Aperture's Blog, page 66

Samuel Fosso and the Invention of the Artist as a Young Photographer

In an interview for his new monograph, Fosso spoke with the late curator Okwui Enwezor about his teenage self-portraits from the 1970s and how all his work concerns the question of power.

By Okwui Enwezor

Samuel Fosso, 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Okwui Enwezor: Many people know you as a renowned photographer from Nigeria, by way of Cameroon and then the Central African Republic. Each of these countries has played a role in your conception of your identity. So, I would like to start—partly to clear up some misunderstandings about your biography—by asking you where you were born and when.

Samuel Fosso: I was born in Kumba, West Cameroon, in 1962, to Nigerian parents. At the time I was born, I was sick and partly paralyzed—that was why my mother took me back to Nigeria, for a local cure. My grandfather was what was known as a “native doctor.” After the treatments in Nigeria, my mother wanted to bring me back to Cameroon. But this was in 1967, and the Biafran War in Nigeria had started. It was impossible to travel. My mother died during this period, so I stayed with my grandparents in Nigeria until the war ended in 1970. I had an uncle in Cameroon who came back to Nigeria to take me with him. We stayed in Cameroon only for six months, because by this time—it was around 1972—my uncle had relocated to Bangui in the Central African Republic, and I moved with him again. I lived with him in Bangui for several years until I started my photographic career.

Enwezor: What did your uncle do for a living?

Fosso: He was a shoemaker, producing women’s shoes. In fact, when he brought me to Bangui, he had me working with him to make shoes.

Enwezor: You must have been very young.

Fosso: Yes. I was around ten years old when I started working with him. One day, in 1975, on my way to the market to go food shopping for his wife, I saw a photographic studio owned by a Nigerian man from Imo State. Usually, after I finished my housework, I went to rest near where this studio was. It was on one such occasion that I asked the owner of the studio if it would be possible for him to teach me to be a photographer. He agreed, but said that before he could take me in as an apprentice he would need to consult with my uncle. I then asked him what it would cost to learn from him in order to make sure that my uncle agreed. He said the training would cost nothing since the Central African Republic functioned at that time like the French system, where apprentices are paid for their work, unlike the English system in Nigeria, where they don’t pay you.

Samuel Fosso, 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: What kind of work did you do in the studio while you were learning?

Fosso: When you are employed as an apprentice, your work involves everything—sweeping the studio, errands, and more. I was very eager to start photographing, but for about one month I did not even touch the camera.

I became impatient and went to the photographer and asked him how long it would take before I could start photographing. He told me it was not a quick process and that I should continue working on the assignments he gave me. Then I found another way, through his assistant, to whom I offered my breakfast money every day for additional instruction. This way, I could learn the job more quickly. It was from then on that I really began to learn to make pictures.

Enwezor: What year did you start this apprenticeship?

Fosso: I worked at the studio for about five months, between October 1974 and March 1975. And in September 1975, I opened my own studio.

Enwezor: You were only thirteen years old. Were there other photographers your age in Bangui at this time?

Fosso: None. There was not a single one. The majority of the photographers were Nigerians and Cameroonians. I was very young, and people sometimes wondered about me when they came to have their pictures taken in the studio.

Samuel Fosso, 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: Conceptually, the photographs you made were very sophisticated, and would have been even for someone who had been practicing photography for a very long time; for me, this still remains a big point. You were not yet a photographer, but you picked up the techniques very quickly.

Fosso: Before I opened my studio on September 14, 1975, I was already working as a street photographer. So, my training and base of knowledge were ongoing. I was constantly learning.

Enwezor: Do you remember which camera you first worked with?

Fosso: It was a Kodak camera, a small six-by-nine, with only nine images in each roll of film. It was larger than a six-by-six lens. After taking the pictures, I would go to the studio where I had trained to have the film developed.

In early September of that first year, my uncle flew to Douala, Cameroon, and bought a larger camera for me and told me I had to find a studio for myself. There was a Nigerian-owned studio I knew of, which was free because it had been closed. This was where I established my first studio.

Samuel Fosso, 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: I want to discuss the moment when you moved from merely making photographs to becoming an artist. When do you think your work as a photographer shifted from making photographs on commission for your clients to making images for yourself?

Fosso: I first knew that I had become a photographer when I finished my training, while I was pursuing street photography, and started working independently in my studio. In Africa we say to become a real photographer you have to take the picture and then make the print yourself; that’s how you establish your professional credentials. I made pictures for myself only after the studio closed at the end of the day, using whatever unused film was left over in the roll of twelve exposures to make photographs of myself. My primary motivation for these self-portraits was to create images I could send to my grandmother, who was missing me a lot. Sometimes when I made photographs that I was not satisfied with, where I didn’t feel beautiful inside, I would cut up the negatives instead of printing them. But if I felt that the image was beautiful or represented how I felt inside, then I would print the image and keep the negative. I had a box reserved where I would store such important and special negatives.

Samuel Fosso, Vintage Studio Portraits, 1977
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: Your relationship to photography has something much deeper, a more personal motivation. From the start it was autobiographical; it had to do with the conditions of your life and how to document that life as it was being transformed. But what you are very well known for are photographic images in which your studio became a theater, a liberated space where you played with codes of representation of gender, sexuality, masculinity, and fashion. This liberated space that was your studio produced some of the most unique and singular examples of studio practice, and I am here thinking of artists such as John Coplans, Pierre Molinier, Van Leo, Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, and others who had also made themselves their own subjects. But in your case, you were not so much making self-portraits as you were invested in working with invented characters, with you as an avatar. This is perhaps why your work has been compared most often with that of Sherman. Can you talk about this aspect of your photographic output?

Fosso: My initial encounter with photographic images outside of the Central African Republic was purely through pictures in magazines, brought by young American Peace Corps volunteers who came to the Central African Republic to visit Pygmies. I was especially excited by the images of African Americans and their sense of style.

I was also very much taken with the style of the popular singer and musician Prince Nico Mbarga, who was very hot around West Africa in 1976 and 1977 with his hit record Sweet Mother. I wanted to replicate these two stylistic approaches in the studio with me posing as a model. To do so, I went to the market and bought different fabrics and commissioned a tailor to make outfits for me, which I then used in the studio. Those are the photographs that I became known for.

Samuel Fosso, 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: How long did you make work in this vein, documenting yourself?

Fosso: From 1975 to 1990.

Enwezor: If initially you saw yourself as only an image-maker, when did it occur to you that you had become an artist?

Fosso: It was at the first Rencontres de Bamako in 1994 that it became clear to me.

Enwezor: Did this realization change your approach and attitude toward photography?

Fosso: Yes.

Samuel Fosso, 70’s Lifestyle, 1975–78
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: What changed?

Fosso: I first realized that I was an artist when I found out that my main task was to create. I then said to myself that if what I had been doing as a job was art, why not continue to create regardless of whether I had clients or not? But I was confronted with a financial problem, of how to reconcile my job and creativity. I did not have the financial means, so the question was how I could continue—because had the talent, and I could do more. Fortunately, I was contacted by Tati, the French department store, for a project with Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. That was a lucky break.

I went to Paris to work on the project. It transpired that Sidibé had already been to Paris, finished his commission, and left for the U.S. for a book signing. However, when I arrived, I learned that the people at Tati had invited us to re-create the African photo-studio environment and make black-and-white pictures. I was not satisfied with this approach, so I asked Tati’s director of photography if it would be possible to work in color. He wondered why, since I had never worked in color, I would want to do so now. That’s how my Tati series (1997) began, because I did not want to go back to the black-and-white style as Keïta and Sidibé had done for their Tati commissions. Since there were three African photographers, I wanted my project to register a different mood of the African imagination, and not the images that were already associated with African photography. My goal was to take a new direction in my work.

Samuel Fosso, Le rêve de mon grand-père (My Grandfather’s Dream), 2003
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: Although the Tati series was initially a commercial commission, you used it as a springboard into contemporary art.

Fosso: After I finished the Tati project, I returned to Bangui. In 2000, Afrique en Créations financed me to initiate a workshop with two artists from Cameroon, two from the Central African Republic, one from Italy, and one from France. The workshop took place in the eastern part of the country on the border with Cameroon. The project I produced was called Mémoire d’un ami (Memory of a Friend, 2000). In 2004, the Prince Claus Fund financed my next project, Le rêve de mon grandpère (My Grandfather’s Dream, 2003). I went to my village in Nigeria to work on that and presented it in Barcelona the same year.

Enwezor: I want to turn to your process, which, in the work you have presented over the last three decades, has focused on what I could call the “structure of self-representation,” with you playing a role or dramatizing historical, gendered, and autobiographical characters. Over the years, these roles and characters have become more elaborate, more theatrical. Your working method has become more of a big production, with sets, props, makeup, assistants, and lighting technicians, like in a film production. The simplicity of your earlier studio approach, when you worked alone, has largely disappeared from your present mode of making images. In fact, the work is no longer about single self-portraits, but about an ensemble of portraits with diverse psychological and emotional attributes carved into their construction. Can you discuss how you decide on the concept of each series you embark on as you begin planning it?

Fosso: The Tati series was also theatrical and less simple, so my approach was already changing and different from the earlier works of the 1970s.

Samuel Fosso, Le Chef qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons (The Chief who Sold Africa to the Colonists), 1997, from the series Tati
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: It’s obvious you want to question representations of African masculinity, but also to break certain normative codes of studio photography that are read reductively within the discourse of African modernity. Your work calls all of these assumptions about African representation into doubt. One of the things that has been constant in your practice is your interest in transgression.

Fosso: I recently did an interview, and the interviewer asked me if I have a fear of the politics of Africa. I said I did. However, when it comes to what you call transgression, it was never about responding negatively against someone or against certain ideas. Maybe you are saying that I am not afraid to do what is seemingly not possible to do. But no, that’s not my motivation when I am working. All I will tell you is that my different approach started with my self-portraits, which gave me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted to do.

Enwezor: So, more than merely reflecting yourself—the artist/ego, if you will—the main impetus for your self-portraits was staging a series of ideal selves, situations, and guises in your self-constituted theater of postcolonial identity. There is hardly any kind of sustained photographic focus in contemporary African photography like the one you initiated in 1975. One would have to go back to the 1930s and ʼ40s self-portraits of Van Leo, the Egyptian Armenian photographer in Cairo, for a comparison. It’s quite an achievement for a thirteen-year-old to initiate such a complex study of urban African identity and male desire.

Fosso: I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know was that I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become. I was living out a series of ideas about myself. These images also extend beyond photography. Making them gave me the opportunity to engage in my own biography: going back to when I was a child, when no one thought I was a desirable child to photograph. At the same time, I discovered images of contemporary events in South Africa and the plight of black people in America. All these things contributed to shaping my lens. Art photography was something completely foreign to me until I arrived in Bamako for the first Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie.

Secondly, it became an opportunity for me to profit from the experience and therefore continue doing what I wanted to do. The invitation by Tati in 1997 to develop new work for their fiftieth-anniversary celebration the following year was an extension of what I had been doing in my studio since 1975. When I aspire to create new images, I try to develop the work in such a way that it will be in direct communication with the viewer. My approach is to produce pictures with as little ambiguity as possible, even when they might seem ambiguous. For example, when I adopt the image of a woman in my photographs, I am by no means trying to create a queer picture. What you see is simply an image of a man in women’s clothing. It is not about creating a double meaning.

Samuel Fosso, La femme américaine libérée des années 70 (The Liberated American Woman of the 1970s), 1997, from the series Tati
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: In your work, the studio becomes a sort of theater of fantasy, as well as a space for the mediation of history and social identity. Given the fact that the roles you enact before the camera are multiple, what roles do you see these various guises or personae playing in your overall conception and construction of the image?

Fosso: While all the series I have done can be understood by viewers as discrete and self-contained, and therefore different, to me there is one unifying theme behind all of them—and that is the question of power. I am particularly interested in the role that slavery played in the history of Africa. If I am representing the image of an African chief (in Igbo we call them “Eze” or “Igwe”), I am thinking about power, but also the role of those chiefs in the slave trade. In the case of “African Spirits,” this becomes much more transparent. This, for me, is the red thread, in either an obvious or subliminal way. I want to show the black man’s relationship to the power that oppresses him.

Enwezor: One of the challenges for African artists of your generation today is the state of their archives. Since much of your work was destroyed during the recent conflict in the Central African Republic, have you given any thought to the state of your own archive?

Fosso: This is a very big issue for many photographers and artists in Africa today. My dream is to bring my work and archive back to Nigeria and give it to a museum in Ebonyi State, where my family comes from.

Samuel Fosso, Le marin (The Sailor), 1997, from the series Tati
Courtesy the artist, The Walther Collection, and Jean Marc Patras/Paris

Enwezor: When you look back at your career, having survived a brutal civil war in Nigeria as a young boy, then beginning in 1975 with Studio Photo National, to today, where your photographs are being collected by museums and private collectors, and being exhibited across the world, would it be safe to say that your work has given you a passport to travel the world both physically and imaginatively?

Fosso: All I can say to you is that since starting my career as a young boy in 1975, my choice to become a photographer has been a positive contribution.

Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was a curator, scholar, writer, and critic of African photography and global contemporary art. From 2011 and 2018, he was the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

This conversation is adapted from Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait (Steidl/The Walther Collection, August 2020).

How Yurie Nagashima’s Self-Portraits Interrogate the Male Gaze

In her latest photobook, the Japanese photographer discusses self-portraiture as a radical feminist gesture.

By Lesley A. Martin

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

I arrived in Japan in 1992, incredibly anxious about the fact that less than six months earlier I had shaved my head. I felt very butch, much too raw, and totally unprepared to navigate the sophisticated cultural and gender dynamics that I suddenly found myself engulfed by as a young American woman teaching English. Most of my colleagues in the Japanese English Teaching program run by the Ministry of Education had their eyes set on a career in diplomacy or business. Prior to my arrival, I had been tearing down drywall for a housing rehabilitation program, teaching neighborhood kids how to read, and volunteering at a photo gallery. At night, I waitressed at a coffeeshop-slash-bar, dressed in my thrift-store best. As a recent graduate of a liberal arts program with a penchant for semiotics, I was trained to analyze and critique the dominant social and power structures of the American culture wars—when suddenly I was working for a foreign government and tasked with representing my own.

After teaching during the day, I would take respite in Tokyo nightlife, then awash in hip hop, punk, psychobilly, and the emerging Shibuya-kei pop music scene. I went to art galleries perched on the top floors of department stores. And I tried hard to read and understand the cultural signifiers of “lolicon” fashion and cosplay fantasy clubs, used-panty vending machines, and the increasingly inescapable “Hair Nude” trend of soft-core photographs of young women, scratched free of damning pubic hair. Somewhere, somehow, I ran into Yurie Nagashima’s Self-Portraits (1993)—a black-and-white series of herself and her family posing in the nude—a hilariously cutting rebuttal to the usual depiction of women (and families) in Japanese media. They were raw, unabashed, and pointedly critical of the power imbalance saddled upon Japanese women. I didn’t know much about Cindy Sherman then, and as it turns out, neither did she—but in the images Nagashima created in the early to mid-1990s, role playing as the various, absurd sexual fantasies rampant in Japanese pop culture, it was obvious to me that this was someone who had a bead on the skewed gender dynamics of Japanese art and media of the time. This was someone with something to say.

Several decades later, I consider myself lucky and gratified to reconnect with the full scope of Nagashima’s work. In a recent Skype conversation, she and I talked about her self-portraits, the long-standing dismissal of “women’s work,” cable releases, and the changing the nature of aesthetic criteria.

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

Lesley Martin: I understand that this collection of self-portraits was originally made for your survey exhibition, And a Pinch of Irony with a Hint of Love, which took place at TOP [Tokyo Photographic Art Museum] in 2017. Was that the first time you put all of your self-portraits together?

Yurie Nagashima: Yes. Originally, there were over 600 images, so I showed them as a thirty-minute slideshow, not as prints. When you start working on a subject, you never know how far it will go. But when you look back, you start to find unintentional connections. I began to make self-portraits while I was traveling. Then I chose to use myself for nudes, too, because I just couldn’t ask my friends or anyone else. I felt guilty asking someone to be naked—not in an “arty” way but a controversial way. That’s the primary reason I started making self-portraits. Another good reason is that I had more control. I’m shy, and it’s hard for me to ask a favor without worrying about how the other person feels. Some time later, I realized that self-portraiture is an important genre of photography, especially in the context of feminism.

Martin: When did you come to realize that about self-portraiture? Was there a point in your life as a photographer when you realized that self-portraiture could be a powerful part of your work?

Nagashima: At first, I was angry at the Hair Nude boom, and thought, “Okay, there’s no way men can use and consume a female body for their own agenda.” Then I received the Parco Prize at Urbanart#2 in 1993 for the self-portraits, in which I appear in each image with my real family, I realized that the self-portrait as a technique implies more than just the subversion of the power relationship between men and women. It also says that my body belongs to no one but me. Aside from that, the series of self-portraits with my family was controversial. There were many discussions about it in magazines and papers. People always asked me how I persuaded my family to pose naked, but it just wasn’t a big deal.

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

Martin: A few years after that prize, in 1995, you were featured in an exhibition alongside Catherine Opie. Is that what made you decide to study at CalArts [California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles]? And how did that impact your work and your sense of image making in relation to yourself and your body, and also to your family?

Nagashima: She suggested that I should go study there. She had graduated from CalArts but wasn’t actually teaching there, although her friend Kaucyila Brooke was. Brooke is a feminist artist and was my mentor. In Japan, you hardly have female professors in art school, but at CalArts I had her, Jo Ann Callis, Ellen Birrell, and Nathalie Bookchin.

Martin: I’m curious about your experience at an American university at that time, I imagine identity politics were a big topic of discussion. 

Nagashima: Yes. Both at school and in my daily life. I was studying with people from different backgrounds and nationalities, young and old with diverse ethnicities and gender, but the majority were Caucasian Americans. For me, it was difficult to make friends who were not Asian or Asian American. I always felt left behind because I couldn’t speak English well enough. I was shocked when my work was severely criticized by some students and a teacher in class because they thought that my work “increased Geisha fantasies.” I wanted to argue back, but I couldn’t accurately explain, not only the concept of the work but also the history of Japanese photography and society, in English. I didn’t understand what the white male’s geisha fantasy even was—because in Japan, such a fetish doesn’t exist. However, it triggered in me for the first time to think about how cultural differences effect the interpretation of artworks.

CalArts kind of broke my belief in art—that art can be understood without language. People can’t always understand what artists are trying to say just by looking at their works. I realized that executing a work and just hoping to be understood is too naïve. Some still say that one talks about her work because the work is not strong enough, but I disagree. Marginalized people always need to speak up about themselves. That I should really try to explain what I am doing, or my work would possibly be misunderstood or even misinterpreted by 180 degrees.

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

Martin: So is that when you started to write seriously? In Japan, you’ve published an award-winning book of biographical stories from your childhood, Senaka no kioku [A memory of her back], and you’ve just published another book, about the Japanese photo movement in the ’90s and feminism, From Their Onnanoko-Shashin to Our Girly Photo.

Nagashima: I started writing seriously after I became a mother. That experience made me wonder if maybe I didn’t have to get “stuck” being a photographer. Carrying a baby and his diaper bag along with 35mm or 6-x-7 cameras seemed crazy to me. At that time, I was making photographic work dealing with my memory. I was working on that series from 2004 to 2005, but it didn’t turn out well. So I tried to write instead. That’s how I wrote the first book. Besides, I could write at home at night, while my son was sleeping. I wanted to make my own works somehow.

Martin: In an interview, you said that you believe in creating as a way of addressing society. I’m curious how you see self-portraiture as a way of doing so? 

Nagashima: About my self-portraits, it’s definitely a way of talking about how the gaze of male society works on the female body. However, the photos were a kind of joke, too. I was serious, but I often laughed alone during the shoots, because of the weird situation I was in. Imagine, a naked girl running back and forth, behind and in front of the camera! It looked pretty silly, and some of the photos are really funny, too. It’s like when you look at the porn magazines, sometimes you just start chuckling because of how unreal the poses or the situations look. Most of them would never happen in a real relationship, unless you are exposed to too many such images and start believing that’s what real women or sex looks like.

My self-portrait is a way of expressing my sarcasm, and I think that many women have had disappointing sex because of the images that the media keeps emitting. After my work started being recognized, I was offered the opportunity to model for some famous male photographers. I was aware that I shouldn’t really take those opportunities, because I knew it would somehow contradict my own work. In art school, for my undergrad degree, I acted and posed for my friends in their movies and photographs, and they made me frustrated with their poor depiction of female characters. It was always awfully stereotypical and boring.

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

Martin: Do you believe that the self-portrait can be a radical feminist gesture?

Nagashima: Of course. It’s like the best, one of the best. The self-portrait means that you can take on both roles, as a model and as a photographer. When you have a camera on a tripod, you have the space in front of the camera and also the space behind the camera. It’s very symbolic. It’s a way of taking action against the historical roles of the male and female in photography.

Martin: Strangely, I hadn’t really thought about Cindy Sherman in relationship to your work until recently. Do you feel like there’s something in what she is doing or did that you’re interested in? 

Nagashima: I wasn’t really into photography when I first started out. I didn’t know about her until somebody wrote a review about my self-portraits and mentioned her work. So I looked her up, and realized that I had this one postcard of hers. She’s standing in a black dress, with long silver hair over her face, sort of like in a horror movie. That was the only image that I knew about her, but later I bought her book, Untitled Film Stills. I love that series.

Martin: There’s certainly a relationship, but I don’t feel like it’s about direct influence; rather it seems as though you were responding to similar issues—namely, how women get portrayed in the media. And how do you redirect that? Redirect it and change it. How do you shift from the male gaze to be able to control the gaze? 

Nagashima: I don’t know if I can “redirect” it, because such gender issues are huge and deeply embedded in society. However, I want to change it, or at least do something to try to change it. I am an artist, so the best I can do is keep making my work. I often think that my photos are records of my performance art; I could have ended up as a performance artist. A lot of times, I enjoyed the process more—acting a role and directing the scene at the same time—than what I got as a result. When I executed the early self-portraits, I believed that showing self-portraits as pin-ups in museums could be a great tactic against the Hair Nude boom back in the ’90s. I didn’t know if my work represented feminism or not, but I knew that I was an activist artist in some way.

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

Martin: There are images in this collection that have been in museums; works that are clearly performative in this way. But as the sequence moves on, it seems to get more personal and diaristic. How do you draw the line between the personal and what you might call “your artwork.” Is there a line? 

Nagashima: I see it as a spectrum, and so there is no line. I think when you decide to capture that very moment in a photograph you are already, most likely, outside of “real life.” Because for that moment, you are looking at the world through the finder or on the screen. In that sense, I can say that the more “real” the image looks, the more you are faking it. Back in 1993, when I executed my early self portraits, I never thought that my photographs would ever be looked at by so many people other than my teachers and friends. The first picture in this book is from 1991; I was going on a backpacking trip. It’s in black and white because I was in a black-and-white printing class [laughs].

In this book, I sequenced the images chronologically, so you can see the change. There are often reasons behind my change in camera, lens, or style of shooting. For example, I started using compact-film cameras more, right after I had a child. My subject matter is often changed by my experiences and by the social changes I experienced. I became more aware of feminist issues after having a child, and then the earthquake in 2011 made me face domestic political issues. My personal interests also changed, and aging, too, is just another cause. When I was young, I thought my body was my own property so I could do whatever, but my son changed that idea completely. I think that my photographs—both set-ups and snap shots—are quite personal.

Martin: Right. All of this is part of your work.

Nagashima: It’s a part of my work and also my life. Being an artist is a big part of my life, it’s who I am now. In the beginning of my career, I thought of my life or my body as really simple—just a regular young woman growing up in Japan. When I started my self-portraits, I thought that the fact that I was nobody would work to my advantage. Because it’s very important for my work to be seen by women who have also struggled with the idea that they might be nobody, no matter how talented and capable, or having actually achieved so much. Even if she were a genius, nobody is going to come and do all the housework for this genius. Genius still has to be a domestic servant just because she is a “woman.” I hope that my work empowers those people and makes them understand that they are not alone.

Yurie Nagashima, from Self-Portraits (Dashwood Books, 2020)

Martin: Is there any connection in your work to the watakushi shōsetsu, or shishōsetsu—the “I-novel” or the subjective, autobiographic novel form, which is very much a part of Japanese literature? 

Nagashima: In some ways, all my photographs are a form of fiction. Because when you are actually just living your life, you don’t pull out the camera and stop the situation just to take a picture.

Martin: It’s a naturalistic type of fiction. Just as authors use their own experience to write about larger, more universal issues. 

Nagashima: It’s also a type of performance. Both my parents belonged to a high school drama club, so sometimes I think I can act because it’s in my blood. Maybe I should state that all of the photos in this book were taken by me. I don’t have a cable release because I thought it wouldn’t fit to my concept of the work.

Martin: Sometimes you see the camera—in mirrors, of course. But otherwise you’re hiding the act of photographing, using tripods and timers. Is this a decision that makes the images feel more like a “real picture”? 

Nagashima: I don’t want to say yes to the term “real picture,” but I know what you mean. My early self-portraits were a parody of Hair Nude photos, so I wanted my photographs to look similar to them. I also wanted the concept of those images not to be too obvious, so that the viewer could misunderstand—they could be confused about whether those images were actually a real Hair Nude or not, for example.

Martin: It looks very natural. You really feel in certain photographs that you’re meeting the eyes of someone photographing you. And especially as the work progresses, you realize it’s actually a strange thing to record these very normal, small moments. It’s interesting to me that fiction that deals with the banal, with the domestic, is very much an area that has traditionally been dismissed as “women’s work.” It happens in the 1920s in Japan with what became known as “women’s literature” [joryū bungaku]—a form that was characterized as sentimental, trivial, and beneath the attention of male writers. It’s very similar to how photographic work by women was dismissed in ’90s Japan—“Oh, these women with their small cameras, they’re just shooting their friends, their lives.” Dismissed as inconsequential. It happens again and again.

Nagashima: That’s one of the reasons why I’ve stuck to my methods and the subject matter. It’s not what’s supposed to be the subjects or techniques of “great art.” All of those criteria were created by men. So of course they didn’t care for my work. I feel like I have to build a whole new criteria for women in the art field. When they look at my work, they consider it “female work” based on their own criteria. Because they don’t have the words to understand what I’m doing. And they don’t have a clue about how to look at those works and what I am—they don’t know what we are doing. But I know! [Laughs]

This interview and images appears courtesy Yurie Nagashima and Dashwood Books and was originally published in Self Portraits: Yurie Nagashima (Dashwood Books, 2020).

Introducing: Muge

Since 2004, the Chinese photographer has captured the upheaval and displacement of over a million people caused by the Three Gorges Dam.

By Casey Quackenbush

Muge, A man on a motorcycle, 2006, from the series Going Home

Muge’s first memory of the Three Gorges Dam is from 1999, five years after construction began. He and his family were taking a trip to Yunyang, a county along China’s mighty Yangtze River so rich in vistas it’s known as the “Bright Pearl of Chongqing.” They were traveling there to get bulk items for their home in Chongqing’s mountainous Wuxi County, an eighty-nine-mile journey through soaring peaks and lush valleys. It’s a frequent trip Muge took during his childhood; a fond memory turned painful when he arrived in Yunyang that year to find the place demolished.

“I lost my beautiful memories,” Muge said recently, likening the feeling of seeing the past disappear to amnesia. “Although you know there is a past, you can’t witness it for yourself.”

Going Home, begun in 2004, is an ongoing, nearly two-decade-long, endeavor to recover his memory, a monochrome series that captures the yearning of over a million people displaced from their homes along the Yangtze River—including Yunyang—caused by the construction of the six-hundred-foot-tall Three Gorges Dam, completed in the mid-2000s. In the years it took to build, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam wrought ecological and societal devastation. The dam swelled the Yangtze for three hundred miles upstream, creating an inland reservoir that submerged, or prompted the demolition of, hundreds of riverside towns and villages in the area where Muge grew up. Through photographs of dirt roads, rubbled shores, and abandoned cities, Muge chronicles a melancholy, spiritual journey in search of a home that is no longer there.

Muge, Passengers queueing to buy tickets, 2007, from the series Going Home

“In the end, you find nothing,” he says. “We wait for better living in desperation.”

Born in 1979 and raised in rural Chongqing, Muge grew up fantasizing about what lay beyond. Travel in those days was slow and crude. Whenever he wanted to do something or go somewhere, it was a journey through the natural world. When his family decided to get a television set when he was seven years old, it was a two-day expedition. “Every trip [was] a new life,” he says. The slowness of travel from Muge’s childhood sets the pace for Going Home. “I am obsessed with the state of being on the road,” he says. Every seemingly trivial detail—from the condition of the road to the majestic landscapes—is a glimpse into his “inner core.”

Because he grew up surrounded by government propaganda, much of Muge’s visual inspiration came later, while he was studying at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, where he earned a degree in broadcasting and television directing. There, he was introduced to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. He also discovered Peter Henry Emerson, Minor White, and Walker Evans, traces of whom are especially visible in his photogravuresque landscapes: epic, mystic, and lonely. In his later travels, Muge picked up his alias. Born Huang Rong, Muge’s friends coined his nickname after traveling to Tibet, where they learned that muge means “wild man,” which his friends jokingly called him because he moves so fast. (In Mongolian, muge means “rising sun.”)

Muge, Lovers, 2007, from the series Going Home

In the wake of the Three Gorges Dam, Going Home becomes more a wandering than a voyage. The expressions of Muge’s subjects—strangers, families, passengers, and migrant workers—are ones of loss and ache, unsure of what the future holds. Some squat along the cement shores of emptied cities waiting for a ferry to arrive. A couple burns a fire in a pile of rubble. Pollution or fog cloaks every sky. Mattresses pile up. A woman naps on an abandoned bunk bed along the river. Construction cranes loom. A policeman crouches in grassland. One man, standing atop a hill of rubble, looks up at a derelict home, looming like a steeple.

“The images are full of collisions between childhood memories and dramatic changes in reality,” says Muge.

Muge, Passengers on a dock, 2006, from the series Going Home

While there is much to be said about China as a rising superpower, Muge’s photography was not created for that arena. To be sure, Muge’s subjects and their experiences are the direct result of China’s rapid economic development. But his intent is neither to comment on China’s macrostate nor to convey his personal feelings. Instead, he aims to “[step] in between,” he says, capturing the spirit of people caught in the nation’s slipstream.

“He’s somebody who’s very curious about people and likes to pay attention to their rhythms, patterns, and personalities,” says Xuan Juliana Wang, a Chinese-born American writer who met Muge in Chengdu, where he is currently based. With Going Home, the aim, above all, is to understand the dirt-level intimacy and complexity of people’s everyday lives. “You can never know about a place or about a people unless you visit it on the ground,” Wang says. “His work is after that.”

Muge, Way home, 2006, from the series Going Home

 

Muge, The man doing the laundry, 2006, from the series Going Home

Muge, Shooting games, 2005, from the series Going Home

Muge, A ferry on the Yangtze River, from the series Going Home

Muge, A girl II, 2006, from the series Going Home

Muge, A boy along the Yangtze River, 2008, from the series Going Home

Casey Quackenbush is a New York/Hong Kong–based journalist who writes about culture and politics. Her writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, and Al Jazeera.

All photographs courtesy the artist. Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

11 Photographers Reflect on Images of Solidarity

How can photographs represent solidarity? From Bruce Davidson’s iconic images of the Civil Right Movement to Richie Shazam’s coverage of the massive Black Trans Lives Matter march in Brooklyn last month, the act of solidarity can be seen in these demonstrations of unity in the face of adversity and oppression. But solidarity is also captured in moments of community and connection, as seen in the work of Chien-Chi Chang and Denise Stephanie.

We’re excited to share Solidarity: The Magnum Square Print Sale in Collaboration with Vogue, which brings together images from legendary photographers that reflect on the power of togetherness in tumultuous times.

For seven days only, you can acquire these signed and estate-stamped, museum-quality images for $100 each. For the duration of this sale, Magnum and Vogue photographers will donate 50% of their proceeds to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When you purchase through Aperture’s affiliate link, you directly help support not only the artists, but also Aperture’s programming, publishing, and operations.

Selected by Aperture’s editors, here are 11 highlights from the Magnum Square Print Sale.

Chien-Chi Chang, Immigrants sleeping on a fire escape to avoid summer heat, New York City, 1998
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Chien-Chi Chang

“Solidarity is a word that is usually written large. To some, it might mean a great victory by the people. But I have seen it in smaller settings. On the hottest night of a New York summer, in a tenement building by the Manhattan Bridge outside rooms too sweltering to sleep in, these men found—and shared in—a sense of solidarity on a fire escape. The goal was not grand. They just yearned for a breeze.” —Chien-Chi Chang

Miranda Barnes, Lorraine Motel, Memphis, 2018
Courtesy the artist/Vogue

Miranda Barnes

“This photograph was taken for the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination for the New York Times in 2018. It was my first assignment through the newspaper, as well as my first time in Memphis. The experience taught me a great deal on the

importance of research in relation to photography, photographing an assignment alone, and the responsibility you have as the person with the camera. Within the theme of solidarity, this photo resonated, as I believe it is important to reflect on moments of history that have been

whitewashed. Acknowledgment and unlearning are critical to the current movement, and they begin from within.” —Miranda Barnes

Enri Canaj, A small boat with refugees and migrants reached safely the Greek coast, It was hard to get the boat to land because of the bad sea, Lesbos, Greece, October, 2015
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Enri Canaj

“It is always the right time for our strength to be seen. No matter what happens, we should never forget solidarity, which lightly bears our sorrows and joys like a lifeboat, carrying us smoothly and safely towards the next port.” —Enri Canaj

Bruce Davidson, The Selma March, Alabama, 1965
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson

“This photograph was taken during the 1965 protest marches from Selma to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of African American, nonviolent marchers to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression. This was a watershed moment in the Civil Rights Movement. I came across this young demonstrator, wrapped in a flag, protesting racism; behind him is Father Smith of San Antonio, a white Catholic priest who protested against injustice for most of his life.” —Bruce Davidson

Lua Ribeira, Los Afortunados, Melilla, Spain, 2019
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Lua Ribeira

“This photograph makes me think about bridges, and the extent to which the origins of our issues reside on an illusion that we are separated. Carlos Skliar writes in his essay ‘The Fragile Look’: “to eliminate judgement is no easy task and, despite this, it is exactly what should be done, everything that would have to be done from now onwards so the world could be different and become pure childhood—or pure abnormality. That is: it doesn’t inevitably progress towards self-destruction, but rather, it would lead to the freedom of time and the precious uselessness of the actions undertaken, those actions that lie far from the benefit of profit-making and the trade of bodies and souls.” —Lua Ribeira

Denise Stephanie, In Your Hands, Brooklyn, 2018
Courtesy the artist/Vogue

Denise Stephanie

“The year 2020 has reminded us that human connection is one of life’s greatest treasures. At first, we were forced to be ‘socially distant’ in response to a global pandemic. We substituted FaceTime and Zoom meetings for in-person interaction and discussion. We found ways to cope and attempted to fill the gaps. Virtual communication has been the bridge to strengthen our relationships, show support for one another, and bring light to what haunts us. Then, triggered by tragic and chronic injustice, we covered our faces but joined our hands across the world in solidarity with Black voices, for Black lives. We leveraged digital platforms to turn conversations into action. Through our resilience, we created a new normal but acknowledged that there is no substitute for the human touch. In this double-exposure image, these faceless, melanated women stand together, supporting one another, joined by the same personal touch we have been missing. They remind us that through compassion, our bonds are unbreakable.” —Denise Stephanie

Elliott Erwitt, Valencia, Spain, 1952
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Elliott Erwitt

“The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe, I try to entertain, but above all I want pictures that are emotional. Little else interests me in photography. Today, so much is being done by unemotional people, or at least it looks that way . . . I mean, work that’s fascinating and fun and clever and technically brilliant. But if it’s not personal, then it misses what interesting photography is about.” —Elliott Erwitt, in Personal Exposures, 1988

Sohrab Hura, Pati, India, 2010
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Sohrab Hura

“I never quite understood what solidarity meant until I went to Pati for the first time in 2005. Pati is a small village block in Madhya Pradesh in central India. Coming from a bigger metropolitan city like New Delhi, I witnessed and experienced solidarity in a way that felt like a life-changing experience—I guess that is what happens when you have the privilege of not really feeling the immediate need for it yourself, and it only remains a sort of a grand gesture that you might extend on to others. It was here that for the first time, I experienced a collectiveness unlike anything else. It was also here that I learnt that solidarity could even exist in the act of stepping back and listening.” —Sohrab Hura

In addition to the donation to the NAACP, Sohrab Hura’s proceeds from the sale of this print will be used to support Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS), a grassroots union formed by people in Pati to fight for basic rights, including the right to work in dignity.

Alex Webb, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2010
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Alex Webb

“I keep returning to these words of James Baldwin, which seem as apt today as when he wrote them nearly sixty years ago: ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’” —Alex Webb

Richie Shazam, Tell Your Friends to Pull Up, New York City, 2020
Courtesy the artist/Vogue

Richie Shazam

“Through my artistic expression, I’ve learned about myself and was able to learn about others. My photography lets me tell stories, send but also transcend messages. My work connects me to who I am, where I come from, and most of all, those around me. Pride is about celebrating our ability to stand up for ourselves. This year, we are called upon to stand up and against the violence and hate thrust onto so many Black and brown bodies. Attending the Black Trans Lives Matter march in Brooklyn was a moving, historical moment.” —Richie Shazam

Ronan McKenzie, Our Place, Los Angeles, 2019
Courtesy the artist/Vogue

Ronan McKenzie

“Father Jamaiel and daughter Akua sit at their table bathed in sunlight, creating time to talk to each other. Within my work, I often explore connection, family, relationships, and communication; I aim to present the love, strength, and support within Black family and friendship that are rarely projected outward but always felt. This image is special to me, as it is a real documentation of true listening and the flood of light, acceptance, beauty, and happiness that comes with it.” —Ronan McKenzie

The Magnum Square Print Sale in Collaboration with Vogue is available now through Sunday, August 2, 2020 at 6:00 p.m. EDT. For seven days only, collect museum-quality, 6-by-6-inch square prints for $100 each—with Magnum and Vogue photographer’s donating 50% of their proceeds to the NAACP. By using this link to make your purchase, you directly help support not only the artists but also Aperture’s programming, publishing, and operations.

Why Janet Malcolm’s Photography Criticism Still Resonates

Forty years after the publication of her collected essays on photography, Malcolm’s writing offers the pleasure of seeing a great mind grapple with the medium.

By Brian Sholis

Cover of Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, 1980

Janet Malcolm began covering photography for the New Yorker at an auspicious moment. In the mid-1970s, art museums began to create curatorial departments dedicated to photography, more commercial galleries devoted to the medium opened to the public, and a growing number of artists began using the camera as part of broader conceptual practices. In the United States and Europe, these transformative changes were accompanied by a boomlet in influential books. Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) were the most celebrated and remain the most well-known; Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), which offers more recondite pleasures, has recently gained traction among cognoscenti. Malcolm’s collection Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography was also part of this wave; it was published forty years ago this spring.

In Diana & Nikon, Malcolm reports from the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and occasionally, from Manhattan galleries. She writes on recently published books. But her elegant considerations do not reflect much of the creative ferment we now associate with the period—for example, the emergence of what is now known as the Pictures Generation or the landscape artists memorably collected under the name New Topographics. Whether by inclination or because she was writing for a general-interest magazine, she mostly sticks to figures already sainted—such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Walker Evans—or to those well on their way, like Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Harry Callahan. (The omnipresence of white men in the book does, unfortunately, reflect the institutional prerogatives of the period.) As Malcolm works through the canon, her writing, she claims in the book’s preface, is an education conducted in public: “It is only about midway through the volume that I think I begin to get hold of the subject, and in the ninth essay, ‘Two Roads,’ that I untangle some of the knottier issues.”

Harry Callahan, Weeds in Snow, Detroit, 1943
© The Estate of Harry Callahan and courtesy Pace Gallery

That humility, however performative, distinguishes Malcolm from Sontag, Barthes, and Flusser—and is partly what makes Diana & Nikon valuable today. Malcolm writes about photographs to learn what she thinks about photography; the others wrote about photography to make declarations about the world. This is not to suggest that Malcolm does not write with authority. Her language is crisp, she demonstrates her perceptiveness through exquisite description, and her opinions can be cutting. (On Avedon’s enormous 1970s group portraits, she writes: “One finally balks at the low sensationalism that is being offered as high seriousness.”) But the decisive clarity of her prose, which fans will recognize from her subsequent writing on artists, literary figures, legal cases, psychoanalysis, and other subjects, is paired in this, her first book, with a willingness to revisit and refine the same few ideas. Provided one reads the chronologically arranged essays in order, witnessing this autodidact at work is one of Diana & Nikon’s chief pleasures.

Throughout these essays, Malcolm has two principal concerns about the art of photography. The first, how it relates to painting, has been worried over since the medium’s invention. Writing on Stieglitz in 1975, she celebrates his framing of the Photo-Secession for how it lifted artists working in photography out of mere mimicry. “What has changed is the literalness of photography’s relationship to painting: photographs no longer exhibit the surface qualities of paintings and drawings.” Thankfully, in her view, the photographers Stieglitz championed retained painting’s emphasis on formal design: “Pictorial formalism as a prerequisite for all else was the real Lesson of the Master.”

Bill Owens, My wife is a realtor and gets invited to every grand opening in town. This week it’s Sambo’s restaurant, 1972
Courtesy the artist

Three years and more than one hundred pages later, when writing about Robert Frank and those he influenced, Malcolm describes a radical shift within photography by linking it to a related shift in painting (say, from Grant Wood to Jackson Pollock): “Simply by going with the camera instead of against it, they produced a body of work that looked as different from the photography of the past as Action Painting did from its predecessors. That this photography emerged shortly after the emergence of Action Painting is itself yet another indication of the close (if often secret) watch that photography keeps on developments in painting.”

The evolution within photography that Frank represents epitomizes Malcolm’s second concern: how its creative practitioners respond to snapshots and other utilitarian pictures. “Photography went modernist . . . when it began to study snapshots,” she writes. Frank’s innovation, though Malcolm might not like the positive connotations of that word, is to sever the link to painting’s emphasis on formal design—to undo what Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession had done half a century earlier. Frank “permitt[ed] the camera what no art photographer had ever hitherto let it get away with—all the accidents of light, the messy conjunctions of shape, the randomness of the framing, the disorderliness of the composition, the arbitrariness of gesture and expression, the blurriness and graininess of the printing.” What did Malcolm make of this development? On the same page, she writes that Frank “produced pictures that look as if a kid has taken them while eating a Popsicle and then had had them developed and printed at the drugstore.”

Robert Frank, Bar, Gallup, New Mexico, from the series The Americans, 1955
© Andrea Frank Foundation

Malcolm’s predilection is for the formalism that avant-garde photographers were then leaving behind. In 1976, she framed the terms of the debate starkly: “The attributes previously sought by photographers—strong design, orderly composition, control over tonal values, lucidity of content, good print quality—have been stood on their heads, and the qualities now courted are formlessness, rawness, clutter, [and] accident.” But the essay on Frank and the snapshot aesthetic is the ninth in the collection, the one she flagged at the outset. It’s to her credit that, in this piece, her prior emphasis on polarities—painting and photography, “artful” versus “artless” pictures—begins to soften. She notes a paradox: “As each side digs out its own position—the avant-garde going deeper and deeper into its examination of the photographic, the old guard into the making of medium-transcending beautiful forms—the gap between them seems to be narrowing rather than widening.”

This realization leads to a growing acceptance of ambiguity in photographs; at one later point, she identifies exceptions to writer William Stott’s face-off between Evans and Frank. It also enables Malcolm to more charitably consider photographers whose work doesn’t match her taste. She writes lucidly on Eve Sonneman’s postmodern image pairings and, near the end of the book, argues for the value of Chauncey Hare’s acid portrayal of late-twentieth-century America. (In Hare’s 1978 book Interior America, Malcolm notes, “Hare enters the homes that Frank sped by when taking the pictures for The Americans.”) Over the four years covered by this volume, she becomes a better critic.

Of course, Malcolm doesn’t need to become a better writer. Throughout the book, her descriptive prowess is its own reward. Here she is on Harry Callahan: “Callahan’s photographs are stylistically of a piece, marked by a kind of exquisite dryness, a quietness and evenness of tone, and a quality of muted restraint, almost grudgingness. He is a sort of harpsichordist of the camera.” Elsewhere, a photograph by William Eggleston depicts “a stretch of dirt road near Glendora, Mississippi, taken on a clear, windy summer day: one of those heart-catchingly lucid days of blue sky and fast-moving clouds, of juicy, fragrant greenness, of shivering tree leaves showing their white undersides—a day that looks, one says to oneself, like a Kodacolor snapshot, but that, conversely, a Kodacolor snapshot never evokes.”

William Eggleston, Untitled, Black Bayou Plantation, near Glendora, Mississippi, ca. 1970
© Eggleston Artistic Trust and courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Malcolm leans on T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to reconcile herself to photography’s newest developments. As she phrases it, “It takes a while for new works of art to settle into the tradition out of which they came. Or, rather, the dust that the difference between the old and the new throws up has to settle before the relative smallness of the difference is perceived and the connection to the past is established.” The use of Eliot is emblematic. Another pleasure Diana & Nikon offers is Malcolm’s continual and apt reference to literature. She compares the “subtle mockery” in Irving Penn’s portraits to Henry James’s The Sacred Fount (1901); twice, she likens Frank, an outsider commenting on America, to Vladimir Nabokov; she relates fashion photography to “the more inflexibly formal poetic modes, such as the villanelle and the sestina”; and she frames the “erotic impact” of Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe by reference to D. H. Lawrence.

These analogies, combined with the tonal difference between Malcolm’s criticism and contemporaneous writing by Sontag and Barthes (to say nothing of more academic photography critics), brought to mind another point of comparison: the literary critic James Wood. Malcolm’s generous and rigorous descriptions, likely due to the fact that her reviews ran without illustrations—Tina Brown introduced photographs to the magazine when she became editor in 1992—are akin to Wood’s frequent use of quotations. And Malcolm’s taste for the classical in photography accords with the popular understanding of Wood’s preference for a humane realism.

Today, photography is undergoing a transition arguably even more dramatic than that of the era when Malcolm’s essays were written. And we have no shortage of theorists actively parsing what photography is and might become. In an interview with Geoff Dyer published in Aperture in 2014, Malcolm admitted that she is “someone who is better equipped to look at pictures than to think about what photography is.” The fortieth anniversary of Diana & Nikon gives us the chance not only to watch a great mind grapple with the medium, but also to remember the value of proceeding from photographs themselves.

Brian Sholis is an independent writer, editor, and curator living in Toronto.

Rebels Without a Cause

A new photobook revisits the Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger’s images of rock-and-roll boys and edgy nudes in full glory.

By Daniel Berndt

Karlheinz Weinberger, St. Petersinsel, 1964
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

There is still a lot to discover in Karlheinz Weinberger’s photography. The self-taught Swiss photographer, who passed away in 2006 at the age of eighty-five, was known for his images of teen rebels taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Photographs: Together & Alone, a new book edited by poet, editor, and painter Ben Estes, assembles a selection of previously unpublished photographs that reveal new aspects of Weinberger’s work, covering his images of teens and a series of nudes. The book reflects on Weinberger’s relationship to his subjects, both in public and more private settings, whereas the dialectic between in- and outside, group dynamics, and one-on-one settings poignantly showcases Weinberger’s distinctly queer perspective on youth culture and masculinity.

Karlheinz Weinberger, “Elvis,” Hardau, Zurich, ca. 1960
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

In 1958, when Weinberger began to portray the rock-and-roll kids—who worshiped Elvis and James Dean, sported gelled comb-backs or teased hairstyles, and wore jeans, leather boots, oversized chains, and gigantic belt buckles (which were often adorned with images of their idols)—the photographer was already thirty-seven. He was intrigued by the teenagers’ edgy look, but more so by the fact that their antiauthoritarian attitude and rowdiness caused a moral panic in Switzerland. Initially, Weinberger photographed boys in the streets of Zürich. Later he invited them to his apartment, which he shared with his mother and had partially turned into an improvised studio. Despite the age difference and his comparatively square lifestyle—Weinberger worked full time as a stock manager in a factory warehouse for Siemens, a job that he kept until his retirement in 1986—he would eventually become friends and go on camping trips or visit local festivals with the teenagers.

Karlheinz Weinberger, St. Petersinsel, 1964
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

Most of the photographs reproduced in the first part of Together & Alone were taken on these outings. While Weinberger literally captured kids at the margins of society, outside the actual social gatherings they attended, his pictures show them posing confidently for the camera, smoking, drinking, or wrestling. During their camping trips, however, he caught them also in more tender and intimate moments, immersed in conversation or making out. Apart from documenting a group of outcasts and the youth culture of this time, Weinberger’s images in Together & Alone pay homage to companionship and puppy love. At the same time, they highlight the homoeroticism of the pubescent rituals of male bonding, as well as the performed machismo, in contrast to the androgynous appearance of the young rebels. The fact that the images in the book are all black and white, makes, as the artist Collier Schorr points out in the introduction, both “the boys and girls” seem “tougher, more masculine.”

Karlheinz Weinberger, Knabenschiessen (Rifle shooting competition), Albisguetli, 1962
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

This emphasis on masculinity is even more amped up in the second part of Together & Alone. Under the pseudonym “Jim,” Weinberger regularly published photos in the Swiss gay magazine Der Kreis (George Platt Lynes was another prominent contributor) and, later on, in its successor Club68. Instead of the pretty boys that dominated his young rebel shots, the subjects of these images are mainly construction workers, bikers, and athletes—rugged men with striking facial features and tattoos. Whereas his photographs printed in Der Kreis in the years between 1952 and 1965 were suggestive in nature but, due to censorship (the depiction of full-frontal nudity was illegal in Switzerland until the end of the 1960s), always pretty tame, the images in the second part of Together & Alone are more explicit. The men are captured in their full glory, at times masturbating and ejaculating.

Karlheinz Weinberger, Portrait, Zurich, ca. mid-1950s
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

The explicit content might have been a reason why these photos have not been published before. Another could be their rough aesthetic. Many are out of focus, slightly underexposed, or awkwardly framed, while the poses of their subjects seem often more clumsy than seductive. The fact that Weinberger published images in Der Kreis that feature the same props and settings also suggests that they essentially were outtakes or surplus material for Weinberger’s private pleasure or “collection,” as Schorr puts it. The way they have been arranged in Together & Alone, however, provides insight into Weinberger’s work process. Scrolling through the pages, one can observe his models stripping down in front of the camera. One can almost hear his instructions: “Look to the right.” Click. “Look to the left.” Click. “Look into the camera.” Click.

Karlheinz Weinberger, Portrait, Zurich, ca. mid-1960s
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

It was a shrewd choice to ask Schorr, an artist who consistently deals with the performance and representation of masculinity and queerness in her own work, to reflect on Weinberg’s photography from a contemporary perspective. In her essay, she highlights both the curious distance in Weinberger’s shots of the young rebels and the straightforwardness of his nudes that “dismantle the fantasy,” as they refrain from any kind of dramatic staging and are all but flawless. She states that Weinberger’s photography is essentially defined by a symbiotic relationship “between the outsider with a camera and the outsiders themselves.” Describing Weinberger as a “fanbase” for the young rebels, Schorr asks: “Was Weinberger ever young with his subjects? Was he ever just one of them?” In a similar vein, one could speculate if he was ever really close to the men in his nudes. According to Schorr, “Photographers are promiscuous . . . . ­Hunt for the one, own the many.”

Karlheinz Weinberger, Portrait, Zurich, ca. mid-1960s
© Karlheinz Weinberger Stiftung, Zurich, and courtesy Artist Resources Management, New York

As much as Together & Alone presents an overview of his portraits, the book also portrays Weinberger himself—from a contemporary perspective, and no longer as an outsider. Weinberger emerges as a forerunner for younger artists like Schorr, Walter Pfeiffer, Wolfgang Tillmans, or Paul Mpagi Sepuya—all of who, like Weinberger, explore youth, masculinity, and desire through photography.

Daniel Berndt is an art historian living and working in Zurich and Berlin.

Karlheinz Weinberger’s Photographs: Together & Alone was published by The Song Cave in July 2020.

In Pop Culture and Propaganda, an Alternate History of the Cold War Era

Aikaterini Gegisian’s new artist book—made from appropriated images—centers physical pleasure as a form of resistance to capitalism.

By Elena Goukassian

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

In her new artist book, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, Aikaterini Gegisian seeks to create alternative histories of the Cold War era through the female gaze. Through a few dozen collages made from clippings of US and Western European popular publications, pornographic magazines, and travel catalogues from the 1950s through the 1970s, Gegisian frees pop-culture images from their original contexts of patriarchal commerce and propaganda, recombining them in ways that reject ideological themes and traditional power relations. Set on bright color blocks of uncoated paper, her collages focus on the view from the periphery. Gegisian’s “spontaneous other” emerges as an entity liberated from the confines of Western capitalism and popular culture, free—for the first time—to explore notions of pleasure and the self on its own terms.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Elena Goukassian: A lot of your work fills in the gaps between various traditional or accepted identities—national, ethnic, and otherwise. How did your own family history inspire these explorations?

Aikaterini Gegisian: I am a diasporic subject, and also a mixed one. All of my grandparents came from different parts of what was the Ottoman Empire. My mother’s family, both my grandmother and grandfather, were Pontic Greeks who came as children to Thessaloniki from the Black Sea coast. My father’s mother came from Crete. My Armenian grandfather came from Izmir, so he was already a diasporic part of the Armenian community. My family is constructed through this dispersal of people.

I was born in Thessaloniki, spent my childhood on the border with Turkey, and returned to Thessaloniki for high school. I studied in Glasgow and Brighton, and the UK has been my base in my adult life, but I have also lived temporarily in other places for fellowships, long-term residencies, and fieldwork. One of these locations was New York in 2014, where I started work on Handbook of the Spontaneous Other.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Goukassian: How did Handbook of the Spontaneous Other come about? Where did you look for images to use in your collages?

Gegisian: When I arrived in New York, there was already a shift in my practice toward working with found and archival material. (Before that, I only filmed.) I went to a flea market in Hell’s Kitchen, collecting ubiquitous American popular culture magazines from the ’50s and ’60s—like LIFE, TIME, anything I could find. One thing I found there was a pornographic magazine. When I bought it, the guy in the stall gave me a book, and he told me, “You may want to use that.” It was a self-published manual of how to become a gigolo, Providing Special Services to Women, and immediately, I wanted to interrogate this type of manual on how to reach female pleasure. The pornographic magazine and this book were the inspiration for Handbook.

Collecting images of American visual culture started as a comparative exercise. Up until then, I was only exploring popular visual cultures of the peripheral (or alternative) modernities that emerged after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire—like Soviet visual culture. In New York, I was collecting American pop-cultural images because I wanted to understand how my work related to American culture. It was clear that American visual culture was the hegemonic voice in the world. But in all the images I collected, what became more interesting for me was the patriarchal, imperialistic gaze. This was what I wanted to question and subvert by making Handbook, appropriating the material and rereading the collections in order to make visible this female gaze through a process of reappropriation.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Goukassian: Over the years, you’ve done a lot of digging into Soviet visual archives as well. What differences have you found between visual cultures in Western capitalist societies versus Soviet socialist societies in the Cold War era?

Gegisian: In both cases, they’re expressions of modernity. In the Soviet context, you’d describe it as “propaganda.” In capitalist culture, we call it “advertising.” But advertising may, at times, be the more aggressive of the two in creating specific ways of being, seeing, and understanding the self and the world. In both cases, visual culture becomes part of the way that ideological structure and power are exercised. For me, collage-making is about taking these materials that express a certain ideology and process, and bringing them together in order to make visible different voices, liberating the images from those ideological forces. I have an intimacy toward the images I collect; I feel they have inner thoughts and ideas that they are not allowed to express.

Goukassian: How do you put your collages together and choose the images?

Gegisian: In each project, there’s a certain type of context, and I’m very strict about the images I use. The context of how images come together is really important in setting up the boundaries of certain types of ideologies.

In my first artist book, A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas (2015), the imagery is from tourist catalogues from Greece, Turkey, and Soviet Armenia from the 1960s to the 1980s. In my research, I looked through the visual culture produced in each Soviet Socialist Republic every year—commemorative photographic albums that functioned as tourist or documentary publications about each republic of the Soviet Union. I noticed that the way they were structured was very similar to the way that photographic albums outside of the Eastern Bloc (like in Greece and Turkey) were structured, so the format was more or less the same. The tourist catalogues functioned as nation-building mechanisms, regardless of the specific nation’s political system. When I chose to focus on Armenia, Greece, and Turkey, it was because of the autobiographical element. I’m part of fragments that have been part of these geographies, but they were not available to me because of the nation-states and borders. A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas was an attempt to create a new landscape and topography outside of the confines of the nation-state. As an Other myself, I try to take hold of the hegemonic material at the center, which has defined me but doesn’t belong to me as a cultural narrative.

Aikaterini Gegisian, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Goukassian: You tend to focus on imagery from the 1950s through the ’70s. Why do you choose that time period specifically? And would you ever work with more recent images or contemporary travel catalogues?

Gegisian: I might, but I haven’t reached that point yet. I am still fascinated with the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, because that was when the photographic magazine was ubiquitous, which made the images part of widespread popular culture. They shaped collective memory. There are also specific types of printing technology and conventions of photography that I am interested in, and a specific color palette. These allow you to locate the images temporally. I stop in the ’80s, because the technology changed, the images became digitally reproduced. Images made after 1980 are harder to place in a specific time.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Goukassian: What’s the role of nostalgia in your work?

Gegisian: I’m critical of nostalgia. I don’t go back to the past because I’m nostalgic; I go back because I’m trying to locate a collective sense of the world, the collective sharing of experiences through images. There’s an equality in the experience of images. In the process of questioning why these images were produced, why they were popular, why they were circulating, and why they have created a collective imagery, I am trying to bring forward that they were all produced through a set of power relations. The nostalgia comes in the way these images are consumed. The collages I make are critiques of this function of nostalgia.

 

Goukassian: How has Brexit affected you and your work?

Gegisian: For me, Brexit has two functions. First, in questioning how certain types of identities are produced—between national, supranational, global, cosmopolitan, diasporic, or transnational identities. At the same time, it made me understand Europe as a Western structural phenomenon. From the point of view of a Greek person, that was not how I identified myself, as a Western person. I was still peripheral.

Goukassian: Greece is a very interesting example, because it’s geographically on the eastern side of the European continent, but it’s often considered Western European.

Gegisian: This is one of the things that I would like to work on, this ambiguous position of Greece and ancient Greek culture as both peripheral and central to understanding Western modernity.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Goukassian: You divided Handbook into sections with various colors. Do the colors provide a narrative structure?

Gegisian: Ideally, everything is up to the interpretation of the reader, but there is always an intention. Self-help guides are very prominent in American society, and I wanted to make a handbook thinking about how the body can find pleasure, but without a set of instructions, placing the body in a position of resistance against capitalism, and finding pleasure, happiness, and spiritualism.

I wanted to avoid giving instructions, because they made finding pleasure a form of labor. Handbook asks how we can find pleasure without working. Capitalism is continuously work, work, work, even with issues of liberation and identity politics. I also wanted to make a handbook that does not place the body in a binary. What emerged was a narrative of nine color variations that go from white to black, or black to white. It functions like a pendulum. The white and black are the binary poles of the ways that we traditionally understand gender, and then in between, there is this endless set of possibilities, of coming together, of encounters.

The book starts with a petrified heterosexual couple, the Western romantic expression of love par excellence, and it sets up this narrative only to break it later. I created Handbook in order to give voice to the Spontaneous Other, a figure of resistance; the moment you give it a voice, it becomes a threat. So, the moment you encounter this petrified image of the heterosexual couple in the first chapter, although it’s quite soft and normalizing, it becomes a threat.

I made a lot of the collages intuitively, without trying to justify the visual relations, and I didn’t put any information in the chapters, because I want you to have the experience of this pendulum of color change. If the collages give voice to the Spontaneous Other, then the text at the end of the book gives voice to the images. It’s written from the point of view of the images. I was thinking of the conventions of early photobooks, where the caption located the image geographically and historically. The text at the end functions as that narrative caption.

Aikaterini Gegisian, from Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, 2020

Goukassian: Do you think of your work as an archeological study of images?

Gegisian: Archaeological and anthropological. I look at these images as documents, as spaces of certain expressions of being and living. I am trying to reread things by giving shape to different types of narratives and imaginations, making visible a certain type of peripheral female gaze that has not had a place to speak. Thus far.

Elena Goukassian is a copy editor at Aperture Foundation.

Aikaterini Gegisian’s Handbook of the Spontaneous Other was published by MACK in March 2020. All images courtesy the artist and MACK.

Remembering Paul Fusco’s Legendary RFK Funeral Train

Fusco’s photographs remain an incomparable document of gestures of public grief, capturing a moment of cultural shift unlike almost any other.

By Vicki Goldberg

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

On June 5, 1968, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president. His death, which occurred only two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., came as a terrible shock to the already grieving nation.

Three days later, a funeral train carried his coffin from New York to its final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of people stood patiently in the searing heat as the train traveled slowly en route to Washington, DC. Paul Fusco, then a staff photographer for LOOK magazine, accompanied the train on its journey. The images he made reveal the respect that the American people—both rich and poor, Black and white—held for RFK, a man who had come to symbolize social justice and hope for a better tomorrow.

Fusco went on to become a member of Magnum Photos in 1974 and held a career that spanned from documenting Cesar Chavez to life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, remaining committed to the principles of civil rights and a more equitable, just society as espoused by RFK and MLK.

Yet for many, Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train remains a touchstone body of work. An incomparable document of gestures of public grief, Fusco’s incredible collection of photographs captures a moment of cultural shift unlike almost any other.

On the occasion of the artist’s passing at the age of ninety, we revisit an essay by Vicki Goldberg from the monograph Paul Fusco: RFK (Aperture, 2008). —The Editors

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

Late on June 4, 1968, after winning the California primary, RFK delivered a victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. Shortly after midnight, he left through a service area, and as he stopped to shake hands with supporters and the kitchen staff, an unemployed drifter named Sirhan Sirhan shot him three times at close range. Kennedy’s last words as he lay mortally wounded were “Is everybody all right?”

He died not long after. The body was flown to New York, where the casket remained in St. Patrick’s for two nights and a day. The line of people waiting outside the cathedral to pay their respects stretched for twenty-five blocks in wilting heat. After the funeral on June 8, a train carried Bobby’s coffin to Washington. Paul Fusco, then a photographer for LOOK magazine and now a Magnum photographer, photographed the mourners outside and inside the cathedral, rode that train, and photographed the grieving crowds—some estimates say as many as a million people lined the route—who stood for hours to pay their last respects to a man who had reached the hearts of a vast public as few politicians had before and none so widely since.

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

The journey through this book, which now includes St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Arlington National Cemetery, is accompanied by more echoes and meanings than most photographs can support. The most obvious one is the enormous loss of a man of intelligence and compassion who had the power to inspire others—a man who might have been president. (Much has been written about how this country might have been different had RFK lived.) The horror of a second young Kennedy cut down by gunfire ran through the event, a sense that the curse of the House of Atreus had been revived in America. Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered a mere sixty-three days earlier; the accumulated assassinations of three outstanding leaders had plunged the nation’s mind yet again into the morbid record of the country’s violent history. Bobby’s death created one more nationwide display of fierce tragedy and bloodshed to add to the copious stream of such news. Less than a year later, President Richard Nixon organized an attack on the media and the news itself, that bearer of bad tidings—an attack that hit a responsive chord in the populace and still resonates today.

In Fusco’s photographs, sorrow broods over St. Patrick’s Cathedral as people soberly and patiently wait in aisles marked out by police tape. Some women cannot keep themselves from crying. Then there are the people along the way, so representative of the citizenry, so intent on honoring the dead in the traditional way by coming into his presence to pay respects, and so silently. Their numbers and races, their assorted classes and unanimous allegiance to the ritual remind us that we are one nation and that we share a sense that we must personally honor those we cared about with our presence. Some women came in curlers, some in hats and heels, nuns in their habits. Men wore shorts, T-shirts, undershirts, or ties. A few even wore suits. Uniformed men stood in line and presented rifles or saluted smartly. Some men in casual clothes saluted too, and some women placed a hand over the heart as if pledging allegiance. Young boys came bare-chested; girls wore bathing suits, shorts, or school uniforms. Women carried babies. Many people raised an arm with the palm toward the train, a combined greeting and civilian salute. One woman knelt on the ground to pray.

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

They gathered anywhere they could get a view of the train: station platforms, tracks, back steps of tenements, rooftops, bridges, baseball fields, small boats in the sea, cemeteries. They peered from passing trains. They stood atop cars, atop boats hitched to cars, on the back of pickup trucks, on fence posts. They stood on distant ridges or clambered to the roof of a parked train car, where the sunlight ate away at heads and bodies until they looked like sculptures by Giacometti. Most touching of all were single figures, one holding a baby, standing alone in a wide green field to watch. Some held up flags, or pictures of Bobby, or signs that said “God Bless the Kennedys,” “God Bless Bobby,” “We Will Miss You,” “Who Will Be the Next One?” “Pray For Us Bobby,” and “We Have Lost Our Last Hope.”

Fusco’s simple, direct, snapshot-like pictures make the book all the more heartrending and all the more convincing: this is the way it was, a tale too powerful to need embellishment or flourish. The immediacy and casualness, the blur of some figures and the indistinctness of others in the distance or darkness presage the ever rougher, caught-on-the-fly images to which we are rapidly becoming accustomed now that cameras in ubiquitous cell phones report news events.

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

Ineluctably tied to the progress of time, the images of the train’s passage coalesce into a literally moving hybrid that lies halfway between still and motion pictures. The journey rolls along the tracks as the reader turns the pages, almost as if it were recorded in frames cut from a video and pasted into an album. Trains changed the visual experience of travel long ago, abruptly snatching away the passing scene, glimpses of people and places sliding past the window so quickly they are either tantalizing or forgettable, at least until the train pulls into a station. The RFK train moved slowly; it took eight hours rather than the usual four to go from New York to Washington, partly because two people had been killed on the tracks in New Jersey when they failed to notice that an express train was coming around a curve in the opposite direction. The funeral train moved on, and a number of Fusco’s pictures are so blurred that the sense of motion stays at the forefront of consciousness.

Because the train took so long, the interment took place at night; what was a metaphorical time of darkness merged with reality, groups of mourners dressed in black—the family, President Lyndon B. and Mrs. Johnson—moving through the darkness to the grave.

Numerous bystanders along the railroad route had brought their own cameras to record the train; at least once, a man turned his camera on the people lined up beside him. Cameras were, of course, the way to memorialize and keep the event, but as Fusco’s camera watches the people watching, there runs beneath the grief and ritual farewell a quiet reminder of those intertwined phenomena of spectator culture and image culture.

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

Kennedy’s killing itself was not televised, but the subsequent events associated with his funeral and interment were. The mind, however, can only preserve bits and pieces and impressions from television, an essentially disposable medium. No one who watched the televised days of President John F. Kennedy’s funeral will ever forget it, yet the singular images—the dignified widow, the little boy saluting his father, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald—have been most indelibly imprinted on memory by still photographs, which also create memories for those too young to have been there. Fusco’s photographs bring us back to a tragedy that left many thousands as stricken as if a parent had been murdered. His images put us next to the mourner and the mourning and quietly detail how people deep in shock and sorrow took refuge in the rituals that have been devised to reassert community and continuity after a leader’s death.

In the Renaissance and after, a king’s (and often a noble’s) death was memorialized with great pomp: an elaborate procession with ornate decorations and the participation of great numbers of soldiers and courtiers, panoply that could only be observed by an audience on the scene, and later at one remove in engravings. Such funerals followed conventional and prescribed rituals that emphasized not merely the greatness of the dead but also the permanence of leadership: it was loudly proclaimed that “the king is dead, long live the king.”

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

This impulse continues, though the trappings have changed somewhat over time (and in democracies). The coffins of leaders and celebrities, lying in state or simply in a church or a funeral home, are the focus of communal grief and the need to honor someone great and beloved. (When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, more than one hundred thousand fans filed past his coffin in the funeral home.) The invention of the railroad made such attendance possible across great distances: Lincoln’s funeral train, which took him from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, 103 years before RFK’s body made its briefer journey, attracted crowds at every stop. (When Bobby Kennedy’s train arrived in Baltimore, the waiting throng joined hands and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” just as the waiting mourners had for Lincoln.) President William McKinley’s funeral train drew crowds, too, after he was assassinated in 1901 and his body taken home to Ohio; so did the train that took Franklin Roosevelt home to New York after he died of natural causes in 1945.

Photography, like the railroad, extended the reach of funeral observances. Television took this around the globe; millions in twenty-three countries watched President Kennedy’s funeral when international broadcasts were only a few years old. In America, that weekend-long ceremony was watched by at least 166 million citizens. People who lived on opposite coasts were seeing and thus, in a way, present at the funeral at the same time, apart but together, sharing feelings of shock and grief in an electronic unification of the country.

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

Martin Luther King Jr.’s death and funeral were similarly widely televised, but for many whites, the riots and fires that broke out almost immediately in Black communities stirred such fear that they took up a comparable, perhaps a greater, place in memory than the obsequies. Bobby Kennedy’s funeral was also fully covered by the media. Once again, the still images are more accessible and more likely to imprint on the mind than those in the transient flow of television, certainly on the minds of those too young to have witnessed the coverage. The impact was not quite like the impact of his brother’s funeral. A fallen president has an immediate successor, so the nation goes on; a fallen presidential candidate does not—another candidate steps in, but this fact means little to the continuity of anything but a campaign. If JFK’s death and funeral united the country even momentarily (at least before the conspiracy theories got loose), MLK’s and RFK’s assassinations ruptured the national fabric.

An idea of America seemed to die with them. Though many new liberties, rights, and valuable social changes came out of the tumult of the sixties, those years were marked by protest and horror. The Vietnam War underlay it all. There were massive protest marches in the streets, and citizens were gassed by the police and jailed. The war’s wounded had begun to turn up in American hospitals and on some streets, making visible the mounting statistics of the dead and injured. At the end of January 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet invasion, entering Saigon, the supposedly secure capital of South Korea, and even occupying the American embassy there for a short while. Just months before, the administration and the military had repeatedly told Americans that we were winning the war. The Tet Offensive was a double blow: we were not only losing but had also been lied to by the people we ought to trust most. Opinion swung to the side of the antiwar movement and against President Johnson.

Paul Fusco, Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968

While the war raged, other national disasters played out on American streets. Civil rights volunteers in the South were brutally murdered; the National Guard kept Black students from entering schools in several states and eventually were required to protect those doing so; dogs and fire hoses were turned on Black adults and children; riots broke out in cities in the North; a president was assassinated; and an apostle of nonviolence was murdered, unleashing the fury of African Americans who saw nothing but oppression and death in their future. For millions, Bobby Kennedy’s murder was, in effect, the final blow; few could believe any more that ideals could be turned into reality. Some say it spelled the end of liberalism as a potent force. Jack Newfield, who knew RFK well, later wrote about his anguish at the funeral:

Now I realized what makes our generation unique, what defines us apart from those who came before the hopeful winter of 1961, and those who came after the murderous spring of 1968. We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.

Newfield thought the disillusion was thorough and lasting, noting that fewer and fewer Americans have voted in presidential elections since 1968.

The murder of Bobby Kennedy killed more than the man alone; it extinguished a spark, a promise, and a sense of hope that America has been struggling to recover ever since. Forty years later, the manifold echoes of that assassination seem to sound through Fusco’s photographs, which once were news—and stirring evidence of an incalculable sorrow.

This essay was first published in Paul Fusco: RFK (Aperture, 2008). All images courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos.

Joel Meyerowitz Tells the Story Behind Three Photographs from His Archive

An early advocate of color photography, Joel Meyerowitz has impacted and influenced generations of artists. For fifty-eight years, the master photographer has documented the US’s ever-changing social landscape. Now, Aperture and Meyerowitz launch a special ten-day print sale, featuring three 5-by-7-inch prints signed by the artist.

This also marks the launch of a new undertaking by Meyerowitz and his studio to scan his archive of over 140,000 previously unseen Kodachrome slides. At the age of eighty-two, Meyerowitz feels the necessity of bringing his nearly six decades of work into a searchable and comprehensive archive and study center.

“In the early years of the ’60s and ’70s, photography wasn’t taken as seriously as it is now, nor were there many places showing photographs,” Meyerowitz explains. “So, there were lots of images that went into the files after a first look and remained there, waiting to see daylight someday. That time is here, and at my age, I want to act on scanning all this work while I can still feel the excitement.”

Proceeds from the print sale not only help support Aperture and fund Meyerowitz’s archiving project, but a portion will also be donated to the Equal Justice Initiative.

“Aperture and I have a long and supportive relationship, and any way I can help further their not-for-profit programs is a step toward keeping the medium, and Aperture’s efforts, alive,” Meyerowitz says. “At the same time, the Equal Justice Initiative needs our support to do their work, which is absolutely necessary if we want to evolve as a just society.”

Below are insights from Meyerowitz on his three selected prints, available exclusively through Aperture through July 26.

Madison Avenue, New York, 1974 

The corner, back in the ’70s, was where I most often liked to work because of the chaotic mix that traversed it. There was always such good nonstop energy up and down the avenue, while the cross streets poured their abundance continuously across the frame. So when a sudden gust of hot, New York summer air made the woman clamp her hat to her head she became, in that split second, like a ship’s figurehead to me, and I reacted immediately.

Paris, France, 1967 

I remember being in Paris for the first time in 1966—67, and for the six weeks that I was there, I often saw this purple couple scooting around the city, always dressed in some version of this color. But then, to be walking through the Bois de Boulogne and to see them there mounting their scooter, while their color appeared both in the car window and under their feet, was a kind of eye candy I couldn’t resist. Not to mention that all the cars played a perfect background color for me.

St. Louis, Missouri, 1978 

How could I pass this up? It’s many things all at once: a great collection of signage and graphics probably from before the Great Depression; the visual joke of BRAINS 25¢ and the idea of driving in to get some, which still pleases me; and then there is the aching, bittersweet loneliness of finding myself at the edges of a failing middle American city and discovering this kind of original beauty.

For ten days only, collect three signed 5-by-7-inch prints by Joel Meyerowitz for just $120.20 each during our special print sale. Proceeds support Aperture and Meyerowitz’s archive project, with an additional percentage of sales being donated to Equal Justice Initiative. Sale ends Saturday, July 26 at midnight EDT.

In London, an Exhibition Provokes Questions about Masculinity

For some men, masculinity is a habit or an addiction—a promise of power. But in the #MeToo era, can “liberation” be found through photography?

By Lou Stoppard

Catherine Opie, Rusty, 2008
© the artist and courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

In January, when invitations went out for the opening of the exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at London’s Barbican Art Gallery, one invitee emailed the show’s curator, Alona Pardo, to ask, “Do men really need liberating?” It’s a question that has, in recent weeks, become all the more compelling. “In one way, no, of course they don’t, because they hold the power,” Pardo told me recently. “But on the other hand, they do, because that power is incredibly constricting.”

There have been many exhibitions about men. And as the Guerrilla Girls have succinctly argued, the history of museums and their collections is, by and large, the history of men. But such exhibitions were usually not about “men as men”—they were about their brushstrokes, their visions, their camera work, the magnificence of their talent. The Masculinities exhibition, which reopened to the public on July 13, and accompanying catalogue are about “men as men.” The project, which includes fifty-five artists and work dating from the 1960s onward, considers, to quote Pardo and Jane Allison (the Barbican’s head of visual arts) in the catalogue’s foreword, “the ways in which masculinity is variously experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed.”

Peter Hujar, David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II), 1982
© The Peter Hujar Archive LLC, and courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Masculinities brings together names one would predict given such a topic—Wolfgang Tillmans, Hal Fischer, Adi Nes, Robert Mapplethorpe—alongside less expected (and thus often more rousing) works by the likes of Liz Johnson Artur, Kalen Na’il Roach, and Aneta Bartos. There is a significant amount of conceptually driven photography—“performative work” as Pardo puts it—which makes sense given that this is an exhibition of the Judith Butler school of thinking: gender is socially constructed and, by default, masculinity and femininity are learned, and performed, behaviors.

The notion of “men as men” is borrowed from the sociologist Michael Kimmel, who observed that there are thousands of books about adventures, travels, and battles, “but books about men are not books about men as men.” Chris Haywood, reader in critical masculinity studies at Newcastle University, UK, cites Kimmel in his catalogue essay looking at popular discourse around masculinity. Haywood argues that the very act of looking at men undermines notions of masculinity because, conventionally, it is “dependent on its being natural, effortless and normal.” Indeed, it seems that to be a man is to try at everything—building one’s body, excelling at work, earning more money—without ever admitting one is actually trying to become more of a man, in an attempt to bolster some shared sense of self-importance, a standard to keep up. To browse the photography in Masculinities and regard that effort, to see men as objects, flawed, constructed, fragile—in other words, to regard them in the way we often regard women—can feel pleasurable, or elicit an odd sense of vindication. One can revel in repulsion at the almost lazy bravado of some frat boy captured by Richard Mosse, or a high-school football player by Catherine Opie. Or one can feel more tender, if so inclined, when encountering a young dreamer in the self-portraits of Samuel Fosso.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Untitled, 1985
© the artist and courtesy Autograph, London

Masculinity has long been omnipresent yet strangely invisible. In 1997, Sally Johnson observed that “it is precisely men’s status as ‘ungendered representatives of humanity’ that is the key to patriarchy.” And yet, right now, it is widely advocated that “good” masculinity is rooted in self-awareness which, of course, means that some men (though not nearly enough) are reflecting on gender in relation to themselves, rather than seeing it as some exterior, foreign thing that affects women or queer people.

“It is a newfound phenomenon that men are looking at themselves, and men, for the first time, properly. Really examining forensically,” Pardo said. She also does some of the work for these men by considering the influence of campus traditions, the military, and sports on masculinity (although a broader analysis of the influence of capitalism would have been useful). Some photographers have done this for a long time—Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Herb Ritz, Rotimi Fani-Kayode—but such work was seen as a fringe endeavor, or some kind of homoerotic play: “not noble, not masculine,” as Pardo puts it. In photography, gender is primarily treated—and, in turn, viewed—superficially, as a matter of appearance. Masculinities is frequently concerned with style, fashion, uniform, facial hair, and fitness. Mapplethorpe’s 1980 images of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon—toned, muscular, and thus clearly included because she looks somehow “like a man”—highlight the way that the exhibition’s agenda returns intuitively to the archetype, to the clichés of hegemonic masculinity (strength, fitness, control) as a starting point, all while trying to push against them.

Hal Fischer, Street Fashion: Jock, 1977/2016, from the series Gay Semiotics
Courtesy the artist and Project Native Informant, London

Pardo takes as a given that masculinity is in “crisis,” although the extent to which that crisis is recognized, beyond certain “bubbles,” as she calls them, is up for debate. Look at President Trump and the attendees at his campaign rallies, clapping along at brutishness and bullying. Or the rise of “incel” groups. Or the boom in revenge porn. Or the spread of domestic violence during COVID-19 lockdowns. Or the frequency of male suicide. Or so much more. The bubbles Pardo mentions are not utopias, but instead sites of hypocrisy and self-delusion, as much as progress.

One can be aware of a problem while also unable to feel it, to turn empathy into personal action. A “woke” millennial man tweets about feminism but then ghosts his Tinder dates. Almost any woman you speak to will say that she, or one of her friends, has been sexually assaulted or harassed, and yet no man will admit that their social circle is full of creeps and rapists. “I really didn’t want the show to be men-bashing,” Pardo said. Why not? For some men, masculinity is a habit, performed with a mindless rhythm; for others, it’s an addiction, damaging but alluring, the promise of access to some higher place, some new sensation of power and control and possibility.

Adi Nes, Untitled, 1999, from the series Soldiers
Courtesy the artist and Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

The book is organized into sections which consider, first, Male Order: Power, Patriarchy and Space; followed by Too Close to Home: Family and Fatherhood. Next come Queering Masculinity, Reclaiming the Black Body, and Women on Men: Reversing the Male Gaze—an order that neatly seems to parody our broader, problematic social hierarchy, headed, as this book observes, by the cis white male. “And while it is safe to say that numerous masculinities exist within every culture and that they often vary according to class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and religion,” Pardo writes in the book’s opening essay, “it should be noted here that hegemonic masculinity sits atop this gendered social hierarchy by embodying the culturally idealised definition of masculinity, constructed as both oppositional and superior to femininity.”

And yet, it seems that the intentions of the ordering are sincere rather than goading. It is something of a shame to see these latter areas othered away from the earlier chapters on power, space, and family—notions relevant to understanding queer culture and its representation, or Black life, and, of course, women’s art. Still, the study of gender is full of divisions, generalizations, conceptual confusions, and, increasingly, angst. It is easy to dismiss any attempt to contribute to the conversation as having missed the mark, given the way the topic intersects the public and private; the obvious and obscure; the legal, bureaucratic, and structural with the all-important individual lived experience. Masculinities grapples with all this as earnestly as any institution can, especially when dealing with a medium (photography) that has its own baggage of patriarchy, exclusion, cliché, and erasure—themes that run through the work of some of the artists featured, from the exquisite portraits of Deana Lawson to the layered work of Sam Contis. The latter’s Deep Springs series (2017), an exploration of the American West and the relationship between its enduring motifs and masculinity, is a highlight of the book.

Perhaps because the US is currently in the run-up to a presidential election, I found myself especially entranced by Richard Avedon’s project The Family, originally made for Rolling Stone in the bicentennial election year of 1976 and featuring, among other influential figures, Ronald Reagan, who had just lost his bid for the Republican nomination to incumbent President Gerald Ford. Reagan looms large in the exhibition as a whole, an emblem for a Hollywood-cowboy kind of masculinity that presents itself as the embodiment of dignity, strength, and righteousness, an identity Reagan manipulated—as others do today. Reagan is cited by Larry Sultan, in the context of his adored series Pictures from Home (1992): “These were the Reagan years, when the image and the institution of the family were being used as an inspirational symbol by resurgent conservatives. I wanted to puncture this mythology of the family and to show what happens when we are driven by images of success.”

Karen Knorr, Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen, 1981–83, from the series Gentlemen
© the artist

In Avedon’s series, we see bankers, executives, publishers—the network that, through a well-oiled cycle of backstabbing and propping up, shapes America’s highest office. It is one of the most convincing attempts in the book at capturing not the surface nature of masculinity, but its goals, the insidious way it pulls individuals into its cause. Such themes preempt the ideas explored in Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen (1981–83), a study of the British political class, and Andrew Moisey’s book The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual (2018) which, to Pardo, show the “structures and scaffolding” that prop up patriarchy and “the way it is handed like a baton, from one generation to the next.” Avedon’s photographs are formal, still portraits, but you imagine the way the subjects made their way to the session, and the way they left. The cufflinks jangling as a hand is extended to shake. The woody smell of cologne. The straightening of the tie. The agreement, over lunch at the club, that the son of a friend will be given a coveted position. The box of cigars in the study. The wives in the other room while the men talk. The firmness of a hand on a woman’s lower back as it ushers her through the door. The discreet call to a lawyer to “make this whole thing go away.”

Much has changed since Avedon’s and Knorr’s pictures were made. A turning point, of course, was #MeToo, which is cited repeatedly throughout the book. Pardo said that while she had been thinking about the exhibition for years, the events of 2017 certainly “galvanized it.” This is just as I see it, but to me, the greatest shift post-#MeToo is that men now see what it is to spend each day afraid—something women have always known. We spend our time hyperaware of what others may read into our movements, our actions. What they may take from us, whether or not we want to give it. We women, through habit and pressure, turn ourselves into malleable vessels, ready to expand or retract or streamline depending on how we are treated. We are told to worry about being hurt or raped or killed with the kind of pragmatism of someone giving road directions: “Don’t walk that way at night.” Men, who once thought their actions, their dominance would never be challenged, now know that daily fear. It’s not identical—they are not afraid of being injured, but they are afraid of being shamed, accused, outed. Such fear stings.

Sam Contis, Untitled (Neck), 2015
© the artist

So maybe that’s why, when reading the book, I found myself returning to the fearful gazes. I found them poignant in the images purportedly partly about strength—could the subjects sense that their power was crumbling around them? The vulnerability in the eyes of Rineke Dijkstra’s bullfighters. The pathetic bile of Anna Fox’s father’s words, screamed at her mother, and perfectly, awfully, transcribed by the artist alongside photographs of mundane props of domesticity in her series My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (1999). The tight way a frail father grips his son, the photographer Masahisa Fukase, in the series Memories of Father (1971­–90). There are various projects in the book in which a male image-maker captures his father. Aren’t all of these largely centered on fear? An exercise in grappling with, and pre-empting, the particulars of one’s own forthcoming demise?

In another essay in the book, on the subject of order, Edwin Coomasaru, associate lecturer at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, interprets the same fear, a lingering nervousness, beneath the bravado on show in Knorr’s Gentlemen which, alongside images, includes quotes and phrases from her subjects. Coomasaru writes that “anxiety creeps into the proclamations of custodianship. The breakup of the British empire haunts such bravado; it is as though the speakers are struggling to adjust to the UK’s loss of influence on the world stage.”

“When the Rule of law Breaks / down, the World takes a further step towards Chaos,” reads one of Knorr’s captions, the words of a man in a suit photographed near St James’s Palace, London. Today, a text like this could be read as defending a man accused of sexual assault on social media but never prosecuted. Or criticizing the current protests against racism and police brutality, the couple of days of looting, the overall urgency. Another step towards chaos? Or a step towards his own irrelevance?

Kalen Na’il Roach, My Father Posing, 2013, from the series My Dad Without Everybody Else
© the artist

It is strange to think of the conversations happening when this show was first conceived and those occurring when it reopens. George Floyd murdered. Black Lives Matter activists marching. The US president even more tyrannical. The police again exposed for their racism and violence. And man proven powerless against a virus. The enormity of it all.

In his 1985 essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” cited repeatedly in the Masculinities book, James Baldwin writes that the American ideal of masculinity “has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white.” He also writes: “Violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the American imagination.” The recent, unbearable visibility of that lust—the sense of self that a police officer seemed to draw from placing his knee on the neck of an already restrained Floyd—should make us see all the pictures in Masculinities, and the power balances and struggles they purportedly show, afresh. If Masculinities is a battle cry against the tyranny of hegemonic masculinity, then mere liberation is one solution. But in recent weeks, there have been many others, more radical and more compelling in their urgency.

Lou Stoppard is a writer and curator based in London and a regular contributor to the Financial Times, New York Times, and Aperture.

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is on view at Barbican Art Gallery, London, through August 23, 2020.