeup, props, and costumes become part of the masquerade that Gutierrez employs as a challenge to stable notions of gender and cultural markers, resulting in a foregrounding of the performative aspects of identity. Within the artist’s critical appropriation of the fashion magazine format, identity itself is put forth as commodity or currency, an item to be formed, expressed, weighed, and exchanged.

Throughout Indigenous Woman, indigeneity becomes a medium to reflect on gender, heritage, and narrative. As a trans artist, Gutierrez mobilizes the concept of indigeneity to question the birth origins of gender—what makes a “Native-born” woman, and what contributes to the stability of this identity? For Gutierrez, who is of Mayan heritage, the title evokes the facets of cultural identity and her family’s Indigenous roots. As a result, the artist deftly avoids being categorized at the same moment that her image is repeated. She is carefully poised within the tension between indigeneity and popular culture. Such sincere investment in both makes the project equal parts impressive and enthralling. Gutierrez states, “Affirming my life is an ongoing project; it’s about identity at large.”

Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, That Girl was Me, Now She’s a Somebody, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Ad, Identity Boots, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Neo-Indio, Kekchí Snatch, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Dear Diary, No Signal During VH1’s Fiercest Divas, 2018



Martine Gutierrez, Neo-Indio, Mam Going Bananas, 2018

This essay originally was originally published in Aperture, issue 240, “Native America,” under the title “Indigenous Woman.”

All works from the series Indigenous Woman, 2018. Courtesy the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

A Photographer’s Personal Account of the Protests in Richmond

Before the COVID-19 lockdown, Christopher “Puma” Smith made landscape and portrait photographs while traveling or touring as lead singer with the band Thievery Corporation. Newly grounded at home in Richmond, Virginia, Smith began to use photography in a different way, engaging with the people and ideas of the former capital of the Confederacy. Under Monument Avenue’s statue of Robert E. Lee, Smith documents the forging of new alliances, which he describes in a recent conversation.

Chris Boot: How did you end up documenting what’s going on in Richmond?

Christopher “Puma” Smith: I moved to Richmond in 2017 from Washington, DC. It was to get away from the noise and have a little bit more peace of mind and space, as opposed to the congestion of DC.

Ever since coming to Richmond, my work changed from documentary and street photography to environmental portraits and landscapes. After the death of Marcus-David Peters in 2018, and especially after the death of George Floyd, I was picking up the camera again to physically be present, as opposed to receiving information and updates from biased news sources and social media. So it was to really motivate myself to be present and to converse and talk with certain individuals who are out there protesting and making demands from our local government.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, Vincent and his son Jordon at police headquarters to protest against police brutality, Richmond, Virginia, June 2020

Boot: What exactly is going on in Richmond? It’s a place that clearly reflects the issues that America as a whole is facing, but perhaps in a more intense way right now.

Smith: Richmond was formerly known—and to many is still known—as the capital of the Confederacy. We have a very large number of Confederate monuments here, or we did, and of course, the story of African slaves coming over to this country started here, in Virginia.

In 2018, a tension started bubbling to the surface after the killing of Marcus-David Peters. He was a twenty-four-year-old biology teacher that was shot and killed by a Richmond police officer. During, I believe, his first mental episode, leaving his part-time job at a hotel, he stripped his clothing off, ended up in his car, hitting three cars with no major accidents—but he steered off the interstate and got out of his car; he rolled around in the street for a moment after being slightly struck by another passing car. He started approaching the officer with threats. Tasers didn’t stop him. And he ended up being shot and killed by the police officer—an African American police officer at that—and died at midnight.

His family and community organizers started pressuring the local government for transparency and police reform, partially in the form of a “Marcus Alert” that would send members of a mental-health awareness response team for mental-health crisis cases. This was demanded by the community in House Bill 5043 and approved by the Virginia House of Delegates, but currently needs to be approved by the state senate and signed by the governor; that makes us hopeful. The community also was fighting to end qualified immunity with House Bill 5013, but it was voted out. It was a huge letdown knowing that there were Democrats that sided with Republicans to kill the bill.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, A demonstration to convince Governor Ralph Northam to extend the statewide eviction moratorium ends in a physical altercation between protestors and officers and the John Marshall Courthouse, Richmond, Virginia, July 1, 2020

Boot: You say “community organizers.” Was that principally Black Lives Matter? Or were many other groups involved?

Smith: With Marcus-David Peters’s case, it was mainly the family. His sister Princess Blanding, is leading that movement, but other independent local organizers have heavily supported it from day one. We don’t have a local chapter of Black Lives Matter. In 757, which is Hampton and Newport News, there is a chapter up there, and it’s called Black Lives Matter 757. They have been in town recently and over the years that I’ve been in Richmond.

Boot: What are the other forces at play? From your pictures, it looks like many different groups, like gun-lobby groups.

Smith: There’s a lot that’s happening besides asking for police reform. There is a huge eviction crisis in Virginia. Richmond is the second city, I believe, in the country with the highest eviction rates. The residents who are at the forefront of these evictions are African Americans, unfortunately. Richmond is predominantly African American. There are organizers who have been fighting for those facing housing issues though. I know of Omari Al-Quadaffi, who works with low-income housing communities and has been on the frontline for these families and individuals. We also have groups like Friends of East End Cemetery and the Evergreen Restoration Foundation, who are working hard to revive two forgotten, heavily overgrown African American cemeteries: East End and Evergreen, where Civil Rights activists like Maggie L. Walker and John Mitchell Jr. are buried. Even veterans from as early as WWI are buried there and were allowed to be completely forgotten, their graves damaged and vandalized.

Also, on July 1 of this year, Richmond passed a lot of new laws, and a big chunk of that had to do with gun restrictions. There was a huge uproar leading up to this, and in January the largest demonstration happened and around 22,000 pro-gun activists and militia groups came through from all over the country into the city to protest around the State Capitol building.        

So, it’s kind of melding into this antigovernment movement right now. What has also caught my attention are the African American gun-owners, and your white pro-gun communities—they are both demanding that they still have enough authority to be armed and to protect their own communities. Now, there’s a lot of disagreements around that and between these communities, but what has been obvious to me is that this is what these two communities, or all of the pro-gun communities so far, have in common. They also want police reform. All sides agree to demilitarize the police department. They want more transparency. And they don’t want these Second Amendment–reform laws, because they want to be able to protect their families and communities—both sides do not believe that the police can efficiently police their communities. They don’t trust the police department, basically, in my opinion.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, Virginia State Senator Amanda F. Chase, a candidate for governor who backs replacing all removed Confederate monuments, participates in a Second Amendment rally, Richmond, Virginia, July 4, 2020

Boot: One gets the sense that it is a place where white supremacists still get to voice their views.

Smith: Yes. What has also bubbled back up to the surface is the talk of the Confederate monuments. I talked to Regina Boone. She is the daughter of the creator of a local newspaper, Richmond Free Press, which mainly reports on the African American community here in Richmond. She expressed to me once that her father has fought for the removal of those statues since the ’60s. The sites of those monuments have melded into the scenery here. But now, as people are pushing for police reform, the degree of anger around that conversation and racism has risen, so that in Richmond, they are on a roll of eliminating any kind of racially divisive symbolism, such as schools named after Confederate soldiers and any Confederate symbolism. A law passed on July 1 was used by Mayor Levar Stoney, a young Black man, to bypass a city council vote to immediately start removing Confederate monuments. There is still a community here that wants to protect this so-called “heritage,” but it’s a predominantly Black city—all the public schools here are predominantly Black, and we have a mayor who is Black, there’s the lieutenant governor who is Black, and our city council consist of members that are Black, white, and people of color. So it’s very strange that they still had these monuments erected down Monument Avenue and around the city today.

You have to remind yourself to follow the dollar though. The statues that are on Monument Avenue provide tourism dollars, and tax incentives for the avenue residents and of course, their property value goes up. The main and largest statue is of Robert E. Lee. He led the Confederate Army and has one of the most infamous reputations in the history of the Confederacy. The property that his statue sits on was donated by a local family, and the city accepted it in 1890. They were the main individuals suing the government based on the deed their family signed in 1887 with the city. Others were suing hoping that the judge, who lives in the area, would side with them so their property value and tax incentives would remain. That judge has since recused himself. The current lawsuit that prevented removal is going to trial in October.

Lee’s is the only state-owned statue, and it was thought by most that state code prevented removing it, but it is becoming clear that wasn’t true. The area has now become this rallying point for the community, for the city. I mean, the statue is covered in graffiti and spray paint, and it’s become this central art piece. Most of the events that are happening, most of the rallies and protests, end up or start at this monument. There have been orchestras out there and local artists. There is a community garden, basketball hoops, and even wellness and voter-registration tents, but those tents were violently removed from the area by police. Even the Floyd family came down and had a hologram art installation and spoke to the community there. So it’s been mainly this powerful space for people to just come together and converse and share their opinions on what’s going on now. The circle has been renamed Marcus-David Peters Circle by locals.

What’s bizarre is that Robert E. Lee was against monuments to the Civil War. He knew it would be divisive, then and now.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, Mike Dunn of the Boogaloo Boys stands guard at Black Guns Matter rally as the Original Black Panthers of Virginia make their way to speak to the crowd, Richmond, Virginia, August 15, 2020

Boot: With so many arms and such strength of feeling, it looks like a war coming. Do you feel this is a sort of continuation of the Civil War?

Smith: Well, there has been a group called the Boogaloo Boys that has come into a lot of people’s attention. Learning about the Boogaloo Boys, we know of 125 groups spread across the country. There’s no local leader. They are known as far right. They are antigovernment, and they believe in inciting a civil war. They, at least the people I have talked to, believe that this government, this dual-party system, is not for the people at the end of the day.

But this group, which is seen as white supremacist, they have been collaborating with the Black Lives Matter 757 chapter. Just the other day, they were invited to a Black Guns Matter rally organized by BLM757. They have shown up for funding schools and for anti-eviction rallies and other protests around the city—though not received and welcomed whole-heartedly, but they have been there. I think their purpose, which they have admitted to, is for some degree of civil war and anarchy to just bring down the system, however that looks.

For me, man, it’s always tricky. There’s definitely a racism problem. There’s also definitely this superiority issue that we have in this country that I think stems from capitalism. But sometimes I don’t know if people are fighting for status, or they are fighting to eliminate or expose racism within the hierarchy here in this country. Because now, there is so much degrees of division, quarreling on social media, and building of brands off of the mistakes from one’s own community members, unfortunately, within African American groups fighting for police reform and equality. Time always tells what people are really fighting for.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, The end to an intense quarrel between Black and white protestors, Richmond, Virginia, July 4, 2020

Boot: Are you saying that the extreme right-wing groups are seeking to forge an alliance with Black groups to take on the government together?

Smith: They haven’t explicitly come out and said that. But they have stated their intent—the Boogaloo Boys. This specific group and this specific sect here in Virginia, they have said they are for civil war, and they are antigovernment, and they are for police reform; they want to demilitarize the police department. They want to be able to protect their own community in the way they want, in the way that they see fit. But they have been walking and marching side by side with Black gun activists. On the day Black Lives Matter 757 did a Black gun rally, there was Black Lives Matter 757, there was the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, the Original Black Panthers of Virginia, there were some white militia groups that showed up, and Spike Cohen, the VP nominee for the Libertarian Party was invited to speak and get enough signatures to be on the ballot. It was just this melting pot, but the common ground was the Second Amendment and distrust of the police.

Boot: You see that in your pictures. For the most part, your images don’t show conflict. They show motivated people, activists—maybe they’re angry, but I don’t see venom. I actually see a relatively civil process going on that you could say is a good example of people resolving their issues peacefully.

Smith: Yes. I think I’m more productive when the protests and the rallies are stationary. Marching down the street is good to capture photographically for historical purposes. But the rallies that are stationary, when they start and when they end, is my opportunity to go and record speakers and to interview people one-on-one on their opinions and their perspectives. It hasn’t been as chaotic as Portland. Some of the protests have gotten out of hand. Some cars got set on fire. Buildings are being damaged, protestors being violently handled by police, arrested, and even charged with felonies, unfortunately. But more has been done just pressing our local politicians and policy-makers, and organizing around that, using the internet and our dollars, instead of going out and just bashing windows and setting cars on fire and destroying property. But I cannot deny that the protests and rallies have helped in some way.

I agree with MLK. It’s the voice of the oppressed, and that’s how a certain percentage knows how to get their point across. But at the end of the day, for me, it’s again, follow the dollar and use your dollar to really make a difference. I think people are catching on to that.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, Neo-Confederates protest the removal of Confederate monuments,
Richmond, Virginia, 2020

Boot: Are you trying to make an account of every side of these arguments? Are you talking to white racists?

Smith: Yeah. I’ve talked to some white militia groups and members of the Boogaloo Boys. The community here is still very suspicious of them, and some of them have just flat out not accepted them and basically told them they’re not welcome. They’re anywhere from nineteen to twenty-two years old. They grew up in rural Virginia. They’ve admitted that they’ve had twisted perspectives from early on and still do now. I think because they’re coming out at such a young age and collaborating with the Black community—I think, for the better, their perspectives are changing. Hopefully. I’ve also talked with Senator Amanda Chase, who is running for governor and is pro-gun and believes in replacing statues. In her words, the Confederate flag for her means iced tea and The Dukes of Hazzard. I’ve also briefly talked with Chuck Smith, who is an African American attorney running for attorney general and a veteran who also is pro–Second Amendment and believes in replacing statues.

My reason for talking to people is to find where the common ground is. Ever since I came to Richmond, I listen to right-wing radio more than left-wing radio. I listen to Jeff Katz and John Reid and Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and Glenn Beck. I listen to all these people, and I listen to left-wing radio also. I’m giving up on mainstream media. I want to see how we can actually get something done, and not just, you know, rage and let it pass. What I found is that people want transparency, and they want to have a voice—an opinion on how their communities should be policed.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, The circle around the Robert E. Lee statue, the last remaining Confederate statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond, has been renamed Marcus-David Peters Circle after biology teacher Marcus-David Peters, who was shot and killed by Richmond Police in 2018, Richmond, Virginia, June 2020

Boot: Are you trying to be objective in the traditions of photojournalism? How do you conceive of your own role as a photographer and a gatherer of documentary evidence and stories?

Smith: I am going out to be an individual, to really learn the community, continue to learn Richmond and the community that has been here fighting for years. It’s really about trying to be an individual, and not going out there with any kind of bias. Again, just trying to find common ground.

But, it’s very tricky, because people want to put you in a group. They want to see: who are you with, who are you defending? And yes, I have my own personal opinions. But again, it’s trying to find: what do we all want, and can we get it accomplished? And maybe, in the midst of that, these prejudices and this degree of racism can be eliminated, once everybody finds a common purpose and a force to communicate and converse and be together for this one purpose. I am going out there really for my own personal education, and to meet people one-on-one, and then to get their perspectives, if they’re willing to share.

Boot: Are you hopeful?

Smith: For the community members, yes. I mean, people who are not elected officials and the people who are starting grassroots movements and have been consistent. I have become hopeful again. I have become hopeful as far as meeting a goal, which is police reform. I am hopeful for that.

Boot: Are you hopeful for America?

Smith: [Laughs] As far as what?

Boot: A better path than the one that we’ve been on, which is division. Hate and division.

Smith: No. Honestly, I’ve tried to be as positive as I can in my short time here. But I see a pattern that we are not breaking, and I am not hopeful. I am not hopeful for America. But I don’t know how we start over. I don’t know how we slow down. Capitalism has been ingrained into everyday life and how we function and how we communicate. It’s hard to answer that, man.

Christopher “Puma” Smith, J. E. B. Stuart Confederate monument being removed, Richmond, Virginia, July 7, 2020

Boot: When you say “capitalism” in that context, I presume you mean the way capitalism favors some and discriminates against others.

Smith: There is always going to be a hierarchy. Looking at Richmond, we say we give everybody a fair chance, but we really don’t, because we don’t focus on the basics of humanity when it comes to just living in general and when it comes to surviving in a capitalist economic system. In Richmond, we don’t focus on and invest enough in education, and it’s predominantly Black schools. If we don’t start there, how are we saying, you know, everybody is getting a fair chance—if we don’t start with education first?

Boot: And health second, presumably.

Smith: Yes, it’s very frustrating.

Boot: You have another source of making a living, which is as a singer with a band that tours a lot, so you’ve seen a lot of places. You’ve worked all over the world. You’ve worked in Ethiopia, for example, doing photography assignments. Is it unusual for you to focus on one place and your hometown in this kind of way? Is this the first time you’ve done that, delved into one community as a photographer and a documentarian?

Smith: Yes. I think I’ve finally got the discipline to focus my camera on a story. I’ve shot for papers, taught photography in nonprofits, and I was hired by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to travel to different rural regions in Ethiopia to document pre- and postnatal care in 2019. I’ve also traveled for ten years with Thievery Corporation, mainly as a vocalist, but always with camera in hand documenting the band. Now, I think my previous experiences have given me this discipline. And especially being a person of color in America has allowed me to have the discipline to not be scatterbrained when I’m picking up the camera. It’s allowed me to actually give myself this kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, to focus and form relationships and converse around this one story. The camera motivates me, picks me up and makes me be present. But it is the research and meeting people which is hard to do in this time of social distancing and, you know, “don’t call me, just text me or e-mail me.” People just don’t want to deal with people one-on-one or face-to-face anymore. So it’s harder even to get people to express their perception honestly on audio and on camera. It’s frustrating and depressing at times, but it’s something that I’ve become more passionate about. One day at a time, one person at a time, one conversation at a time.

The Photographer Whose Mother Built Trump Tower

In 1978, when Donald Trump met Barbara Res, he called her a “killer.” Barbara was then one of the few women working as a construction engineer in New York, but after Trump witnessed her berating male workers renovating the Grand Hyatt on 42nd Street (Trump’s first major Manhattan real estate project), he snapped her up. “He said men are better than women, but a good woman is better than ten men,” Barbara recalled in 2016. She would go on to manage the construction of Trump Tower, and pictures of her at the Fifth Avenue construction site in 1980—with her hard hat and wraparound sweater, standing as if on a dais amid scaffolding far above a foundation pit—evince her formidable self-possession. “I was that woman,” Barbara said. She was thirty-one years old.

The photographer Res turned thirty-one on November 8, 2016, the day Trump was elected president. Res was at the Yale School of Art at the time. “The sculpture department threw a party for me and it was the worst party you could imagine,” Res said recently over Zoom from Sweden, where they are currently living. The day after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Res and their mother, Barbara Res, joined the Women’s March in Washington, DC. Trump Tower was part of Res’s mythology as a child: Res had pored over profiles of their mother in the magazine Savvy Woman; the mauve Trump Tower marble was as familiar as a household rug. But Barbara had long since left the Trump Organization, and in 2016, she began to speak out against her old boss. Her media appearances provoked a typically offensive tweet from @realDonaldTrump: “I gave a woman named Barbara Res a top N.Y. construction job, when that was unheard of, and now she is nasty. So much for a nice thank you!” For some women, “nasty” is a badge of honor; at the Women’s March, Barbara held aloft a sign that read, “I AM THE WOMAN WHO BUILT TRUMP TOWER.”

Res, Spread from   Towers of Thanks   (Loose Joints, 2017)

Res grew up in New Jersey and studied photography at Smith College. They started out experimenting with self-portraiture, but “the faculty were just so tired of ‘women’ constantly using themselves as subjects,” Res said. “We were kind of asked not to do self-portraiture.” Later, in 2015, Res—a self-described “jock” who once trained as an amateur boxer—began a project about their father, who had recently lost his job and was spending all his time at home. Res was at Yale, and they would return to New Jersey on weekends, collaborating with their father on what would become the series Thicker Than Water (2015), a speculative family portrait tinged with dramatic shadows and neonoir flair. Res and their father had drifted apart, but the project became a way to relate and mediate feelings about queerness, masculinity, unemployment, and family expectations. Res was motivated to “witness him,” they noted in an interview for MATTE magazine in 2016. “He spends so much time alone and unseen, so it felt special to me that I could put my eyes on him, that I could value him in that way.”

One of the most striking photographs in Thicker Than Water is a self-portrait of Res dressed as Barbara. Res wears Barbara’s wig and an ill-fitting red bra. Barbara did Res’s makeup, pouty lipstick and overapplied rouge. Surrounded by heavy liner, Res’s glowing eyes look searchingly into some faraway distance. As Barbara, Res appears neither behind a mask nor fully embodied; like a Cindy Sherman Hollywood/Hamptons self-portrait or a Duane Hanson sculpture, the uncanny tension between life, image, and pose is unsettling. Res tattooed “Butch” on their chest for the image, which they describe as “one hundred percent” drag: “Drag as my mother. Drag as a woman.” “It is a funny picture,” Corrine Fitzpatrick notes in MATTE, “awkwardly performed and thoughtfully, committedly, composed.”

Res, Me as Mom, 2015

Elsewhere in Res’s practice, the body and the figure take on similarly sculptural forms. In one image from the series Read You (2013–15), Res captures a subject in a black bra who, as she pulls off a mustard-yellow sweater, obscures her face like a lone René Magritte lover. “I was trying to think about how to describe intimacy outside of the reveal,” Res said. “Sometimes what we don’t show, or what we don’t display, is just as much of a reveal.” Just at the moment when the subject in Stevie (2014) may become known to us by her face, all we can see is outline, as well as a doubling in the form of a shadow on the wall—a totem, a smoky silhouette. The drop of sweat from Stevie’s armpit is the punctum. “And that being kind of what’s out of control,” Res said. “This beautiful gesture of it dripping.”

But sweat, for all of its associations with physical lust, becomes a tragic substance in Res’s series Pulse (2016), made in the aftermath of the mass shooting in 2016 at the eponymous gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Res was driving to Florida for a residency when alerts began to arrive about the massacre. They began to visit the makeshift memorial that had materialized in Pulse’s parking lot but decided against making portraits of survivors or witnesses. Instead, Res was moved by the temporary walls erected of chain link and shrouded in black cloth, into which visitors stuck flowers, signs, and rainbow flags. They were “poetic articulations of public mourning,” Res said, noting that the sweat and the humidity in the parking lot was like the enclosed space of a nightclub. “You think about being in a club, the last breath of these flowers. You’re seeing them die.” Separating life and death, the memorial fences seemed to contain a form of evanescent queer memory: fierce, colorful, and operatic.

In all of their work, Res searches for bonds between people, from the nuclear family in the household to the contingent family of a protest. Res’s self-portrait as Barbara makes a cameo in Towers of Thanks, Res’s 2017 photobook about their mother. Doing overtime as a specific impression and a seemingly universal gesture to the performance of femininity and motherhood, the image fits alongside pages of Res’s photography and collaged vintage images of Trump Tower, news clippings from Barbara’s heyday. At thirty-one, Barbara was atop Trump Tower, a powerful woman working to realize a man’s dreams. At thirty-one, Res was down on the street with Barbara, both their voices shouting together with thousands of others. But history has a way of haunting the present. After the completion of Trump Tower, Barbara was given a Cartier bracelet engraved with the words “Towers of Thanks.” When you turn the bracelet in your hand, another line appears in elegant cursive: “Love, Donald.”

Res, The Woman Who Built Trump Tower, 2017



Res, Flowers (Blue, Purple, Pink), 2016



Res, Flowers no. 1, 2016



Res, Stevie, 2014



Res, TV Light, 2015



Res, Mom with Dad’s Shadow, 2015



Res, Like Pearls, 2015



Res, Julia’s Back, 2014

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

All photographs courtesy the artist.