Aperture's Blog, page 72

What Happens When the American Dream of Homeownership Reaches Mexico?

For more than a decade, Alejandro Cartagena has photographed Mexican suburbs transformed by the rapid construction of new homes.

By Yxta Maya Murray

Alejandro Cartagena, Family walking back from store in Juárez suburb, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

The photographer Alejandro Cartagena knows you want to go home. You yearn for a house that really feels like home—an affordable space of serenity or happy chaos, with easy access to work, clean air, and clean water. Where you can become fully human and maybe raise a family. Not a site of destruction or pollution. Not a place that will bankrupt you or pen you in or poison you. Home.

Alejandro Cartagena, Housing agency, Monterrey, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

The failure of the world’s metropolitan areas to fulfill this dream for all of its residents drives Cartagena’s work. Cartagena, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1977 and now lives in Monterrey, Mexico, has photographed Mexican suburban architecture and its housing-challenged inhabitants for the past fourteen years. His images of cheap structures and exhausted commuters critique the international club of politicians and urban planners whose model of quick and unequal development has left many people bereft of a safe place to call home. The housing boom started in Mexico in the early 2000s, when aspiring landholders began acquiring properties financed by mortgages.

Alejandro Cartagena, Bureaucrat at her desk at the INFONAVIT, Monterrey, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

Though this practice has allowed more people to acquire homes built out of permanent materials, government loans are only available to those with salaried employment, a status that sixty percent of the Mexican working population can claim. Salaried workers thus possess a greater likelihood of living in such sound structures than those surviving in seasonal or gig economies.

“My images are trying to present the more complex situation that’s never told in the commercial and ideological stories of homeownership,” Cartagena says. “The idea of buying a home is that it will bring social mobility, safety, love, a family, the whole Hollywood, Disneyland version. But there exist loopholes in this story, particularly in how homeownership had been photographed, always from the outside.”

Alejandro Cartagena, Apodaca, 2007
Courtesy the artist and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

In 2010, Cartagena published Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities with Daylight/Photolucida. This project recorded the suburban sprawl in Monterrey, a city that had 339,282 residents in 1950, but today lodges over 3.8 million. Suburbia Mexicana features images of 328-square-foot houses that typically billet four to six people and look like the cookie-cutter “little boxes” lampooned by folk singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds in her song by that title. In 2014, Cartagena self-published Carpoolers: on Monterrey’s Highway 85, a route carrying men from their homes in the new suburbs to their work sites, he captured his voyagers lying down, eating, and sleeping in the backs of trucks, often amid the detritus of their jobs.

Alejandro Cartagena, Girl coming home to suburb in Juárez from a night out in the city, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

Cartagena’s recent series A Small Guide To Homeownership: Case Study: Mexico (2019) takes the form of a photo-collaged proto-Dummies manual that blithely, and blindly, gives tips on financing residential real estate and managing thirty-year, fixed-rate mortgages. It tucks images from Suburbia Mexicana and Carpoolers into found text from home-buying guidebooks. In a particularly lacerating chapter, Cartagena layers the pictures of the little boxes over the real estate–industrial complex’s conventional rah-rah fantasies, which counsel that if your family has “two who cook, you need . . . a big kitchen,” and if you have “small children, you need . . . lots of bedrooms,” conveying how unrealistic the own-your-own-home cult can be.

Alejandro Cartagena, Mother and daughter at public phone in Juárez suburb, 2009
Courtesy the artist and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

Cartagena observes that his photographs fill in the gaps left by government and development propaganda that pushes the idea of homeownership as an unqualified good. “If you connect a picture of a house in the suburbs with a picture of carpoolers, with a picture of a desiccated river—those images weren’t meant to be together,” he says. “But if you connect those dots, the story becomes more complex, and the questions open up to ‘What are we really doing?’”

Yxta Maya Murray is Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and the author of the forthcoming novel Art Is Everything.

Read more from Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

11 Photographers on How To Finish a Body of Work

Over the course of her career, curator and lecturer Sasha Wolf has heard countless young photographers say they often feel adrift in their own practices, wondering if they are doing it the “right” way. This inspired her to seek out insights from a wide range of photographers about their approaches to making photographs and a sustained a body of work, which are brought together in PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, the responses from both established and newly emerging photographers reveal that there is no single path. Below, eleven artists respond to the question: How do you know when a body of work is finished?

Dawoud Bey, Woman and Two Boys Passing, Harlem, NY, 1978
Courtesy the artist

Dawoud Bey

On the one hand, I think the project is finished when I have said visually all that I think needs to be said about that particular subject. But one never knows. Recently, I thought my project Harlem Redux [published in 2012] was done, but then I started to feel like there were gaps in terms of the kinds of pictures, range of subjects, and varying vantage points from which I wanted to tell the story about the ways the Harlem community is changing. I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that there was more to do, and so I went back. Turns out, I made some of the strongest photographs on that visit. So sometimes you know, and sometimes you don’t.

John Chiara, Topanga Canyon Boulevard at Pacific Coast Highway, Los Angeles, 2012, from John Chiara: California (Aperture/Pier 24 Photography, 2017)
Courtesy the artist

John Chiara

It’s so hard to know! Maybe when I’ve run out of things to say and pictures I want to take. There are, of course, lots of practical and pragmatic reasons it ends: deadlines, energy, inspiration, resources. Even so, I find it very difficult to end a body of work. I might not ever truly end it because of the way I work. I can spend five or six years in a place if I’m drawn to it, even after an exhibition has ended. I revisit places. I continue following the train of thought until I feel it’s resolved.

Siân Davey, Before Prom, Getting Ready, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Siân Davey

I know when a body of work is finished when the charge drops, and the thing that pulled you along is no longer there. You can feel yourself lose your connection to the narrative. At this point, the story has been told and is now in danger of repeating itself. It’s about knowing when that time has come and having the courage to let it go.

Doug DuBois, Jordan up the Pole, Russell Heights, Cobh, Ireland, 2010, from My Last Day At Seventeen (Aperture, 2015)
Courtesy the artist

Doug DuBois

Deadlines help and are often critical to preventing something from getting overthought and overworked. I’ve been lucky to have some good book editors who, more than once, kept me from ruining a good idea. Repetition is another sign—but it’s tricky. Going back again and again to a certain subject or making variations is an important discipline. The bad repetition, the kind that doesn’t add up to anything and becomes a dead end or a compulsive gesture—that’s a sign that you are done with a project.

LaToya Ruby Fraizer, Huxtables, Mom, and Me, 2008, from The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014/2016)
Courtesy the artist

LaToya Ruby Frazier

It will never be finished. The meaning of an image is never fixed. It changes as history changes. We’re all connected intergenerationally—we’re connected to the images of the past and to the future. I’m thinking about time travel when I make my work—take, as an example, my work with my mother and my grandmother (The Notion of Family, Aperture 2014). I’m suggesting we are one entity; we are all markers on a timeline that is cyclical. But even within that work, things change. Take the self-portrait Huxtables, Mom, and Me (2008). I’m wearing a T-shirt that’s worn, the ink is peeling off; the mirror behind me, in which a reflection of my mom can be seen, is dusty and scratched. The image already had meaning embedded in it because of what the Huxtables meant to American society—the first public image of a middle-class Black family and the whole “Cosby effect” that I wanted to critique. Looking at it now, thanks to Bill Cosby’s sex crimes, that image has acquired a whole new layer of meaning.

Paul Graham, Ship Jigsaw, Berlin, 1989, from New Europe
Courtesy the artist

Paul Graham

When the question “Does this work?” is not keeping me awake anymore. At that point you have the answer to the thing that has been troubling you, so in a way it is, or will soon be, finished, and you can start to think ahead to the future.

Todd Hido, #3737, 2005, from Intimate Distance (Aperture, 2016)
Courtesy the artist

Todd Hido

I used to say, “When I stop getting out of the car to take the picture.” Basically, you know you’re finished when the burden of setting up the camera outweighs your drive to capture that particular image.

One note of caution: I feel that photographers and artists these days are very much on an accelerated production cycle, where we can feel pressured to have an entirely new project every couple of years. It is important to slow down around your own work, trust yourself, and ask if you really are done. Knowing when to push through and keep going is just as important as knowing when to stop. The new iterations, the small discoveries, and the nuances of my own way of working were all important realizations for me, and those only came through continued efforts.

Peter Kayafas, Twin Bridges, Montana, from The Way West (Purple Martin Press, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Peter Kayafas

I think it is essential to finish, to edit and present, in whatever form, a project or body of work so that it is permanent, out of the hands of the artist, and into the public sphere. When I look back on any project that I have finished, whether it be from a few years or a few decades ago, I find that there are always things I’m proud of, as well as things I would do totally differently. It seems to me that there is no better indication of growth as an artist than to have circumstances that allow for such insights.

Justine Kurland, Poison Ivy, 1999, from Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2020)
Courtesy the artist

Justine Kurland

I teach with Nayland Blake, and I have heard him tell students, “Finishing is for furniture.” Once the problems of construction are resolved, of a table for instance, the process no longer involves thinking. Finishing is the stage where the person mindlessly applies polish but no longer pays attention. At this point you are no longer making art. Nayland is one of the most intelligent and clear-sighted artists I know. I often ask myself, “What would Nayland do?”

Bryan Schutmaat, Gold Mine, 2011
Courtesy the artist

Bryan Schutmaat

What’s the cliché? A work of art is never finished, only abandoned. With the kind of work I do, I could shoot forever, trying to improve the photos or tweak the edit or just fuck with things endlessly. But life is short, and at some point you have to say, “Ok, this is enough.” If you feel the subject matter isn’t thoroughly explored after the completion of a project, then you can always go shoot the same kind of stuff in the future.

Alec Soth, Peter’s Houseboat, Winona, Minnesota, 2002, from Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004)
Courtesy the artist

Alec Soth

This is a difficult question to answer. If photography were a true narrative art like filmmaking or fiction-writing, you’d have certain narrative conventions like the feature-length film, the television program, the novel, the short story, etc. But photography functions more like poetry and, like contemporary poetry, is usually free verse in nature. There are no standards for beginning, middle, and end. It’s up to each photographer to create her own structure. In the past, I’ve usually used the book as the chief structural device. Since most of the photobooks I love generally have around forty to sixty pictures, that’s been the number I tried to achieve. But I’m currently less project-orientated. Nowadays, I’m just happy to work on an individual poem and see where it takes me.

Responses have been edited for space. To read the full interviews, order your copy of PhotoWork here.

Denise Scott Brown on the Signs and Symbols for Living

For the acclaimed architect, photography has always been a central approach to design.

By Peter Barberie

Denise Scott Brown, Philadelphia, November 2019
Photograph by Jody Rogac for Aperture

In her 1907 Art Nouveau home on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the architect Denise Scott Brown lives among an eclectic collection of art, furniture, and knickknacks. As in her iconic designs and writings, elements of vernacular culture mix freely with classical references. Batman pillows converse with a Piranesi etching.

Born and raised in South Africa, Scott Brown arrived in the United States in 1958 following extensive travel in Europe. She and her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, came to study with the architect Louis Kahn, bringing with them a strong commitment to urban planning that has informed her designs, teaching, and writing ever since. As a professor at UC Berkeley and UCLA in the mid-1960s, she became interested in the rapidly growing cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In 1967, she married fellow architect Robert Venturi and returned to Philadelphia to join his architectural practice. Five years later, with Venturi and Steven Izenour, she coauthored the groundbreaking 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas.

Scott Brown’s built projects range from the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London to the Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri Resort in Japan to Franklin Court, a dramatic reconstruction of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia house frame that blends her love of building, archaeology, and neighborhood planning. Photography has been a key element of Scott Brown’s approach to architecture and urban design: she will soon publish a book of her photographs, Wayward Eye, Photographs 1950–1970.

Denise Scott Brown’s house, Philadelphia, 2019
Photographs by Jason Fulford for Aperture

Denise Scott Brown: It was said that, of all crowded rooms, there was never one so crowded as when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Peter Barberie: [Laughs] I’ve heard that.

Scott Brown: Yes. So this house is us dining alone. These crowded things mean I can sit here and have happy memories, or be reminded of what to talk about.

Barberie: I can see that you have eclectic taste.

Scott Brown: Well, Bob Venturi and I could spot things that other people would like in a few years and buy them when they still cost four dollars. Look at this Art Nouveau detail on this chair. One day, I’ll see it in a book. Do you see it?

Barberie: Yes, I do. It’s delicate.

Scott Brown: It’s so exquisite. The chairs aren’t Majorelle, because they are too small. But one day we’ll find someone illustrating something like them, and we’ll say, “Oh, that’s like our chairs.”

Barberie: They are made with great, great attention.

Scott Brown: Yes. And we had fun reupholstering them. I’d go to New York and return with a pile of samples, and we’d choose those we liked. We spent a year or so decorating, once we had a new roof. We were afraid of leaks.

That couch is from the Traymore Hotel [a grand Atlantic City hotel that was demolished in 1972]. It was exhibited in Paris in 1925. And it cost us twenty dollars. That table was in the elevator lobbies. We picked up two van loads at the Traymore.

Denise Scott Brown’s house, Philadelphia, 2019
Photograph by Jason Fulford for Aperture

Barberie: This room is amazing, with its painted patterns on the ceiling and walls. The wall mural looks familiar to me. It’s quite like the decorated skin on the Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates buildings that I’ve seen.

Scott Brown: The ceiling was painted in the 1920s. The wall is stenciled; its pattern was designed by Bob. It was a long story that began with a trip to Decorators Walk to find floral wallpaper for the bedrooms. And perhaps you could call this suite of rooms our Strip. The house is from 1907.

Barberie: It’s a wonderfully open house. The light that comes through this entire floor is beautiful.

Scott Brown: Oh, that’s the first thing we saw. We drove by it regularly and were fascinated to see all the way through the house to the yard beyond. So one day we drove down the driveway, and sure enough, there was a vista through the wide glass doors, and there were stained-glass windows on either side. Art Nouveau has been my style, like this pin, you see, and my clothes. It’s what I have worn since I bought my first Art Nouveau pin in about 1953. So I said to Bob, “I can’t believe this; it’s an Art Nouveau house in America.” Because I hadn’t seen even one here.

Barberie: Yes, there are not too many. Do you know who designed it?

Scott Brown: Milton B. Medary at the age of twenty-five. He had a very distinguished later career, and his work is all over Philadelphia, but, just as he was to become dean at the School of Architecture at Penn, he died. His clients here were German. They wanted and got a German Art Nouveau house, and its woodwork was probably made in Germany. But because it’s close in design to Arts and Crafts, neighbors called it the California house. The first owners were art collectors and patrons, and important works by Samuel Yellin and Wharton Esherick were housed here. They lived here from 1909 to 1970. Then a painting contractor bought it and redecorated it in “Art Nouveau” as he knew it, rubbing lye into woodwork and smearing white paint on that, to make it look like driftwood.

Not all Art Nouveau goes with this house, because its scale lies between English Romantic and automobile freeway. So I tuck this little Art Nouveau pitcher into a corner, because it’s too prim for the house. This library now supports two work nooks; the one facing the bay window is a small conference space and my favorite place to work. I have four such places to sit so my back doesn’t die. It’s like, “We need small, mass-repeated comfort enhancers distributed system-wide, to reveal places changed for new use. And they should be soft to give their users comfort.” Small, mass- repeated events that make you feel comfortable are pillows. But I said, “I don’t want them to be Art Nouveau; I want them to be Art Deco—related but not altogether.” And then Charlotte Caldwell, who worked here, said, “Have you thought of Batman?” So people think—it was even said in one article—that I designed the pillows. I didn’t. I went to the catalogs, and I looked up “little boys’ rooms.” I found cotton Batman pillowcases at eight dollars apiece.

Denise Scott Brown’s house, Philadelphia, 2019
Photograph by Jason Fulford for Aperture

Barberie: I see you’ve got Catwoman alongside Batman.

Scott Brown: Yes. You see, they talk to each other, but boy, do they talk to that Piranesi etching of a Roman street. Look at the technique there, such beautiful drawing. Roy Lichtenstein learned from this. And adjacent to the Piranesi, Bob hung a Lichtenstein comic- book print.

Barberie: From the way you’re explaining the house, it sounds as though you think of it almost the way you think about cities.

Scott Brown: Very much so. Look out here at the yard. I saw one like it in front of the Mies van der Rohe houses in Krefeld. An English Romantic landscape. Our house was built for Germans who knew [Hermann] Muthesius’s Das Englische Haus. Germans and Austrians fell in love with that style, and also with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but Americans and the English wouldn’t touch it. This is an English Romantic landscape to go with a German house.

Barberie: Is the Wissahickon Creek down there, that way?

Scott Brown: It’s down there. That’s our German linden tree, at the edge of the lawn. Its life span is one hundred years, and this one is 110 years now. Our landscape contractor gives our trees very loving attention. And I think about the garden in urban terms. Its carriage driveway, for example, is augmented to suit the geometry of cars and trucks.

Denise Scott Brown’s dog, Alvar Aalto, Philadelphia, 2019
Photograph by Jason Fulford for Aperture

Barberie: [A dog enters.] Who is this?

Scott Brown: You won’t believe it—his name is Alvar Aalto.

Barberie: Well, he’s very handsome.

Scott Brown: Hello, lovey. Hello, doggie. You see, he comes and leans against my knee. Bob used to say, “Where’s man’s best friend?”—and he’d come running. And, “Where’s the dog?” And, “Poochie.” And, “Aalto-ie.” [Walking from the sitting room to the dining room, she pauses to show Peter Barberie things on the mantel.] I like this combination. This was here to amuse Bob, because, in his nineties, he liked to sit here.

Obama and Liberty toys in Denise Scott Brown’s house, Philadelphia, 2019
Photograph by Jason Fulford for Aperture

Barberie: So we have plastic wind-up toys of the Statue of Liberty and Barack Obama.

Scott Brown: And look what the Statue of Liberty can do. [She winds it, and noise is emitted.] Isn’t that enchanting? As I went by Bob, I’d give it a wind up. Mmmmmmm.

Bob grew up with this chair and surrounded by books filled with photographs of Italian architecture. Princeton added modern architecture, particularly Le Corbusier, and openness to the study of historical architecture. Two years at the American Academy in Rome deepened his outlook, but it was only just before he left that he discovered Italian Mannerist architecture and vocabulary.

For the Vanna Venturi House (1964), which used our postmodernism, not Philip Johnson’s “PoMo” of the 1980s, his process was fascinating. He was learning about David Crane’s “four faces of movement.” He knew Crane, who was teaching us urban design courses about the street, the buildings, the communications systems that you can study between them, how the crossroads beget marketplaces and towns, and all of that. Bob was very eager to learn about these things—he was the only architect at Penn who was. That’s why I invited him to come and look at Las Vegas.

Denise Scott Brown, Vanna Venturi House, 1969
Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Barberie: So you had been to Las Vegas prior to that?

Scott Brown: No. My parents went to Las Vegas in 1950, and they sent back photographs. They were very strange, because of my mother’s inexpertise. She’d just been on a game reserve in South Africa, and then they went to see family in America, and in one of her rolls of film of the Strip at night there’s a giraffe walking down it—so two pictures are superimposed. Anyway, so I saw that then. But I was already in love with theme parks because my dad was, and because my grandparents had sent us souvenirs from Coney Island in 1936. That was my first piece of magic. Later, I was interested in Pop art and popular culture. I wanted to look at places like Disneyland or Las Vegas, where people actually liked to go. We wanted to do some work around there, and that’s how the Las Vegas Studio started.

We also did a studio called “mass communication on the people’s freeway.” In Santa Monica, Los Angeles, we did a studio on the beach, thinking about it as a Strip too. In Los Angeles, on Sunset Boulevard, for example, I was seeking an outlook on urbanism in the essence of sun and seduction—what were these very private buildings, possibly of film stars, communicating?

Denise Scott Brown, Soweto, 1970
Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Barberie: Did Las Vegas in the 1960s remind you of the Johannesburg that you had known a decade earlier? You have written about Johannesburg being less than fifty years old when you went there as a young woman.

Scott Brown: Well, Johannesburg when it started was really small. It was mining camps, you see. And then it grew to a big scale.

Barberie: I read a wonderful quote from you about your experience traversing countries and cultures, which you said gave you a healthy perspective on things. You were in your twenties, a young woman, when you landed here.

Scott Brown: Yes, and I was with Robert Scott Brown then, you see—it was the two of us. We’d been photographing all over Venice for a full month. When we arrived in Philadelphia, looking at our maps, I found Thirtieth Street Station and then a bridge to cross with all these little houses, and I was sure I’d find something in there. So I point to one, and I say, “We must go and look for an apartment in this house. It was Boathouse Row! It turned out I was right. They did have apartments in Boathouse Row. But we ended up in Grays Ferry, an Irish neighborhood. Pretty quickly people started telling us to avoid black neighborhoods. I said, “I think I’m in apartheid South Africa, with people saying, ‘Don’t go to this area because it’s bad.’”

Denise Scott Brown, Los Angeles, 1965
Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Barberie: Looking at the galleys of your book—just the pictures—I could see that you’re drawing a line from Johannesburg and Soweto to New York, Philadelphia, and Levittown, and even to the Vanna Venturi House.

Scott Brown: The book needs a little novella about Soweto. The initial, liberal aim for building the settlements before apartheid was to give shelter to the employees in the gold mines and white-owned businesses. You needed to do that if you wanted to have a workforce. Then the Nationalists said, “Yes, we must do that, and we’re going to use it as our means of enforcing apartheid. We’ll build townships in places far enough away from Johannesburg to never meld, but close enough so that these people can be employed in Johannesburg and in the mines.” That’s how Soweto developed.

Douglas Calderwood wrote about African mass housing in the 1940s. No one knows about him, but his book really shows it was a liberal activity taken up by the Nationalists. He says that housing will do better if it comes with strong strategic planning. But look at the people who do planning. In Levittown it was William Levitt, a sly developer. Follow the forces where they take you, and find a way to get the extra little business. In Soweto it was Joe Slovo, an amazing character of the African National Congress Underground, who did that sly planning.

Barberie: And photography is a powerful tool to show these systems and patterns.

Scott Brown: Photography is crucial for ideas about architecture and urbanism, to intrigue students and win them over. And you can do that by having slides that show your ideas.

Denise Scott Brown and the Learning from Las Vegas Studio, The Stardust Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, 1968
Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Barberie: So you really were photographing, in essence, for slide-shows? To show the context for buildings and urban design?

Scott Brown: Robert Scott Brown and I began taking photographs on our trip through Europe, because we were planning to return home to South Africa, and we thought we would not have much opportunity to travel for a while, given the Nationalist government. When we set off to travel, I didn’t take photographs until Robert arrived, and he had the camera—I didn’t have one then. Though I had done photographs at home and my mother was always doing photographs. She did beautiful photographs.

We wanted a record. Everyone tells young architects, no matter which school, “You can’t just look at pictures and books; you have to go and look at the real thing.” We were strongly told that. “Get out and see these things; get out and see them before you can’t, and then take good photographs so that you can have a memory of them when you come back.” So we went out to do record shots.

We were going through all these museums. We were learning about the Japanese organization of paintings, and about [Piet] Mondrian and how he painted, and seeing all these interesting ways of putting together things, which I’ve lived with ever since. That whole philosophy is in how I’ve organized my book of photographs. Even if it looks very dour, it’s made in such a way as to draw people in. A lot of it is based on the plan for Chicago in 1909.

Bob and I were at first looking for record shots, and then we got all involved with communication, streets, and the way store signs behave. So we began taking those photographs too. By then Bob had already fallen in love with Coca-Cola signs.

Then, you see, there’s a tradition in America where you show pairs of slides. So I began designing lectures with pairs of slides, sometimes for contrast.

Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas, 1966
Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Barberie: I know you and Robert Venturi commissioned Stephen Shore to make photographs for your 1975 exhibition Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City. Were you looking at other street photographers too?

Scott Brown: Yes, we moved from Las Vegas to Levitttown to the Smithsonian for that exhibition. We asked photographers to work with us. We figured, why not get some great photographers and send them on a journey? The studios were not only visual; they were sociological. Before then, I became very keen on [Henri] Cartier-Bresson. That’s another interesting story, how that happened. But I found a picture in a Cartier-Bresson book that took me a little while to work out. It’s got to be London. But it didn’t say. At least, I couldn’t find it.

Barberie: Sure.

Scott Brown: When I saw the picture, it prompted me to utter a quote: “The mild, lumpy faces of the British.”

Barberie: [Laughs]

Scott Brown: So there they are, this crowd, sitting on the balustrade, looking out, and they’re looking at something. You don’t know what it is, but you can see it. Then, at the bottom, there’s a drunken guy lying, sleeping, and there are all the remnants of a big parade.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Coronation of King George VI, London, 1937
Courtesy Magnum Photos

Scott Brown: And so he’s lying on this system, like the pillow system we have here in our house. He’s there, and then all these people are looking out—and what’s going by is the whole might of the British Empire in golden carriages for the coronation. And Cartier-Bresson couldn’t care less about the coronation. He’s looking at people, or looking at one thing, and making geometric formulas. Well, I was very taken with things like that, as I was with the geometry of trees when I was lying under them while camping and just looking up.

Barberie: So tell me how you became keen on Cartier-Bresson.

Scott Brown: Before Robert Scott Brown came to England, I traveled on my own in Europe. In Bonn, I met a young law student who offered to show me around. I was hesitant, but I wanted to see the city, so I said yes.

Later on, he invited me to join him and a friend on a road trip through Spain. I accepted the invitation, and then they wrote me and said, “We have been joined. He’s an American. He’s called Len. You would like him.” It was an amazing adventure. Len had set out to do a grand tour, and then he discovered that if he didn’t eat very much, and didn’t buy anything, and just kept his camera and traveled the way we traveled, he could spend two or three times as much time there as he had budgeted for.

So there he was, falling apart, his clothes falling apart, long and lanky, about a foot taller than all the Spanish and my two German friends, with lots of dark hair, taking photographs of Spanish markets and talking about Cartier-Bresson, the monopoly of Kodachrome, and all kinds of things. He went to Columbia. It turned out Len was Len Freed—Leonard Freed. So that was a terribly worthwhile trip.

Denise Scott Brown, Philadelphia, 1961
Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Barberie: He also went on to make incredibly important photographs of the civil rights marches. Did you reconnect with him later on?

Scott Brown: We met once, and he looked at Robert’s black-and-white photographs. You see, I took the color ones (those are the fun ones), and Robert took the serious ones. Len looked at them and said, “If you’re going to do this kind of photography, you’d better get to be a lot more serious about focus.” Then suddenly he changed, and he wasn’t so keen on focus either, and that’s when he started to do the antiwar-activity pictures, which were blurred and had movement in them.

Barberie: Did you always love color photography?

Scott Brown: I did. I loved the black-and-white, but I couldn’t be that kind of serious photographer.

Barberie: Well, you’re so drawn to the flavor of the street that I’m guessing color was crucial.

Scott Brown: Very much so. But then there’s my picture of a wall that says, “I love you.” We’d been making pictures like that in Italy for political posters—some of the urban surfaces were peeling—and saying, “Gee, that looks like [Georges] Braque” or “That looks like Mondrian when he’s learning how to abstract a tree.” I remember Cartier-Bresson talking about a little girl crossing a sunny patch on the square. He said, “I sat and waited and waited, and then she suddenly was there—that was my picture.” You see, it was a decisive moment. So, with the “I love you” photograph, I was sitting and waiting in Philadelphia. I’m thinking, “Something miraculous will happen, just listen and wait.”

Peter Barberie is Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Read more from Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Midcentury Modern in Black and White

In the postwar years, Ezra Stoller photographed iconic buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. But, were his images a reality—or an ideal?

By Mimi Zeiger

Ezra Stoller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mossberg House, South Bend, Indiana, 1952
Courtesy the artist/Esto

Ezra Stoller photographed postwar U.S. architecture with the rigor of a true believer. His images—published widely in numerous trade magazines as well as in House Beautiful and House & Garden—presented modernism not as an avant-garde or utopian vision, but as a movement in situ, one born fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s skull. Yet a global war and an ocean unequivocally separate early twentieth-century experiments undertaken at the Bauhaus and by Le Corbusier from the postwar embrace of modern architecture by corporate leaders and the cultural elite in the United States.

Ezra Stoller, Marcel Breuer, Gilbert Tompkins House, Hewlett Harbor, New York, 1947
Courtesy the artist/Esto

In Stoller’s crisp, black-and-white prints, boxy-shouldered skyscrapers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s building for Union Carbide (1960), both in New York, proudly rise above the city grid—steel and glass curtain walls towering over masonry edifices. These were depicted as the heroes of a new age. Stoller, always precise about natural light and time of day, photographed Mies’s structure at dusk; every floor is illuminated, and the building seems to glow with industry. His image of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1959), taken looking straight up into the cylindrical belly of the building, freezes Frank Lloyd Wright’s experiential design of spiraling ramps into an iconic composition—modernism’s dynamism temporarily tamed.

Ezra Stoller, Harry Weese, Brenner House, Champaign, Illinois, 1952
Courtesy the artist/Esto

While civic and commercial architecture have come to define both Stoller’s oeuvre and the heroism of the modern movement in the United States, his archive is full of transparencies showing residential buildings. Throughout his career, he photographed homes designed by architects he was friends with, and those he admired, from Paul Rudolph and Marcel Breuer to Alvar Aalto and Eero Saarinen. Indeed, one of his earliest published images is of the A. C. Koch House (1936) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designed by the architects Carl Koch and Edward Durell Stone, who taught the evening architecture classes Stoller attended at New York University in the mid-1930s. (He would graduate a few years later with a degree in industrial design and an established photography practice.)

Pierluigi Serraino, author of the recent volume Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture (2019), and Erica Stoller, Stoller’s daughter and director of Esto Photographics, Inc., the company her father founded, both claim that the photographer didn’t change his approach according to building type. “He was extremely studied, each composition was a painting,” says Serraino. Stoller would visit each site and meticulously take notes about the building and the light before setting up a single shot. “His goal was to understand something and explain it,” says his daughter. “He spent a lot of time figuring out the architecture. He believed his pictures were telling the truth.”

Ezra Stoller, Arthur Erickson, David Graham House, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 1967
Courtesy the artist/Esto

However, the drive toward veracity registers differently when looking at houses and not at the swooping monumentality of Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1962) or the repetitive efficiency of IBM’s corporate campus (1958) in Rochester, Minnesota. When modernism is performed at the scale of the home, it is personal. Each home signifies a break with the past, a new way to live, the postwar American dream. The architectural photography of Julius Shulman most immediately comes to mind when thinking about mid-century modern residential architecture. His images sell a California lifestyle of improbable vistas and turquoise swimming pools. Stoller’s vérité presents the modern home as attainable, not aspirational. And although Stoller, like Shulman, photographed on the West Coast, most of his commissions were along the Eastern Seaboard, capturing pockets of modernism around Cambridge; Rye, New York; New Canaan, Connecticut; and Sarasota, Florida. That difference in geography, cultural and topographic, points away from the drama of palm trees and blue sky. A forest of tree trunks with bare branches surrounds the Baker Residence (1951) by Minoru Yamasaki, while the interior is full of lush houseplants. A spindly bush nearly dominates Stoller’s photograph of Breuer’s Gilbert Tompkins House (1946), its branches offering a compositional counterpoint to the austerity of the architect’s geometries.

Ezra Stoller, Carson, Lundin & Shaw, Shaw House, Long Island, New York, 1959
Courtesy the artist/Esto

In many ways, Stoller’s own bootstrapped life encapsulated the American dream he so carefully depicted. The child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he had an upbringing marked by uncertainty. His father was blacklisted due to union activism, and his mother suffered from depression. The family moved from New York to Chicago and back again, and he went to school in New Jersey, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Success (and his eventual position as gatekeeper) was built through countless magazine and firm assignments and the ability to capture a unity within a space, public or private, even if in real life that cohesion wasn’t quite there.

Such alchemical skill led the architect Philip Johnson to quip that architects wanted their projects “Stollerized.” In 1981, around the time Stoller was winding down his decades-long career, the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable questioned the very truths of architectural photography central to Stoller’s work. “How much is real and how much is ‘edited’ reality?” she wrote. “At what point do the actual and the ideological merge?”

Ezra Stoller, Helen Stoller with children, Erica and Evan, at the Stoller House, designed by Nemeny and Geller, Rye, New York, 1949
Courtesy the artist/Esto

A series from 1949 underscores Huxtable’s query. That year, Stoller photographed his own home in Rye. He had worked closely with the architects Abraham Geller and George Nemeny on the low-slung design clad in vertical timber. The double-height living room, pictured with Eames plywood lounge chairs, a fire in the hearth, and late-afternoon sun casting long shadows across the floor, peddles a modernism that is warm and cozy. In an image of the kitchen, Stoller’s wife, Helen, stands at the stove as two of his children, Erica and Evan, sit at the counter eating from cereal bowls. Erica is in pigtails. In a color version of this photograph, Helen is wearing a bright-red dress and is posed against the white stove and blue countertops. This is the dream manifested.

“The late ’40s was the American moment,” says Erica Stoller. “He had a perfection in mind, especially if you grew up in rental apartments. This is the ideal life cleaned up and controlled.” Her childhood coincided with the exponential growth of her father’s practice, a time when he was capturing the modernist possibilities of other houses, corporate campuses, and high-rises. She recalls that he was always on the road and rarely at home: “The ideal life wasn’t always so ideal.”

Mimi Zeiger is a critic, editor, and curator based in Los Angeles. She was the cocurator of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Read more from Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The Terror and Pleasure of Staying at Home

How did an early 1990s exhibition anticipate the transformation of family life in the U.S.?

By Sara Knelman

Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Sergio and Totti, 1985
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York/Art Resource, New York

In 1991, the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, among its most ambitious group exhibitions since The Family of Man in 1955. While The Family of Man sought to universalize human experience by surveying journalistic images of familial bonds and rituals from around the globe, Pleasures and Terrors looked squarely at a narrow swathe of distinctly American life: the home and, more pointedly, its affluent surfaces. (“Comfort,” after all, implies not only the rounded edges of cozy furniture, but the economic ease that affords them.) Curated by Peter Galassi, who would formally succeed John Szarkowski as head of the department during the show’s run, it included over 150 images by more than seventy artists. Pleasures and Terrors marked a shift in interest, by both photographers and their subjects, from the politics of the wider world and even from the street outside, toward the warm, lit living rooms of American domestic life. What might we understand of this moment if we take the time to wander back through some of these homes today?

With the exception of William Eggleston’s 1970s images—Eggleston being the hero then as now of recasting the mundane as monumental—most of the works in the show were made in the 1980s. After Watergate and Vietnam, after Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, the politics of social concern gave way to a tidal wave of late-capitalist individualism and aspiration. A culture of slogans and protests retreated inside to the solace of TV and tchotchkes. Galassi explained it this way:

It became all too reasonable to conclude that moral conviction and political effectiveness, at least on a national scale, had parted company forever. If there is any truth in these partisan simplifications, then perhaps an effort to get one’s own house in order, or at least to see it clearly, will seem less a withdrawal from responsibility than an expression of sanity.

The American dream, it seems, is alive and well, if a little frayed at the edges.

Doug DuBois, My Sister Lise, Christmas Eve, Far Hills, NJ, 1984
Courtesy the artist

On the surface, there were the usual snapshot-worthy events in the exhibition: babies and backyards, Christmas trees and card games. The plethora of patterns and interior decor is one of the pleasures of looking back. Indeed, the show drew attention from Elle Decor, House Beautiful, and Parenting, which all ran lighthearted notices. The soft pinks of Laurie Simmons’s Coral Living Room with Lilies (1983) and the typical youthful mess of Doug DuBois’s My Sister Lise, Christmas Eve, Far Hills, NJ (1984) give us a feeling for the palettes and textures of the time, the kinds of pictures that might provoke nostalgia in a certain generation or inspire Pinterest mood boards or period cinema now. Set against the backdrops of enviable domestic spaces, the kind we might find in advertising images for perfect kitchens or in home-decorating magazines, the subtler hints of disquiet can be missed.

Yet the stark undertone and palpable discomfort in many of the images, often overlooked at the time, are unmistakable from this perspective—though one also wonders if the past always looks a little melancholy. The cinematic stagings of Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Tina Barney are dramatically forlorn, suggestive of larger narratives that never quite unfold. The young boy in diCorcia’s Brian (1988) looks glumly at a large hunk of meat, the counter awash with piles of food and gadgets. In Sergio and Totti (1985) a couple in loungewear sit on a floral couch looking away from one another, one watching television, the other obscured by the camera’s flash, as he—presumably Sergio—documents his own documentation. (Interestingly, the exhibition also utilized television as a promotional tool, a medium that museums had long eschewed. A three-minute spot for a short-lived PBS culture show called The Edge broadcast an unnarrated montage of images from the exhibition interspersed with audio clips from popular TV shows and Hollywood movies of the era, making an implicit connection between popular dramatizations of domestic life and those displayed in the MoMA exhibition.)

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #10, 1978
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Barney’s Sunday New York Times (1982) shows a big family orbiting a table, the newspaper spread across it, in a warm-yellow room. A woman in the corner holds a baby and scowls ineffectually at a man in the foreground intently reading the news, oblivious to the baby bottle beside him and the chaos that surrounds. Similarly, The Landscape (1988) depicts a group sharing space but distinctly lost in their own worlds, the youngest a blur of blonde curls in the foreground. Though they are crowded together in the center of the frame, each person, even the dog, looks away. A gilt-framed painting echoes the blues and greens outside a bay window in the room beyond, layering natural and contrived landscapes. However enviable the real estate or ornamentation, otherwise gracious rooms are also filled with less tangible things—loneliness, resentment, desire, and uncertainty.

If the show is remarkable in its expression of such subtlety of feeling, this comes in part from the work of the many women photographers included (about half ), whose projects look unflinchingly at the subjects of motherhood, domestic labor, and the wider expectations of girls and women near the close of the twentieth century. The show brought together poetic documents of intimacy in the work of Sally Mann, Marilyn Nance, and Jo Ann Walters, whose thirty-year project, only just published in 2018, began with the image of a family in a Connecticut backyard included in Pleasures and Terrors. In many photographs, like Barney’s, or those of Mary Frey, women appear conspicuously as mothers and wives, often the less powerful figures in the frame. As if in challenge to them, selections from Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) sought to reconsider these expectations from the inside out. In these projects, placed side by side in the catalog, Weems holds her cards close to her chest and looks sidelong at her male companion, while Sherman crouches to collect her fallen groceries, gazing intently beyond the frame. Who are we, in your eyes, they each ask, and who do we want to be?

Laurie Simmons, Coral Living Room with Lillies, 1983
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York

The emphasis on female practices is significant, though it’s also curiously glossed over in the catalog essay. Indeed, Galassi writes that “photographers, like businessmen, generally have maintained a barrier between work and home.” Such a statement ignores the fact of domestic labor, the business of keeping house, long a cultural expectation of women and one that extended to maintaining a photographic record of the family. The photographers Rosy Martin and Jo Spence have suggested in their extraordinary work on the culture and aesthetics of the family album that, as a genre, it is beholden to a set of conventions and expectations. “Family snaps,” they write, “hardly give any indication of the contradictions, power struggles or desires inherent at all levels of family life, or in the intersection of that life with the structures which make up a patriarchal society with sexual, racial and class divisions.” In retrospect, Pleasures and Terrors is striking not only as a powerful expression of the significance of the domestic sphere, but as an opening up of its complicated dynamics, often through the eyes of women working in the wake of second-wave feminism and ushering in the third.

Pleasures and Terrors also had a number of clear gaps, some acknowledged openly at the time, others more starkly visible from a distance. Galassi makes brief note of some omissions, writing that “a great deal is missing. Racially, ethnically, and economically the pictures are far from representative of contemporary America.” He fails to account for these gaps, however, other than to group them together with what he calls “the journalistic favorites of domestic trouble—homelessness, drug abuse, child abuse, violence,” suggesting such subjects belong to a realm that is somehow in opposition to or outside the bounds of art. This division is disturbing, a circuitous excuse releasing the museum from any sense of social responsibility. With the exception of images by Weems and Nance, most display white, heteronormative figures. Carol Squires wrote at the time that Weems’s image “raises a variety of questions, not least among them whether a black female photographer has ever been shown before by MoMA’s photography department.” And most omit the violence, physical or psychological, that is often wrought in the home. The exception was Nan Goldin’s slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), which contains a more complex idea of family and of the brutality of desire—though it screened only once, for an extra cost of eight dollars. Like the omission of the nuclear explosion in The Family of Man, there is a void at the center of the exhibition’s contents that hollows out both critical and moral perspectives.

Tina Barney, The Landscape, 1988
Courtesy the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York

This problem is inherently one of self-reflection and is hinted at, even if obliquely, in the sheer number of images that contain mirrors, or, in the case of diCorcia’s Sergio and Totti, the camera’s flash. A trick of domestic decor and a trope of self-reflection, mirrors enact a visual deceit and enable vanity. In hindsight, the show’s failings made clear the willful blindness to a diversity of perspectives and lifestyles, a circumstance that began to be redressed by artists, including Catherine Opie and Alec Soth, who have credited Pleasures and Terrors as a catalyst for their work. Opie drove an RV around the country to make her series Domestic (1998), which pictures everyday lesbian domestic life in America, in response to Pleasures and as part of a conversation with Galassi. Soth, who was a college student when he saw the exhibition, has credited it with making “domestic life seem like a worthwhile subject for photographers,” a subject he’s pursued, loosely, in his varied pictures of American life, including Broken Manual, which documents the desire to abandon the comforts of home in favor of a reclusive existence off the grid.

Curators were equally attuned to the significance of Pleasures and Terrors, and a number of exhibitions looking at domesticity and everyday life sprung up in its wake, most notably Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998, Who’s Looking at the Family? at the Barbican in 1994, and, over a decade later, the similarly oppositional photography exhibition Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth- Century Photograph at Tate Modern in 2003. Pleasures and Terrors is notable as the first encompassing exploration of the translation of the “snapshot aesthetic” into formal, monumental museum photography (and, it should be said, for the rise of an art market that would support such works—pictures made as much of the subjects as for their big empty walls). Galassi also understood intuitively the way that it would connect with wider audiences.

Mary Frey, Women at Coffee Break, 1979–83, from the series Domestic Rituals
Courtesy the artist and Foley Gallery, New York

At a time when museums had to adapt to survive, the relevance of photography as a document of everyday life became crucial. Pleasures and Terrors was important not only for opening up new photographic territory for future generations, but for legitimizing the subject of everyday life within the history of the medium, and within the parameters of the public art museum. And as an extension, Pleasures and Terrors also preluded the deluge of images that would define social media within a decade.

The ambiguity of pleasure is played out endlessly in the contradictions of our enjoyment and our pathological projection of enjoyment, and in the dissolution of the boundaries between private and public.

Galassi seems to have found a poetic name in a riff on the title of Aaron Siskind’s 1954 series The Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (Siskind died in February 1991, as the show was being planned). The photographs depict bodies suspended dramatically in midair, perhaps floating, perhaps falling, their beauty complicated by the uncertainty of their peril or safety. Though Siskind’s images are neither domestically themed nor included in the exhibition, the tension between aesthetic pleasure and lurking threat evident within them is an apt analog for the themes of Galassi’s show.

Myopic as it was, Pleasures and Terrors opened up a conversation about what it might mean to be American, not from a view of patriotism or warfaring, but from an internal perspective of private life. It can be retrospectively understood as a fulcrum for its historical moment, connecting back to Edward Steichen’s imperialist vision of a collective view of human experience in The Family of Man and to John Szarkowski’s predilection for poetic subjectivity. But it also pointed out the problems of those histories and looked forward to the future, toward the demise of privacy, the loneliness of late capitalism, and the significance of image and identity culture in shaping our perceptions of gender, class, and race. Pleasures and terrors, the show suggests, are like holograms, embedded within one another, twisting and changing according to the slant of light.

Sara Knelman is an educator, curator, and writer living in Toronto.

Read more from Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

8 Educational Photography Resources to Spark Creativity

Aperture is invested in providing resources for photography enthusiasts looking to develop their knowledge of the medium, as well as to educators who want to teach their students visual literacy skills. From educational titles written by the world’s top photographers to Aperture’s free twenty-lesson photography curriculum (Aperture On Sight), we’ve gathered a variety of educational resources and activities to inspire those who are eager to engage with the craft of photography.

Activities for kids:

Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids

By Alice Proujansky

Go Photo! features twenty-five creative hands-on activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations, get messy with materials, and engage with the world in new and exciting ways.

Try “Little Me,” a fun and engaging activity from Go Photo! today.

In this student example of Visual Dominoes, both images include a sports ball.

Visual Dominoes Activity

From Aperture On Sight

Visual Dominoes is a game that challenges students to create a sequence of images by finding visual connections. To play, download, print, and cut out the deck of cards provided by Aperture. Once you have all of the images, find a specific color in one of the photographs (like red), and place it next to another photograph that has the same color in it. Now find a shape in the second photograph, and place a photograph that has that same shape in it next to that one. Keep going like this, trying to find harder elements as you go, like composition or focus (color and shape are usually the easiest to notice).

James Mollison, Tristan, 7, New York, USA; from Where Children Sleep (2010)

Signs and Symbols Activity

From Aperture On Sight

Lesson Five from Aperture On Sight introduces signs and symbols and how they contribute to meaning in photographic images. Understanding that photographic content can function like a symbol—representing things not seen in the picture—encourages students to look for elements in their own work that stand in for something else. Have your students look at James Mollison’s book Where Children Sleep, part of which you can view in the Lesson Five slideshow. Have each student choose an object from their bedroom, and ask them to photograph the object against a colored poster-board backdrop to create a still life “self-portrait.”

Resources for college students and adults:

Todd Hido, #2479-a, 1999, from House Hunting (2001)

PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice

Edited and introduced by Sasha Wolf

Curator and lecturer Sasha Wolf was inspired to seek out and assemble artist responses to specific questions about their craft after hearing from countless young photographers that they often feel adrift in their own practice, wondering if they are doing it the “right” way. The responses, from both established and emerging photographers, reveal that there is no single path. PhotoWork is a collection of interviews with forty artists—Robert Adams, Dawoud Bey, Elinor Carucci, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paul Graham, Rinko Kawauchi, Richard Renaldi, Alec Soth, and more—about their approaches to making individual photographs and a sustained a body of work. Structured as a Proust-like questionnaire, each individual answers the same set of questions; the resulting interviews provide essential insights and advice from both emerging and established photographers.

Aperture Conversations

With wide-ranging conversations and inspiring artist talks, we offer over one hundred Aperture Conversations online. To list just two examples: hear from Elinor Carucci, Paul Graham, and Gus Powell on their processes of making photographs; or delve into Diana Markosian’s exploration of immigration and identity through family.

Resources for educators:

Alex Webb, Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, 1996; from Alex Webb: La Calle (Aperture/Televisa Foundation, 2016)

Free Visual Literacy Curriculum

The Aperture On Sight curriculum is designed to teach visual literacy through working with photography and creating photobooks. It builds students’ abilities to communicate as visual storytellers and develops their creative and critical thinking, as well as building their capacity for academic and professional success. Educators can download all twenty lesson plans, plus a variety of resources, for free through Aperture’s website.

Mary Ellen Mark, Ram Prakash Singh with His Elephant Shyama, Great Golden Circus, Ahmedabad, India, 1990; from Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment (Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, 2015)

Workshop Books by Leading Photographers

With Free Learning Guide Companions

For The Photography Workshop Series, Aperture Foundation works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.

Aperture has created free learning guides for almost all of the Workshop Series titles. Aperture’s Education Department staff have organized each guide thematically, highlighting salient topics from the text. Within each theme, relevant chapters, passages, and vocabulary are noted, along with guiding questions to accompany specific images. You can download the free guides here.

Virtual Professional Development

Alice Proujansky, Aperture’s community partnerships coordinator and the author of Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids, is available to provide direct educational services virtually, or over the phone. Aperture is also available to assist educators and schools in developing best practices and strategies on how to work with students who are learning from home. Proujansky was the lead curriculum writer for the Aperture On Sight program and is currently coordinator of the online program and all professional development activities. If interested, please email Alice Proujanksy and Emily Stewart, manager of education and engagement programs, at education@aperture.org.

Browse Aperture’s collection of educational publications.

Access free learning guides to accompany Aperture’s educational titles.

View and download the full Aperture On Sight curriculum here.

Picturing Obama

Aperture is deeply saddened by the loss of Maurice Berger (1957–2020), whose urgent writing about race and visual culture defined a standard of excellence for the photography community and beyond. Here, we revisit his essay for Aperture, issue 223, “Vision & Justice.”

How have photographs defined a transformative presidency?

By Maurice Berger

Damon Winter, Barack Obama, October 28, 2008
Courtesy Damon Winter/ The New York Times/Redux

“What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.”

—James Baldwin, “Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve,” 1961

The photograph by chief official White House photographer Pete Souza of President Barack Obama boarding Air Force One in Jamaica last year is at once mystical and trite. As the president waves to the crowd below, the rainbow that appears behind him seems to issue from his outstretched hand. “With hard work and hope, change is always within our reach,” tweeted the White House along with the photograph, echoing themes that go back to Obama’s first presidential campaign. Although Souza has claimed that the image was largely the result of luck, his admission that he “ran under the wing of the plane to try and line up where the President would be when he waved goodbye” suggests the degree to which the image was premeditated.

The photograph’s calculation attests to the lengths this administration has gone to in order to control the public image of the president and First Lady, a vigilance motivated, in part, by the need to push back against the unprecedented bigotry and vehemence of their adversaries. Admired by supporters and maligned by foes, political leaders inevitably serve as lightning rods for public opinion. Depictions of them appear in myriad forms and are shaped by multiple and often contradictory motives, from documenting official duties to disseminating partisan propaganda. But this president’s race has rendered his image vulnerable to extreme manipulation and distortion. Right-wing and white supremacist media outlets have habitually altered, taken out of context, and falsified photographs of him in order to promulgate a range of racist stereotypes and myths. Intent on undermining Obama’s authority and legitimacy, they have portrayed him as an inept neophyte, an angry black man intent on avenging historic injustices, a foreign-born Muslim, a liar, and, at their most debased, a primate.

Pete Souza, Inside the White House, May 8, 2009
© Pete Souza/The White House/Handout/Corbis

Depictions of Michelle Obama have been similarly fraught. Tabloids have shown her as a fist-bumping black militant bent on destroying white patriarchy and have doubted her fitness to be First Lady. “I was . . . the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others,” she recalled last year. “Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?” Like her husband, the First Lady has also been subjected to more subtle slights. Mainstream publications, perhaps taking their cue from a cautious White House concerned about perceptions of her as strident, have downplayed her formidable intellect and distinguished career before becoming First Lady, focusing instead on her roles as dutiful mother in chief, health advocate, and fashion icon.

There is no doubt that affirmative images of the Obamas have played an important role in the struggle for racial equality and justice. They have defied stereotypes, established new role models, bolstered confidence and self-possession, and challenged expectations about political and cultural power. But the White House’s vigilant management of these images, whatever the motivation, has a complicated history. For one, it has raised concerns among photojournalists who have routinely been denied access to the president, restrictions with serious long-term implications. In 2013, a number of news organizations, in a letter submitted to White House press secretary Jay Carney, made clear their dismay: “As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government.”

Also, the White House and its supporters have at times been drawn into a battle of stereotypes with their detractors, countering right-wing myths with left-wing ones. This problem has been especially true of depictions of the president. To liberal admirers, he has been an object of fascination, the epitome of cool. To the White House, as Nicole Fleetwood has observed, he has served as a paragon of black masculinity as he implores African American men to take “responsibility as fathers.” To Senator Joe Biden, before he joined the Democratic ticket, Obama was “storybook” perfect—a mainstream African American presidential candidate who was “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” To the mythmakers of the 2008 campaign, he was a messiah who would unite a divided nation and heal its racial wounds.

David Burnett, Senator Barack Obama with his wife Michelle at Fourth of July celebrations, July 4, 2008
© David Burnett/Contact Press Images

This myth was enabled by the most notable image of that election: Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, distributed independently by the artist and then with the approval of the Obama campaign. Hope depicted the man who would soon be president as confident and dynamic. But the band of white paint that raked across his face, in a picture devoid of the color brown, implied something else: that Obama was beyond race, a “postracial” politician, half African, half white American, unburdened by the legacy of slavery and segregation. This idea helped to placate apprehensive white Democrats in the campaign against Hillary Clinton—many of these voters, their lives largely segregated, were plagued by racial angst. In Fairey’s ingenious poster, Obama was depicted as black and white, race specific and race neutral, a blank screen onto which voters were invited to project their dreams and aspirations. Obama the man was transformed into Obama the myth—a mystical leader, who, for the price of their support, allowed voters to assuage their guilt and feel good about themselves.

Implicit in this purposely iconic imagery was the idea that the senator from Illinois was uniquely qualified to bestow upon white America a divine gift: racial “atonement and redemption,” as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote during the campaign. Thomas L. Friedman, writing in the New York Times, imagined a similar possibility: the election of the first black president had ushered in a “different country,” where we could “start afresh . . . from a whole new baseline,” despite the persistence of racial prejudice. “And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended,” Friedman proclaimed in language befitting the Bible, a breakthrough not possible until “America’s white majority actually elected an African American as President.”

If the seven and a half years of racial discord, violence, and murder since Obama’s election have not been sobering enough, a simple statistic concerning the 2008 election results reveals the hollowness of this claim: America’s white majority, in fact, gave the bulk of its support to white men, affording Obama only 43 percent of its vote. In Obama’s race for reelection in 2012, the number was even lower, at 39 percent. The president’s victories proffered neither a sweeping repudiation of white racism nor the end of racial divisions. Nevertheless, as Friedman’s argument suggests, many white Americans, with much to prove about their racial attitudes and behavior, believed that the election of the first black president was principally about them. But Obama’s victory owed more to other forces: a motivating and gifted nominee, the promise of change, and rapidly evolving demographics. In the twenty-first century, a national candidate of color could prevail without a majority of white voters, a sign of the latter’s inexorable decline toward minority status.

Chip Somodevilla, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, 2009
Courtesy epa/Chip Somodevilla

Seen in this context, one of the most realistic and hopeful implications of the 2008 election was the extent to which Obama inspired a robust electoral majority, consisting principally of people of color, other minorities, and urban whites, to elect a commander in chief who better reflected their diversity. If this milestone was not always stressed by the president or the campaign, for fear of alienating white supporters, it nonetheless has motivated or underscored some of the most inspiring images of the Obama presidency.

A sense of hope and possibility infuses Pete Souza’s 2009 image of the president interacting with five-year-old Jacob Philadelphia, for example. The child’s father, leaving the White House after two years of service on the National Security Council, had asked for a family photograph with the president. After those pictures were taken and the family was about to leave, Jacob had a question for Obama: “I want to know if my hair is just like yours.” “Why don’t you touch it and see for yourself ?” the President replied, leaning forward. As the child hesitantly patted his head, Obama asked him what he thought. “Yes, it does feel the same,” said Jacob. Souza’s poignant image affirmed the extraordinary symbolic power of the Obama presidency as well as its potential to challenge stereotypes. Against a relentless backdrop of pessimism and deprecating myths about black men, a little boy had come to realize that he, like the president who bowed before him, could one day achieve his dreams.

Historically, images of hope, accomplishment, and self- assurance have been influential in achieving stability in the black community and social justice in the nation at large. They have bolstered the self-esteem of African Americans, steeling them against a relentless tide of negative images and withering stereotypes, just as they have challenged white Americans to rethink the misconceptions that underwrite their prejudices. Almost since its introduction in the United States, photography has done more than just document the reality of racial prejudice and oppression: it has motivated a people, even during periods of extreme violence and repression, to create alternative and affirmative images of themselves and thus take control of how they are seen by others. As Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer observe in their groundbreaking 2012 book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery:

These wide-ranging photographs can be seen as the embodiment of the history and memories of slavery, emancipation, and freedom. They constitute an archive of black people’s seen and unseen lives, their spoken and unspoken experiences. . . . They offer powerful evidence of how black women, men, and children saw themselves and each other: as dignified, beautiful, creative, intellectual, energetic, diligent, steadfast, powerful, and free.

Nona Faustine, My Wishes and Dreams Are with You …, January 20, 2009
Courtesy the artist

The representation of black political and cultural leaders—from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X—has played a significant role in this history. Douglass believed that the broad “moral and social influence” of photography was more powerful in transforming national culture than “the making of its laws.” An ex-slave who became one of the leading abolitionists and crusaders for racial equality and justice, Douglass was also the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. His commitment to being pictured was coextensive with his social activism: images of black role models and leaders, he argued, had the potential to challenge racial biases and empower people of color.

As the editors of Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (2015) write, the sheer number of public portraits of Douglass, “from his earliest known photograph as a young man with an Afro, circa 1841, to the postmortem portrait fifty-four years later, conveys not only Douglass’s faith in photography but his understanding of the public identity he was crafting.” By disseminating pictures of himself that were nuanced and continually evolving, Douglass was effectively undermining the stereotypes and clichés that robbed human beings of their individuality and humanity. This transformative understanding of selfhood—and the social possibilities of a nascent visual technology—helped destabilize the rigid misperceptions that justified racism, perpetuated slavery, and endangered the survival, confidence, and self-possession of African Americans.

Today, with stereotypes continuing to perpetuate racism and harm people of color, it is impossible to underestimate the symbolic importance of the myriad photographs of President Obama. But the unique circumstances of his presidency have also complicated the ability of his image to achieve the broad disruption of stereotypes that Douglass envisioned. Ultimately, the public image of every president is largely reduced to the superficial clichés that inform popular conceptions of them: John F. Kennedy as the tragic hero of an unattainable Camelot, for example, or Richard Nixon as the deceitful Tricky Dick. From the beginning, Obama’s race has constituted the abiding adjective of his groundbreaking presidency, regardless of whether it has impacted his policies and conduct in office. Ultimately, he will always be known as the first black president, a fact that has also exposed him to other, more insidious forms of stereotyping. Thus, his public image has been constricted by the mythmaking endemic to his job, the media, and his race, as well as the magical thinking that has burdened him with unattainable expectations. Nearing the end of his tenure, and despite remarkable achievements, Obama remains, for many, the mystical cipher of the Hope poster or the foreign-born imposter of right-wing fantasy: a one-dimensional symbol of our loftiest ambitions or our most venomous fears.

Gary Hershorn, U.S. President-elect Senator Barack Obama leaves with his wife Michelle after being declared the winner of the 2008 presidential campaign, November 4, 2008
Courtesy REUTERS/Gary Hershorn

The most illuminating and inspiring depictions of the president, like those of the First Lady, transgress this limitation, subtly challenging stereotypes with images that are complex, nuanced, and, to a great extent, spontaneous. Rejecting political clichés and symbols, these pictures return to the Obamas the humanity lost not only to seditious rhetoric, but also to veneration or the routine give-and-take of partisan politics. The photograph of little Jacob, for example, was neither staged nor planned, as its awkward composition, unintentional cropping, and blurred foreground affirm. Its unguarded interaction reveals a nimble, sensitive, and racially aware president, a leader who has inspired, by his own example, millions of Americans to imagine a positive and just future. Similarly, a photograph taken by Damon Winter during the 2008 campaign shows Obama not as a rainbow whisperer but rather as a vulnerable human being, drenched by rain but determined to be there for the crowd who turned out to support him in Chester, Pennsylvania. Another impromptu image from the campaign, taken by photojournalist David Burnett, reveals a thoughtful, poised, and introspective Michelle Obama absorbed in conversation as her husband looks on, an inversion of the conventional image of political leader and adoring spouse.

In an age when millions of photographs are posted on social media each day—and the camera endures as a vital weapon in the struggle for racial justice—it is important to remember that the authority to represent the president and First Lady belongs not only to political insiders or the media, but also to the people they serve. Whether amateurs with cellphones or renowned photographers, their take on the Obamas constitutes the ultimate commentary on how Barack and Michelle are being received and understood. Well before the White House released the picture of little Jacob, for example, the photographer Nona Faustine recognized the personal and historic significance of the proximity of Obama’s election to the birth of her daughter. Watching his first inaugural address on television, her newborn stirring in the foreground, Faustine did what generations of African American men and women had done before her: she picked up her camera and recorded for posterity the beauty and consequence of the moment. The photograph she took is at once intimate and historic, a testament to new possibilities and a touching declaration of hope. It is also a reminder that the prosaic can be monumental, quietly testifying to the faith, aspirations, and triumphs of a people.

Maurice Berger was Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He wrote the monthly “Race Stories” series for the Lens Blog of the New York Times.

This piece was originally published in Aperture, issue 223, “Vision & Justice,” Summer 2016.

These Women Changed the History of Photography

Celebrate Women’s History Month with 14 must-read articles and interviews that chronicle the impact of women artists, from the dawn of photography to today.

The Woman Who Made the World’s First Photobook

Why Anna Atkins deserves her place in the pantheon of great photographers.

Graciela Iturbide’s Dreams and Visions

The life and work of Latin America’s most revered photographer. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 236, “Mexico City.”

For Annabelle Sellforf, Architecture is Not About Powerful Images

The art world’s favorite architect on her photographic influences, designing sought-after homes, and how buildings can actually “do something.” This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home.”

A Japanese Photographer’s Encounters with Natural Disasters

Eight years after a devastating tsunami, Lieko Shiga investigates Japan’s haunted landscapes. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 234, “Earth.”

When Women Photographers Went to War

From Gerda Taro to Susan Meiselas, a new book examines the ways eight women have expanded the field of war photography. This piece originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review 017.

How Do Portraits Keep Families of Incarcerated Individuals Together?

Drawing from her family’s experience, Nicole R. Fleetwood considers prison photographs as objects of love and belonging. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 230, “Prison Nation.”

What Is A Feminist Photobook?

Carmen Winant on feminism, photobooks, and the radical gestures of world-building. This piece originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review 017.

Tania Franco Klein’s Magic Spells

Inspired by Mexico City’s Sonora Market, the photographer’s cinematic new series depicts an unshakeable belief in enchantment. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 236, “Mexico City.”

The Woman Behind the First Photo Gallery

Helen Gee risked everything to open Limelight in 1954, selling prints by Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Robert Frank for less than fifty dollars each. This piece was originally published in Helen Gee: Limelight, a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties.

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s Confrontational Photographs Transcend Time and Place

In a conversation with Francine Prose, the photographer speaks about the trajectory of her career, as well as her recurring themes of ritual, religion, gender, and travel. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 220, “The Interview Issue.”

These Radical Black Women Changed the Art World

Jessica Lynne speaks with the curators behind a landmark exhibition about the revolutionary artists who transformed American culture.

Rosalyne Blumenstein and the Art of Living

In her newest series, artist and activist Zackary Drucker pays homage to a trans icon. This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 235, “Orlando.”

12 Inspiring Photobooks by Women Photographers

From seminal first monographs by Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin to modern classics by Deana Lawson, Rinko Kawauchi and more.

Three Women Photographers Reclaim the American Landscape

Susan Lipper, Kristine Potter, and Justine Kurland deconstruct the mythology of the Wild West. This piece originally appeared in The PhotoBook Review 015.

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For Annabelle Selldorf, Architecture is Not About Powerful Images

The art world’s favorite architect on her photographic influences, designing sought-after homes, and how buildings can actually “do something.”

By Julian Rose

Annabelle Selldorf, New York, October 2019
Photograph by Balarama Heller for Aperture

Annabelle Selldorf is the art world’s favorite architect. But her work is nothing if not subtle—rather than the splashy icons we have come to expect from the starchitects long chosen to design art galleries and museums, Selldorf prefers to craft what she modestly calls “functional” settings for art. Rooted in an understated modernist aesthetic, with an updated material palate and innovative geometries, Selldorf ’s exhibition spaces have remade the white cube for the twenty-first century. Small wonder, then, that she is frequently sought out to design the homes of high-profile art collectors, or that she has now designed major museums and galleries for over two decades, from the Neue Galerie and the Swiss Institute to David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth.

Given her sensitivity to art, it’s not surprising that Selldorf ’s practice is also engaged in an ongoing dialogue with artists. She has collaborated directly with contemporary artists such as the photographer Todd Eberle, and she readily acknowledges the influence of a generation of postwar photographers who examine the modern metropolis and industrial landscape—particularly Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose work hangs on the wall of her light-filled New York office just north of Union Square. That’s where the architecture critic Julian Rose visited Selldorf last fall to talk about her relationship to photography, both professional and personal, and the intriguing challenges faced by architects who design homes for art.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wassertürme (Water towers), 1966–86
Courtesy the Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, and Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur–Bernd and Hilla Archive, Cologne

Julian Rose: Let’s start with the photographs right here in your office. You have works by Bernd and Hilla Becher on the walls. I’d love to hear what they mean to you. Of course their subject is architecture, and they’re gorgeous photographs, no question, but I could argue that they’re critical of architecture too.

Annabelle Selldorf: They are all of that. They have a kind of face value that draws you in. It’s not just what you look at, but how you look at it. The Bechers look without drama, in a way. And the “without drama” is one of the things that I am interested in, because it takes away our need for the sentimental hyperbole that accompanies practically everything people do. We always need to find hyperbole for our architects, for their work: it’s “amazing,” it’s “incredible,” and on and on.

Rose: So what you’re getting from those images is not so much an aesthetic per se, certainly not a style. You’re talking about photography as a mode of looking, an approach to the world— a kind of methodology.

Selldorf: Right. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a conversation with anybody about this, but it is a process of clearing away layers that allows you to look at something straight. Mies van der Rohe once said, “One doesn’t invent a new architecture every Monday morning.” Rather, you develop a methodology.

Rose: What other photographers are important to you?

Selldorf: I love the work of Gabriele Basilico—he has the eye of a humanist, and, at the same time, I think it’s the eye of an architect. He did a series of pictures of war-torn Beirut, and they were riveting.

Gabriele Basilico, Beirut, 1991
Courtesy the artist and Archivio Gabriele Basilico, Milan

Rose: He did study architecture, after all, and there does seem to be a level of sensitivity—an insight into how people and buildings relate—that an architect can bring to photography.

Selldorf: In a funny way, the Bechers don’t have that because to them buildings are objects—they just categorize and anthologize. Whereas with Basilico, I always feel that his photographs are about people and how they interact with architectural environments. Whether it’s images of bombed-out Beirut, or buildings in Milan, or the amazing, very moody photographs he did of the industrial park in Dunkirk, France, his work is unbelievably powerful because it has this human dimension. I’d always hoped that one day I could get him to photograph one of my projects. That’s so naive and silly, but it was a measure of my admiration.

Rose: In general, architectural photography is not often done by the same photographers we think of as artists in their own right. Is that something you think about in relation to your work?

Selldorf: Absolutely. We did a book a couple of years ago, Portfolio and Projects (2016), and I asked my friend the photographer Todd Eberle to do the photography. I think he is one person who negotiates between the two categories. I just asked him to put together a portfolio of images of my work. He went to all these different buildings, and he took pictures.

Rose: With minimal direction from you?

Selldorf: Yes. But we’ve known each other for a long time. And I wanted the portfolio to be as much about his eye as it is about our buildings. In the beginning, I really wanted him to photograph in black and white, because I find that lends a particular focus. But he didn’t want to do that. Early in his career, he photographed a lot in black and white, but now he thinks in color. So I had to make a decision. If I was going to work with an artist, I couldn’t tell him what to do.

Gabriele Basilico, Milano ritratti di fabbriche (Milan factory portraits), 1978–80
Courtesy the artist and Archivio Gabriele Basilico, Milan

Rose: Was it hard to let go?

Selldorf: Not at all.

Rose: What did you learn from seeing your work through his eyes?

Selldorf: He discovers the composition right away. Often the work we do comes from a utilitarian, almost wishful idea about how people will move in a space, and I start to think that this idea is guiding how the spaces should be proportioned, and all of the rest of the design. But, of course, eventually it does return to the question: what does it look like?

Rose: It’s intriguing that you feel his images almost tease out the underlying intention in your designs. I think frequently it’s the reverse—projects are designed for the photograph.

Selldorf: Absolutely. I remember from when I was a young architect people would say, “This is a three-picture job.” It makes you want to weep.

Rose: Does photography play a role in your own process?

Selldorf: It has a lot more than I necessarily intended because of what we were just talking about. Nicholas Venezia, who works in the office in communications, is a photographer, and he has brought his sensibility to our relationship with the outside world. He has learned to understand what we do, and he channels his own talent and his own eye to participate in our process. Sometimes when we’re starting a project, I ask him to document the site, and that is so much better than relying on my own amateurish photographs— I always think that I take such great photographs, and then I look at them and I realize I’m really not very good at it after all.

Rachel Ruysch, A ‘Forest Floor’ Still Life of Flowers, 1679–1750
Courtesy Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Rose: I know you’re also something of a collector. What is the difference between the art you work with and the art you live with?

Selldorf: It’s an interesting question, because it has become so fashionable for people to display their personality through a collection—usually an eclectic collection that portrays them as someone eclectic. But I am not a collector. That’s very important. I have a lot of things, but that’s just because I’m getting old—I’m only half kidding. I have never thought of myself as a collector, but over time, I have discovered things that I respond to. I love drawings, because drawing is something that I can relate to.

Rose: It’s part of your own practice as an architect.

Selldorf: Part of my process, yes. But sometimes I am envious of artists, like when I see a Paul Klee drawing—I can feel his immersion in the drawing process, I marvel at the exploration of color, the detail, the wit. That’s the difference between an artist and an architect. An artist makes a drawing about drawing. I make a drawing because it’s a step toward making something else.

Rose: It’s interesting to me that we haven’t discussed painting yet. Painting was really the preferred medium of modernist architects. Le Corbusier is the most obvious example—he actually fancied himself a painter as much as an architect—but any number of his contemporaries also cited modern painting as an important source of inspiration. Has painting’s importance for architects been usurped by other media, like photography or drawing?

Selldorf: Well, I do have some paintings too. I have two seventeenth- century Dutch still lifes that I like very much. One is a scene in the forest ground. Strictly speaking, it’s not a still life because there is a salamander in it, and a fly, and a butterfly. But the painting takes you into a different world—it’s an almost surrealist setting, but it has been depicted with total realism. There’s something so unfamiliar and unexpected about it; it’s like it opens up a new space in your brain.

Selldorf Architects, Van de Weghe Townhouse, New York, 2012
Photograph by Todd Eberle, 2015

Rose: You’re saying that this kind of image, whether it’s the Klee drawing or the Dutch painting, can transport you into a different world.

Selldorf: That’s exactly right, and actually very different from how I tend to think about photography. Photography, more than anything else, captures a moment in time. I have a photograph that I bought from Fraenkel Gallery a long time ago. It’s of one of those automated photographs from a British bombing mission during the war. The pilots documented the before and after as they flew over. I’ve always found this image fascinating, because it shows the crazy idea that we force change in such a brutal, sudden way, in such a violent and inhuman process.

Rose: I can see how this distinction plays into your own relationship to different kinds of art and affects what you might want to hang in your own home or your own office, but I’m curious to know if it also carries over into the spaces you design in which other people look at art. You’ve done a lot of houses for collectors, for example. Are there certain principles—certain ideas about what it is like to live with art—that add up to a common approach to this kind of project? Or does each one evolve on a case-by- case basis depending on the particular client and the particular collection?

Selldorf: I think that all our work has a kind of specificity that relies on getting to know the client. I also think that many people call themselves collectors when they are not. A lot of people have the money to buy a lot of things they like and to hang them on the wall. A collector is somebody who has a specific mind-set, somebody who pursues art with rigor and a specific intellectual disposition, who systematically fills out a thesis, if you will. Very few people do that. But it’s fun to find someone who is actually putting thought into a collection, because then they think about space differently.

Selldorf Architects, West Village Residence, New York, 2013
Photograph by John Chelsey, 2013

Rose: And I imagine that in these cases, your work can essentially become another formulation of the thesis. You’re shaping the collection, perhaps not in a direct way, but you’re helping to bring a particular vision to life. But this question of having a thesis—or not having one—raises the question of architecture’s neutrality, which I think we should talk about in relation to your gallery architecture. It’s always seemed ironic to me that the term neutrality has become so controversial in this context. Take the white cube, which we all know is a bit of a straw man but is still a dominant typology of exhibition architecture today. On one side, you have artists complaining that their work is always shown in a white cube. They’ll say that the white cube isn’t neutral at all, that it’s ideological and constricting. On the other side, you have architects bristling at the fact that they’re always asked to design white cubes. They’ll ask why architecture needs to stay neutral. You seem to have found a way beyond this binary in your work. I don’t quite know what to call the gallery typology you’ve invented—I wish I could come up with a good neologism.

Selldorf: A good hyperbole?

Rose: Exactly! But what I’m trying to get at is that your gallery spaces aren’t always white, and they’re not cubes either, but they still feel very sensitive, almost respectful to the art that’s displayed in them.

Selldorf: They’re not respectful. They’re functional. I don’t think that neutrality exists. Take the white cube: It’s interesting because it’s a foil, right? I don’t think that’s limiting. It’s not inherently good or bad. Or rather, it’s good only if it’s good architecture, and that has to do with a host of things that have to do with proportions, with light, with the way you place a human being in the middle of it.

Selldorf Architects, Skarstedt Residence, Sagaponack, New York, 2014
Photograph by Nikolas Koenig, 2015

Rose: So would you say that you’re more interested in designing a certain kind of gallery experience than a gallery aesthetic?

Selldorf: I tend to think that distraction is not desirable. I think that noise takes away from focus. In the most primitive way, when we design spaces for art, we facilitate concentration. We give people the opportunity to focus on what they are meant to see. I don’t care whether somebody doesn’t like white, or doesn’t like green, for that matter. What I care about is a kind of calm, or tranquility, that creates a setting. We live in an age where everything is event-driven, and, for me, that’s overwhelming.

Rose: Often this calm seems to be expressed through the details of your architecture. At David Zwirner gallery, I’ve always been struck by the warm wood accenting the concrete.

Selldorf: Zwirner’s gallery is a very good example. It’s about looking at art in the best circumstances, but it doesn’t deny itself a measure of personality or presence. I think it’s in dialogue with the art. It’s not a neutral space.

Rose: It’s not neutral, but also not overpowering.

Selldorf: I want people to feel welcomed by these spaces. That’s not an event-driven sentiment, for me, but more about longevity. These spaces should last. Today, we are questioning how museums function, and everyone agrees that beaux-arts museums are bad and big open spaces are good. But I think exactly how and why we’ve decided this are worth examining.

Selldorf Architects, Chelsea Townhouse, New York, 2015
Photograph by Todd Eberle, 2015

Rose: It’s definitely worth emphasizing that a neoclassical, beaux- arts museum is not inherently any more an expression of power than an ultracontemporary one. But you’re also suggesting, I think, that there are fundamental continuities in the experience of art. Traditionally, museums were designed to be spaces of quiet contemplation, and we still need spaces without distraction. Maybe there is a sense in which going to a great nineteenth- century museum, say [Karl Friedrich] Schinkel’s Altes Museum, is not materially different from going to any museum that has been constructed in the twenty-first century.

Selldorf: Well, it isn’t to you, and it isn’t to me, because we have the confidence that comes from always being afforded that access.

Rose: That’s a good point.

Selldorf: I really think that’s a very, very important thing to understand. We need to ask: How do we create places that are inclusive? And if they are inclusive, they have to be inclusive of everybody, which is by necessity very complicated, because everyone is entering from a different place. How does the architecture of the museum contract or expand in ways that communicate openness?

Rose: So rethinking the institution starts with the architecture, in a very fundamental sense.

Selldorf: I think so. In a way, this gets back to photography. Today, because we are so image-driven, everybody thinks they’re an expert on architecture because they’ve seen photographs of it. But that’s not what architecture is about. Architecture is about being there. Architecture is not about powerful images, it’s about a building actually doing something. When I was in architecture school, we would do field trips to visit buildings, and that was a very different experience from seeing them in photographs. And I think that is no different now.

Selldorf Architects, Neue Galerie, New York, 2001
Photograph by Todd Eberle, 2005

Rose: Architecture has a tortured relationship with images, though. There are so many important buildings that are known almost entirely through photographs. The most extreme example might be Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, which was built in 1929 and destroyed within a year. It was eventually rebuilt in the 1980s, but its impact on the development of modern architecture—which was enormous—was almost entirely through its circulation in the form of photographic images. Is there a tension between architecture’s reliance on the image and the idea that you just expressed, that a building will always exceed an image somehow? Images can be very powerful tools in the hands of architects, but their work is also supposed to be about specificity, about a relationship to a place—precisely the things that we can’t circulate, that can’t be captured in a photograph.

Selldorf: There is a tension, but today I see it less in photography than in the production of renderings. Everybody wants you to show them, in advance, exactly what they’re going to see when the building is finished. And because it is now possible to make renderings of such high quality that they are truly photo-realistic, that is what everyone expects. I find this incredibly depressing— it’s a fake reality. I know that sometimes we do a rendering that looks exactly like the building, and after it’s built, we don’t have a really good photograph of that particular angle, so we continue to use the rendering because that represents it better. What I really mind about that is a kind of consumer attitude we’re creating. It’s like everyone is telling us, “Give it to me NOW.” We just lost a competition because I didn’t think of providing teaser images. I am heartbroken, because it’s a job I wanted. And I didn’t want this job because I was going to make amazing images; I wanted this job because it was an opportunity to do something with architecture that I haven’t done before.

Rose: What seems so problematic today is that often the image precedes the architecture, and the building is merely catching up. But obviously architects aren’t going to stop making renderings anytime soon. Can you use images in ways that are still surprising?

Selldorf: One interesting thing is that you cannot make a school anymore. Architects like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used images to represent a way of thinking.

Rose: And that way of thinking became a broader architectural movement. It’s true that the entire generation of postmodern architects was, on some level, united by a shared interest in certain kinds of images. 

Selldorf: There is no longer any interest in that kind of intellectual community. I think architects are valued only as individuals. Sometimes people ask me if I’m a modernist, and I don’t even know what that means. How could I represent something like modernism by myself? The irony is that when I started my office, I was alone, and I was unbelievably intimidated by my colleagues—I really did not seek the company of other architects. Today I do. Because I think, in small ways, I can contribute to changing our conversation.

Julian Rose is an architect and critic based in New York.

Read more from Aperture, issue 238, “House & Home,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

Marking Time

When a loved one is incarcerated, how do portrait studios keep families together?

By Nicole R. Fleetwood

Allen, Valentine’s Day portrait, ca. 2010
Courtesy Nicole R. Fleetwood

Since 1994, I have had an exchange of words and images with my cousin Allen, who was sentenced to life in prison at the age of eighteen. We write to each other regularly, often reminiscing about growing up in southwest Ohio. There is such a familiarity in our connection, although our time together is limited to a couple of hours during each of my visits to see him. Allen and I grew up as siblings, along with several other first cousins in our large and close-knit family. His mother is my mother’s older sister, and child-rearing was very much a group effort that was shared among all the female relatives.

Allen ends all his letters to me in the same way: “Niki, send more pictures. Love, your lil cuz Allen.”

His requests for pictures make me think of other populations removed from their loved ones—migrant workers, those in exile or at war, those estranged from their families—who stay connected through letter writing and family photographs. I send him pictures, and he reciprocates. I have a small suitcase of memorabilia from Ohio prisons that includes letters, greeting cards, and prison photographs sent from Allen and other male relatives during their time incarcerated. The photographs are studio portraits taken by incarcerated photographers whose job in prison is to take pictures. Allen poses in them sometimes with props, always in uniform. The backdrops are painted by incarcerated people, and break up the uniformity and repetition of the prison attire and staged poses. There are also photographs from our visits to see Allen. In most of these, he stands in the center, and we huddle around, hugging him tightly.

In the first few years of his imprisonment, I could not look at these photographs that arrived tucked behind his letters. I dreaded opening an envelope from him if I could feel that the contents included something akin to the thickness and flexibility of photo- graphic paper. I would quickly glance and put the photographs back in the envelope, feeling much more comfortable with the letter. With his words, I had space to process and react. With the pictures, I had difficulty controlling my emotions. Gradually, my looks grew longer. I began to fixate on certain details—his hairstyle, a new tattoo, the shape of his arms and his neck. Then, as an experiment, I decided to hang the photographs around my home—secured by magnets on the refrigerator, tacked to a wall, or taped to the back of a door. After a while, they no longer unsettled me; they were just there, along with other images and possessions in my cluttered home.

Nicole (the author), Allen, and Sharon (Allen’s mother), August 2012
Courtesy Nicole R. Fleetwood

In some ways, I forgot they were on display until a friend, who is an art historian, visited my home and inquired about one of them. Hanging on my refrigerator was a photograph of another cousin, also imprisoned in Ohio. In the portrait, De’Andre, in his late teens, smiles at the camera; he stands in a blue uniform, while hugging his grandmother (my aunt Frances). The backdrop is a painting of a winter scene, with snow-covered trees and rolling hills. A deer’s partial figure animates the landscape. I replied, “That’s my cousin De’Andre in prison during a visit from his grandmother—my aunt.” My friend was shocked: “Wow. That was taken in prison … There’s so much love in that image. They both look so happy.”

My friend had never seen a photograph documenting a family visit to an imprisoned relative and was unaware of how common these images are among groups most affected by mass incarceration—blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. The smiles and hug shared between grandson and grandmother were far from what he associated with prison life and culture. He compared the fantasy backdrops and setting to photographer James VanDerZee’s early twentieth-century portraits of black residents of Harlem. Also notable in VanDerZee’s work is the intentionality of his photographic subjects to use portraiture to document aspirations for upward mobility, equality, and inclusion. VanDerZee’s photographs have a sense of futurity, hopefulness, and often a subtle or explicit claim of the nation (the U.S. flag as prop or black soldiers in uniform); his images document anticipation of a better life for blacks of the time period.

My friend’s comments led me to see these photographs as more than documents of my family’s pain and loss, our separation from De’Andre, Allen, and other loved ones. Millions of them circulate between incarcerated people and their families and friends, given that there are over two million people incarcerated in the United States. In terms of sheer volume, prison photography is one of the largest practices of vernacular photography in the contemporary era. Like most vernacular photography, these images are primarily in private collections, housed in shoeboxes, photo- albums, drawers, and closets. These photographs serve as important visual and haptic objects of love and belonging structured through the U.S. prison regime, and provide an important counterpoint to a long history of visually indexing criminal profiles, such as mug shots and prison ID cards. Alternately, these photographs reveal the quotidian familiarity of penal settings for many millions who must navigate familial and intimate relations through prison bureaucracies and surveillance.

Deana Lawson, Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jasmine & Family, 2013. Installation photograph by Jason Wyche
© the artist

Among the most striking features that set these images apart from more publicly circulated photographs of prisoners are the emotive smiles, the imaginative backdrops, and the familial gazes of the photographic subjects that, one could argue, acknowledge their intended audience. Within portrait photography, backdrops tend to be read as signs of aspiration, futurity, and fantasy. In prison portraiture, the backdrops are more varied than the poses and uniforms of the imprisoned photographic subjects. Carceral backdrops project exterior life—a space outside prison walls—and they fall within landscape-painting traditions. While some backdrops reference iconic landmarks, like New York City’s skyline, the majority do not project a sense of place or specificity of location. Instead, they represent a sense of nonconfinement, a lack of bars, boundaries, borders—an ungoverned, yet manicured, space.

Until recently, vernacular prison portraits have had little visibility outside of their widespread interchange between incarcerated people and their personal networks. However, in the past few years, these images have circulated more broadly in public culture as art, appearing in exhibitions, catalogs, art auctions, and blogs dedicated to prison culture. David Adler’s collection of prison portraits, which has received considerable attention, is one example. Photographer Deana Lawson’s series Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jasmine & Family (2013) is another. The photographs are of Lawson’s cousin Jasmine; Jasmine’s incarcerated partner, Eric; and their young children. The name of the series is taken from the prison where Eric was incarcer- ated—a name that reiterates the dispossession and confinement of indigenous peoples, a carceral facility now primarily occupied by hyperincarcerated young black and Latino men from New York City, and staffed by rural white workers. In the series, we see the power of prison studio portraits to document familial and intimate relations. In some photographs, Jasmine and Eric hold each other affectionately. They kiss and hug. In others, they stand together as a family with their young children. The backdrop is unchanging and more austere than in many prison studios. It is a mural painted on cinder blocks; the lines of the blocks are visible through the paint. Against this backdrop, Jasmine and Eric—and other prisoners with their lovers, families, and friends—make memories shaped by the carceral system.

Photographer unknown, Jesus (left) and friend, Bronx, New York, ca. 2009
Courtesy David Adler

In one memorable visit, the emotional weight of this form of memory making comes to the fore. It was September 2012 and I was at Ross Correctional Institution with my cousin Eric. We were visiting De’Andre, his son and my cousin. Then twenty-three years old, De’Andre had been in an adult prison for more than six years and had six years left of his minimum sentencing. Eric was visibly uncomfortable. De’Andre had recently been transferred to Ross from another prison that was closer to home. He had written to both of us, depressed and worried about his safety. He had not had a visitor in over a year.

At Ross, the photography studio is right next to the guard’s desk and close to the visitors’ entrance. The backdrop is of an autumnal setting sun. The sky is a pale shade of pink, and centered at the top of the landscape is a large, warm yellow sun. The outer ring of sun bleeds into the pink and touches the edge of the lone tree on the horizon. The leafless tree stands majestic, peaking up above the sun’s rays. It’s one of the sparest backdrops I have seen, and its color scheme is unusual.

I speak briefly to the photographer while he sets up a shot; communication between the photographer and visitors is not officially allowed, but the guard does not seem to mind. The shift photographer, a middle-aged white man, tells me that he learned to take pictures in prison; he had never given photography much consideration when he was on the outside, he notes. The visiting room experience here feels more casual and less regulated than in most prisons I have visited, and yet this is one of the most restrictive institutions known to house prisoners who have committed serious felonies, or who have had disciplinary records at other penal institutions.

Allen, Nicole and De’Andre, 2011
Courtesy Nicole R. Fleetwood

Photoshoots in prison tend to be quick and cursory. The photographer is careful not to spend much time talking with his subjects for fear of scrutiny by the guards, but today the shoots last longer, and those who are posing linger on the bench and chat with each other. Ahead of us, a young Latino couple spends considerable time, staging several images. The photographer walks to our table and tells us that we are next. De’Andre, Eric, and I take two pictures. In one, De’Andre is in the center, Eric is on his right side, and I am on the left. For the second picture, Eric says that De’Andre and I should take one together. De’Andre likes this idea; he has had very little contact with women in six years. He squeezes me much tighter than I expect when the photographer asks us if we are ready.

I have this photograph collection of Allen and De’Andre aging, maturing, changing in prison. The images of Allen, now almost twenty years into his life sentence, shift from an angry and scared teenager, to a depressed man in his twenties, to a resigned but hopeful man in his late thirties anticipating each time he goes before the parole board that he will be released.

After years of struggling with anger, shame, guilt, and depression about Allen’s life sentence at such a young age—his first time being arrested and convicted of any crime, but the judge having said during sentencing that he was making an example out of Allen so that other boys in our community would stay “in line”—his mother and sister work even harder to incorporate him into their daily lives. Allen is brought up with the frequency of one who shares a home with them. Their 2011 holiday card is evidence of this commitment. The photograph, staged in prison against an idyllic winter backdrop, is thickly layered as it circulates through many locations and emotional registers. Allen is the male central figure customary of family portraiture, as the women—his mother, sister, niece, and daughter—stand at his sides and lean in toward him. The prison portrait has been enfolded into another narrative and way of marking time—the holiday greeting card. The message on the card reads: “Have a blessed & prosperous 2011. Love, Sharon, Cassandra, Allen, Tanasha, & Mariah.”

Eleanor (the author’s mother), Allen, Nicole, and Sharon, 2009
Courtest Nicole R. Fleetwood

There is one image of Allen that unsettles me. He poses with his mother, my mother, and me during a visit in June 2009. My mother and I were in town to celebrate the graduation of four younger cousins from high school, a milestone that Allen did not accomplish. In this shot, we stand close to him. He hugs my mother and me tightly on each side of him. Aunt Sharon leans in, and we wrap our arms around each other. The women, all three of us, smile at the photographer. Our eyes are focused on the moment at hand, documenting our visit, a temporary break in Allen’s routine, a moment of connectedness. Allen’s eyes, his half smile, the creases around his mouth disturb me. His look is painful. It anticipates what will happen after we are finished posing and our visit ends. It will be another year before I see him. He will be here, living in a cell, when we return.

On February 2, 2015, Allen was released from an Ohio prison after serving almost twenty-one years. He walked out of the facility with his mother and sister accompanying him. They walked to the family car and took a group selfie. It was his first photograph outside of prison. In the weeks after his release, Allen used the smartphone that his mother purchased for him and took digital images of many of the photographs that his relatives had sent him over the past two decades. He then sent those photographs to us in text messages and emails with notes of love and playful emoticons. Many of the images that he returned were photographs that we had forgotten about. Allen had archived them. In many respects, he has become the keeper of our family’s photographic record. For the next five years, he will be heavily monitored through parole. Nevertheless, he told me to refer to him in this article’s conclusion as a “free man.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood is Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) and guest curator of the accompanying exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York.

This piece was originally published in Aperture, issue 230, “Prison Nation,” Spring 2018.