Aperture's Blog, page 69

Introducing: Natalie Keyssar

In Venezuela, a photographer finds spontaneous grief and joy in everyday life.

By Laura Cadena

Natalie Keyssar, The inauguration of a new basketball court as part of a violence prevention initiative in Caracas, Caracas, Venezuela, 2019

In the seven years that Natalie Keyssar has spent photographing Venezuela, she has come to understand herself as a student of a culture that produces miracles.

In February 2014, four years into her career as a photojournalist, Keyssar’s first glimpse of Caracas was during a self-appointed assignment to cover the widespread protests that had overtaken Venezuela. Public discontent due to government corruption and deteriorating social and economic conditions soon devolved into violent clashes between protesters and government forces—rattling Nicolás Maduro’s unsteady presidency, whose slim victory the previous April marked a moment of immense fragility for the Bolivarian Revolution. In retrospect, Keyssar describes her first photographs of Venezuela as having “missed the point” and unwittingly contributed to “oversimplified narratives” about the crisis.

“I knew I didn’t understand, and I wanted to understand,” Keyssar recounted during a conversation in late March. “I wanted to communicate the complexities that were causing this unrest, and not just take the unrest out of context.” After wrapping up her assignment, Keyssar traveled home to New York City, only to pack her bags and return to Venezuela—this time compelled by an incipient awareness of the many ways in which Caracas would soon become her classroom.

In the years that followed, Keyssar produced an expansive body of work, which serves as a rare record of contemporary Venezuelan life. Her photographs eschew the photojournalistic tendency to zoom in on crisis, and instead linger on the affective residues and reorganizations of community life that crisis wears into the everyday. In doing so, these images make room for narratives that get written out of patriarchal political representations of Venezuelan life—in particular, the everyday experiences of Venezuelan women.

“So much of documentary photography focuses on the stars of the political show. There’s a circus around the men in power,” Keyssar says. “But if you pull back just a little bit, often in the same spaces, you start to see the roles that women play.”

In her series Make Me A Little Miracle (2014–ongoing), Keyssar proves the radical effects of pulling back by presenting a selection of images where women are no longer portrayed as redundant bodies in masculinized zones of conflict, but are instead acknowledged as fundamental agents in the sculpting and maintenance of Venezuela’s daily realities.

“I often see Venezuelan women as holding the fabric of society together as it tries to fall apart,” Keyssar says. In her photographs, evidence of this holding becomes enfleshed in a variety of iterations: women holding their heads down as an act of protection; holding each other as they climb over a broken fence; a woman holding herself in an empty kitchen. By centralizing these forms of holding, Keyssar’s photographs give stark legibility and protagonism to the ways Venezuelan women support their communities as they mitigate and maneuver the challenges of political violence and economic crisis.

Titled after a stanza in Rubén Blades’s 1978 salsa homage to María Lionza—a national emblem of hope and feminine strength often called upon for miracle work—Make Me A Little Miracle envisions these forms of maneuvering as a type of miracle working. However, miracles should not be understood as spontaneous blessings, but as the direct results of women’s labor and learning. “Despite all the hardship, there’s a space for the miraculous,” Keyssar says. “There’s a culture of overcoming, which has expanded my understanding of what is possible.”

Still, there’s a simultaneous grief and joy to the way Keyssar’s photographs apprehend these miracles while sensing the immanent pressure of hardship. Imbued with both gratitude and cautious admiration, Make Me A Little Miracle functions as the ramo de flores (bouquet of flowers), which Keyssar extends toward María Lionza—and all the women who aid her—in hopes that she might bear witness to one more miracle.

Natalie Keyssar, Anthony Arteago, 20, wounded by a blast of birdshot from Venezuelan forces after clashes on the Colombian border, Caracas, Venezuela, 2019

Natalie Keyssar, Cheerleaders backstage for a performance at a cryptocurrency conference at a luxury hotel, Caracas, Venezuela, 2018

Natalie Keyssar, A rainbow photographed from a helicopter over the Avila mountain range. The helicopter once belonged to Bill Clinton, Caracas, Venezuela, 2015

Natalie Keyssar, Caracas-based neighborhood dance team “Moni Dance” hop a fence on a rooftop, Caracas, Venezuela, 2019

Natalie Keyssar, Protesters clash with the National Guard in Altamira, Caracas, Caracas, Venezuela, 2014

Natalie Keyssar, Exhausted after two days in a row of waking up at 3 a.m. to wait in line for food, Eli rests at home with her daughter Rashelle, Caracas, Venezuela, 2016

Natalie Keyssar, A group of girls from La Vega prepare for a dance performance to celebrate the opening of a soup kitchen for their community, Caracas, Venezuela, 2019

Laura Cadena is a writer based in New York, where she co-facilitates the New York Arts Practicum. All images from the series Make Me A Little Miracle (2014–ongoing) courtesy the artist. 

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

How Should a Mother Be?

Charlie Engman’s portraits of his mother are an intimate—and provocative—exchange of mind, body, and spirit.

By Sheila Heti

Charlie Engman, Mom in the Yellow Suburbs, 2016
Courtesy the artist

What is a grown man supposed to do with his mother? Ignore her. Help her. Visit her dutifully. Keep an emotional and intellectual distance. Bring the grandchildren around to show. Suffer with a plastic smile through Thanksgiving dinners. Keep the thick and invisible wall between grown child and mature parent in its place.

Charlie Engman, Mom in Purple, 2016
Courtesy the artist

To do anything else is a taboo that we do not even talk about. But the heart-stopping fear and wonder and sometimes disgust that Charlie Engman’s portraits of his mother engender in the viewer make this taboo plain. To make art with someone else (as Engman and his mother make these photographs together) is always to engage in an intimate exchange of mind, body, spirit, heart. Why should it be so shocking to see this intimacy happen between a grown man and his mother? If a man sees his mother naked—photographs her naked—the mind reels. It’s not incest, the viewer assures herself, but is it like incest? What sorts of conversations did these two have? It’s not disgust—it’s almost envy. How did this mother-son dyad breach the invisible wall and come to be collaborators? Come to be peers? How did they take on such new (and seemingly free) roles in relation to each other, not the roles prescribed by society—in which the son views his mother with polite forbearance and the mother hides from her child the truth of her aging body (at the very least!)—but something radical they invented in common? The photographs do not answer these questions, but these questions hang in their atmosphere. There is something proud in these photographs—something of the Nietzschean Übermensch. There is also something abject—to abjure the roles that others play is both heroic and abject. That is how these pictures seem. That is how this mother seems.

 

Charlie Engman, Mom with Brace, 2016
Courtesy the artist

But it is not only that the model is the photographer’s mother that chips away at our conventional sensibilities; it is also that the female model is old. It’s hardly worth saying that the desire of men (and of many women) to look at a woman is most often the desire to look at a young woman. Looking at a young woman is natural, because on some level the (male) looker is looking in order to assess her fertility: there is something wholesome about it. Sure, it is about lust, but that lust is about adding to the human population. Looking at an older woman cannot fit into that equation so snugly. It cannot be as simply explained. If looking at a young woman is natural, looking at an old woman is perverse. No one would argue this. We don’t believe it. And yet that is in these pictures, too.

Charlie Engman, Mom on Rocks, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Also, a mother is supposed to tell her son what to do. A son is not supposed to tell his mother what to do. But even though these two are collaborators in their art, if the viewer doesn’t know this, we credit the photographer with the inevitable power any artist has over their subject, and so, in these pictures, there is a quality of sadism, or at least of revenge: the son orders the mother around now. Finally the child has the upper hand!

 

Charlie Engman, Mom (detail), 2014
Courtesy the artist

Yet you can’t help but notice, looking at this woman’s face, that she is strong. She is magnetic. She has something deep and compelling inside her. She is not a mere tool of her child’s will. What if she is the artist, and her son is the tool? To dwell on this idea while looking at these pictures is very gratifying.

Charlie Engman, Mom in the Snow, 2012
Courtesy the artist

But that is not where we can end. We must accept that they are both the artist, and that they made these images together, because that is the truth. Which brings us back to their Thanksgiving dinner—achingly, unimaginably unlike our own! Or else, just like our own. Perhaps only in front of and behind the lens, only in the making of art (as is the case with every artist), are this mother and son so free.

 

Sheila Heti is the author several books, including How Should a Person Be? (2010) and Motherhood (2018).

Read more from Aperture, issue 233, “Family.”

5 Depression-Era Photographs That Galvanized Social Change

From Dorothea Lange to Walker Evans, the FSA photographers of the 1930s shaped a vision of the world transformed by economic crisis.

By Eli Cohen

As the United States dives further into what will surely be an economic recession, and as anxiety increases over how the nation will respond, photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the wake of the Great Depression show the potential impact of the arts on an American collective conscience. During the Great Depression, the famed photographers of the FSA, led by director Roy Stryker, dispersed across the once prosperous nation to document the fall. Part of a government-funded relief program, the FSA’s photography division strove to record economic and environmental struggles, propagate the era’s essential photographs, educate Americans on the country’s situation, and inspire social change. “We believed, we knew, we saw,” said Stryker in 1963, “we sensed we were a part of this perception, part of coming in contact, part of seeing a world—a country of ours in turmoil, a country in trouble.”

In the exhibition One Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration, viewable online at Howard Greenberg Gallery until May 15, this essential historical record comes rushing back through iconic pictures taken by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, and others. Looking at the FSA photographs today, in an online viewing room presented by necessity rather than comfort or experimentation, we are left to marvel at the lasting strength of these images, as well as their newly relevant meanings, and to wonder how the contemporary moment will be portrayed when we look back in the decades to come.

Dorothea Lange, Greek migratory woman living in a cotton camp near Exeter, California, ca. 1935
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Dorothea Lange

The beginnings of the FSA photography project aligned perfectly with a transition in Dorothea Lange’s early career, when she left San Francisco to focus on photographing agricultural labor and migratory workers throughout the state. Her most powerful work pictured men, women, and children either at work or stranded in the aftermath, like this woman: hands on hips, an understated, worldly experience emanating from her posture. Lange’s monumental photographs from her time in California—Migrant Mother (1936), Filipinos Cutting Lettuce (1935), and White Angel Breadline (1933) are on view in the gallery as well—form the backbone of the FSA’s lasting historical significance. In these photographs, Lange aligned her social documentation with a labor-focused political agenda that remains pointedly relevant today.

Walker Evans, Construction worker, Louisiana, 1936
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Walker Evans

For Evans, the photograph was a site of negotiation, a setting to distill the American experience into a singular moment. His Depression-era portraits, immortalized in his collaborative book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), portray a commanding stoicism in the face of hardship. When fellow FSA photographer Jack Delano first saw Evans’s photographs, he said he was “stunned by the simplicity, sureness, power, and grace of the images.” This photograph of a construction worker in Louisiana is no different. Shot at an upward angle, Evans’s subject is given nearly mythical status, even as he looks away with a despondent glance.

Russell Lee, Untitled (Floods Kill Hundreds . . .), 1936
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Russell Lee

Feeling limited by his chosen medium of painting, Russell Lee first picked up a camera in 1935; one year later, he was hired by Roy Stryker at the Resettlement Administration—which would later become the Farm Security Administration. Perhaps the most prolific photographer employed by the FSA, Lee is most known for his photo-essays depicting rural Iowa and other locales in his coverage of the Midwest and West Coast. Lee’s photographs presented in One Third of a Nation give new light to the urban scenes he captured over those same years. Here, with a sign overhead proclaiming, “Floods Kill Hundreds in East,” and a man playing violin on the street, the malaise of metropolitan society resonates across America, urban and rural alike.

Marion Post Wolcott, Unemployed coal miner’s daughter carrying home can of kerosene. Company housing, Scotts Run, W. Va., 1938
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Marion Post Wolcott

In 1937, stuck shooting fashion assignments for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Marion Post (later Wolcott) approached her friend and mentor Ralph Steiner for advice. Two weeks later, buoyed by recommendations from Steiner and Paul Strand, she joined Stryker’s team of photographers at the FSA. Post made this photograph on her first assignment, in the coal-mining regions of West Virginia, hard struck by economic depression. A haunting image, the isolation speaks to the contemporary moment in both context and tone. As industries grind to a halt, oil prices implode, and streets empty, Post’s photograph of an unemployed coal miner’s daughter is a loaded reminder of what the next years could look like.

Jack Delano, Greene County, Georgia, 1941
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Jack Delano

Like Walker Evans’s construction worker, the subjects of Jack Delano’s photographs in Greene County, Georgia, are tall-standing, prophetic figures. A hotbed of FSA and New Deal activity—numerous FSA photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, and Russell Lee, visited in the late 1930s and early ’40s—Greene County was a Southern center of agriculture, poverty, and racial animosities. In 1941, Delano added his own angle to the county’s photographic record, joining the sociologist Arthur Raper to pair visual documentation with written analysis. There, Delano used his camera to expose Southern poverty and racism alongside surveys of the people he saw, their livelihoods, vernacular architecture, and landscape: timely visual ethnographies set against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

Eli Cohen is the work scholar for Aperture magazine.

One Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration is viewable online at Howard Greenberg Gallery through May 15, 2020.

In a World of Loneliness, One Photographer’s Search for Community

Eli Durst speaks about team-building exercises, suburban Americana, and why his photographs resist interpretation.

By Gideon Jacobs

Eli Durst, Gwen in Circle, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Eli Durst’s first monograph, The Community, an examination of “the fundamental search for community in America,” arrives this spring in a moment of unprecedented isolation and alienation. The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered the act of gathering—a behavior coded into our very DNA—unsafe and, in most of the country, illegal. But even before the lockdown, sociological studies have long shown that in-person community is on the decline, and that the practice of building intimacy and identity in a group is migrating, like seemingly everything else, into the digital sphere. I wanted to discuss this—the uncanny relationship between the book and the state of the world it’s entering—but also get a better general understanding of Durst’s photographic approach as he takes on more editorial assignments. We spoke in late April, mediated by our screens, of course, a mode of conversation that felt appropriate for reasons beyond public health mandates.

Eli Durst, Adam, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Gideon Jacobs: To begin, I wanted to ask you about the end of your book, the very direct statement of intent on the final page: “Put simply, these photographs are about the search for purpose and meaning in a world that both demands and resists interpretation.” I was kind of surprised to see you explain what the work is about in such a straightforward way. What made you want to articulate that?

Eli Durst: Well, I wanted to give some context without having to provide titles or details about each image. I felt like a little bit of explanation would give people some more context to interpret the book. However, I put it in the back of the book for a reason—so the viewer can look at the work first. I kept the explanation brief for this same reason. I want the viewer to interpret the work for themselves, but I don’t want to be intentionally opaque.

Eli Durst, Melting Ice Cream, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: It seems like a tricky balance to strike for all photographers, finding a comfortable zone between giving context, explaining, priming, and letting the work speak for itself. Where do you think you fall on that spectrum? Is it something you think about?

Durst: I generally don’t like over-explanatory text, because I want to figure out the work for myself. But at the same time, I think you need to give the viewer a framework through which to interpret the work. I hope the book remains a mysterious object, even with the text in the back.

Eli Durst, Casa Ritual, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: I think it does! Let’s talk about that framework. What is the link between community—the more overt subject of the book—and our search for purpose and meaning—the more subtle subject?

Durst: The book is about pursuing physical community—something that seems even more important now that we have been deprived of it for public-health reasons. The series is not really meant as a documentary project studying the unique qualities of each group or activity. I’m more interested in the commonalities across all these different pursuits. What is everyone after? Why, in the twenty-first century, congregate at a rec center or church basement? What is at stake? What do people gain from being together in physical space? What do people need from each other, from a community?

Eli Durst, Knot Tying with Dante, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: Something I think a lot about when looking at your pictures is that, for community building activities to be effective, you need an earnest buy-in from the whole group. People can’t be too cool for school. Your photographs are often striking to me in the way they capture earnestness, a rare kind of sincere participation. What is it about that quality in a person or a moment that attracts you?

Durst: That’s true. You have to be vulnerable in some way, open yourself up to other people. With the team-building exercises, people think they’re silly or ridiculous, but that’s the entire point, for your boss to do something that they would never normally do, to make yourself look ridiculous, to give up your ego in some small way. It’s not that trust falls give you some business acumen you lacked before. It’s that you bond with someone by acting outside of yourself.

Eli Durst, Lightbulb, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: That vulnerability and ridiculousness can make your pictures kind of funny. Do you ever fear that humor? Do you ever worry that these earnest subjects, when viewed by those outside of the team-building activity—especially when viewed by a critical, cynical photo audience—will be laughed at for the wrong reasons?

Durst: Definitely, and it’s something that I really tried to work against in the edit of the book. I cut out some photos that I thought were successful, because they felt too jokey and undermined the project as a whole. But humor is still a part of the work. The statement at the end of the book about “a world that both demands and resists interpretation” alludes to a certain absurdity in our pursuit of meaning. When I started making these photos in graduate school, I gravitated towards funny Americana-type subjects, like bingo for instance, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t satisfied making ironic photos. I also didn’t want the pictures to become overly sappy. The tone of the project changed a lot as I was making it. I tried to learn from the pictures.

Eli Durst, Sam and Ben, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: What about this body of work feels uniquely American to you? Could this book have been made in another country or culture?

Durst: I don’t think so. The core of my work, regardless of series, has always focused on American identity and suburban iconography. I think the need for a sense of purpose is universal, but the setting in which this pursuit unfolds in The Community is uniquely American. I was an American studies major in undergrad, and I’ve always been drawn to photography for its ability to investigate or think critically about the landscape around me, the landscapes that I feel closest to.

Eli Durst, James with Baby, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: Did this have anything to do with why you called the book The Community instead of simply Community?

Durst: I liked The Community, because it almost made it feel like this was one fictional community center, in which all these events were unfolding simultaneously.

Jacobs: It seems like one of the possible consequences of the pandemic might be that it has sped up the migration of community from the real world to the digital one. Do you see your book as covering the last vestiges of something? Maybe something that won’t really exist for the next generation?

Durst: I was reading the book Bowling Alone (2000) when I started making the work and thinking about the disappearance of certain aspects of American culture. I wonder if the move online during COVID will be permanent, or if this is actually making people realize how much value they get from interacting with other humans face to face.

Eli Durst, Apple (Meeting), 2016

Jacobs: Over the last several months, you have been shooting a lot of editorial assignments, including a piece about criminal justice in Florida, as well as a profile of Bernie Sanders, for the New York Times Magazine. How do you bring your approach to a more photojournalistic arena? Do you even make a distinction regarding process in your head? Or is it all just one thing: photography?

Durst: It really depends on the assignment. For some, like the story I did about Buc-ee’s for the New York Times, I approach it in the exact same way that I would approach art-making, which makes sense because it’s very much in line with what I’m interested in generally. Other assignments, however, like straightforward portraits, are different. You have to think about the tone and position of the story. I don’t want to just slap a style onto a subject matter or story that doesn’t ask for it. With editorial assignments, you obviously have a lot more restrictions and limitations. I have less directorial control, which is a big part of my art-making—feeling free to change things or move things, or create scenarios in which people have to act or react.

Eli Durst, Brisket Round Up, New Braunfels, Texas, 2019, for the New York Times
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: The photographs in The Community often imply a story, either individually or in sequence, making a viewer consciously or unconsciously extrapolate a narrative that explains how this moment came to be. As your editorial work is usually made to illustrate a written piece, is there room for the abstraction that sometimes flavors the book?

Durst: I hope my images from the Buc-ee’s story have the same, strange, open-ended quality of The Community, but there’s also a photo editor and publication to think of. They have a big say in which photos run, of course.

Eli Durst, Buc-ee the Beaver Statue, Katy, Texas, 2019, for the New York Times
Courtesy the artist

Jacobs: The other clear distinction between your editorial work and your more personal work is that, when working for a magazine, you’re beholden to some orientation around truth, and have to, at least loosely, abide by some photojournalistic codes. Do you find this limiting? Do you ever find it tricky to straddle the line between docu-art and docu-journalism? 

Durst: Here’s an example: In the book, there’s a photo of a man named Jerry, who I had put on a wig and act out some basic scenarios. When I photographed Jeff Sessions for an assignment, I would have loved to put a wig on him . . . but that was definitely not allowed. You’re restricted by the story but also the realities of access and journalistic ethics in ways that you’re not when making art. I don’t think changing or manipulating a scene necessarily makes a photo less true. In fact, sometimes you can get at things that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent.

Gideon Jacobs has contributed to the New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, BOMB, Playboy, and VICE.

Eli Durst: The Community was published by Mörel in spring 2020.

What Is Street Photography without Street Life?

In the age of pandemic, the romance of the empty street becomes the terror of absence.

By Geoff Dyer

Charles Marville, Rue de Constantine, ca. 1865
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and courtesy Art Resource, NY

So here we are, thrown back to the dawn of street photography! I still remember the thrill I got when I first read that the streets in photographs of nineteenth-century cities weren’t really as empty as they looked—and as ours are now. It was because the slow shutter speeds vaporized or disappeared any people, horses, and carriages moving quickly. London and Paris became cities of the dead, haunted by the faint ghosts of anyone moving slowly or shifting position slightly. Only the rigidly unmoving remained substantial and intact, fully corporeal.

What I find extraordinary now is that I ever took these photographs of empty cities at face value, as it were, since I knew from the densely populated novels of Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens how these streets were full of characters bumping into or evading each other according to the needs of the bulky mechanics of theme and plot. In London, even the pollution—the famous fog of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853)—was not just visible, but palpable. It seems that two contradictory versions of the same place—one crowded, the other deserted—were able to coexist in my head. The idyllic quality of the latter, which became more pronounced as pressure was applied by the former, found apocalyptic expression in the opening sequence of an empty Westminster in Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie movie, 28 Days Later. The nearest one could come to glimpsing this future in the actual life of the present was emerging from a nightclub at six o’clock on a Sunday morning to find the waiting world devoid of life except for a few saucer-eyed and friendly zombies (as corroborated by Richard Renaldi in his 2016 book Manhattan Sunday).

Richard Renaldi, 06:27, from the book Manhattan Sunday (Aperture, 2016)
© the artist

A version of this experience animates Sebastian Schipper’s film Victoria (2015), when the eponymous heroine leaves a club with her new acquaintances to pursue a real-time, single-take adventure in the Berlin dawn. On a smaller scale, Claude Lelouch’s C’etait un rendezvous (1976) features an eight-minute, high-speed journey through Paris, filmed in one take by a camera attached low down, near the front bumper of a car driven by the stunty auteur—at 5:30 am on a Sunday morning in August. It’s not just exciting, it’s terrifying, because although most Parisians are either en vacance or asleep, the city is not empty. The risk is all too real.

Nowadays, even trundling a shopping trolley through Whole Foods feels risky but, as far as I know, photographers have not yet been able to capture the psychic terror of the times. The source of the threat is invisible and its effects, overwhelmingly, are of absence. Its symbol, the mask, hides from view.

Eugène Atget, Café, Avenue de la Grande-Armée, 1924–25
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The camera can only film what is there. So, as John Szarkowski pointed out, while it was possible to construct a memorial to the murdered President Lincoln sitting in a chair, photography was left only with the chair. As a result, empty chairs were themselves altered by the invention of photography. A picture taken by Eugène Atget in 1924–25 of empty chairs outside a Paris café, Szarkowski suggests, is imbued with the thought of soldiers who did not return from the battlefields of the First World War. Published recently in the New Yorker, Philip Montgomery’s photographs of chairs stacked up in cafés attest to what might be termed the consistent contrary of the scene recorded by Atget: the hope of an eventual return of customers and life from the dead time of lockdown.

The last customer at a Jackson Heights restaurant before citywide closures took effect, March 16, 2020. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for the New Yorker
Courtesy the artist

And what of the streets themselves? Garry Winogrand did not like being called a street photographer. Referring to his book The Animals (1968), he said he might as well be called a zoo photographer, but our current predicament shows the limits of his objection. If its cages are empty, a zoo is no longer a zoo, while an empty street remains a street. What’s happened is that street photography has been obliged to become a species of architectural photography. And while it used to be necessary, if you wanted to concentrate on the buildings, to get out of bed as early on a Sunday as Lelouch, there is no longer any need to set your alarm. Time has largely been taken out of the day (just as the days have been taken out of the week), so that the street can be surveyed in its Giorgio de Chirico–like emptiness at all hours. There is no urgent need now to have a Leica loaded with high-speed film, since the fleeting rhymes caught by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt or the collisions jumped on by Winogrand are few and far between. This, instead, is the domain of the large-format view camera. The terror is manifest as its opposite: a ubiquitous visual calm—the opposite of a riot or carnival—which only accentuates the unphotographable wail of ambulances.

Garry Winogrand, New York City, 1968
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The loss of life from COVID-19 is potentially huge, and the loss of street life necessary to minimize that loss involves the loss of almost everything that makes the life of the street photographer worth living. Winogrand has often been lambasted for leching his way around the streets of New York. He was not shy about admitting that whenever he saw an attractive woman, he wanted to photograph her, and there is ample evidence, to put it mildly, of how doggedly he pursued this ambition. With so much going on, however, an element of this endeavor—and of his work more generally—is easily overlooked: namely, its lyricism. It’s not just that he occasionally conveys that enduring phenomenon, love at first sight. Sometimes in life, this first sight can lead to thirty years of marriage, an outcome that lies beyond the severely limited scope of the picture frame. More usually, on the street, it evaporates—due in no small measure to the necessary observance of decorum and respect—even as it is experienced. The moment it occurs is followed, almost instantly, by its disappearance. And that—unlike the terror—is something that the camera, in sufficiently dexterous hands, has proved itself highly capable of recording: the eternal and transient romance of the street. It is masked and much missed.

Geoff Dyer is the author of numerous books, including The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018) and The Ongoing Moment (2009). See-Saw, a selection of his writing on photography from the last ten years, will be published in May 2021.

Luigi Ghirri and the Indefinable

Aperture is deeply saddened by the loss of the Italian art historian Germano Celant (1940–2020). Here, we revisit an excerpt from Celant’s introduction to Luigi Ghirri’s 2008 Aperture monograph.

Relating real copies of urban landscapes to real human beings, Ghirri’s photographs always produced an element of surprise.

By Germano Celant

Luigi Ghirri, Lucerne, 1971–72, from Paesaggi di cartone (Cardboard Landscapes)
Courtesy the Estate of Luigi Ghirri

Photography expanded in the 1960s, as photographers sought to imbue it with philosophical meaning, underscoring its connection to the worlds of thought and existential experience. It was to be considered not a secondary, incidental medium, with an almost parasitical relationship to reality, as many still then thought, but an affirmation of interrogative vision and of the principle of bearing visual witness. The camera could record countless phenomena, could produce a potentially infinite flow of images, yet the artist who reflected on the meaning of making photographs could compose them out of elements that might be disparate but were nevertheless ultimately unified. Pleasure or censure, conscious awareness or unconscious impulse, might inform the images that reflected his or her perspective on the world; the realism and naturalism that had come to dominate the understanding of the medium gave way to an interpretation of the photograph as an evaluation or assessment of reality rather than a description of it. The objectification of a perception that moved between the living and the material, the organic and the historical, the animate and the inanimate, the photograph was intellectual in intention, the result of an action that was mental and emotional yet was fused with an appreciation of reality. Even as one was allowed access to something presented as external and objectified, one’s attention was transported elsewhere.

Luigi Ghirri, Rimini, 1985, from Paesaggio Italiano (Italian Landscape)
Courtesy the Estate of Luigi Ghirri

“Artist” photographers from Ugo Mulas to Duane Michals made this transition from work that was documentary, and often took advantage of accident, to an understanding of the photograph as involving an intentional meaning of their own making. Their approaches relied not just on cropping and montage, or on the duration of a sequence of images over time—this is still a simplification—but on the intrinsic, logical value of the experience of seeing. Here was an alternative to the idea of the photographic document as indifferent and neutral; instead it was an act of the imagination, something with an autonomy like that of language, analyzing the continuity of language and contributing to an emerging understanding of the representational surface. From Giulio Paolini to Ed Ruscha, photography was transformed from a practical pursuit into a study of the linguistic devices involved in the construction of the image. It took possession of itself, becoming a vital philosophical elaboration, less an attempt to record reality than the product of a free activity of the mind. Photographic images are “unreal” in that they are “imaginary.” As “unreal” syntheses, they subtend an “elsewhere” that exists only in the eye of the photographer, and of the viewer who observes the photograph, scrutinizes it, analyzes it, interprets it. The experience of making photographs consequently implies a detachment, a suspension, in the confrontation with reality, in favor of an increasing absorption in the photographic process—a subversion of fact in favor of feelings and thoughts that “speak” through the language of images. The photographer moves away from the habits and customs of photographic convention and engages instead in the creation or visualization of a social and cultural communication involving pictorial display. This makes available a concept of space and time, of life and idea, that is interwoven with the persona of the artist/photographer, so that existence and technique enter into an essential relationship.

Luigi Ghirri, Rome, 1979, from Diaframma
Courtesy the Estate of Luigi Ghirri

In the early 1970s, then, photography asserted its autonomy. Surrendering its naturalistic function as a reproducer of facts, insisting on a relationship with reality that was less mimetic than creative, it transformed itself into an “apparition” that put inner aspects of a situation on view, a mirror that “made” details of the world and brought them to attention, that echoed reality yet revealed in it something unknown. Since photography documented preexisting conditions in the world, it could not be wholly new or invented, but it extended the real into the unreal, the true into the false, the original into the simulation. Indeed, photography exists at the threshold between these polarities, for it counterposes perception and “vision”—a vision made up of dreams, impulses, illusions, hallucinations. It brings to the surface events that are personal and therefore unreal, since they are not shared by others, and it makes them real—in fact puts the real and the unreal on the same level, and defines their relationship as the communicative process. Whether printed on light-sensitized paper or projected with a movie or TV screen, it makes visible an inaccessible reality with which we desperately seek to fix some parameters of certainty. But since the camera can produce an infinite flow of images, that certainty wavers, and the distinction between illusion and non-illusion remains undefined; we can only communicate.

Luigi Ghirri, Capri, 1981, from Paesaggio Italiano (Italian Landscape)
Courtesy the Estate of Luigi Ghirri

This is what Luigi Ghirri began to attempt in 1970. He had lived through the “desubjectification” of photography in the era of Process art and Conceptual art—the liberation of the photographic image from its aestheticisms and heroisms—and had seen there a danger of nullification. So he threw himself into affirming the grandeur and power of photographic language as a territory in which extremes—of the conscious and the unconscious, the real and the unreal, the physical and the metaphysical—could be maintained and preserved. Surfaces sensitive equally to lived experience and the linguistic nature of human perception, his pictures both stimulate and question the differences between true and false. A collector of surveys or maps that describe being and nonbeing within a single image, he produced a photography of both action and thought, rooted in history and the past but with its origin in the present, locating something there that occurs only within its frame, while the world flows by.

To continue reading, buy It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It… Photographs by Luigi Ghirri, edited by Melissa Harris and Paola Ghirri, and originally published by Aperture in 2008.

A Portrait of the Socialites as Bright Young Things

In Cecil Beaton’s glittering world, everyone was dressed up with somewhere to go.

By Lou Stoppard

Cecil Beaton, The Silver Soap Suds (from left, Baba Beaton, the Hon. Mrs Charles Baillie-Hamilton, and Lady Bridget Poulett), 1930
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Everything was so beautiful, until it wasn’t. The parties, the costumes, the faces, the promises.

A visit to the exhibition Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG)—before it was closed due to the health crisis—or a read of the accompanying catalogue, provokes a complex kind of tenderness. It’s an imagined nostalgia for the seemingly carefree nature of the interwar years, when the parties were long and the people were unashamedly flamboyant; the days when an elaborate headdress, or the gushing words of so-and-so, could be a ticket to social and artistic success. But there’s an odd kind of revulsion too—at the excess, the navel-gazing, the bickering, the frivolity, the wastefulness, and, of course, the emptiness beneath the glitter.

Yes, Bright Young Things is a diverting riot of stylized portraits, silver hues, polka dots, doodles, and Beaton-style handwritten headings, a festival of high-society titbits and deliciously witty hearsay, located by the exhibition’s curator, the talented Robin Muir, in various biographies and diaries. Even the tone of Beaton’s diary-writing seems to have seeped into Muir’s text, which talks gayly of great beauties, meteoric success, effortless humor, and all manner of people coming up and down to Oxford and Cambridge.

Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor, Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant, 1927
Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

But there’s a probing sense of concern too. In the catalogue’s introduction, Muir writes of the summer of 1927, which solidified the reputation of the Bright Young Things, the monied young people who delighted in endless parties and dress-up opportunities. He quotes from the diary of Evelyn Waugh, who bullied Beaton at school, and whose novels—especially Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930)—are deliciously bitchy takedowns of the whole Bright Young Things scene. “I went to another party the other night,” wrote Waugh. “Everyone was dressed up and for the most part looking rather ridiculous. Olivia had had her hair died and curled and was dressed to look like Brenda Dean Paul. She seemed so unhappy.”

Dualities are a good way of thinking about Beaton’s work, which is, in some ways, in step with the zeitgeist, when one considers his devotion to artificiality: the performance of identity, a freewheeling approach to gender, the idea that through dress and image, you can become the person you want to be and transcend your lot. Yet these same qualities might strike as jarring, given the conversations around privilege and representation abundant in photography—and society—today. Beaton’s folk were posh folk; the book itself is largely a who’s who, ordered by name and family—the Sitwells, Stephen Tennant, Lady Diana Cooper, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, the Princesse de Faucigny-Lucinge, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, the Maharani of Cooch Behar.

Cecil Beaton, Paula Gellibrand, Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

There is talent amongst it all. A web of names spins around every image, every interaction—Virginia Woolf, the actress Anna May Wong, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the author Daphne du Maurier. Everyone seemed to known everyone. And they are all lovely looking, and maybe that in itself is just fine. Beaton, after all, didn’t pretend to care about much more than appearance (recall the title of his lauded book, The Book of Beauty, from 1930, which featured drawings and photographs of some fifty sitters, personally selected by Beaton as a means of cementing his status as an authority on taste, fashion, and the general hierarchy of who was in and who was out). Beaton’s goals, read aloud by Muir at the exhibition’s opening back in March, were, “all the trappings of celebrity.” In 1923, Beaton wrote, “I don’t want people to know me as I really am, but as I am trying and pretending to be.” Has there ever been a more modern sentiment, so fitting for the Instagram age?

As Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the NPG, explains in the catalogue, Beaton’s work offers a nice narrative arc when it comes to the museum’s—and, indeed, Britain’s—display of photography. This is the third Beaton exhibition at the venue. A large retrospective in 1968 was the first of any living photographer to be held in a British museum. The exhibition was extended twice, and its installation saw the gallery change its stance of displaying portraits of living sitters; after the show’s success, the gallery hired its first keeper of photography and film. Another display of Beaton’s portraits was mounted in 2004. It seems fitting that Bright Young Things comes at a time of transition for the gallery, which is scheduled to be closing this year for renovation, and at a point when questions around photography, and, in turn, gender, performance, style, and identity (all Beaton themes) are in a dynamic period of flux.

Cecil Beaton, Anna May Wong, 1929
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Those interested in detail will be well served. Muir, with meticulous research, encourages us to think about the amount Beaton did with so little. At the start, Beaton’s tools were little more than his patient sisters, a folding Kodak A3, and a stash of bedsheets and household objects to be used as backdrops and props. Muir describes Beaton’s photographic style, once fully developed, as “a marriage of Edwardian stage portraiture to nascent European surrealism, filtered through a determinedly English sensibility, one that revered in particular the modes and gestures of the upper classes.” The pictures themselves reveal something elemental about the human condition, about wants, needs, social habits, manners, norms and, that all-important factor in Beaton’s career—maybe the most important factor of all—ambition. We see, through Beaton, his subjects’ relentless search for distraction and, simultaneously, for meaning. We see their quest for a semblance of place, a home, but also, in contradiction, for freedom—for an escape from the humdrum, for that heady, if sometimes startling, sensation of not being trapped, never fully attached, maybe never fully present.

Still, of course, it had to end somewhere. And Bright Young Things smartly chronicles the demise, as well as the rise, of the Bright Young Things—including Beaton’s own fall from grace after he submitted a design with an anti-Semitic slur in the margins to Vogue in 1938. Clearly, from the very fact of this book and exhibition’s existence, and the countless more before it, the downfall was short lived.

Paul Tanqueray, Cecil Beaton, 1937
© Estate of Paul Tanqueray and courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

Elsewhere, we learn of the addictions, the suicides, the time wasted, the unfulfilled potential. I found myself moved by the restlessness of it all—the hedonism, the vaguely nihilistic sense of freedom, but also the guilt. The Bright Young Things were the generation after the war had passed. They were, for a while, the lucky ones. There was, like today, a remarkable split between generations, a chasm between young and old. And if you were young, you were so very young.

Post-lockdown, post-COVID-19, post–all the death and anxiety and the relentlessness of being cooped up and afraid, will the young of today fully take up their place as a “generation after”? Will it be the roaring twenties all over again? Will they break free from worry into parties and make-believe and lightness? Or will they do something more? I’m sure the latter, but who can know. The words of Lord Metroland, in Waugh’s Vile Bodies, have never seemed more poignant: “There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade. And all they seem to do is play the fool.”

Cecil Beaton, Edith Sitwell at Sussex Gardens, 1926
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Lou Stoppard is a writer and curator based in London. She is the editor of Fashion Together: Fashion’s Most Extraordinary Duos on the Art of Collaboration (2017), Shirley Baker (2019), and Pools: Lounging, Diving, Floating, Dreaming: Picturing Life at the Swimming Pool (2020).

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things opened at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on March 12; the museum is currently closed due to the coronavirus crisis. See the museum’s website for updates.

A Land of Their Own

In the 1970s, Meadow Muska documented the feminist collectives that offered a new definition of home for hundreds of women.

By Michelle Millar Fisher

Meadow Muska, Rising Moon Welcoming, Aitkin, MN, 1974/2019
© the artist and courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art

Anyone who has studied architecture’s histories knows that utopias are rarely, if ever, realized. The annals are littered with paper plans for radical homes never built or, worse, promised paradises—from Pruitt–Igoe in St. Louis to Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City—that saw the light of day and either failed their residents or only worked as intended for a fortunate few.

Yet, there are exceptions to every rule.

It surprises me little that when utopia comes close to actualization, its architects are usually not men. One such breach, born of the radical feminist movements of the 1960s, came in the form of 1970s and ’80s womyn’s land collectives that created new paradigms of domestic freedom and kinship between lesbians denied those rights across the United States. Meadow Muska, a photographer, feminist, and master electrician, recorded land collectives that existed in her home state of Minnesota. Fresh out of her BFA at Ohio University, Meadow (who prefers to be referred to by first name) made work that chronicled the “beautiful, strong women, full of love and joy” that she witnessed at places like Rising Moon, a one-hundred-sixty-acre site in Aitkin, Minnesota. Her work was largely unknown until a 2019 exhibition curated by Casey Riley, Strong Women, Full of Love, was staged at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA).

Meadow captured a time when hundreds of women, most identifying as lesbians, imagined a radically different version of belonging, forming intentional, women-only, agrarian communities across the U.S. As women were usually paid less than their male counterparts in the workplace and unable to access the same credit as men, the womyn’s land movement burgeoned as they pooled their resources and purchased pockets of rural land. Rejecting traditional expectations around their reproductive capacities, the shape and design of the home, and women’s prescribed roles within it, they made room for their own desires and identities. They built physical and psychological hearths with their own hands, from the ground up, and recorded these revolutionary acts through photographing their lives, loves, and independence.

Meadow Muska, Tradeswomen: Get Serious!, 1976/2019
© the artist and courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art

For Meadow, as for so many of her generation, freedom to express one’s sexuality and personhood meant crossing a threshold both literally and figuratively. In 1972, aged twenty, Meadow found her way to a South Minneapolis feminist bookstore, where she met her first important romantic partner and publicly affirmed her sexuality. A photograph taken at the city zoo shortly after that meeting shows her smiling radiantly next to her girlfriend, Cydni James Irish, whose shades reflect the photographer, their friend Molly McCarthy. It is an uninhibited moment. Their faces are nestled close together and Irish’s Afro hairstyle is echoed in the curve of her partner’s raised parka hood. The composition conjures the signature style of New York Times wedding announcement photographs.

There is irony in this similitude. In the same year that Meadow met Cydni, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a local Minneapolis county clerk’s refusal to issue a marriage license to a gay couple. The nonchalance captured by McCarthy belied the daily reality of threats, harassment, and ostracization experienced then (and still) by LGBTQ individuals and communities across the country. While that case, Baker v. Nelson, catalyzed activists in the fight for equal access to the institution of matrimony, contemporary commentary on average American homelife more often focused on heterosexual couples trying to escape it, as evidenced by the ensuing spike in divorce rates, which peaked in the 1970s. Photographers were primed to document this dissolution of the nuclear family. LIFE commissioned photo-essays that drew back the curtain on varied domestic stories of separation, collective living, and birth outside wedlock, though they centered predominately heteronormative, middle-class, white protagonists. Wanda Adams, a thirty-five-year-old Seattle spouse and mother, smiled confidently on the cover of the March 17, 1972, issue under a headline in scarlet type: “DROPOUT WIFE: A Striking Current Phenomenon.”

Cover of LIFE, 1972

But women were not “dropping out.” They were directing their expertise and energies to places and people they—not a husband, boss, or society at large—chose. And while reimagining home was an expansive project with heterogeneous outcomes, in many cases redefining domesticity took very concrete skills. Like Adams in Seattle, Meadow was active in her local chapter of Women in the Trades, a 1970s labor advocacy group that supported women working as independent contractors—the career Meadow turned to when she lost her job as a photojournalist after coming out. Meadow’s 1976 portrait of nine women in Eugene, Oregon, shows them collapsed together in laughter. They form a joyous frieze; their bodies read almost as one, hands clasped tightly atop one another. (A moment later, Meadow told them to “get serious!” so she could capture the shot for a skilled-trades grant application.) In a 1981 picture of one of the first residents of Rising Moon, River Brady, Meadow shows her subject bare breasted, a sawhorse in the background, and holding a tool whose end extends out of the shot, hard at work on a farm she rented in Osseo, Minnesota, where she raised goats.

Meadow recalled that women rode horses from Missouri and Wisconsin to get to these sites of freedom in Minnesota. Like her, many had lost their livelihoods, or family ties, after coming out. Some had experienced gender-based violence. “It was a huge deal to them—for everybody involved—to trust me that I wouldn’t use these images without consent,” Meadow told me. “It wasn’t just a snapshot.” To avoid confiscation or exposure of identity, she had her own basement darkroom and gave her subjects a copy of their photograph. Usually a 5-by-7-inch print, it was perfect for domestic presentation and, as Meadow put it, a way of “my sharing as they shared themselves.”

Carmen Winant, spread from Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us (Printed Matter, 2019)

Meadow was not the only person documenting these rural inhabitants. Working from a generation’s distance, contemporary artist Carmen Winant has recently amplified the work of photographers from that era who made similar images. Her recent project, Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us, includes works by Tee Corinne, Joan E. Biren (JEB), Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, Carol Newhouse, and Clytia Fuller. Part artist book and part historical document, Notes on Fundamental Joy gathers photographs that show circles of women sitting on the land, tending to each other with haircuts, and reimagining their lives through collective models of domesticity. They formed not only new spaces, but whole lexicons (menstruation → moonstruation / women → womyn / history → herstory) and last names. These photographers conducted workshops, “Ovulars” (a conflation of ovulation + ocular, against the seminar and its etymological connotation of “spreading seed.”) In the wake of feminisms that contested each other as fiercely as they did the systems of patriarchy around them, they photographed these spaces as proof of their will to self-determine. Winant’s opening lines set out these stakes clearly:

Is it possible to leave everything behind? Is it possible to begin again, outside of and

beyond every system of living you’ve ever known, reinventing what it means (and

looks like) to exist as a body and its soul, on the land?

And yet, whose utopias were these? Winant’s book contains an essay by San Francisco Bay Area writer Ariel Goldberg that meditates on who gets to create and define spaces of their own. Goldberg parses the relative nature of difference and separatism as both a form of affirmation and one that demarcates others with even less privilege, agency, or defenses against exclusion. They wonder where trans and bisexual, poor, and nonwhite identities fit within womyn’s utopias, historically and today. And, in the portrayal of predominately white women, “how separatism functions when it has not dismantled whiteness as its norm.” These were questions that many of the photographers, including Meadow, asked of themselves at the time. And in re-presenting images taken almost fifty years ago in a book or museum—a paragon of exclusionary space—Meadow and Casey Riley in the exhibition at MIA, and Winant in her artist book, were all painstakingly careful about seeking permission from their subjects, thinking carefully about who benefits from such recirculation. Is the act of making a home always inherently exclusionary of some, even as it seeks to sow inclusion?

Samantha Nye, Attractive People, Doing Attractive Things In Attractive Places—Pool Party 1, 2018
Courtesy the artist

The week after I stood enraptured by Meadow’s exhibition, I visited Samantha Nye, a young painter and filmmaker, in her basement studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Nye, like Winant, reaches back into the historical archive, drawing primarily on two celluloid sources: 1960s Scopitone films (precursors to MTV, in which scantily clad white women grin and grind to pop hits) and Slim Aarons’s mid-century jet-set scene photographs of, in his formulation, “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” In her video work and canvases, Nye casts elders from her own family and queer communities with whom she collaborates. She inserts them into these historic scenes to create fantasies that function as an imaginary future for spaces like Rising Moon, “bound by the concept of chosen family” in a vision that is age and trans inclusive. Like Meadow and her generation, faced with suburban conformation, for Nye the photograph is a site for artistic subversion of homogeneous and oppressive worlds that socialize women to expected patterns of desire and domesticity. In her attempt to image queer kinship, Nye acknowledges its “beautiful parts, the prickly parts, the radical parts and the parts that have long needed fixing.” The parts, in other words, that exist in most families, and most homes, and most portraits of domestic life, however they are built, and whomever by.

Originally from Scotland, Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Read more about photography and the domestic realm in Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home.”

Dorothea Lange and the Afterlife of Photographs

Confronting the economic crisis of the Great Depression, Lange produced some of the most influential photographs of the twentieth century. A new exhibition reveals how her concern for the dispossessed has never been more relevant.

By Brian Wallis

Dorothea Lange, Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, November 1940
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

In 1934, in the midst of an economic, agricultural, and environmental disaster that was actively devastating the United States during the long depression, Dorothea Lange abandoned her lucrative San Francisco portrait-studio practice to photograph the urgent and unfolding humanitarian crisis. Over the next ten years, working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and a variety of other government agencies, Lange produced some of the most powerful and influential social-documentary photographs of the modern era. Her photographs—and their distribution through government channels—gave a human face to indigent, outcast, starving, and forgotten laborers, often in the form of iconic images, such as her famous Migrant Mother (1936). Yet despite the evocative efficacy of her individual pictures, Lange claimed that, “All photographs—not only those that are so-called ‘documentary,’ and every photograph really is documentary and belongs in some place, has a place in history—can be fortified by words.”

Lange’s contention pinpoints a dilemma at the heart of all documentary photography: despite the tremendous evidentiary potential of the image to document historically specific effects and relations of power, it still relies on the inherently ambiguous medium of photographic realism, particularly when such photographs are decontextualized or uncaptioned. As German playwright Bertolt Brecht famously observed in 1931, a simple reproduction of the Krupp weapons factory tells us nothing about the labor relations of that workplace or its imperial significance. Seizing this classic modernist dilemma as its thesis, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, the stylish retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, but reopening online this month), cleverly organized by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister, reconsiders Lange’s key photographs as formal solutions to this essentially political problem.

Installation view of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020. Photograph by John Wronn
© The Museum of Modern Art

One of the first objects in the exhibition is a magazine, the leftist Survey Graphic, in which a reproduction of Lange’s heroizing portrait of a labor organizer speaking at a rally for strikers in San Francisco in 1934, dramatically shot from below, is given pointed meaning by the militant caption “Workers, unite!” This photograph accompanies a fiery article by Paul S. Taylor, a progressive economist at the University of California, Berkeley, with a deep knowledge of the history and economic structure of modern agricultural practices, from the tenant farms of the Old South to increasingly industrialized farming in California. Soon thereafter, Lange and Taylor married and began a years-long collaboration to produce books and field reports containing clear, factual information through data mining, research, interviews, travel, and photography. Lange became what her biographer, historian Linda Gordon, calls a “visual sociologist,” meaning that she brought to her documentary photography an almost scientific precision and an empathetic sociological interest in the lives and working conditions of the laborers and others she photographed and interviewed.

The environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl and the economic and health requirements of migrant farm laborers flooding into California throughout the 1930s formed the narrative of Lange and Taylor’s great documentary photobook An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939). The book was compiled and designed by Lange and Taylor, and it traces their journeys crisscrossing five geographical areas of the United States. With Lange’s hard-hitting photographs, often close-up portraits of individual workers, and Taylor’s clear and passionate prose, An American Exodus made a radical case for establishing a systematic and sustained government policy on agriculture, with reforms based around the family-owned farm and cast in opposition to increasingly industrial-scale farm mechanization. In their introduction, Lange and Taylor outlined their activist strategy: “We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field.”

Dorothea Lange, Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas, 1938
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Formally, what is most radical about An American Exodus is how Lange and Taylor shaped their arguments through a sophisticated type of photomontage, an ingenious juxtaposition of many of Lange’s most dramatic photographs (though, surprisingly, not Migrant Mother) with an unexpected variety of primary texts—newspaper headlines, excerpts from government reports, and snippets of oral testimonies. Words & Pictures includes a rich selection of Lange’s photographs from this period, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection. These pictures are emblazoned in our collective memories: workers in cloth caps and overalls, standing alone or in groups, looking stunned or lost; farm families of dirty and barefoot children piled into the backs of open pickup trucks; rows of fieldworkers hunched over roughly plowed furrows. But the real kicker in An American Exodus comes when one unforgettable 1938 image from Texas—showing a weary woman in a sack dress, her hand to her forehead, silhouetted against a sweltering sky—is captioned with words the woman spoke: “If you die, you’re dead—that’s all.”

With its rich and politically pointed collage of American farmworkers in distress, An American Exodus provides the most compelling proof of the idea proposed by Words & Pictures that words shape the effects of documentary photographs. Similar documentary photobooks were hugely popular internationally in the 1930s, often with highly innovative uses of graphic design and photomontage. But the American examples, like An American Exodus, are less well known and less commonly exhibited than those produced by avant-garde Russian or European makers. So it is a welcome intervention that this exhibition generously highlights not only An American Exodus, but also two other important American photobooks—Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938) and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941)—both extraordinary visual compilations which borrowed Lange’s photographs, though without her texts or direct involvement.

Installation view of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2020. Photograph by John Wronn
© The Museum of Modern Art

In considering the words that provide the politicized context for Lange’s work, Meister focuses primarily on what some have called the “afterlife of photographs”—that is, not the decisive moment of capture, but rather the subsequent uses of images, how they circulate and accrue new meanings, often well beyond the photographer’s original intentions. This perspective is particularly crucial for understanding Lange, whose best work was created for and controlled by U.S. government agencies, often in the form of propaganda, sometimes to the point of censorship. For example, as historian Nicholas Natanson has pointed out, while almost a third of Lange’s FSA photographs depicted people of color, the New Deal government agency, mindful of Southern social codes and the political power of white Southern congressmen, never distributed any of them. And her World War II–era images of the Japanese American evacuation and internment camps, taken on assignment for the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command in 1942, were immediately impounded by the government and not published until 2006.

This blatantly propagandistic deployment of Lange’s photographs is often reflected in the shifting titles of her works, some applied by Lange (Damaged Child, 1936), but most not. Few photographs have been as transformed in their afterlife as Migrant Mother, which portrays an unemployed female pea picker and her children huddled in a makeshift tent in a laborers camp in Nipomo, California. Almost immediately, this portrait was recognized as an archetypal symbol of the impact of the blistering economic crisis, and it was published in halftone reproduction in national newspapers. Within days, the photograph was printed alongside a scathing editorial in the San Francisco News, which shamed the state of California for attempting to block the construction of government-sponsored sanitary workers camps. Echoing Lange’s own activist stance, the headline screamed, “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean To This Mother and Her Children?” The text continued, “Here, in the fine strong face of this mother . . . is the tragedy of lives lived in squalor and fear, on terms that mock the American dream of security and independence and opportunity.” Providing secure and sanitary living conditions for migratory farmworkers was one of Lange and Taylor’s pet projects—they succeeded in gaining a one-time $20,000 grant to build better facilities—but for the most part, even the reformist New Deal government ignored this need.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, March 1936
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

When originally published in the New York Times in 1936, Migrant Mother was captioned “A destitute mother—the type aided by the W.P.A.,” and in 1940, it was shown at MoMA as “Pea Picker Family, California”; the photograph was not given its lasting title until 1952. It was featured prominently recast as a symbol of eternal motherhood in curator Edward Steichen’s magisterial 1955 MoMA exhibition The Family of Man, and much of its subsequent sentimental mythologization depended on that presentation and on the photographer’s own hazy recollections, as spelled out in two prominent magazine articles exhibited in Words & Pictures, one by Lange and one by her son, Daniel Dixon.

More recently, Migrant Mother has been the focus of substantial critical attention, much of it focusing on the afterlife and recontextualization of the image. It is the subject of a small, separate monograph by Meister, published by MoMA, and a lengthier scholarly examination, published last month, Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender, by photo historian Sally Stein. As these studies show, following the popular circulation of Migrant Mother as a “Dust Bowl Madonna,” scholars have uncovered the real person behind this previously anonymous symbol of universal suffering, Florence Owen Thompson—not a Nordic Okie or universal everywoman, but a Native American pea picker with ten children, driven west in search of backbreaking labor and forced to shelter in a roadside lean-to in a camp with 1,500 other indigent farmworkers. For years, the migrant mother’s identity as a full-blood Cherokee was masked by racial fantasies and misrepresentations.

Dorothea Lange, Kern County, California, 1938
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Words & Pictures also provides a useful perspective on the limitations of the classic photo-essay, especially as deployed by LIFE magazine during the 1940s and 1950s (itself the subject of an enlightening exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey). The brutally reductive photo-editing style of LIFE and the magazine’s right-of-center politics tamped down the progressive political slant of Lange’s photography. Though she focused almost exclusively on photo-essays from 1945 to 1960, she had difficulty mastering the blunt requirements of LIFE; all but two of her six commissions for the magazine were rejected. One of the successful ones, part of an extensive sociological study done jointly with Dixon, was called Irish Country People (1955). The other, produced in collaboration with Ansel Adams, was titled Three Mormon Towns (1954) and featured thirty-five images—a lot for LIFE—but only a fraction of Lange and Adams’s 135-image layout. The MoMA exhibition boldly exhibits every page of these stories, and it is clear what happened: while Lange was interested in the complex communal life of isolated, self-sufficient, almost utopian villages, the LIFE magazine machinery used nostalgic subheads (“Serenely they live in age-old patterns”) to turn them into sentimental pap. As Adams lamented, “The Mormon story turned out very sour indeed.”

Unfortunately, more often than not, Lange had little control over how her photographs were distributed or presented, and her own views on the subject of contextualization shifted. Lange’s images were repeatedly wrenched from their original contexts and accompanying voices, particularly by museums. As Meister shows through numerous MoMA installation photographs, Lange had a long and complex relationship with MoMA, beginning with the photography department’s inaugural exhibition in 1940. Over time, Lange came increasingly to regard her photographs as autonomous artworks, accompanied by descriptive captions and poetic texts. Lange was instrumental in the formulation of Steichen’s exhibition The Family of Man, for which she was an informal associate curator. The exhibition’s initial proposal included a long list of keywords (“birth,” “death,” “pestilence,” “conflict,” “peace”) and solicited photographs that would “reveal by visual images Man’s dreams and aspirations, his strength, his despair under evil.” As Steichen’s West Coast advisor, Lange suggested potential photographers as well as additional texts and thematic categories. But the Cold War–era exhibition tried to make its political points regarding the universal nature of certain human traits through a photo-magazine-style layout, with juxtapositions of large photomurals, mounted and unframed photographs, and allusive texts, including quotations, religious citations, proverbs, and folk songs.

Dorothea Lange, Richmond, California, 1942
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Subsequently, Lange seems to have advocated a more abstract attitude toward her photographs, including her earlier reformist ones. For Lange’s 1966 retrospective at MoMA, organized by the young curator John Szarkowski, her photographs were arranged thematically rather than chronologically and, again, presented large and unframed, as more traditional artworks, with no wall labels and largely devoid of explanatory historical context. Looking at old installation photographs of that exhibition (online or in the Words & Pictures catalogue), we see Lange’s brutal photographs, like Migrant Mother and White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco (1933), aligned like so much black-and-white formal imagery, removed from their original advocacy. In a letter to Szarkowski in 1965, Lange stated that she wanted the captions to “carry not only factual information, but also added clues to attitudes, relationships and meanings.” About half of that 1966 retrospective comprised photographs from the last ten years of Lange’s life—more formalist images of trees, gardens, family members, and hands—with fewer and fewer words.

This is the fundamental dilemma Words & Pictures seeks to overcome. By acknowledging the interdependence of what artist Martha Rosler calls “two inadequate descriptive systems,” the exhibition aims to reunite Lange’s powerful pictures with their original political rhetoric. But amid the elegance of the exhibition design and the sheer artiness of the large, framed photographs, it is hard for viewers to reconstruct the filthy and intolerable conditions that Lange’s subjects endured and the contested politics engaged in fighting for justice, what she called “the big story which is behind it, which is the story of our natural resources.” Seeing these same photographs today, even in this provocative exhibition, we cannot help reading them as stolen gestures, misused and misinterpreted, or regarding them as valuable trophies in the context of today’s runaway market for vintage photography. (A vintage print of Lange’s White Angel Bread Line sold at Sotheby’s in 2005 for a record price of $822,400.) Blunting the edge of Lange’s content with an overriding emphasis on style and photographic beauty, Words & Pictures fits the apolitical through line of MoMA’s recent revisionist expansion. Like a lot of the museum’s new galleries, this temporary exhibition tries to overturn the museum world’s long-standing sexism by celebrating a female artist. But at the same time, it struggles to identify—much less harness—what made Lange’s bold work such an awkward fit in an art museum to begin with: her deliberate sociological investigations, her idealistic and tireless visual activism, the sharp feminist critique embodied in all her work.

Dorothea Lange, White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, 1933
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Lange’s relevance could hardly be greater today. The themes she addressed—environmental blight, enforced migration, economic division, exploitation of labor, ingrained racial discrimination—are perhaps even more obvious and more contested now than in Lange’s lifetime. And yet, focusing on Lange’s formal juxtaposition of words and pictures, and by reprising Lange’s historical engagement with successive generations at MoMA, this exhibition inadvertently downplays the immediacy of Lange’s themes and portrays her as a onetime political activist whose photographs were gradually drained of their meaning and force, and an increasingly style-conscious artist who acceded to the poetic reinterpretation of her powerful images in museum settings. Read in reverse, Words & Pictures provides an exemplary case study of the way museums are complicit in stripping devastating pictures of their once-urgent words, and hence of their politics.

Brian Wallis is a writer and curator based in New York.

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures opened on February 9, 2020, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The museum is currently closed, but an online version of the exhibition opens April 30 at moma.org.

Is African Photography a State of Mind?

In a biennial and two recent photobooks, artists consider the postcolonial African subject through intriguingly intimate images.

By Nicole Acheampong

Bruno Boudjelal, Blida Hospital where Frantz Fanon Worked, Blida, Algeria, from the series Fanon, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Autograph ABP, London

In 1952, Frantz Fanon, the Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist, published a galvanizing work of anticolonial critical theory, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs). Fanon often attended to dislocated bodies, and his writing is meticulously depersonalized. The Negro body, for example, “impedes the closing of the postural schema” of the white body. Devalued bodies “experience a destructuration.” For Fanon, the Black body is at risk of becoming overly corporeal. In the book’s last pages he writes, with uncharacteristic plainness, “There are times when the black man is locked into his body.”

After the release of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon made his home in Algeria, where he secured an appointment as a psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville Hospital. In the following years, he would become an influential participant in the Algerian revolutionary struggle. He worked with patients subjected to the twin tortures of colonial oppression and wartime violence. Their psyches were haunted, their bodies too.

Eric Gyamfi, Nana and Razak, 2016
© the artist

Such haunting is explicit in the Franco-Algerian photographer Bruno Boudjelal’s series Fanon (2011), which claimed a corridor of the FotoFest Biennial 2020 in Houston, Texas. (The biennial was originally scheduled to be on view through April 19; online programming continues through the end of the month.) Curated by Mark Sealy and taking as its title and theme African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, the multi-venue exhibition and extensive accompanying exhibition catalogue feature thirty-two artists—including Eric Gyamfi, Santu Mofokeng, Eustáquio Neves, and Jean Depara—from all regions of the African continent and several countries throughout the diaspora, among them Brazil, Canada, and Belgium.

Boudjelal’s contribution is likewise transnational. In his Fanon series, Boudjelal tracks the writer’s geographical legacy and finds parallels with his own, traveling to Algeria, Martinique, and other significant sites in the theorist’s life to make hazy black-and-white images that carry the spook and insistent intimacy of dream fragments. Boudjelal zeroes in on Blida-Joinville Hospital, in slivers. He catches a crack on a concrete wall, a blurred figure, just visible, rushing by; a sudden spray of white flowers; a small girl peering through the delicate grid of a screen or gate, something weighty and somber expanding in her face. Beneath one photo, the caption reads: “The Haunted House,” Casino during the French colonization, then center of torture during the war of independence. Now no more people want to live in this because they say it is haunted, Algiers, Algeria. The house is cut off and askew. The landscape leans; the horror disorients.

Hélène A. Amouzou, Self-Portrait, 2008
Courtesy the artist

For Hélène A. Amouzou, the body is bluntly ethereal—to borrow from Fanon, the body is deprived of itself. The Togo-born artist made her 2008 series Self-Portraits in the attic of a transitional housing unit in Belgium as she awaited an official residence visa. In these images, she is blurred and vaporous against the backdrop of an open suitcase, peeling wallpaper, low-slung, exposed rafters. Her gaze is steady and still, though she seems always braced for involuntary movement. This limbo is clearly untenable. Even so, one self-portrait suggests the soft touch of healing: nude, standing ramrod-straight, her arms crossed tightly before her chest in a protective gesture, she appears braced for flight.

Similarly spectral are the images in Lebohang Kganye’s Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story (2013), which are featured in the book Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent (2020) by the London-based curator and writer Ekow Eshun, the publication of which happens to coincide with FotoFest. Following the passing of Kganye’s mother in 2010, the South African artist burrowed into the family archive, culling old pictures of her mother as a young woman. Outfitted and coiffed to match, Kganye creates digital photomontages in which she is her mother’s ghostly double. The artist virtually images, in her own words, “a new story and a commonality––she is me, I am her.” By indulging these ambiguously and imperfectly unified bodies, Kganye cultivates a new language for mourning and memory, not unlike Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s diary-format series I carry Her photo with Me (2017–ongoing), which was displayed in glass vitrines at FotoFest, and which mourns the South African artist’s sister by imagining her presence in the bodies of other subjects, in particular the women with whom she made a life after running away from home.

Lebohang Kganye, Tshimong ka hara toropo II, 2013
© the artist and courtesy Afronova Gallery

In his introduction to Africa State of Mind, Eshun reflects on photography’s historical entrenchment in the colonial project while also recognizing the presence of African photographers “as far back as the Victorian era,” whose images held “an affinity for their subject matter that runs far contrary to the degrading stereotypes promulgated by Europeans.” The cultivation of both new and newly remembered visual languages is therefore integral to his premise.

In 2020, this premise is not prototypical. Eshun picks up on a schema that is nearly twenty-five years in the making, beginning with the late, acclaimed curator Okwui Enwezor’s 1996 Guggenheim exhibition and catalogue In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, and evidenced in Chris Spring’s 2008 anthology Angaza Africa: African Art Now. But unlike Spring, Eshun doesn’t attempt to exhaustively catalogue the continent’s immense sweep of art-makers from a bird’s-eye view. Rather than “any sort of movement,” writes Eshun, the book testifies to “a moment when a generation of African photographers claims the creative freedom to look inwards.” Africa State of Mind is arguably most in alignment with Enwezor’s follow-up to In/sight, the 2006 International Center of Photography exhibition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, which argues for space for the dynamic postcolonial artist, as well as the “uses of Afro-Pessimism,” while acknowledging the aesthetic histories that ground modern image-making on the continent. Threading these progenitors to the diverse group of contemporary photographers assembled in the book, Eshun proposes a concept of Africa that is critically amorphous and sustained by subjectivity.

Zina Saro-Wiwa, Futures, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary

Many of the artists represented within the pages of Africa State of Mind abandon a Western frame of reference in favor of nestling into a pleasurable, elastic alterity. In a section titled “Myth and Memory,” Eshun includes Zina Saro-Wiwa’s series Karikpo: Holy Star Boyz (2018), which draws inspiration from the annual Karikpo masquerade of the Niger Delta’s Ogoni community. Featuring male subjects who don peroxide-bright antelope masks, the images are pointedly playful in their subversion of traditional performance practices. They also introduce to the visual record a set of bodies that are somehow both impossible and inevitable. “The Holy Star Boyz are a new breed,” Saro-Wiwa divulges in her artist statement. “From another place that is still being invented, they are hybrid forms of existence that cannot truly belong.” Unrecognizable and ever-mutating, these bodies initiate what Fanon calls, in the penultimate chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “the possibility of the impossible.”

Nobukho Nqaba, Untitled, 2012
© the artist

“The Black presence ruins the representative narrative of Western personhood,” the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha notes in his introduction to the 1986 edition of Black Skin, White Masks. “The White man’s eyes break up the Black man’s body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed.” Sealy included these musings from Bhabha at FotoFest, as well as from scholars and artists like Fred Moten and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. They’re meant, Sealy says, to act as “moments of reflection”—not captions, but rather “things you might overhear.” Overheard in quick succession, these quotes reveal the festival’s intentions: to lay bare that ruined representative narrative and revisit the body it disturbed. Africa is not a body, although the Western gaze often endeavors to lock it into one. And what does the non-body look like? Eshun’s and Sealy’s projects seek looser frames­­­­­­—a state of mind, a collection of cosmologies. Most notably, they gather artists who have already looked away from the ruins. They’re tending their own bodies now.

Nicole Acheampong is the editorial assistant of Aperture magazine.

The FotoFest Biennial 2020, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other, opened on March 8, 2020, in Houston. The biennial is currently closed, but visit fotofest.org for updates and further information.

Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent was published by Thames & Hudson in April 2020.