Aperture's Blog, page 70
April 24, 2020
A Visual Record of Black Lives, Four Decades After Emancipation
A new book revisits W.E.B. Du Bois’s landmark 1900 exhibition on Black American identity.
By Jovonna Jones
Cadets at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, Augusta, Georgia, from The Exhibit of American Negroes, 1900
In 1900, partway through the official planning for The Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition, photographer Harry Shepherd was kicked off of the project. Shepherd was a successful African American studio-owner from Minnesota, and for the fair’s American Pavilion, he had photographed students at Black colleges in the South. He showed particular compassion for young people trying to figure out what kinds of members of society they might become, as Black Codes and Jim Crow laws increasingly encroached on their prospects. But these photographs were not the cause of controversy. According to the Afro-American Advance, Shepherd was dismissed from the project for preaching “anarchy” in the South and advising “the Negroes to combine against the United States in the event of war with foreign powers.”
Man seen in profile, from The Exhibit of American Negroes, 1900
Shepherd is a pretty fleeting character in the history of the American Negro exhibition, which was co-organized by W. E. B. Du Bois. The first and only time I came across Shepherd in the scholarly literature on the exhibition was in Deborah Willis’s and David Levering Lewis’s seminal work on the subject, A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (2005). He remains a footnote contributor to the exhibition’s visual archive. But Shepherd rushed to my mind while I was studying visual pairs of photographs and infographics in the book Black Lives 1900: W. E. B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition (2019), edited by Julian Rothenstein.
On one page in the book, cadets pose in rows for a group portrait in front of an American flag at the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. They appear so upright and stern that this group of young boys looks almost like men. Their fidgeting, uncertain hands and curious faces give away their performance. On the opposing page, an infographic depicts the “proportion of Negroes in the total population of the United States” as literal small nations within a nation, to use Du Bois’s phrase. At the turn of the century, in the midst of wars, colonization, and a burgeoning twentieth-century Pan-African movement, these cadets stood at a crossroads. Where Shepherd proposed anarchy, Du Bois strategized an exhibition, placing Black students like these at the center of a global conversation on progress.
Infographic from The Exhibit of American Negroes, 1900
Du Bois originally displayed the photographs and infographics in the award-winning Paris exhibition separately: three thick albums of hundreds of photographs, a set of infographics on the “Georgia Negro,” and another set of infographics on “the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America.” Each set offered discrete narratives and arguments. In Black Lives 1900, Rothenstein takes on the interpretative challenge of reading the photographs and the data visualizations together. This approach opens up the archive in some instances—working Shepherd and his politics back into the story—and overdetermines or flattens the archive in others.
In one spread, Rothenstein places a studio portrait of a young girl, with a light complexion and silky curls, looking at an open book above an image of three women and a man hoeing in what appears to be a hot field. Rothenstein pairs these photographs with an infographic that compares the number of Black people living in cites to those in rural areas and villages in 1890. The photographs not only mimic the explanatory function of the infographic, they make a more specific claim: to be urban is to comport oneself as pristine, contemplative, and youthful, to imagine a life in modern cities away from a feudal past. Rothenstein is likely gesturing toward Alain Locke’s canonical (and criticized) concept of the “New Negro,” which would take root among Black intellectuals and artists decades after The Exhibit of American Negroes. But without some kind of contextual nudge, the pairing risks reproducing Black archetypes rather than complicating them.
The Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition, 1900
Black Lives 1900 celebrates the dynamism of the Paris exhibition’s visual archive, but the photographs and infographics might be better analyzed and interpreted when treated on their own terms. They each emerge from entirely different visual logics and concerns, and for Du Bois, the distinctions were critical. The photo albums he compiled included no captions, no markers; he instead arranged a visual record of Black living that could reference itself. The infographics presented numerical data as striking visual figures. Through modernist aesthetics, Du Bois made the statement that any competent study of Black Americans into the new century would need a new framework, a novel way of considering social scientific data. If the importance of the exhibition and its legacy relies on Du Bois’s meticulous attention to the visual in distinct ways, then maybe a dynamic, information-dense archive of this kind needs the spaciousness that a live exhibition affords. If not a new exhibition, then a more exhaustive scholarly catalogue.
The archive and this book are ultimately about Black lives as a subject of visual empirical study. Still, I’m itching to appreciate these photographs and the people in them as something other than figural data points, and the addition of the infographics only enhances that desire. While elegant, even the portraits feel quite lonely and impersonal. To be Black and aspirational at the turn of the century and on the world stage is to possibly feel isolated and scrutinized, even while being admired.
Young women, three-quarter length portrait, from The Exhibit of American Negroes, 1900
I did find one delightful moment of intimacy, a glimpse of Black sociality beyond the twin burdens of representation and exceptionalism. Two young women pose together in a three-quarter length studio portrait. Unlike all of the other group portraits in the book, these sitters touch, nearly embrace. One woman sits on the other’s lap, their hands clasped and resting on the former’s thigh. Their rings glitter; their gazes linger. The woman smiles up at her friend—or lover—this person is special to her. The caption does not identify sitters by name nor relation; the photographs were intended to be representative after all. But the touch between these two women, the warmth made and held between them, is entirely their own. This portrait—its tenderness, its intimacy—holds open the purpose at the heart of the project. That is, in Du Bois’s words, to picture Black lives honestly, “without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.”
Jovonna Jones is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She researches Black cultural history and aesthetics in the U.S., with a special focus on Black women’s photographs and spaces.
Black Lives 1900: W. E. B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition was published by Redstone Press in October 2019. All images courtesy Redstone Press.
April 22, 2020
What It Takes to Be a Photo Editor
For TIME magazine’s editor at large, photography is about speaking truth to the world.
By Brendan Embser
Paul Moakley. Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME
In November 2014, Paul Moakley traveled to Liberia with the photographer Jackie Nickerson to make portraits of the doctors and frontline workers fighting against the Ebola epidemic for TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue. As they waited to see Dr. Jerry Brown, a medical director in Monrovia, Moakley and Nickerson witnessed a burial team preparing to move Ebola victims to a site for mass cremation.
“All I could think about was how no family members were present to witness this final moment,” he wrote in TIME for a behind-the-scenes diary about the photo shoot. “All I could do was hold my head down in respect.”
Covering the Ebola crisis prepared Moakley for the challenges posed by COVID-19, as visitors are restricted from hospitals and funeral homes, and people throughout the world—including reporters—face isolation in all forms. The need to protect photographers and subjects, he says, is as important as telling a story accurately. “Our job as journalists is to point these things out, to show the visual evidence.”
As TIME’s deputy director of photography and later editor at large for special projects, Moakley, one of the cocurators of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, has produced ambitious visual stories and iconic covers, from a 2018 special issue about the devastating opioid epidemic in the United States, to Ryan Pfluger’s controversial portrait of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. He values long-standing creative relationships with photographers, but he also seeks out new voices. “There’s room for everyone,” he says.
When I spoke with Moakley in early April, he was calling in from TIME’s temporary photo headquarters—the kitchen at the Alice Austen House, a museum on Staten Island, where he lives and moonlights as the museum’s caretaker. He was working around the clock, figuring out with the team at TIME how to approach the most consequential story in recent memory.
Covers of the April 20, 2020, issue of TIME. Clockwise from top left, photographs by Danny Kim, Elizabeth Bick, Lorenzo Meloni/Magnum Photos, Lauren Lancaster, and Christopher Morris/VII for TIME
Brendan Embser: How quickly did you and everyone at TIME have to adapt to the new working situation caused by the coronavirus?
Paul Moakley: I went to a shoot in Brooklyn on March 11—we were shooting the chef José Andrés with photographer Martin Schoeller—and our security person told us we had to follow CDC guidelines and ask everyone who’s entering the room where they’ve traveled. It was really weird being in Brooklyn that day. When I went home on the train, there was one person with a mask on. He had just got it, and he had an Amazon package on his lap. I asked if I could photograph him. I said, “I feel like everyone’s starting to prepare.” He was really excited about his mask. It was camo and kind of cool looking.
Embser: Do you carry a camera with you all the time? Or do you just take lots of pictures on your phone?
Moakley: I do carry a camera around, a little Sony RX100 VII. It fits in my pocket, has a great flash, and takes awesome pictures.
Embser: Some of the best photo editors are also photographers, because they know what’s good and they can cut through things quickly.
Moakley: Yes, sometimes. Jason Fulford, for instance, is a wonderful editor and collaborator. And I think back to the history of photography, to Alfred Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work (1903–17) and the way photographers used to publish magazines and have galleries and also take pictures. I’ve made people like that the model for myself. I’ve often felt some anxiety about needing to specialize in one thing—to be either a photographer or a photo editor.
Embser: And now you have it all!
Moakley: I don’t know if I have it all, I don’t think so! Being a photographer keeps me sharper as an editor. If I’m taking my own pictures and editing them, I feel like I’m better at editing other people’s pictures. It’s like exercise for me. I live in a museum, the Alice Austen House, which is a whole other way of thinking about pictures, as compared to laying them out in a magazine, which is more about delivering information.
Embser: We are living in a moment when people are obsessed with information, looking at their news feeds every hour, and possibly even have an unhealthy relationship to the news. On the other side of that are people like you—essential workers, I would say!—who are helping us interpret and understand what’s going on. What has changed for you over the last few weeks? What has it been like to put together visuals and images for a magazine that’s a major part of the American news DNA?
Moakley: It really hit me in a weird way the first time we had a phone call about what might happen with the virus. We have a security specialist at TIME who worked for the FBI, and she keeps an eye on all of our photo shoots that might have a dangerous aspect to them. All of a sudden, every shoot became dangerous, and this possibility of being locked down as a city came up. It scared me. It took me some time to process how to approach it visually.
Cover of the March 30, 2020, issue of TIME. Photograph by Angela Strassheim for TIME
Embser: When you realized what was happening, at least in the U.S., how did you develop a cover for the magazine?
Moakley: As things got stranger and stranger by the day, I called the photographer Angela Strassheim. She’s a really wonderful artist. I knew she knew how to make work about forensics. I told her the story is getting really big, and it’s dangerous, and I think we’re afraid to have photo shoots and to bring people together right now. I thought she could do something with fingerprints on everyday objects, all the things you carry around, to raise consciousness about what people touch. We kept talking, a little bit through email and text.
Eventually, Angela called me and said she had a friend in Connecticut who thinks she has COVID-19. “She can’t leave the house, and she’s a single mother,” Angela said. “I was dropping groceries off for her, and I saw her inside her house in her robe with a mask.” And then she said, “That’s the picture I want to make for you.” (Angela makes incredible pictures of people in domestic spaces, and they have this really strange tension that she taps into, like Doug DuBois—they just pick up on another part of the ether that we’re not seeing.)
I had to call the security people at work to evaluate the situation and explain that Angela would never go into the house or have any direct contact with the subject. (We weren’t even thinking six feet yet.) We told her, “Don’t go in the house, photograph through the window, stay far away.” That shoot went really well—Angela made a startling picture of this person trapped in her home with a mask on. This was early on, when we had government leaders telling us we didn’t need to wear masks. But this woman was being really responsible, worried about other people and her son, quarantining in her bedroom, and depending on family and friends to bring her food. So it was a great story.
We then decided to crash a bunch of covers around the world of people who either have COVID-19 and are stuck at home, or have a role as essential workers, like delivery people. It was difficult in China, where they make everyone stay in quarantine. But in the UK, Iran, the United States, Brazil, and all of the other places where our photo department did shoots, we approached them the way Angela did. We had everyone shoot from a safe vantage point, a doorway or window, and it created a series that was very effective. One cover our deputy photo director, Andrew Katz, produced was by David Ryder, a Reuters photographer who works on the wires primarily in Seattle. He was photographing the nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where there was one of the biggest outbreaks of COVID-19. David made a powerful photo of a middle-aged woman staring into the window of a nursing home and trying to talk to her mother, who was in bed inside. It was like Angela’s picture—this idea of being separated by glass and walls and space.
Embser: Angela’s image strikes me as iconic. It’s a classic TIME magazine cover, quintessential TIME. And the others radiate outward into different styles.
Moakley: That’s the fun thing about working at TIME. You’re communicating to this mass audience and you’re trying to come up with a really smart way to tell a story, like any other magazine—like the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, or California Sunday Magazine. I love the clarity of Angela’s photograph, along with the message the other covers send that this was not only happening in the U.S.
A COVID-19 patient being prepared to be intubated by the anesthesiologist. The plastic tent is so the virus isn’t spread while transporting the patient between units. March 31, 2020. Photograph by Danny Kim for TIME
Embser: What kinds of conversations are you having with photographers about how they’re doing their reporting? Would it be fair to say that everyone is a war photographer now?
Moakley: Yeah, that is exactly what’s happening. Almost every assignment is treated almost like a war assignment. We run through a checklist with photographers, and we make sure we have emergency contacts for them in case something happens while they’re traveling. We have to prepare special letters and IDs for them, so people know they’re essential workers. We have to check and see if they have health insurance, and if they don’t, we can look into getting them some kind of temporary insurance. Then there’s the issue after the photo shoot of what happens to the person, and when does our responsibility to take care of photographers end?
Embser: Have you had an experience like this before?
Moakley: In 2014, I traveled to Liberia with the photographer Jackie Nickerson and writer Aryn Baker to produce our “Person of the Year” shoot. That was a series of photographs around the Ebola fighters, and we were looking at people on the ground in Liberia, specifically Liberian doctors. The Liberian doctor Jerry Brown was the first person to figure out how to get people to recover and walk out of the hospital. It was one of those issues we were so proud to work on, because we were honoring people doing incredible, dangerous work.
Embser: Is it typical that the photo editor would travel with the photographer like that, especially for such a dangerous assignment? Or was that specific to your role producing “Person of the Year”?
Moakley: I would say I’m definitely a rare hybrid of being a producer and photo editor—I produce photography and video, and I also work a lot as a reporter. So I’m useful in these kinds of situations, to multitask. I was also worried about Jackie. We wanted a photographer I had a relationship with, someone who could work without lights and make elevated, beautiful, monumental portraits. Jackie had no hesitation—she understood the dangers immediately, but she was willing to take the risk and felt it was a story she wanted to tell. I wanted to be there as a photo assistant, as a producer, to be an extra set of hands for her, in situations where she needed someone to hold a reflector, hold an umbrella over someone’s head, and to do all the fact-checking for captions.
Cover of the 2014 “Person of the Year” issue of TIME. Photograph by Jackie Nickerson for TIME
Embser: I remember the pictures from that period, in Liberia and elsewhere in West Africa, were incredibly distressing—in some cases, they were apocalyptic. Jackie’s covers are regal. They’re not sensational. And I think that’s why, at least in my opinion, they hold up really well.
Moakley: Thank you, that was precisely our intention.
Embser: What was it like for the two of you working together on the ground?
Moakley: It was a moment that really prepared me for COVID-19, I have to say. There was a period during the Ebola crisis when we said, “We are not sending photographers into this, it’s too dangerous.” It was a wall of “No.” But our job as journalists is to point these things out, to show the visual evidence—at TIME, the photo editors all feel strongly about that.
For the shoot, we had the most elaborate security plan—I have it in a binder to this day—and directions to airlift us if one of us got Ebola and we had to be taken out of the country. We were some of the only foreign journalists in the country at the time, and it was spooky to be alone almost, and not see any other press around. I remember learning about PPE [personal protective equipment] and how to apply it properly and how to put it on someone else—it’s really a two-person job to don full PPE.
I went to Liberia with trunks of equipment, and when I got off the plane, a man in a white space suit checked my temperature. Our fixer picked us up at the airport with Aryn Baker, our reporter. I remember he opened the car door, and he had a sweat rag sitting on the seat he wanted me to sit on. I was too polite to say, “Can you move the towel that you’ve been sweating on?” I was just like, Okay, this is where I’m in it. I can’t touch my face anymore. I moved the towel and locked my hands onto my knees until I was in a space where I could wash my hands again.
Jackie Nickerson photographs nurse Salome Karwah in Monrovia, Liberia, on November 26, 2014. Photograph by Paul Moakley
Embser: When you were working with Jackie and Aryn, did you have a sense that this was a moment you would share for the rest of your lives?
Moakley: Yeah, we all really bonded. There were moments when it really started to escalate. I was seeing things that I’d only seen in pictures of genocide: a dump truck loaded up with bodies. Seeing people working so carefully and diligently at a time when they couldn’t really have funerals, they were just trying to take care of the dead, and the dead were sadly being buried without funerals and without family members around. It was one of the most unforgettable scenes I’ve ever witnessed as a journalist, and it marks me to this day.
I remember looking at Jackie, in our gear, and making eye contact with her. We were working quietly, and I thought, This is where you just have to focus and get this. After almost two weeks in Monrovia, the best day was when we were with Dr. Brown and he told us they were sending a whole family home who had recovered. To see this family come out of quarantine, it looked like they were in a camp—like in Holocaust pictures. The gates opened, this family walked out, and they were weakened but smiling and so excited and happy. That really lifted our spirits after seeing such death and destruction. Knowing that people were getting better and that we were on a mission to celebrate the people who were helping them.
Spread from the 2014 “Person of the Year” issue of TIME. Nurses Augustine Bindi (left) and Princess Ideko (right) in Monrovia, Liberia, November 2014. Photographs by Jackie Nickerson for TIME
Embser: Over the course of your photo editing career, I imagine there have been photographers you’ve called on repeatedly. What makes those creative relationships work?
Moakley: It’s truly the energy of the collaboration. If I tell a photographer I love some part of their portfolio, I really mean it. I don’t say those things lightly. When you hire someone and they do a job for you, you trust them. On the inverse, you have to publish their work well, treat it with the utmost respect, be their representative at the magazine, and they begin to trust you too. I would say how that relationship grows is the most essential thing about photo editing, because from that point of trust, I can ask them to go a little bit out of their comfort zone. If it doesn’t go well, they know I’ll be respectful, and that I’ll only show their best work.
Embser: How do you engage with photographers you’re commissioning for the first time?
Moakley: When you work with a photographer who has a lot of raw talent, or someone who’s in a place where they are given an opportunity to rise up to the challenge, you have to set up circumstances for them to be successful. And that is really where a photo editor comes in. I think people don’t realize how much production, research, mood board–making, and therapy go into photo shoots. Everyone needs different levels of help. Whether they’re experienced or not, I just want it to be exciting for them. I value the energy of what somebody puts into an assignment, how friendly they are in the back and forth, and their openness to ideas. We spend a lot of time thinking of what the outcome of a shoot’s going to be, because that’s our job, but we also want to be open to the unexpected—that’s where amazing work happens.
Staff of the Capital Gazette, December 9, 2018. Photograph by Moises Saman/Magnum Photos for TIME
Embser: You are one of the curators of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, which this year is called Information, inspired by the 1970 exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At a time when we have divided ideas about authority and truth, what does “information” mean to you?
Moakley: As a photo editor and journalist working in the new social-media landscape—where you’re called into question more and more, where the audience can respond directly—we’ve all had to work harder. We’re three years into a presidency where this idea of “fake news” has escalated. There’s a whole segment of our country, and the world, that doesn’t believe journalists. I think it’s good to be skeptical—we all need to be—and we need to take a lot of different sources of information into account to come up with our own ideas. But it’s also hurtful and deeply harmful to have such powerful people dismiss organizations that are doing good work. We’re fighting against that every day.
I think we have to let people know what we do, bring them into the process a bit, and be really clear about what’s real and what’s not, especially when it comes to photography. At TIME, we have a mass audience, so we have to account for different levels of visual literacy—letting people know when images are manipulated in some way or when we’re calling it an illustration, and what’s the information that runs next to a picture that might be staged. That is all really tricky and delicate. I think when people come to TIME magazine, there’s an expectation that they’re going to look at news pictures that aren’t retouched or altered in any way. This week, we needed to protect the identity of somebody in a hospital, blurring out the name of somebody in a room, and with that picture, we have to run a statement saying that it has been altered, so the viewer knows that this is a very special picture, that we wouldn’t do this to any other picture. That also sends the message that everything else is real.
Embser: Yet, don’t you think that artists—photographers who are not only working in journalism but also making lens-based artwork—need space to blur the lines between fact and fiction a little bit?
Moakley: Yes, on the other side of things, when we’re talking about art—definitely. My interest in photography has always been in that ambiguous part of it, that power to really play. I love documentary work, but I love documentary artists who challenge the idea of photography’s authority. Some of the most exciting things I’m seeing right now are photographers playing with ideas of sequence and repetition in their work. One of the last bodies of work that stuck in my head was Sohrab Hura’s The Coast (2019). He makes these very intense pictures, but there is something about the repetition, and this idea of seeing a repetition and a sequence, that makes the pictures even more powerful.
Eleventh-grade student Robbie Moore and Jayde LaPorte, a transgender ninth grader, attend Milwaukee’s Alliance School, October 2011. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for TIME
Embser: I have to ask you about the Pete Buttigieg cover. The cover of a magazine, especially the cover of TIME, still holds an amazing symbolic value, even if you don’t buy the magazine or ever see it in print. The TIME cover is like a way station toward immortality. And the concept of the cover has completely survived the leap into the world of Instagram—just look at Tyler Mitchell’s 2018 Beyoncé cover for Vogue. Mayor Pete’s cover is part of a queer trajectory in TIME, from Ellen’s cover from 1997 to Laverne Cox’s cover in 2014. You commissioned Ryan Pfluger for the portrait of Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, and Ryan is someone who is known for his beautiful and sensitive work around LGBT themes. Can you talk a little bit about how that image was made?
Moakley: Definitely. Ryan Pfluger has been a contributor to TIME for about ten years. As our relationship has grown, I think of Ryan for a number of things. I think of him definitely for queer subject matter (I love the way he photographs men), and he’s obsessed with cinema, so I think of him for movies. I also like his artwork, what he posts on his personal Instagram feed. For this cover, I had twenty-four hours to set it up, and I knew the shoot was going to be ten minutes and that Ryan could work under pressure. I actually felt a little self-conscious, because I was like, Is he going to think I’m calling him just because it’s a queer subject? But Ryan was excited about it.
Last spring, when I flew to South Bend, Indiana, for the shoot, Ryan was waiting at the hotel, ready to have a conversation and to start work right away. This is one of those situations where you have to trust each other. I was really pushing Ryan toward this clean picture of Pete, and we spent a lot of time lighting and setting it up. Pete was on the cover of New York magazine the previous week, so we knew we would have to do something different.
Embser: And you ended up with this totally American portrait, with the front porch and the natural light.
Moakley: Yeah, it was all very fast. I remember Pete opened the door for us, and he was the most normal person in the world. He offered us coffee. (He was walking around with a JFK mug, which made me crack up—I asked him if he would pose in the picture with the JFK mug, and he was totally into it.) Anyway, we made these beautiful painterly portraits of Pete, and then I wanted a secondary shot with Chasten—I didn’t know if Pete and Chasten were going to go on the cover together, but I knew one picture would end up on the cover and one would end up on the inside. We were trying to get as much as possible out of ten minutes. Ryan said he was going outside for a look. I give it to Ryan because he had the instincts to see the house, to see American Gothic. The picture is this queer American Gothic.
Cover of the May 13, 2019, issue of TIME. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for TIME
Embser: Greta LaFleur in the Los Angeles Review of Books said that this cover offers “the promise that our first gay family might actually be a straight one,” meaning it’s a very straight image of a gay couple, who are adopting the posture of a “regular” American family.
Moakley: They were just being themselves. And that’s a big part of that picture, whatever perception the Los Angeles Review of Books has about them, it’s just Pete and Chasten being themselves. That’s the picture they would have taken for their engagement, they would have stood that way—but then it’s filtered through Ryan, and it’s filtered through TIME, and packaged by TIME.
Embser: And seen around the world. So, perhaps the suspicion derives from the spectacle of someone who is getting all this attention on the American stage, and who happens to be gay, and therefore his perfect nuclear family image is inaccurately associated with a queer community that’s, in fact, completely fragmented and diverse—a population that has many different ideas of what a family can be.
Moakley: Yes, I think so. In my own search for my identity as a queer individual, as a gay man in America, in this generation that comes post–AIDS crisis, I think about how our self-perceptions have changed and what acceptance means. I think it means something different for people in different parts of the country. Pete Buttigieg, like all of us, is growing into his queerness and discovering his sense of masculinity or whatever that means to him.
Chasten Buttigieg and Mayor Pete Buttigieg on the front steps of their home in South Bend, Indiana. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for TIME
Embser: The best portraits, and especially those on a magazine cover, have more than one meaning. Ryan’s portrait of Pete is destined to cause disagreement: it’s a touchstone, or it’s offensive, or it’s conformist. It’s “queer” in every sense. It’s also the last of its kind. The next time we have a gay candidate, you won’t need to do a cover like this, because it won’t be a TIME magazine cover story. It’ll just be like, yeah, that’s another presidential candidate.
Moakley: Exactly. If we can make important pictures that people share and talk about—what else could we do that would be better right now? That’s what we hope to do as journalists, writers, and artists. We’re living through extraordinary times since Black Lives Matter and Me Too, and I feel like the internet and social media propelled a revolution around all of our lives and the way we’re rethinking who tells stories. As photographers and the publishing community, we all are in a place where we’re trying to emphasize diversity of perspectives in storytelling. And this goes back to your question about photography: it’s really the artists that lead this. Artists drive all the ideas. And the great art photographers, their ideas trickle down into other things. We all need that inspiration and that energy.
Brendan Embser is managing editor of Aperture magazine.
The 2020 Aperture Summer Open is accepting applications through April 29, 2020. See here for details.
What it Takes to Be a Photo Editor
For TIME magazine’s editor at large, photography is about speaking truth to the world.
By Brendan Embser
Paul Moakley. Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME
In November 2014, Paul Moakley traveled to Liberia with the photographer Jackie Nickerson to make portraits of the doctors and frontline workers fighting against the Ebola epidemic for TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue. As they waited to see Dr. Jerry Brown, a medical director in Monrovia, Moakley and Nickerson witnessed a burial team preparing to move Ebola victims to a site for mass cremation.
“All I could think about was how no family members were present to witness this final moment,” he wrote in TIME for a behind-the-scenes diary about the photo shoot. “All I could do was hold my head down in respect.”
Covering the Ebola crisis prepared Moakley for the challenges posed by COVID-19, as visitors are restricted from hospitals and funeral homes, and people throughout the world—including reporters—face isolation in all forms. The need to protect photographers and subjects, he says, is as important as telling a story accurately. “Our job as journalists is to point these things out, to show the visual evidence.”
As TIME’s deputy director of photography and later editor at large for special projects, Moakley, one of the cocurators of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, has produced ambitious visual stories and iconic covers, from a 2018 special issue about the devastating opioid epidemic in the United States, to Ryan Pfluger’s controversial portrait of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. He values long-standing creative relationships with photographers, but he also seeks out new voices. “There’s room for everyone,” he says.
When I spoke with Moakley in early April, he was calling in from TIME’s temporary photo headquarters—the kitchen at the Alice Austen House, a museum on Staten Island, where he lives and moonlights as the museum’s caretaker. He was working around the clock, figuring out with the team at TIME how to approach the most consequential story in recent memory.
Covers of the April 20, 2020, issue of TIME. Clockwise from top left, photographs by Danny Kim, Elizabeth Bick, Lorenzo Meloni/Magnum Photos, Lauren Lancaster, and Christopher Morris/VII for TIME
Brendan Embser: How quickly did you and everyone at TIME have to adapt to the new working situation caused by the coronavirus?
Paul Moakley: I went to a shoot in Brooklyn on March 11—we were shooting the chef José Andrés with photographer Martin Schoeller—and our security person told us we had to follow CDC guidelines and ask everyone who’s entering the room where they’ve traveled. It was really weird being in Brooklyn that day. When I went home on the train, there was one person with a mask on. He had just got it, and he had an Amazon package on his lap. I asked if I could photograph him. I said, “I feel like everyone’s starting to prepare.” He was really excited about his mask. It was camo and kind of cool looking.
Embser: Do you carry a camera with you all the time? Or do you just take lots of pictures on your phone?
Moakley: I do carry a camera around, a little Sony RX100 VII. It fits in my pocket, has a great flash, and takes awesome pictures.
Embser: Some of the best photo editors are also photographers, because they know what’s good and they can cut through things quickly.
Moakley: Yes, sometimes. Jason Fulford, for instance, is a wonderful editor and collaborator. And I think back to the history of photography, to Alfred Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work (1903–17) and the way photographers used to publish magazines and have galleries and also take pictures. I’ve made people like that the model for myself. I’ve often felt some anxiety about needing to specialize in one thing—to be either a photographer or a photo editor.
Embser: And now you have it all!
Moakley: I don’t know if I have it all, I don’t think so! Being a photographer keeps me sharper as an editor. If I’m taking my own pictures and editing them, I feel like I’m better at editing other people’s pictures. It’s like exercise for me. I live in a museum, the Alice Austen House, which is a whole other way of thinking about pictures, as compared to laying them out in a magazine, which is more about delivering information.
Embser: We are living in a moment when people are obsessed with information, looking at their news feeds every hour, and possibly even have an unhealthy relationship to the news. On the other side of that are people like you—essential workers, I would say!—who are helping us interpret and understand what’s going on. What has changed for you over the last few weeks? What has it been like to put together visuals and images for a magazine that’s a major part of the American news DNA?
Moakley: It really hit me in a weird way the first time we had a phone call about what might happen with the virus. We have a security specialist at TIME who worked for the FBI, and she keeps an eye on all of our photo shoots that might have a dangerous aspect to them. All of a sudden, every shoot became dangerous, and this possibility of being locked down as a city came up. It scared me. It took me some time to process how to approach it visually.
Cover of the March 30, 2020, issue of TIME. Photograph by Angela Strassheim for TIME
Embser: When you realized what was happening, at least in the U.S., how did you develop a cover for the magazine?
Moakley: As things got stranger and stranger by the day, I called the photographer Angela Strassheim. She’s a really wonderful artist. I knew she knew how to make work about forensics. I told her the story is getting really big, and it’s dangerous, and I think we’re afraid to have photo shoots and to bring people together right now. I thought she could do something with fingerprints on everyday objects, all the things you carry around, to raise consciousness about what people touch. We kept talking, a little bit through email and text.
Eventually, Angela called me and said she had a friend in Connecticut who thinks she has COVID-19. “She can’t leave the house, and she’s a single mother,” Angela said. “I was dropping groceries off for her, and I saw her inside her house in her robe with a mask.” And then she said, “That’s the picture I want to make for you.” (Angela makes incredible pictures of people in domestic spaces, and they have this really strange tension that she taps into, like Doug DuBois—they just pick up on another part of the ether that we’re not seeing.)
I had to call the security people at work to evaluate the situation and explain that Angela would never go into the house or have any direct contact with the subject. (We weren’t even thinking six feet yet.) We told her, “Don’t go in the house, photograph through the window, stay far away.” That shoot went really well—Angela made a startling picture of this person trapped in her home with a mask on. This was early on, when we had government leaders telling us we didn’t need to wear masks. But this woman was being really responsible, worried about other people and her son, quarantining in her bedroom, and depending on family and friends to bring her food. So it was a great story.
We then decided to crash a bunch of covers around the world of people who either have COVID-19 and are stuck at home, or have a role as essential workers, like delivery people. It was difficult in China, where they make everyone stay in quarantine. But in the UK, Iran, the United States, Brazil, and all of the other places where our photo department did shoots, we approached them the way Angela did. We had everyone shoot from a safe vantage point, a doorway or window, and it created a series that was very effective. One cover our deputy photo director, Andrew Katz, produced was by David Ryder, a Reuters photographer who works on the wires primarily in Seattle. He was photographing the nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where there was one of the biggest outbreaks of COVID-19. David made a powerful photo of a middle-aged woman staring into the window of a nursing home and trying to talk to her mother, who was in bed inside. It was like Angela’s picture—this idea of being separated by glass and walls and space.
Embser: Angela’s image strikes me as iconic. It’s a classic TIME magazine cover, quintessential TIME. And the others radiate outward into different styles.
Moakley: That’s the fun thing about working at TIME. You’re communicating to this mass audience and you’re trying to come up with a really smart way to tell a story, like any other magazine—like the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, or California Sunday Magazine. I love the clarity of Angela’s photograph, along with the message the other covers send that this was not only happening in the U.S.
A COVID-19 patient being prepared to be intubated by the anesthesiologist. The plastic tent is so the virus isn’t spread while transporting the patient between units. March 31, 2020. Photograph by Danny Kim for TIME
Embser: What kinds of conversations are you having with photographers about how they’re doing their reporting? Would it be fair to say that everyone is a war photographer now?
Moakley: Yeah, that is exactly what’s happening. Almost every assignment is treated almost like a war assignment. We run through a checklist with photographers, and we make sure we have emergency contacts for them in case something happens while they’re traveling. We have to prepare special letters and IDs for them, so people know they’re essential workers. We have to check and see if they have health insurance, and if they don’t, we can look into getting them some kind of temporary insurance. Then there’s the issue after the photo shoot of what happens to the person, and when does our responsibility to take care of photographers end?
Embser: Have you had an experience like this before?
Moakley: In 2014, I traveled to Liberia with the photographer Jackie Nickerson and writer Aryn Baker to produce our “Person of the Year” shoot. That was a series of photographs around the Ebola fighters, and we were looking at people on the ground in Liberia, specifically Liberian doctors. The Liberian doctor Jerry Brown was the first person to figure out how to get people to recover and walk out of the hospital. It was one of those issues we were so proud to work on, because we were honoring people doing incredible, dangerous work.
Embser: Is it typical that the photo editor would travel with the photographer like that, especially for such a dangerous assignment? Or was that specific to your role producing “Person of the Year”?
Moakley: I would say I’m definitely a rare hybrid of being a producer and photo editor—I produce photography and video, and I also work a lot as a reporter. So I’m useful in these kinds of situations, to multitask. I was also worried about Jackie. We wanted a photographer I had a relationship with, someone who could work without lights and make elevated, beautiful, monumental portraits. Jackie had no hesitation—she understood the dangers immediately, but she was willing to take the risk and felt it was a story she wanted to tell. I wanted to be there as a photo assistant, as a producer, to be an extra set of hands for her, in situations where she needed someone to hold a reflector, hold an umbrella over someone’s head, and to do all the fact-checking for captions.
Cover of the 2014 “Person of the Year” issue of TIME. Photograph by Jackie Nickerson for TIME
Embser: I remember the pictures from that period, in Liberia and elsewhere in West Africa, were incredibly distressing—in some cases, they were apocalyptic. Jackie’s covers are regal. They’re not sensational. And I think that’s why, at least in my opinion, they hold up really well.
Moakley: Thank you, that was precisely our intention.
Embser: What was it like for the two of you working together on the ground?
Moakley: It was a moment that really prepared me for COVID-19, I have to say. There was a period during the Ebola crisis when we said, “We are not sending photographers into this, it’s too dangerous.” It was a wall of “No.” But our job as journalists is to point these things out, to show the visual evidence—at TIME, the photo editors all feel strongly about that.
For the shoot, we had the most elaborate security plan—I have it in a binder to this day—and directions to airlift us if one of us got Ebola and we had to be taken out of the country. We were some of the only foreign journalists in the country at the time, and it was spooky to be alone almost, and not see any other press around. I remember learning about PPE [personal protective equipment] and how to apply it properly and how to put it on someone else—it’s really a two-person job to don full PPE.
I went to Liberia with trunks of equipment, and when I got off the plane, a man in a white space suit checked my temperature. Our fixer picked us up at the airport with Aryn Baker, our reporter. I remember he opened the car door, and he had a sweat rag sitting on the seat he wanted me to sit on. I was too polite to say, “Can you move the towel that you’ve been sweating on?” I was just like, Okay, this is where I’m in it. I can’t touch my face anymore. I moved the towel and locked my hands onto my knees until I was in a space where I could wash my hands again.
Jackie Nickerson photographs nurse Salome Karwah in Monrovia, Liberia, on November 26, 2014. Photograph by Paul Moakley
Embser: When you were working with Jackie and Aryn, did you have a sense that this was a moment you would share for the rest of your lives?
Moakley: Yeah, we all really bonded. There were moments when it really started to escalate. I was seeing things that I’d only seen in pictures of genocide: a dump truck loaded up with bodies. Seeing people working so carefully and diligently at a time when they couldn’t really have funerals, they were just trying to take care of the dead, and the dead were sadly being buried without funerals and without family members around. It was one of the most unforgettable scenes I’ve ever witnessed as a journalist, and it marks me to this day.
I remember looking at Jackie, in our gear, and making eye contact with her. We were working quietly, and I thought, This is where you just have to focus and get this. After almost two weeks in Monrovia, the best day was when we were with Dr. Brown and he told us they were sending a whole family home who had recovered. To see this family come out of quarantine, it looked like they were in a camp—like in Holocaust pictures. The gates opened, this family walked out, and they were weakened but smiling and so excited and happy. That really lifted our spirits after seeing such death and destruction. Knowing that people were getting better and that we were on a mission to celebrate the people who were helping them.
Spread from the 2014 “Person of the Year” issue of TIME. Nurses Augustine Bindi (left) and Princess Ideko (right) in Monrovia, Liberia, November 2014. Photographs by Jackie Nickerson for TIME
Embser: Over the course of your photo editing career, I imagine there have been photographers you’ve called on repeatedly. What makes those creative relationships work?
Moakley: It’s truly the energy of the collaboration. If I tell a photographer I love some part of their portfolio, I really mean it. I don’t say those things lightly. When you hire someone and they do a job for you, you trust them. On the inverse, you have to publish their work well, treat it with the utmost respect, be their representative at the magazine, and they begin to trust you too. I would say how that relationship grows is the most essential thing about photo editing, because from that point of trust, I can ask them to go a little bit out of their comfort zone. If it doesn’t go well, they know I’ll be respectful, and that I’ll only show their best work.
Embser: How do you engage with photographers you’re commissioning for the first time?
Moakley: When you work with a photographer who has a lot of raw talent, or someone who’s in a place where they are given an opportunity to rise up to the challenge, you have to set up circumstances for them to be successful. And that is really where a photo editor comes in. I think people don’t realize how much production, research, mood board–making, and therapy go into photo shoots. Everyone needs different levels of help. Whether they’re experienced or not, I just want it to be exciting for them. I value the energy of what somebody puts into an assignment, how friendly they are in the back and forth, and their openness to ideas. We spend a lot of time thinking of what the outcome of a shoot’s going to be, because that’s our job, but we also want to be open to the unexpected—that’s where amazing work happens.
Staff of the Capital Gazette, December 9, 2018. Photograph by Moises Saman/Magnum Photos for TIME
Embser: You are one of the curators of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, which this year is called Information, inspired by the 1970 exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At a time when we have divided ideas about authority and truth, what does “information” mean to you?
Moakley: As a photo editor and journalist working in the new social-media landscape—where you’re called into question more and more, where the audience can respond directly—we’ve all had to work harder. We’re three years into a presidency where this idea of “fake news” has escalated. There’s a whole segment of our country, and the world, that doesn’t believe journalists. I think it’s good to be skeptical—we all need to be—and we need to take a lot of different sources of information into account to come up with our own ideas. But it’s also hurtful and deeply harmful to have such powerful people dismiss organizations that are doing good work. We’re fighting against that every day.
I think we have to let people know what we do, bring them into the process a bit, and be really clear about what’s real and what’s not, especially when it comes to photography. At TIME, we have a mass audience, so we have to account for different levels of visual literacy—letting people know when images are manipulated in some way or when we’re calling it an illustration, and what’s the information that runs next to a picture that might be staged. That is all really tricky and delicate. I think when people come to TIME magazine, there’s an expectation that they’re going to look at news pictures that aren’t retouched or altered in any way. This week, we needed to protect the identity of somebody in a hospital, blurring out the name of somebody in a room, and with that picture, we have to run a statement saying that it has been altered, so the viewer knows that this is a very special picture, that we wouldn’t do this to any other picture. That also sends the message that everything else is real.
Embser: Yet, don’t you think that artists—photographers who are not only working in journalism but also making lens-based artwork—need space to blur the lines between fact and fiction a little bit?
Moakley: Yes, on the other side of things, when we’re talking about art—definitely. My interest in photography has always been in that ambiguous part of it, that power to really play. I love documentary work, but I love documentary artists who challenge the idea of photography’s authority. Some of the most exciting things I’m seeing right now are photographers playing with ideas of sequence and repetition in their work. One of the last bodies of work that stuck in my head was Sohrab Hura’s The Coast (2019). He makes these very intense pictures, but there is something about the repetition, and this idea of seeing a repetition and a sequence, that makes the pictures even more powerful.
Eleventh-grade student Robbie Moore and Jayde LaPorte, a transgender ninth grader, attend Milwaukee’s Alliance School, October 2011. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for TIME
Embser: I have to ask you about the Pete Buttigieg cover. The cover of a magazine, especially the cover of TIME, still holds an amazing symbolic value, even if you don’t buy the magazine or ever see it in print. The TIME cover is like a way station toward immortality. And the concept of the cover has completely survived the leap into the world of Instagram—just look at Tyler Mitchell’s 2018 Beyoncé cover for Vogue. Mayor Pete’s cover is part of a queer trajectory in TIME, from Ellen’s cover from 1997 to Laverne Cox’s cover in 2014. You commissioned Ryan Pfluger for the portrait of Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, and Ryan is someone who is known for his beautiful and sensitive work around LGBT themes. Can you talk a little bit about how that image was made?
Moakley: Definitely. Ryan Pfluger has been a contributor to TIME for about ten years. As our relationship has grown, I think of Ryan for a number of things. I think of him definitely for queer subject matter (I love the way he photographs men), and he’s obsessed with cinema, so I think of him for movies. I also like his artwork, what he posts on his personal Instagram feed. For this cover, I had twenty-four hours to set it up, and I knew the shoot was going to be ten minutes and that Ryan could work under pressure. I actually felt a little self-conscious, because I was like, Is he going to think I’m calling him just because it’s a queer subject? But Ryan was excited about it.
Last spring, when I flew to South Bend, Indiana, for the shoot, Ryan was waiting at the hotel, ready to have a conversation and to start work right away. This is one of those situations where you have to trust each other. I was really pushing Ryan toward this clean picture of Pete, and we spent a lot of time lighting and setting it up. Pete was on the cover of New York magazine the previous week, so we knew we would have to do something different.
Embser: And you ended up with this totally American portrait, with the front porch and the natural light.
Moakley: Yeah, it was all very fast. I remember Pete opened the door for us, and he was the most normal person in the world. He offered us coffee. (He was walking around with a JFK mug, which made me crack up—I asked him if he would pose in the picture with the JFK mug, and he was totally into it.) Anyway, we made these beautiful painterly portraits of Pete, and then I wanted a secondary shot with Chasten—I didn’t know if Pete and Chasten were going to go on the cover together, but I knew one picture would end up on the cover and one would end up on the inside. We were trying to get as much as possible out of ten minutes. Ryan said he was going outside for a look. I give it to Ryan because he had the instincts to see the house, to see American Gothic. The picture is this queer American Gothic.
Cover of the May 13, 2019, issue of TIME. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for TIME
Embser: Greta LaFleur in the Los Angeles Review of Books said that this cover offers “the promise that our first gay family might actually be a straight one,” meaning it’s a very straight image of a gay couple, who are adopting the posture of a “regular” American family.
Moakley: They were just being themselves. And that’s a big part of that picture, whatever perception the Los Angeles Review of Books has about them, it’s just Pete and Chasten being themselves. That’s the picture they would have taken for their engagement, they would have stood that way—but then it’s filtered through Ryan, and it’s filtered through TIME, and packaged by TIME.
Embser: And seen around the world. So, perhaps the suspicion derives from the spectacle of someone who is getting all this attention on the American stage, and who happens to be gay, and therefore his perfect nuclear family image is inaccurately associated with a queer community that’s, in fact, completely fragmented and diverse—a population that has many different ideas of what a family can be.
Moakley: Yes, I think so. In my own search for my identity as a queer individual, as a gay man in America, in this generation that comes post–AIDS crisis, I think about how our self-perceptions have changed and what acceptance means. I think it means something different for people in different parts of the country. Pete Buttigieg, like all of us, is growing into his queerness and discovering his sense of masculinity or whatever that means to him.
Chasten Buttigieg and Mayor Pete Buttigieg on the front steps of their home in South Bend, Indiana. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger for TIME
Embser: The best portraits, and especially those on a magazine cover, have more than one meaning. Ryan’s portrait of Pete is destined to cause disagreement: it’s a touchstone, or it’s offensive, or it’s conformist. It’s “queer” in every sense. It’s also the last of its kind. The next time we have a gay candidate, you won’t need to do a cover like this, because it won’t be a TIME magazine cover story. It’ll just be like, yeah, that’s another presidential candidate.
Moakley: Exactly. If we can make important pictures that people share and talk about—what else could we do that would be better right now? That’s what we hope to do as journalists, writers, and artists. We’re living through extraordinary times since Black Lives Matter and Me Too, and I feel like the internet and social media propelled a revolution around all of our lives and the way we’re rethinking who tells stories. As photographers and the publishing community, we all are in a place where we’re trying to emphasize diversity of perspectives in storytelling. And this goes back to your question about photography: it’s really the artists that lead this. Artists drive all the ideas. And the great art photographers, their ideas trickle down into other things. We all need that inspiration and that energy.
Brendan Embser is managing editor of Aperture magazine.
The 2020 Aperture Summer Open is accepting applications through April 29, 2020. See here for details.
April 21, 2020
The Photographer’s Playlist
Photography might be a silent medium, but these renowned photographers are turning up the volume while in isolation. Coinciding with the “House & Home” issue of Aperture magazine, Nan Goldin, Alec Soth, Jamel Shabazz, and others share the music that comforts, inspires, or makes them move.
Nan Goldin, Crowd at Saint Rosalia Feast, Paternò, 1986
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, London, and Paris
In 1986, I was in Palermo, Italy, during the feast of Saint Rosalia. She is the patron saint of Palermo, who rescued the Sicilian city from the plague. According to legend, people found her bones in a cave, and when they carried them through the city, the plague ended and people were cured. Today, Palermo is invoking Saint Rosalia to protect the city from COVID-19. I’m praying to her myself. I remember when the world looked like this photograph, not so long ago. Hopefully, we’ll be able to touch each other again soon. We need to call it physical distancing, not social distancing. Words are important. When I went into quarantine, Thora, a writer, came to interview me and never left. I’ve gathered the songs that we’ve been listening to, while baking pies and playing backgammon.
Alec Soth, Park Hyatt Hotel, Tokyo, 2015
Courtesy the artist
The pandemic has provided an opportunity to reflect on the power of stripped-down communication. The Rolling Stones seem closer to their roots when forced to perform in their living rooms. Here are some of the bare-bones songs that have inspired me over the years. This playlist starts with my teenage neighbor Prince, and ends with my 2021 collaborator Dave King of The Bad Plus. In between are songs by artists that inspired my projects Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004: Low, Lucinda Williams), NIAGARA (2006: Antony and the Johnsons, Leonard Cohen), Broken Manual (2010: The Langley Schools Music Project, Daniel Johnston), Songbook (2015: Sufjan Stevens), and I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019: Max Richter with Tilda Swinton reading this line by Franz Kafka: “Everyone carries a room about inside them”).
Jamel Shabazz, The Basement, Hempstead NY, 2010
Courtesy the artist
Music has always played a major role in my creative process. It fed my soul and provided me with a glimpse into a larger world. I am personally drawn to music and recording artists that address political and social issues. Those types of songs and artists are needed more today than ever before due to the current state of the world. It brings me great joy to share these ten songs that are all very close to my heart and soul.
Justine Kurland, Shipwrecked, 2000
Courtesy the artist
I listened to these songs repeatedly while driving cross-country during my two decades on the road. The music operated as a narrative, each song articulating the sense of loss I felt leaving, being left, running away. But also an optimism for what lay ahead—confinement in a car is a space for imagining. The strangest song on this list, a must-listen, is by Scott Walker, who basically sings a synopsis of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957).
Awol Erizku, Untitled (A Bowl of Soul), 2018
Courtesy the artist
Meticulous selections of high-frequency vibrations.
Pieter Hugo, Yu Yuechao, Beijing, 2015–16
Courtesy the artist
Music for house cleaning. Vacuum. Underneath the sink, behind the toilet. Scrub. Scrub hard. Repeat.
Elle Pérez, Tomashi and Ally, 2019
Courtesy the artist
My playlist is a love story and a dance party. My quarantine experience has been truly bittersweet: finding myself distanced from and concerned about my friends and family, but getting to spend such wonderful and rare time with my partner. These are some of the songs that have just been keeping me going during this time.
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Why Farah Al Qasimi Has Her Eye on You
The photographer and cocurator of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open speaks about glamorous bodegas, New York maximalism, and why art is essential—even during a crisis.
By Brendan Embser
Farah Al Qasimi, Woman in Leopard Print, 2019
Courtesy the artist, Helena Anrather, New York, and The Third Line, Dubai
Farah Al Qasimi has her eye on you. In Woman in Leopard Print, one of her seventeen photographs commissioned by the Public Art Fund in 2019 and presented at one hundred bus shelters across New York’s five boroughs, a woman in said leopard print peers into a tiny compact mirror, her eyebrow superbly arched and perfectly groomed. The bold print of her headscarf is thrown into uncanny relief against a backdrop of giant yet slender fingers with glitter-tipped nails. It’s a scene of explosive beauty and humorous excess, one in which the gazes between photographer, subject, and viewer bound back and forth.
For Al Qasimi, who was raised in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and earned her MFA from the Yale School of Art, that hall-of-mirrors choreography is central to her ideas about cultural exchange and hybridity: she’s photographed a fake “Amazon” department store in Dubai, a sparkling chandelier at a bodega in Queens, a Muslim beauty pageant in Iowa, a goat in a playhouse, and a bright blue volume of United States Treaties and Other International Agreements teetering perilously on the edge of a bookshelf.
When we spoke earlier this month, Al Qasimi, one of the most exciting young photographers working today, and a cocurator of the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, was hunkered down in rural Massachusetts, trying to make a new video piece while in isolation amidst the coronavirus crisis. Her latest solo show, Funhouse, had opened at Helena Anrather at the beginning of March, only to close a week later, along with all of New York’s other galleries; the custom orange carpeting she installed for the exhibition remains untouched—for now.
Farah Al Qasimi, Miss Muslimah Pageant 2019 (Miss Iowa), 2019
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Brendan Embser: Your current exhibition, Funhouse at Helena Anrather in New York, shows your sense of curiosity about female subjects and feminine-oriented spaces, perhaps in contrast to More Good News (2017), which was more concerned with ideas about manhood and masculinity. Do you see Funhouse as a follow-up when it comes to looking at gender, or is that too simple of a comparison?
Farah Al Qasimi: I don’t see it as being so much a division by gender. But I do see that there is a similarity, in that all of the photographs have a confusing sense of location or geography that indicates that you are in a lot of in-between spaces, whether they’re immigrant communities in the U.S. or signs of colonial influence in the Middle East. There’s usually that dichotomy in the work, but I think that this particular project is more concerned with an affect. It’s more self-referential to photography as a medium that can only produce mistakes or imperfections. I compare the act of photographing something to the act of it being reflected in a funhouse mirror that warps or exaggerates reality.
Farah Al Qasimi, Trompe L’oeil Car Seat, 2019
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: What do you mean by “mistakes or imperfections”? One of the qualities that’s recognizable in your work is actually a type of perfection in the way that you build images and the quality of your printing and composition.
Al Qasimi: It’s impossible for a photograph to be truly subjective, even when we think about photojournalism and work that is primarily concerned with the act of truth-telling. There’s always a decision to leave something out of the frame. I think of “imperfection” as a replacement word for a clear lack of subjectivity. As somebody who engages with photography primarily as an artist and secondarily as a photojournalist, I’m always interested in taking creative liberties with the truth—and also in presenting a situation or an image in which people might not feel the need to ask for the truth. Maybe there’s something inherent in the image that provides information, or enough interest that you could take it at face value.
Installation view of Farah Al Qasimi, Funhouse, 2020. Photograph by Sebastian Bach
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: In your captions, you often don’t tell us where a picture is made. For example, The Amazon Department Store (2020), which is presented in the exhibition at life size.
Al Qasimi: First and foremost, it’s about certain types of visibility. There are a couple of references in the show to fakes—fake surfaces that are printed to look like something else. There’s an image of a trompe l’oeil car seat that’s printed to look as though it’s tufted, but it’s not. There’s a video in which I’m wearing a copy of a clown suit from a mall that’s known for selling copies of things [Alone In A Crowd (King of Joy) (2020)]. The Amazon store is a fake Amazon, obviously. When you see it in life size, you can see there’s a tiny “the” in the corner of the sign, so it’s actually called “The Amazon.” It’s a scaled-down dollar store that’s claiming to have the same variety and low prices that the actual Amazon does. I think it’s like entering a place in which there is a real scale shift and a sense of humor about it. And also, a comedic failure in trying to transcend reality.
Farah Al Qasimi, Coco, 2019
Courtesy the artist, Helena Anrather, New York, and The Third Line, Dubai
Embser: It plunges us into this distinct yet still inexact setting, which is compounded by the other images in the exhibition that are taken in a variety of places. “Back and forth,” as you say—and that’s the title of your commission for the Public Art Fund, Back and Forth Disco (2020), an outdoor exhibition displayed where advertisements usually appear on New York’s bus shelters. It’s one of the few exhibitions New Yorkers can actually see this spring! How did you approach this commission? When you were making the images, did you know that they’d be displayed at bus stops, and if so, did you have a sense of a different type of audience or a different way of seeing?
Al Qasimi: There was definitely a distinction. I took a very different approach to this versus making photographic work for a gallery or a book. I think part of that was just understanding how those images would function in the public landscape. I really wanted to make the photographs more celebratory than critical. I focused on small businesses in New York, many of which are run by immigrants—it started off with a desire to celebrate some of the places in my own neighborhood that I frequent as a customer. Then it grew to other neighborhoods, and I wanted to echo New York back to these people in a way that would make them feel properly represented.
Farah Al Qasimi, Woman on Phone, 2019
Courtesy the artist, Helena Anrather, New York, and The Third Line, Dubai
Embser: The word disco—was that in your mind at the beginning, or did that come later on?
Al Qasimi: That came later. There’s a lot of color, a lot of mirrored surfaces. I think of the movement of New York as this harsh choreography of routine. We are going back and forth between places all the time on public transport, people are constantly in motion, it’s this wild frenzy of movement. Obviously, that doesn’t really apply now, but at the time it was certainly truthful to my vision of New York.
Embser: What has been your experience of seeing your work on the street or hearing about it from other people? It’s not like visiting a gallery or a museum, where you’re going to the “altar,” where there’s this agreed-upon meditation or sense of “aura.” Yet when you see an image on the street, its presence can be really interrogative, it might prompt you to be critical and self-questioning, maybe even more so than when you’re in a gallery. You’re like, What is that?
Al Qasimi: For some of the people that I’ve heard from, it’s been a surprise. They weren’t necessarily paying attention and then they saw something that echoed an advertisement, except it wasn’t really trying to sell them something. It was a photograph of something that already existed, and that was a positive thing for them to witness. I’ve also seen a few that have been graffitied—and I actually like that, because I feel like it further affirms their presence as a part of the city. I think that they’re not supposed to be these precious things that are protected by white walls. I like that people are interacting with them, even if it does “deface” the surface of the thing. A lot of the surfaces that I’m photographing have already been weathered, because they’ve been a part of the public domain for so long, and this is just an act of collaging or repurposing.
Farah Al Qasimi, Woman in Leopard Print, 2019. Sixth Avenue Between Minetta Lane and West 3rd Street, Manhattan. Photograph by James Ewing
Courtesy the Public Art Fund, New York
Embser: Your photographs for the project focus on local communities and small businesses. Was it a challenge for you to do this kind of work? Going into a bodega or a shop, do you find it easy to interact with people and draw them out? Does that come easily to you?
Al Qasimi: No, it doesn’t. I’m extremely shy and I’m really wary of taking up people’s time, so it took a lot of courage to talk to people, and I had to come up with a way to efficiently explain the project so that I wasn’t bothering people if they weren’t interested. When people were interested, though, they were incredibly generous with their time.
Farah Al Qasimi, Blanket Shop, 2019
Courtesy the artist, Helena Anrather, New York, and The Third Line, Dubai
Embser: Were there any discoveries along the way?
Al Qasimi: There was one beauty salon, Grace Beauty Salon, that I ended up at in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, that was great. The owner had been there for a while, and it turns out that one of my good friends who grew up nearby, in Sheepshead Bay, went to this salon to get her eyebrows done as a teenager. Rubeena, the beautician and owner—her back is in one of the photographs, and she’s wearing a floral printed dress. (I actually had my eyebrows done there and she did a great job.)
Embser: I used to live in Bed-Stuy—also in Brooklyn—and there was a dry cleaner near me that was run by an elderly Korean couple. After the dry cleaner closed, that shop building reopened as a bodega, and it was fully renovated and tricked out with chandeliers. I called my dad, and I was like, “Dad, my bodega has a chandelier!” The guys who worked there were so proud of how they had redecorated the place. My dad was like, “That’s New York. That’s just what happens.”
Al Qasimi: Totally. This is your business, this is where you spend most of your time, and it’s also the way that you represent yourself to the world. It’s beautiful when somebody takes pride in that and attempts to make people feel welcome with their sense of aesthetic.
Farah Al Qasimi, Bodega Chandelier, 2019
Courtesy the artist, Helena Anrather, New York, and The Third Line, Dubai
Embser: You have a color palette that’s increasingly recognizable as yours. The “Farah Al Qasimi” look. It’s a lot of light greens and pinks and blues. I had a sense about this from both More Good News and Funhouse, but it really hit me when I saw your photograph Bird Market (The Blue One Escaped)(2019)—all those colors are in one image. Then I began to see it more in your images of staircases, bedspreads, the gold ball gown in the beauty pageant. How did you develop your photographic sensibility when it comes to ideas of beauty and surface?
Al Qasimi: I grew up in the United Arab Emirates, a place that was still being developed in the 1990s and early 2000s, but there was also a lag in taste, where people were designing buildings in the style of ten years earlier. There’s also a real appreciation of the old that still exists in some pockets of the country, despite its rapid growth. At the same time, it’s a place that privileges maximalist aesthetics over minimalism, the Brooklyn-esque, the faux industrial. So, my work reflects the world that surrounded me as a young person. It’s really hard to shake. It’s funny, even with the Public Art Fund photographs, so many people are like, “Are those really all in New York?” And they are absolutely all in New York. I think it’s just that we all respond to things that feel familiar to us.
Farah Al Qasimi, Bird Market (The Blue One Escaped), 2019
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: When you said the work for the Public Art Fund commission was less “critical,” what do you mean by that?
Al Qasimi: When I say “critical,” I mean it’s embedded in a sense of humor. Certainly, the Amazon image is a bit more critical in that way. With the Public Art Fund work, I really wanted the images to be much more quickly legible than other photographs. People are moving very fast, they don’t have a lot of attention to give, and I’m very conscious of how much space I want to take up in their daily lives, when they’re already being bombarded by so much imagery that’s asking them to do something, buy something, sign up for something, or call Cellino & Barnes or whatever. I think that the photographs do have a certain undercurrent of humor, but I think it’s more of a loving humor than a dark humor.
Farah Al Qasimi, Beige Bathroom, 2020
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: Whereas in your exhibition, to take the example of Beige Bathroom (2020)—this might not have played in the same way if it was at a bus stop. In a gallery, it becomes an object of complete fascination. The surfaces are so exacting; there’s perfect, even lighting across everything. It almost looks like a Thomas Demand construction. Then the toilet paper hanging down is the punctum, this uncanny detail. When you’re working in these private spaces, how do you achieve the perfection of the surfaces?
Al Qasimi: You know, what’s crazy is that I didn’t make any changes to that bathroom— that’s our bathroom at our house in the Emirates. It has looked that way since the house was built in the early nineties. I love that from a distance, it looks so great photographed; I think there’s something about the evenness of the light that transforms it. But when you look closer, you can see that a lot of the taps have started to rust green, because the water where we live has an incredibly high iron content. It’s this very pristine, undisturbed scene, but then you think about what happens in bathrooms and it starts to lose this veneer of beauty. It almost looks like a dollhouse bathroom, a bathroom that doesn’t get used. But I use it! There’s something kind of funny about that to me. I also think a lot of my work contains signifiers of class, but they’re legible in different ways depending on where you come from. In the Emirates, there are a lot of places where you can buy these maximalist designs for cheap. You can get beautiful baroque furniture from a Walmart. There’s a very different relationship to taste and class there than there is here.
Farah Al Qasimi, Green Soap in Blue Bathroom, 2020
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: The viewer brings something to these images that also depends on timing. Your Green Soap in Blue Bathroom (2020) has lately become a kind of stylish quarantine icon—and a cheerful reminder to wash your hands. Yet somehow it will outlive even this moment of fear and vigilance about hygiene; it will mean something else in one or two years.
Al Qasimi: I hope so! I’ve been photographing soaps for four or five years now. It’s sort of an ongoing joke that every show I ever do has to have soap in it. For me, soap has always been a stand-in for the body. I come from a place where we have a particularly formal relationship to bodies and visibility, and I like to photograph things that touch the naked body, as opposed to photographing a nude. Soaps have that undercurrent of intimacy and almost perversion.
Farah Al Qasimi, G Climbing a Prop Warehouse Facade, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: You are one of the curators for the 2020 Aperture Summer Open, the theme for which was inspired by an exhibition presented by MoMA fifty years ago called Information. The remit for that show was a global survey of young artists, with “information” being the through line for organizing disparate projects. Kynaston McShine, the curator, noted in his catalogue essay that young people around the world, no matter if they’re in Brazil or Argentina or the U.S., may face some kind of political violence every day, regardless of whether or not their country is at war. He wrote, “It may seem too inappropriate, if not absurd, to get up in the morning, walk into a room, and apply dabs of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas. What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaningful?” As a curator who is also an image-maker, what are you interested in seeing from the Aperture Summer Open?
Al Qasimi: I really appreciate work with a sense of curiosity and purpose. I don’t know what that looks like, but I know that you know it when you see it. One of the best things about photography is that we all have the same raw materials available to us, but it’s a matter of how we transform those materials. It’s really about how we see the world and how we engage with it. We’re inundated with imagery so often that I think it sometimes feels like the most eye-grabbing thing will make the most successful image. But there has to be something at stake, there has to be something that is being said beyond the act of making an intriguing image. What happens after the intrigue fades? What are you actually saying with your photographs? What are you bringing to the world that is particularly of your own mind and nobody else’s? I think that’s what I’m excited about seeing.
Farah Al Qasimi, My Dear, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Helena Anrather, New York
Embser: Finally, do you think it’s going to be harder as an artist now, in this moment, and in the coming years? What advice would you give photographers out there to stay the course?
Al Qasimi: We should continue because we have to. With relationship to “information,” artists form so much how we see the world and how we connect with one another. They teach us so much, they teach me so much. It is really important to maintain that curiosity, to keep the lines of communication open. Obviously, things will change with these extenuating circumstances. I haven’t made any art for a while. I’m trying—I was trying to make this dumb video piece on my cell phone before you called me, and it’s going terribly. But I’m trying to do it with what I have available to me, because it’s how I reckon with the world. And there are days when I can’t, because I’m too busy dealing with taxes, or emails, figuring out how to finance my studio rent for the next couple of months, or doing lectures so I can make a little bit of money here and there. But when I have a moment to breathe, I do it because I have to, because it’s the only thing that I know how to do, and that keeps me going, and that gives me a fighting chance of understanding anything about the world. If anybody else feels that urgency, then I think it’s imperative that they find a balance: being kind to themselves and meeting their basic needs, but also leaving space every so often when they’re able to practice.
Brendan Embser is managing editor of Aperture magazine.
Funhouse opened on March 5, 2020, at Helena Anrather, New York. See the gallery’s website for updates during the coronavirus crisis. Farah Al Qasimi: Back and Forth Disco is on view through May 17, 2020, in public spaces throughout New York City’s five boroughs.
The 2020 Aperture Summer Open is accepting applications through April 29, 2020. See here for details.
April 20, 2020
A Searing Exhibition Charts the History of Abortion
Through photographs, historical documents, and recent interviews, Laia Abril presents the case that abortion is here to stay, whether it’s legal or not.
By Russet Lederman
Françoise, 76, is known as the grandmother of modern abortion in Europe. She describes her lifelong activism as a calling, with the personal motto, “When you have power, you also have a responsibility.” Vintage image from Laia Abril: On Abortion, 2020
Courtesy the artist
A friend’s text message popped up on a thread that covered everything from family to work to the usual mundane news we frequently share with one another. She was pregnant. It was unplanned, and she and her partner had made the decision to terminate the pregnancy through a “medication abortion” (aka abortion pills). She is one of the lucky ones. She lives in a city, a state, and a country where abortion is legal and accessible; has a partner who is supportive; health insurance that would cover a portion of the cost; and a private doctor who would handle the prescription with care and confidentiality. Yet despite her access and support, making the decision, undergoing the procedure, and dealing with the aftermath of an abortion was, and will always be, traumatic. Add to that the obstacles in states that have enacted bans and stringent abortion restrictions both before and since the COVID-19 pandemic—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming—and a difficult personal decision is egregiously turned into a political issue with often tragic consequences.
Installation view of Laia Abril—On Abortion, Museum of Sex, New York, 2020
Photograph by Kris Graves
In Laia Abril’s exhibition On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access, the debate over abortion is center stage. Through historical documents, medical publications, gynecological tools, personal stories, and news and police reports, Abril confronts the misogynistic horrors that befall our society when women are denied access to affordable and safe abortions.
A long-term project presented as a book and series of exhibitions, On Abortion is the first chapter in her ongoing A History of Misogyny series. It is a project I’ve been following since I first saw an earlier installation at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, in 2016. Both then and now, I left the exhibition with the feeling that my head was about to explode. Reading, hearing, and seeing the personal stories of condemned, criminalized, and in extreme cases, dead women in Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Ireland, Poland, and the United States—who had no other choice but to seek an illegal abortion due to rape, incest, or a medical condition that put their lives at risk—is an unbearable experience. Yet, it is an experience and a discussion that needs to be had by any society that sees itself as humane.
Installation view of Laia Abril—On Abortion, Museum of Sex, New York, 2020
Photograph by Kris Graves
In selecting New York’s Museum of Sex (now temporarily closed due to the coronavirus crisis) as the venue for the U.S. premiere of On Abortion, Abril has done more than just share her work. She has consciously chosen to place this discussion within a context that reaches beyond the art world and engages a diverse audience that may have no interest in art, but does in sexuality and the partisan discourse on abortion. Within this setting, Abril makes abundantly clear that abortion is unequivocally linked to sex and that the only way to depoliticize, decriminalize, and liberate the right to a difficult private decision is to make visible the factual evidence and tragic outcomes that have harmed women when abortion is denied or limited. As long as women have sex, abortion will remain an experience shared by millions of women around the world. Despite the efforts of religious groups and antiabortion crusaders, abortion is here to stay, whether legal or not.
The Museum of Sex deserves credit for a respectful restraint in the exhibition design of On Abortion. It is not their norm. Unlike the three other shows at the museum—Superfunland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival, Cam Life, and Stag: The Illicit Origins of Pornographic Film—the installation of On Abortion is thoughtful and befitting the subject. Entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters a space that combines wall-mounted photographs, poster-size news clippings, illustrations, a circa-1890s OB-GYN exam table, and books and antique medical instruments (from the Burns Archive and Collection) displayed in a traditional Americana-style vitrine. A wall text by abortion historian Linda Greenhouse reads like a treatise for action: “Instead of stigma and silence, we need to raise our voices and lift our sights, as this fascinating exhibit by a brilliant young artist inspires us to do. Abortion is a word. It is also a right we must fight for.”
Installation view of Laia Abril—On Abortion, Museum of Sex, New York, 2020
Photograph by Kris Graves
It is a contemplative exhibition that requires not just looking, but close reading and listening. Illustrations and photographs of early contraception (fish-bladder condoms, vaginal douches, and soap or enema syringes) along with pregnancy termination devices (knitting needles, wood and plastic rods) lead the way to more graphic and personal stories that caption black-and-white photographs of the women who have performed, sought, or been accused of having illegal abortions, and the spaces where their terminated pregnancies occurred. Sometimes their eyes are pixilated, their faces presented as photographic negatives or blurred, but most of the time they stare straight ahead, fixing the viewer in their gazes. Reading their stories on the wall texts or typed notes that accompany their photographs is wrenching. Whether it is the two-year prison sentence given to an Indiana woman who left her stillborn fetus in a dumpster after using abortion pills ordered illegally online from a Hong Kong pharmacy, or the tale of a young Salvadoran woman who was sentenced to thirty years in prison for homicide after losing her wanted baby in her third trimester when her employer would not let her go home after passing out, Abril’s direct use of personal narrative is fearless.
Trained in journalism, Abril is a multidisciplinary artist whose projects are the result of years of in-depth research. The strength of On Abortion is its all-encompassing approach to its subject matter and the range of perspectives presented. Included with the personal stories of survivors are police records of antiabortion terrorists accompanied by their rhetoric—a disturbing voice mail recording received by an abortion clinic can be heard on a phone within the installation. Through the voices of victims, family members, advocates, providers, historians, and antiabortion protesters, Abril forces the visitor to confront the slow and steady erosion of women’s rights as they pertain to their own bodies.
Installation view of Laia Abril—On Abortion, Museum of Sex, New York, 2020
Photograph by Kris Graves
Discussion while viewing On Abortion is unavoidable. During my visit, I overheard a male teenager quietly telling his friends, “This shit is crazy tragic!” It is exactly this kind of response that is needed for a society to address the horrific repercussions that women must endure when safe and legal abortions are denied. And if we are to have this discussion across genders, races, religions, and nationalities, it is most fitting that Abril’s work should be seen in settings that draw audiences beyond the art world, such as the Museum of Sex—an space where both sex and abortion can be discussed by adults, teenagers, tourists, and others who wander past a gift shop filled with sex toys to encounter this enormously important exhibition.
Russet Lederman, a researcher and writer based in New York, is a cofounder of 10×10 Photobooks and The Gould Collection.
Laia Abril—On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access is now temporarily closed due to the coronavirus crisis, but is scheduled to be on view at the Museum of Sex, New York, through October 15, 2020.
April 18, 2020
2020 Portfolio Prize Winner: Dannielle Bowman
Dannielle Bowman hijacks the traditional language of black-and-white photography to inject new meaning into the search for home.
By Lesley A. Martin
Dannielle Bowman, Vision (Bump’N’Curl), 2019, from the series What Had Happened
There are multiple entry points into Dannielle Bowman’s What Had Happened, a series in progress. Bowman makes excellent use of the pleasures of photographic space, described in elongated tonal-gradations of black, white, and maximum greys balanced against compositions etched sharply by California-noir shadows—Robert Adams meets Maya Deren in the Los Angeles suburbs. These elements lure the viewer to linger within the work. Aside from the surplus of visual gratification, the work simmers with the tension of a story mostly withheld. What has happened? On one level, these pictures are about the neighborhoods in and around the artist’s family home in Los Angeles. On another, Bowman’s work describes the passage of time and memories of home—or more precisely, the homes one makes on leaving old ones; about the search for better places in which to put down new roots and grow. Dig further, and the work begins to hint at even more specific histories—those of the Great Migration, which drew African Americans from the South (like Bowman’s own grandparents) into not only the North, but also the American West. The clues are not part of the standard-issue, broad brush–stroke narrative of the African American diaspora; they are found in details, such as the framed family photos on the mantle and the bump ’n’ curl hairdo worn by the woman standing on her flamingo bedecked lawn.
In Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, she describes the stories African Americans tell of their various journeys as “a secret told in syllables.” Similarly, Bowman has begun to map histories that remain mostly unspoken, eliciting memory via the judicious placement of alternative signifiers—signifiers mostly illegible to those outside or unfamiliar with these stories. In doing so via a rigorously composed, formal set of pictures that stand outside traditional documentary storytelling, Bowman not only begins to carefully unfurl these secrets; she also manages to bend a classic set of photographic conventions toward her own goals, enfolding her own family history within them.
Dannielle Bowman, Untitled (Hand), 2019, from the series What Had Happened
Dannielle Bowman, Carpeted Stairs, 2019, from the series What Had Happened
Dannielle Bowman, Faces, 2019, from the series What Had Happened
Dannielle Bowman, Screen Door, 2019, from the series What Had Happened
Dannielle Bowman received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where she was awarded the 2018 Richard Benson Prize. In 2019, she was a contributor to the New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project. Bowman has been an artist in residence at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York; the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York; and PICTURE BERLIN. Bowman has exhibited in the US and internationally. She lives and works in New York.
Lesley A. Martin is Aperture’s Creative Director and Publisher of The PhotoBook Review. All images courtesy the artist.
2020 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Jessica Chou
Photographing in Monterey Park, Jessica Chou evaluates how immigrant communities fit into today’s suburban landscape.
By Emily Stewart
Jessica Chou, Superco, 2013, from the series Suburban Chinatown
A short distance east of Los Angeles sits the San Gabriel Valley, a cluster of majority Asian suburbs that is home to a large immigrant community. Monterey Park, located in the San Gabriel Valley, was the first city in the United States to reach a majority Asian-descent population, and it is where photographer Jessica Chou grew up.
In her series Suburban Chinatown, Chou tackles the notion of the suburban landscape and how immigrant communities fit into that narrative. Inspired by the work of Stephen Shore and Larry Sultan, Chou approaches Monterey Park with an urgency to document a space she’s called home for most of her life. Chou describes growing up in Monterey Park as living in a bubble, aware that her childhood experiences were drastically different from what she read in novels or watched on TV, which was often an idealized white suburbia.
Chou explores the importance of recontextualizing suburban ideals and the American dream in today’s social landscape. Her title, Suburban Chinatown, is a nod to how society typically thinks about Asian immigrant communities in America: what often comes to mind is a space like Chinatown. “Chinatown has this timeless, exotic foreignness and otherness that often mimics what people want to see,” notes Chou. The San Gabriel Valley, and specifically Monterey Park, offers a different entry point into American life for Asian immigrants.
Chou’s photographs capture subtle moments of intertwined Asian and American identities in Monterey Park. They often showcase the subtlety of Asian culture in Southern California in small details, like Chinese characters on the side of the building or hymns sung in Chinese during a church service. A photograph of a cactus—a symbol of the desert and the Southern California landscape—graffitied with both English and Chinese writing, symbolizes an immigrant community carving its mark on American identity. Chou’s work is a gentle reminder that not all suburban spaces look the same, nor are they occupied by the same type of people. “There are many interpretations of the American dream,” she says. “And I hope this work updates both the immigrant and suburban story.”
Jessica Chou, Daydream, 2018, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Jessica Chou, RHCCC Chinese Speaking Service, 2019, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Jessica Chou, Monterey Park City Council Election, 2015, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Jessica Chou, Marine Corps SSgt Chen, Recruiter, 2019, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Jessica Chou, Woman in Abercrombie, 2013, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Jessica Chou, China, Monterey Park, Los Angeles, 2016, from the series Suburban Chinatown
Jessica Chou was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in history with an emphasis on the Middle East. In her photographic work, Chou is interested in chronicling contemporary events that are shaping conversations around how we understand ourselves. She regularly contributes to publications such as the New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others. Chou’s work can also be found in the permanent collection of the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, Minnesota. She currently lives and works between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Emily Stewart is manager of education and engagement programs at Aperture Foundation. All images courtesy the artist.
2020 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Daniel Jack Lyons
Daniel Jack Lyons explores environmental peril and Indigenous youth culture in the Amazon.
By Michael Famighetti
Daniel Jack Lyons, Leo, 2019, from the series Amazônica
The Earth’s lungs are in peril. With Brazil under the control of Jair Bolsonaro and his right-wing regime, illegal mining and agricultural expansion in the Amazon have recently contributed to catastrophic fires. While some image-makers captured dramatic aerial views of the spectacle of smoke and fire, Daniel Jack Lyons, a Los Angeles–based photographer who has spent much of his career focusing on the lives of youth subcultures—often in marginalized communities—was drawn to the largely unseen lives of young Indigenous people in the region.
A Portuguese speaker who had previously worked in Brazil, Lyons teamed up with a local community organizer based in a remote location in the Amazon and set out on a series of intimate portraits, realized in his characteristic soft, earthy palette. His photographs offer an individualized take on Indigenous communities in the region: his subjects are skateboarders, drag queens, heavy-metal fans, and farmers. “I wanted to document the banality of everyday life and the rebellious creativity it inspires,” Lyons says. “This universal impulse to express and affirm one’s individuality is resilient but at risk from a toxic mix of environmental degradation, violence, and discrimination. As another generation passes through the quotidian rites and rituals of adolescence, what sort of world will they inhabit and how much autonomy will they have over it?”
Daniel Jack Lyons, Milton, 2019, from the series Amazônica
Daniel Jack Lyons, Rio Tupana, 2019, from the series Amazônica
Daniel Jack Lyons, Stefani and Fabricio, 2019, from the series Amazônica
Daniel Jack Lyons, Alvaro’s Crocodile, 2019, from the series Amazônica
Daniel Jack Lyons, Lucas, 2019, from the series Amazônica
Daniel Jack Lyons, Diana and Alejandra, 2019, from the series Amazônica
Daniel Jack Lyons’s background as a social anthropologist is very much at the heart of his practice as a photographer. His work, both personal and commissioned, focuses largely on marginalized youth, whether occupying spaces on the periphery of society or in the face of conflict. He employs collaborative methods that grant his subjects a greater sense of autonomy in guiding each project’s message, infusing Lyons’s work with a deeper creative spirit that often illuminates universal experiences. Creating this kind of work has taken him to Mozambique, Ukraine, New York, the Amazon, and Los Angeles. In each case, Lyons documents the particular expressions of joy, optimism, and concern that tap into the general insouciance and naiveté of “coming of age.” He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, More or Less, and Vogue Italia, and his body of work Hotel Luso was included in the exhibition Labs New Artists II at Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn, in 2018.
Michael Famighetti is editor of Aperture magazine. All images courtesy the artist.
2020 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Lindley Warren Mickunas
In haunting black-and-white photographs, Lindley Warren Mickunas investigates the complexities of the maternal bond.
By Cassidy Paul
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Mother and Daughter, 2017, from the series Maternal Sheet
We are all born of our mothers. This symbiotic relationship is fraught with complexities, yet it is instrumental to our very being. But what happens when the mother and child separate? Or when their relationship extends beyond what is healthy? For the past three years, Chicago-based artist Lindley Warren Mickunas has created a haunting investigation of the maternal bond—examining codependency, the violence placed on female bodies, and generational trauma in families.
Drawing from her childhood experiences, Warren Mickunas mixes together staged reenactments performed by nonrelatives alongside documentation of her family. The resulting series, Maternal Sheet, speaks to the complicated dynamics found within families, juxtaposing the ways comfort, trauma, and coldness all coexist. There is no single perspective, shifting between mother, child, parent, and the ominous, removed, viewer. For Warren Mickunas, addressing these complexities is vital. “I approach this series both as a woman who intends to someday be a mother, and as a daughter,” she explains. “I’m not only thinking about the way that motherhood and the maternal shape life, but also how these concepts are imbedded into my practice as a female artist. Every creative act that springs forth from me I view as an act of mothering.”
Intentionally blending the line between real and fabricated, Warren Mickunas’s images live in different states between past, dream, concept, and memory. Utilizing black and white alongside a harsh flash, the artist trades the intimacy often associated with family and motherhood for cold detachment. A child plays with her mother’s hair. Gloves filled with milk resemble an udder, squeezed harshly by a child that remains unseen. Figures of parents and children are clouded by shadows and haze. A single rocking chair sits poised in a corner, as if pulled from a horror film. Two opposing adult arms battle for a helpless child. Each frame has an almost atmospheric sense of tension, hinting at a darker presence lurking beyond that single moment.
Though Maternal Sheet started with Warren Mickunas’s personal history, she sees it as addressing a much larger experience. “I hope that the work can communicate the complexities within the home and the pressures placed on the traumatized family,” Warren Mickunas reflects, “but also the truth that we as humans, especially as children, possess an incredible resiliency and ability to adapt and cope with very challenging circumstances.”
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Milk, 2020, from the series Maternal Sheet
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Mouth, 2019, from the series Maternal Sheet
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Three Hands, 2019, from the series Maternal Sheet
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Rocking Chair, 2017, from the series Maternal Sheet
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Feeding, 2019, from the series Maternal Sheet
Lindley Warren Mickunas, Egg, 2018, from the series Maternal Sheet
Lindley Warren Mickunas is a Chicago-based photographer, editor, and curator. She is the founder of various publications, including The Ones We Love andThe Reservoir, a collective editorial project on the politics of image-making. Warren Mickunas is an MFA candidate in photography at Columbia College Chicago, and curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Most recently, she was published in FotoFilmic’s JRNL 2 (guest edited by Rachel and Gregory Barker of STANLEY/BARKER) and exhibited by Der Greif at Berlin Photo Week.
Cassidy Paul is the digital editor at Aperture Foundation. All images courtesy the artist.
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