Aperture's Blog, page 74

A Photographer’s Chronicle of Indigenous Life in Brazil

Throughout her career, Claudia Andujar has always experimented with visual language to portray her country’s most pressing cultural questions.

By Thyago Nogueira

Claudia Andujar, Rua Direita (Direita Street), São Paolo, ca. 1970
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

On one of the hottest days of the Brazilian summer last February, I sat with Claudia Andujar in her apartment to talk about her remarkable life and career in photography. Claudia, now eighty-three, has lived in São Paulo since the mid-1950s, but the story of how she came to live in Brazil parallels some of the tragedies of the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland, Claudia spent her early years in Hungary, before fleeing during World War II. She lived in New York, where she finished high school, attended Hunter College, and embarked on a career as a painter. After a brief marriage, Claudia rejoined her mother who was living in São Paulo, in 1955, and left painting for photography. During the 1960s, Claudia returned regularly to New York, maintaining ties to the city’s artistic community, including figures like Edward Steichen and documentarian W. Eugene Smith, who would profoundly influence her humanist vision. Her photographs were published in Life magazine and in Aperture, in 1971, then edited by Minor White. In 1960, her work was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

In Brazil, Claudia worked as a photo-journalist for magazines such as Realidade, until the early seventies, when she quit everything to focus on a personal project about the struggles of an indigenous group in the Amazon region called the Yanomami. This would become her life’s work. She photographed the Yanomami extensively, in hopes of preserving and understanding their culture, and fought politically for the respect of their traditions and land. today, Claudia has not slowed down. In September, Inhotim, a contemporary art museum in the state of Minas Gerais, north of São Paulo, will inaugurate a permanent pavilion dedicated to her work on the Yanomami. I am currently organizing an exhibition, opening at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro in 2015, focused on Claudia’s career, which includes her years in photojournalism and her experiments with color and infrared film.

Claudia Andujar, Rua Direita (Direita Street), São Paolo, ca. 1970
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Thyago Nogueira: How did someone who was born in Switzerland and grew up in Hungary end up living in São Paulo?

Claudia Andujar: It’s a long story. My mother was Swiss and my father was Hungarian. They lived in Transylvania, a place that was sometimes Romania and sometimes Hungary. For some reason—I should have asked why—she wanted me to be born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and so she went there for my birth.

We then came back to our city, which is called Oradea in Romanian (in Hungarian it’s called Nagyvárad). We lived there until World War II. In 1944, all the Jews were deported. My father was Jewish. He and his whole family were deported; they died in a concentration camp. I was living with my mother, who was divorced from my father. After he was deported, the Russians began closing in, so my mother decided to go to Switzerland. The rail trip took weeks because of all the broken bridges on the way. We also had to stop in Vienna, because my mother became ill. In the city, which was under German rule, my mother stayed at a hospital and I was interrogated daily. They wanted to know why we had fled. I had to hide the fact that my father was Jewish or they would have taken me. They never discovered my story. I stayed in Switzerland for two years, until one of my father’s brothers found out that I was there and asked me if I wanted to come to the United States. I went as a refugee to New York in 1947 to live with my aunt and uncle.

Nogueira: How was your time in New York? Why did you leave for Brazil?

Andujar: I didn’t really get along with my aunt and uncle. They accused my mother of leaving my father. It’s a complicated story …. I decided to rent a room and go to work. I worked at the United Nations and I painted. At night I studied at the university. After a while I felt abandoned and married a Spanish refugee; that’s why I have the name Andujar. But he became a soldier in the Army and had to go to Korea. I was really unhappy. At that time my mother was living in Brazil, where she had gone to marry a Romanian who ran away from the Russian occupation. After two years, my husband returned from Korea and we separated. I then decided to visit my mother. That’s how I came to Brazil, in 1955.

Claudia Andujar, Sem titulo—Sonhos Yanomami (Untitled–Yanomami Dreams), 1974
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: When did you take up photography?

Andujar: I abandoned my painting career when I arrived in Brazil. But I needed a language to communicate—for me, this was photographing people I met. I wanted to get to know Brazil because I felt at home there. So I picked up a camera, and when I could, I photographed. I’m self-taught. I would go to the north coast of São Paulo a lot, and I began to travel to the islands of the fishermen and became friends with the families. What interested me were the origins of Brazil, the native population. I wasn’t interested in the middle or upper classes.

Nogueira: Did you ever feel unsafe as a European woman traveling alone?

Andujar: No, traveling was easy. In the crowd I was mixing with, this wasn’t a problem at all. I was adopted by the families of these people. I think that the connection through photography, showing the work to the people I was photographing, helped me identify with people and learn Portuguese. At that time, I met the famous anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, and he suggested that I go visit an indigenous village. I embraced the suggestion and went to meet the Karajá Indians. Later, I tried to show my work to the Brazilian magazines O Cruzeiro and Manchete. But they weren’t interested.

Claudia Andujar, Sem titulo—Sonhos Yanomami (Untitled–Yanomami Dreams), 1974
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: Why?

Andujar: I was a foreigner, a woman who was messing with things she shouldn’t. I stayed with the Karajá twice, two months each time. Then I decided to go back to the States to show my photography and was well-received. I went to Life magazine, to the museums. I had tried in Brazil, but nothing had panned out. In New York, I knew the world of photography. But I didn’t want to stay in the States; I wanted to go back to Brazil.

Nogueira: When you came back, you worked for the magazine Realidade (1966–1976), which was critical to the history of Brazilian photojournalism. the majority of their photographers were immigrants like you. What was it like there?

Andujar: The story of Realidade is special. The magazine’s journalists were against the military government that took power in 1964; they looked for stories that spoke of the difficulties in Brazil. I did well there because the places I went were always places with people who were in some way oppressed by the political situation.

Cover and inside views of Realidade magazine, featuring Andujar’s photographs

Nogueira: You photographed stories on the erotic theaters in downtown São Paulo, childbirths, prostitutes in the countryside. What moved you?

Andujar: I was the person the magazine could always send to shoot in difficult places. I always sought out people on the margins. I wanted to get into people’s souls. Later I got interested in the spiritualist medium Chico Xavier. There are things that to this day I don’t understand. I would almost say that he had a connection with shamanism. But it isn’t shamanism. He had a very strong spiritual life. The way he managed to do certain things—I can’t explain it. Once I photographed someone being cured of cataracts. He hypnotized the person, gained some power over her, and stuck a knife into her eye. A knife! A regular knife, to cure her. And he cured her, but I don’t know how this person kept quiet, leaning against the wall, and letting him do that. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Nogueira: You were also exploring the city.

Andujar: Yes, my photos of Direita Street and those made with infrared film are from that time, but those weren’t for Realidade. I did those for myself. Before Realidade, I didn’t photograph in color.

Nogueira: You squatted on the ground to make the Direita Street photos. Did people find that strange?

Andujar: Well, they didn’t find it very common; they thought it was a little curious, but nobody messed with me. They got a kick out of my attitude, that’s for sure.

Claudia Andujar, Untitled from Kayapó series, 1970
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: Your 1970s work has a visual freedom that’s rare for someone who worked for the press—the infrared film, the dislocated point of view, or even when you rephotographed slides, like in the photos of Sônia. Where did that experimentation come from?

Andujar: I would say that it was my contact with George Love, my second husband. He was interested in new angles, new ways of photographing. But even with these new techniques, I still maintained a humanist vision, don’t you think?

Nogueira: You once took a model and magazine crew to do a fashion shoot in an indigenous village. How did that come about?

Andujar: In the 1970s there was a fashion magazine called Setenta, for which I did various jobs. I suggested a fashion piece with the Xicrin Indians, which Setenta published.

Nogueira: You were criticized severely for this piece, weren’t you?

Andujar: I was—an anthropologist said I had gone to the Xicrin to show that they were inferior. For me it was nothing like that. I wanted to show that the Xicrin had their own style, their own inventiveness, that they were creative. But everyone has their own interpretation.

Claudia Andujar, Urihi-a, 1974

Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: In 1971, Realidade did a special edition on the Amazon. Why were they interested in the region?

Andujar: The Trans-Amazonian Highway was being built; an American had bought all this land there. When I went to photograph, there was so much deforestation going on. It was a disaster, but the Brazilian government allowed it to happen. They said that the Amazon was an empty space that had to be developed. The magazine was interested in showing what the Amazon was like at that time.

Nogueira: Was it then that you made your first contact with the Yanomami?

Andujar: Yes. When I went to photograph in the Amazon, they asked me not to photograph the indigenous people because the Brazilian government was mistreating them. It was a type of government repression. But after I had been there for some time, I found out that a priest had died suddenly, and nobody knew how. I asked the magazine if they would be interested in this story. They said yes. So I went to the Yanomami. I never found out why the priest died, but I photographed the Yanomami. I liked them a lot, and in the end the magazine published many pages and put one Yanomami on the cover. The Yanomami hadn’t received any Western influences yet; they were first-contact people. The magazine accepted the story … and we all forgot about the priest.

Nogueira: Realidade had a short life span, did it not?

Andujar: After the special edition on the Amazon, they started letting people go. The whole office was fired for political reasons, because all of us were leftists. I decided to leave and no longer work in photojournalism. I decided to go deeper into the question of the Yanomami.

Claudia Andujar, Metrópole (Metropolis), 1974
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: So you went on to photograph them regularly, as an ongoing project?

Andujar: I tried to penetrate the Yanomami culture. I wanted to understand their beliefs, social practices, shamanism. I began this work in 1971. Later, in 1974, the government began the construction of the Northern Perimeter Highway, the second longest roadway in the Amazon. I was there when it began. And it changed me profoundly. I saw hundreds and hundreds of people dying. These people had no immunity to the diseases that were suddenly brought there. And, because of that, I decided to dedicate my life to their lives and culture.

I tried to show the shamanism, which is essential to their culture. And I explored the contact and the harm this brought to these people, which was sickness and death. I used color a lot, and double exposures. I thought that I had found a kind of visual expression that referred to the culture.

Nogueira: Therein lies the beauty of the work. You are always experimenting with visual language to deal with cultural questions.

Andujar: That’s right.

Claudia Andujar, Exercises with Sônia, early 1970s
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: What was your routine in the village like? Did you take special precautions?          

Andujar: In the beginning, they didn’t know what photography was. When they first saw it, they didn’t recognize themselves. With time I believe they will refer to the images I took of them as a reference to their past, their cultural heritage. But I think that to this day, it still isn’t totally clear to them. I never photographed anything they didn’t want me to. The death rituals, for example. They thought that through photography something of the person was stolen. In their funeral rites, they destroyed and burned everything that linked the person to his life, to free his soul so he could live for eternity. That included burning the photographs.

Nogueira: You received many grants to continue the work, including two from the Guggenheim, but in 1977, together with foreign anthropologists and researchers, you were taken by force from Yanomami lands. What happened there?

Andujar: I was ousted by the Brazilian government. They didn’t understand what I was doing there. They thought I was trying to show how the government was mistreating the Indians. That I did this to show to people abroad, that I was some sort of spy.

Claudia Andujar, View of São Paulo, 1974
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Nogueira: You’ve said you are not convinced your work in photography has been the most important thing you’ve done to date. What do you mean?

Andujar: Photography is an eternal search for myself—a language. But the work of trying to understand the life and the culture of a people is much more than photography. Photography is part of that, but not everything. One day we asked the Indians what art was for them. And they said we make our categories, and one of them is art, but for them it is not the same. Photography has brought me many things, but the survival of the world, of humanity, is something we struggle for constantly.

Nogueira: Do you see a parallel between your story and that of the Yanomami?

Andujar: Yes, I do, of course. I lost my whole family and I always think my relatives were marked to die. I’ve learned so much from the Yanomami. We are destroying nature, destroying life. The Indians consider themselves part of this totality of nature, the human being as part of the whole. If you destroy any part of the whole, you destroy the world. That’s why I did the photo of the end of the world in the series Sonhos Yanomami (Yanomami Dreams).

Thyago Nogueira is editor of Revista ZUM, a Brazilian photography magazine, and the head of the contemporary photography department at Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo.

This piece was originally published in Aperture, issue 215, Summer 2014.

In Harry Gruyaert’s Radical Street Photography, Color is the Defining Element

No matter where he turns his eye, the Belgian photographer constantly explores of the potential of color in a seemingly colorless urban world.

By Wilco Versteeg

Harry Gruyaert, Rue Royale, Brussels, Belgium, 1981, from Roots (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012/2018)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Harry Gruyaert’s intuitive and candid color work was not always understood in a world that looked skeptically at anything smacking of “street photography” and equated black-and-white photography with serious artistry well into the 1980s. His work is under renewed consideration as one of Europe’s most important photographers. This retrospective moment in his career sees the reissue of Roots (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012 and 2018), a large exhibition at Fotomuseum Antwerp, and the publication of several other volumes of his work. Among them is East/West (Éditions Textuel, 2017), featuring his photographs from the United States and the Soviet Union, and his fifth book to date with the publisher. No matter where he turns his eye, his work attests to a constant exploration of the potentialities of color in seemingly colorless urban environments.

Harry Gruyaert, In the first class carriage, between the towns of Ostende and Brussels, Belgium, 1975, from Roots (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012/2018)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Roots offers a large selection of black-and-white photographs alongside Gruyaert’s groundbreaking work in color portraying life in Belgium, his country of origin, in the 1970s and 1980s. Gruyaert has asserted that it wasn’t until he had shot color during his circumnavigations around the globe, that he became able to see the hues of Belgium for the first time. Viewing the earlier works in the book, one cannot help but feel a crucial element is missing that would take those earlier images beyond traditional documentary: color. In Gruyaert’s best images, such as a photo radically cut in half by a brightly colored lamppost, color becomes the structuring element. The same shot in black and white would merely have been a failed composition; this colorful rupture is instead artistic as much as it is psychological. To the untrained eye, Belgian public life can seem hopeless and dilapidated, best captured in black and white. But its Felliniesque Catholicism, local bars, carnivals, cycling races (and propensity to enjoy a drink or two) are well-matched with Gruyaert’s color treatment. The absurdity and true grit of a country that is fragmented along political, cultural, and linguistic fault lines is best portrayed in high-key color—a medium that Gruyaert helped come of age just as much as the acknowledged American heroes of the so-called New Color of the 1970s. His is an active, relentless exploration of color—one that allows Gruyaert to create a new hierarchy based on chromatic tones rather than a supposed politics of representation. Gruyaert, although intimately connected with Belgium, fortunately eschews anthropological pretensions. Mirroring surfaces and windows are abundant: the man and woman sitting in a café, or the prostitute whose leg is visible through a window in the multicolored facade of an Antwerp brothel, attest to Gruyaert’s self-chosen distance, while nonetheless situating the photographer as observer and frame-giver—the quintessential flâneur. Rather than explicating large political or societal issues through his work, he prefers to speak about the contradictions of reality through the quality of light, color, and contrasts.

Harry Gruyaert, “Place de la Bourse” square, Coffee, Brussels, Belgium, 1981, from Roots (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2012/2018)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Looking through Harry Gruyaert’s lens at Belgium, a country I deeply love and whose language is also my mother tongue, I experience what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “alienated majesty”: I recognize it—but it is made strange, if deeply compelling. Belgium’s neighboring countries used to smirk about its rise of right-wing politics, gang violence, and political murder, thinking them remnants of a history that had already disappeared in other European countries. Today we see that Belgium never was an anomaly in the upward progress toward the End of History, but rather an example of where Europe is collectively headed.

Harry Gruyaert, Moscow, Russia, 1989, from East/West (Éditions Textuel, 2017)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

In Roots, Gruyaert brings his Belgium to the world; in East/West, his inalienable vision is brought to Moscow and in the United States, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. In the 1980s, as the U.S. seemed to be ascendant and the USSR in decline, their visual cultures might have seemed to be miles apart. Thanks to Gruyaert’s astute intervention, we are invited to consider the dialogue between them. His work from Moscow in 1989 is especially important. Seeing Moscow in cinema-like color is an aesthetic revelation: a distinct Soviet visual culture, lacking the smoothness and commercialism of the United States, is shown in a humane light that seems to contest our perceived ideas on the grayness of the region with pops of brilliant color. Take, for instance, the photograph showing decorated scaffolding contrasting with the dark figures of two Soviet officials, or the collection of images showing vibrant public playgrounds.

Harry Gruyaert, Freemont Street, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1982, from East/West (Éditions Textuel, 2017)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

His photographs from Las Vegas and LA show a world that is awe-inspiring and spectacular but that seems to have lost its need for humans. (The cars appear to inhabit the landscape more vibrantly than the people). For a photographer searching for the marvels of color, places that naturally look better in black and white turn out to be more interesting: the West Coast is brilliantly pigmented; it does not need Gruyaert to discover its own nature. While the images from the United States sparkle, it seems that Gruyaert is tempted and challenged more effectively by the Soviet Union and Belgium.

Harry Gruyaert, 1st of May celebrations, Moscow, Russia, 1989, from East/West (Éditions Textuel, 2017)
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

Looking at Roots and East/West side by side, we get a clear view of the singular vision of a true auteur. Whether Gruyaert roams the streets of Antwerp, Las Vegas, Moscow, or Paris, it is not the need to document that drives him, but his appetite for interpretation. He directs us toward the unsung joys and tragedies of realities that upon first observation seem barren and empty, but in fact are structured through colored planes and details. It takes a hungry eye to artistically reinvest in these places and reestablish their contorted majesty.

Wilco Versteeg is a writer, photographer, and PhD candidate in contemporary war photography at Université Paris Diderot.

This piece was originally published in The PhotoBook Review 014, spring 2018.

Picturing Utopia, From Shakers to Hippie Communes

A visual record of American longing and discontent.

By Chris Jennings

Justine Kurland, Waterfall Lesson, Drawing a Stick Figure, 2007
Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

And I John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her bridegroom. —Revelation 21:2

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden. —Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”

Utopia is invisible. Only the utopian can see it. Take, for instance, Nathan Meeker. In 1844, soon after graduating from Oberlin, Meeker joined the Trumbull Phalanx, a community of two hundred fifty men and women in the wilds of eastern Ohio that was modeled on the ideas of the French visionary Charles Fourier. Fourier believed that if women were emancipated, labor was organized according to his elaborate specifications, and everyone gathered into cooperative communities of precisely 1,620 (called phalanxes), then the world would be briskly transformed into a paradise he called Harmony. In Harmony, he prophesied, every human impulse, even the most taboo sexual predilection, would be satisfied and rendered productive; abundance would prevail; friendly whales would tow our ships; and the oceans, tinctured by “boreal fluid” from the melting Arctic icecap, would taste like lemonade. Fourier’s ideas—pasteurized of their erotic digressions by his American translators—became so popular in the United States that twenty-nine American phalanxes were established during the 1840s and ’50s. New Jersey’s North American Phalanx, the ruins of which are pictured here, lasted the longest, from 1843 to 1855.

Charles François Daubigny, View of a French Phalanstery (lithograph), 1800s
Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library

One spring afternoon at the Trumbull Phalanx, young Meeker sat down with his notebook and took stock of his new home:

Seating myself in the venerable orchard, with the temporary dwellings on the opposite side, the joiners at their benches in their open shops under the green boughs, and hearing on every side the sound of industry, the roll of wheels in the mills, and merry voices, I could not help exclaiming mentally: Indeed my eyes see men making haste to free the slave of all names, nations and tongues, and my ears hear them driving, thick and fast, nails into the coffin of despotism. I can but look on the establishment of this phalanx as a step of as much importance as any which secured our political independence; and much greater than that which gained the Magna Carta, the foundation of English liberty.

Looking upon the most mundane tableau of rural life, Meeker saw the transformation of the world. If he had been carrying a camera rather than a pen, the picture he would have taken would be indistinguishable from one taken in any other American village: a dusty orchard, a gristmill, men and women hard at work. The gulf separating what the believer sees and what a camera can record haunts every photograph of utopian living. Some images deliberately try to bridge this gulf by approximating on film what the utopian sees. An image of the theosophist community at Point Loma—shot from below and at a distance like the dream of a shining hilltop city—is a perfect example. Other photographs make the gulf itself their subject.

North American Phalanx, Country Route 537, Monmouth County, New Jersey (photographer unknown)
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Utopia, as its most ardent citizens see it, may be camera-shy, but images have always been the lifeblood of utopianism. In the past those images have usually existed in the form of fiction, that meters-long shelf of novels describing life in the perfect society. These books typically recount the adventures of a wide-eyed, sunburnt explorer as he stumbles upon a delightful yet unknown nation. As he drifts about, chatting up the locals and taking in the sights (often falling for some winsome utopian lass), the explorer narrates in detail what life in utopia looks like. How do the utopians get to work? What color are their costumes? Are their streets clean? If the novel is any good, the shape and texture of life in utopia slowly forms in the reader’s imagination. The whole point of writing a utopian novel—instead of, say, a political tract on the virtues of universal education and collectivized agriculture—is that fiction can render ideas visible, allowing us to evaluate the author’s particular notion of the ideal society by the most intimate criterion: can I picture myself living there?

Rachel Barret, Zoe, 2009
Courtesy the artist

There are as many utopias as there are utopians, but two general visions of paradise tend to dominate the communitarian mind. These two visions are probably as old as human imagination, but their most influential formulations, at least in the West, come from scripture, where they form the bookends of biblical history. In the beginning, it is written, God planted a garden eastward in Eden. And with it was planted the half-remembered dream of a bountiful, property-free existence in the venerable orchards of Paradise, a life uncorrupted by capitalism, technology, or pants.

History, as the Bible tells it, might begin in a garden, but it ends in a metropolis: the gleaming, prefab city of New Jerusalem that God will lower down to earth at the time of the millennium (the thousand-year reign of heaven on earth). For those utopians who do not take the Book of Revelation literally, the prophecy of New Jerusalem has been swapped for (or merged with) the Enlightenment’s promise of ceaseless human progress, the belief that science and reason will someday usher humanity into an orderly, air-conditioned paradise of comfort and fraternity.

Photographer unknown, Raja Yoga Academy and Aryan Memorial Temple at the International Theosophical Headquarters, Point Loma, California, 1919

Over the last few centuries no place on the globe has been more crowded with utopian longing than North America. Since its “discovery” by Europeans, “the fresh, green breast of the New World,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald described it, has stirred dreams of abandoning the crumbling edifice of the Old World to build the perfect society from scratch. At the outset most of this thinking was theological. Many early visitors to the New World (including Captain Columbus himself) believed that they had arrived at, or at least near, the “historical” location of Eden. Many others, including the Shakers and Oneida Perfectionists (whose communal home is pictured here) believed that the young American republic would be ground zero for a new dispensation of social perfection. They believed that this was where the millennium was slated to commence (or had already commenced) and that it was up to them to begin building the perfect society, their own New Jerusalem.

A group of Oneida Community Perfectionists posed in front of their communal home, the Mansion House, ca. 1875
Courtesy Oneida Community Mansion House

The first major wave of communal utopianism in the United States peaked just before the widespread availability of pho-tography (roughly 1820–50, with a lull in the 1830s). During this era, utopians such as the textile magnate Robert Owen and the apostles of Fourier broadcast their visions of a secular, cooperative New Jerusalem using paintings and lithographs. These technical-looking images of the ideal city were printed in utopian newsletters and Whig broadsheets like the New York Tribune and hung on the walls of “associationist” clubs and workingmen’s halls. Owen, who came to the United States from Scotland in 1824 to found Indiana’s New Harmony community, was the canniest of the utopian propagandists. He commissioned a British architect to build an elaborate, six-foot-square model of the “parallelogram” that he intended to build on the Western frontier. Owen’s parallelogram, like Fourier’s “phalanstery,” was essentially an entire city contained in a single building, a sprawling, high-tech palace for the people. John Quincy Adams was so captivated by Owen’s model that he displayed it in the White House during the winter of 1825.

Dennis Stock, Drop City Artists’ Commune, Colorado, 1969
Courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos

These pre-photographic images, projected straight from the imagination onto the page, helped inspire thousands of Americans to pursue the dream of building a New World utopia. The immense scale of the structures dreamed up by Owen and Fourier mirrored the grandiosity of their aspirations. As Meeker’s letter makes plain, the utopians of the mid-nineteenth century aimed for nothing less than a peaceful, worldwide revolution. Their logic was simple: if they could build one working model of the perfect society—a society founded on cooperation rather than competition—its shining example would inspire rapid and endless duplication, or, as one Fourierist optimistically put it, “thousands of analogous organizations will rapidly arise without obstacle and as if by enchantment around the first specimens.” This was how they planned to trigger a secular millennium. “The only practical difficulty,” Owen wrote with typical breeziness, “will be to restrain men from rushing too precipitously” into the new utopia.

A century later communitarian fever once again swept the United States. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, after the scene went sour in the East Village and the Haight, longhaired youths flocked to the remote counties of New York, California, Colorado, and New Mexico to build their own small utopias. Although they tried and often succeeded to build strongholds of consciousness and fraternity amidst the competitive bustle of American life, they rarely spoke, as their utopian forebears had, of global transformation. The dream of an American New Jerusalem was, for the most part, replaced by the search for a new Eden, a paradise walled-off from the fallen world.

Lucas Foglia, Victoria Bringing in the Goats, Tennessee, 2008
Courtesy the artist

The buildings tell the story. The “unitary dwellings” of the nineteenth-century utopians—the fanatically symmetrical Shaker dormitories, the ornate Oneida “Mansion House,” and Fourier’s (unrealized) Versailles-like phalanstery—were replaced, in the 1960s and ‘70s, by Drop City’s improvised Fuller Domes (called zomes), the scattered teepees of the New Buffalo Commune, and the assorted yurts, lean-tos, and chicken coops of countless backwoods communes. Like the nineteenth-century utopians, the hippie communards built homes intended to expand the meaning of the word “family,” but their ambitions were more modest, more spontaneous, and more realistic. They did not attempt to supplant the dominant institutions of America or “free the slave of all names.” They simply aspired to take leave of what they regarded as a repressed, faltering culture. (The lysergic cheerleaders at the vanguard of the psychedelic revolution are an interesting exception. Their rhetoric of instantaneous global awakening occasionally echoed the high-flown prophecies of utopians like Owen and Fourier.) Even those communes that were expressly organized around political activism did not regard cooperative living as the chief lever of social change. For them, communalism was a means—an inexpensive place to crash between marches—not an end.

On its face utopianism is a way of thinking about the future, of picturing, in H. G. Wells’s elegant phrase, “the shape of things to come.” For this reason, photographs of old utopias may seem quaint in the way that all antique visions of the future can. And yet, building or imagining a utopia is not only a way of thinking about the future, it is also a way to organize our grievances with the here and now, to nail our complaints to the wall. Nobody tries to build a new society if they like the one they live in. Seen in this light, the utopian experiments of the past offer up a surprisingly accurate psychological history, a chronicle of each era’s most acute frustrations. While these images may not reveal utopia as it was seen by fervid dreamers like Nathan Meeker, they present us with something just as valuable: a visual record of American longing and American discontent.

This piece was originally published in Aperture, issue 209, Winter 2012.

Dreamlike Photographs of Life Among the Trees

Clare Richardson and David Spero document communities embedded in nature—and search for the promised land.

By Jason Oddy

Clare Richardson, from the series Harlemville, 2000
Courtesy the artist

From its inception, photography has been a bearer of conscience. Long before the traditions of reportage or “concerned” photography emerged, the medium’s capacity to produce an afterimage of reality meant that the past could persist into the present. Instantly invoking nostalgia, these fragments of the has-been reproach the complacency of the here and now. As early beholders of daguerreotypes intuited, there is an uncanny relation of past to present through photography. Photographer Karl Dauthendey commented: “We didn’t trust ourselves at first to look at the first pictures he [Daguerre] developed. We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyone affected by the unaccustomed clarity and the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotypes.”

Yet if a century and a half on we have outgrown (or at least suppressed) that instinctive reaction, photographs still remind us of the contingency of our present. Forwarded across space and time, these emanations create a ripple in our consciousness. And since in front of the intractable stillness of a photograph it is we who undergo change, it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that photographs behold us, at least to the same degree that we behold them.

Clare Richardson, from the series Harlemville, 2000
Courtesy the artist

Over the years, photographers have harnessed this principle of mutual regard in various ways. The genres of photojournalism and socially engaged photography customarily depict a fractured world in order to prod the viewer’s conscience. But this is not the only way the medium can steer our emotional and moral outlook in new directions. Recently, as disenchantment with contemporary ways of living and anxieties about impending environmental catastrophes continue to grow, a handful of photographers have discovered a new brand of romanticism, turning their attention–and by extension ours–to various arcadias, in particular those that would lead us back toward a promised land.

For her series “Harlemville” (2000), the young British photographer Clare Richardson spent several months over a period of two years with a Rudolf Steiner community in upstate New York. Founded by refugees from late twentieth-century capitalism, Harlemville is a town where every attempt is made to live in harmony with nature. As part of the Steiner educational philosophy, children are sent into the woods in order to experience and understand the continuum that must exist between the environment and the self. Their immersion in the natural world is the focus of Richardson’s series.

Clare Richardson, from the series Harlemville, 2000
Courtesy the artist

Unlike many other recent bodies of work that have taken adolescence as their theme, these photographs portray this purportedly troubled period of life as a time of wonder, growth, and serenity. Richardson ‘s approach is observational, as though her subjects are unaware of her presence. She manages to achieve an intimacy with her subjects that surpasses simple candor. Looking at the images of Harlemville, the viewer is linked in a chain of empathy that seems to invite us to become part of the picture.

In one photograph, a group of boys stand in a river, bathed in Edenic sunshine. Their fishing spears are at the ready, their faces a picture of concentration. In another image, we see a boy in the water by a riverbank, his eyes closed and head framed by the roots of a tree. He seems almost to be dreaming nature into existence. In these, as in many of the other images, the audience is privy to more than just the secret world of childhood: Richardson’s sensibility allows us to enter into the youths’ rapt absorption and apparent oneness with their surroundings.

Laughter features little in “Harlemville,” but if the pictures are full of seriousness it is because they are above all works of feeling. Joel Sternfeld’s recently published project Sweet Earth looks at various instances of utopian communities in America with an ironic, distancing eye; Richardson, by contrast, is not in the least bit interested either in setting things into a historical perspective or in creating a conceptual framework for her work. Rather, her photographs are charged with the same idealistic sentiments that they describe.

David Spero, Mary and Joe’s, Tinker’s Bubble, Somerset, June 2004
Courtesy the artist

At the heart of “Harlemville” lies the notion of sustainability, not just in today’s common ecological understanding of the term, but in a deeper holistic way as well. This is a body of work that, in both content and form, would offer us moral and emotional sustenance. It provides a glimpse into a different way of life, one that exhorts us to pay humble attention to nature instead of being locked into a system that constantly obliges us to conquer and destroy it––and thus ultimately ourselves, too.

Many of the same ideas underlie “Settlements,” a project by British photographer David Spem, who has spent nearly three years taking pictures of environmentally “low-impact” communities in the forests of England and Wales. Although shot in an objective, almost Becheresque manner, Spero’s photographs are as much an expression of sentiment as is “Harlemville.” As its name implies, “Settlements” is a document of the dwellings that comprise these outposts of idealism. Their inhabitants hardly feature: the photographer feels that it is the structures themselves that best portray the back-to-the-land ideology that led to their creation.

David Spero, Cheryl’s, Steward Community Woodland, November 2004
Courtesy the artist

Looking at pictures such as Emma and John’s, Tir Ysbrydol (Spiritual Land), Brithdir Mawr, Pembrokeshire (2004), you can only wonder at how this human habitation with its turf roof and mud walls melds so perfectly with its surroundings. In another picture, The Longhouse, Steward Community Woodland, Devon (2004), we see how that building has almost disappeared into the adjacent trees. This seeming harmony between the natural and the man-made is one of the central themes that Spero tackles in this body of work. “I was particularly interested in the lightness of these structures and in how the world you build around you affects your relationship to the environment,” he explains. “It’s quite amazing how close to the environment these people actually are.”

Spero’s frontal approach and preference for flat, undramatic lighting lend his pictures a decidedly factual air. Yet even the everyday clutter––dirty dishes or log piles or pots heaped up beside the homes––does not disturb the apparent deeper unity depicted here. Instead, these mundane details seem to belong in the landscape, as though they are necessary preconditions for a realizable arcadia.

David Spero, Tony and June’s, Brithdir Mawr, Pembrokeshire, July 2005
Courtesy the artist

While such a tack is somewhat grittier than Richardson’s visual reveries, both “Settlements” and “Harlemville” envision a mythic wholeness that opposes what many of us understand to be humanity’s current fractured condition.The search for a lost Eden, or for a promised land, is as old as civilization. Here it is updated using the magic of photography, whose close contact with reality tends to brand the myths it depicts with the stamp of veracity. When treated in other media–in painting, say–the theme of arcadia is likely to remain an idle if agreeable daydream. When represented in photographs, it becomes a vision of something possible. And so, however partial and to varying degrees romantic Richardson’s and Spero’s portrayals of their rustic idylls may be, they contain an incontrovertible dimension of actuality that seems to indicate that they are something more than just useful fictions.

Traditionally, photographs have either berated or tantalized us with the unalterable, unrepeatable past. By picturing communities that have broken step with the mainstream march toward global doom, these two British artists have instead chosen to put potential futures on view, to similar effect. The numbers of people involved in Harlemville and in the forest communes of Britain may be few, and their attempts to establish tangible ecotopias may be fraught with problems. But the fact that these places exist at all is of no small symbolic importance. For like every utopia, they refute the inevitability of history. As we look around for models to keep us going now, and into the uncertain future, we could do worse than to follow the gaze of photographers such as Richardson and Spero. Their focus on the realized fantasies that these experimental communities represent might just prick us into turning away from our engineered existences, to seek a new life among the trees.

This piece was originally published in Aperture, issue 186, Spring 2007. 

A Photographer’s Intimate Portraits of East Village Art Stars

In the early 1980s, Tim Greathouse photographed David Wojnarowicz, Greer Lankton, and Jimmy DeSana—and captured New York’s downtown scene before the destruction of AIDS.

By Jesse Dorris

Tim Greathouse, Self-Portrait, 1983
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

At most parties, the really good stuff happens in the bathroom. And so it was at a gathering in a tenement on East 9th Street in New York’s East Village one evening in March 1982. Gracie Mansion, a downtown fixture who had appropriated the mayor’s residence for her name, made a gallery out of her water closet, called it the Loo Division, and filled it with prints by her friend, photographer and artist Tim Greathouse. Everybody seemed to visit, including Melik Kaylan, who reviewed the show for the Village Voice and thereby anointed the gallery. It must have felt like any number of futures were beginning.

Tim Greathouse, Gracie Mansion, Gallerist, 1983
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Sixteen years later, Greathouse would be dead of AIDS, along with countless others who had seen their world reflected in the photos on Gracie’s walls—in Work Prints (1982) and, later, another show in the Gracie’s permanent space on St. Mark’s. Or who had seen early work from Jimmy DeSana and Zoe Leonard at Greathouse’s own gallery, Oggi Domani, the first in the East Village devoted entirely to photography. Or who had taken in the visual identity Greathouse as a designer developed for Marlborough Gallery and other clients. Those who survived the plague, however, wouldn’t see much more of Greathouse’s own work. He tended to champion other artists over himself, and when he died at the age of forty-eight without a proper estate, his high-contrast black-and-white portraits and graphic works on paper (and the odd sculpture) were returned to the apartments of his devoted friends, unremembered by the downtown art world Greathouse intensely, if only briefly, did so much to encourage.

Tim Greathouse, Jimmy DeSana, Artist, 1983
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Until now. Albeit, currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, offers a new view of Greathouse that centers his own electric body of work. Gathered with crucial assistance by Mansion and Greathouse’s longtime friend and roommate Sur Rodney (Sur), Albeit includes a few fine late paintings which now look like relics of activism, in which stenciled letters hector “AIDS” à la Gran Fury’s bittersweet swipe of Robert Indiana; or the lyrics to “We Shall Overcome” breaking apart like a Christopher Wool, fighting to be seen in fields of jaundiced yellow, or perhaps submerged under blood-red blurred boxes. “Ecce Homo,” says a dark piece from 1988, and it’s tough not to see faces of the dead in the blank spaces around the command.

Tim Greathouse, Sur Rodney Sur, Archivist, Gallerist, Gracie Mansion Gallery, 1983
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Indeed, faces form the heart of this show, vibrating so strongly in Greathouse’s gelatin-silver prints that the photographs almost become holograms. Two barely contain Sur Rodney (Sur); both taken at Gracie Mansion Gallery in 1983, they show him either boldly wearing big sunglasses and carrying a paper umbrella, or just staring down the lens at the center of it all. “It never felt like I was posing,” Sur told me recently. “We were living in the midst of drug trade and guns on Avenue C.” Greathouse had moved into a storefront his friend Larry Loffredo rented, but because it was a commercial space, he had to open a business. “So why not a photo gallery? He could live illegally in the back, something easy for him because all his belongings could fit into a file drawer,” Sur says. “He was a minimalist monk.”

Tim Greathouse, Rhonda Zwillinger, Artist, 1983
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

A monk with a keen eye for cropping: Greathouse’s portrait of Larry Loffrado is equal parts chest and head, with a stiff shadow parallel to his jawline. The image is coolly formal, like the bust on a coin you’d spend on a dime bag. In one portrait, artist Rhonda Zwillinger emerges from the shadows like a Hollywood star getting her first break; in another, she goes full Farrah Fawcett, in a black swimsuit so dark it creates one triangle for her chest and another for her arm—akimbo, as if the glamor of her body were a mathematical fact.

Tim Greathouse, David Wojnarowicz, Artist, ca. 1983
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Gracie Mansion herself shows up in two photographs, taken at her show of Stephen Lack’s paintings, either peeking from behind her chic fringe of hair or topless and charismatically flexing her bicep. “Tim was my best friend,” she told me. “So it felt like a collaboration.” Lack himself shows up in another work, eyes ablaze and hands holding his head as buildings twist behind him. In a pair of landscapes of the infamous gay Valhalla, Pier 47, buildings collapse as if felled by the force of a vibrant Keith Haring piece poking through a corner, or another by David Wojnarowicz—who glares at the viewer in perhaps the show’s most astonishing photograph, sitting in a T-shirt in two-thirds of the frame and taking up the viewer’s entire field of vision.

Tim Greathouse, Greer Lankton, Artist, 1984
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

A couple of self-portraits capture Greathouse’s evident charm, whether serving the “clone” look—white tank top, mustache, stern bedroom eyes—in a 1978 shot or hovering in a blur of his own paintings a few years later. In 1983, he peeked through the hole of a wooden spoon and gave a little smile: I’ve never seen a photograph I’d more like to hug. Albeit, a first draft for a much-needed history of Greathouse and his warmhearted work, will hopefully nudge others who gathered in bathroom parties back then to go through their own file cabinets and see what else might remain.

Tim Greathouse, Self-Portrait, ca. 1980s
Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art

Jesse Dorris is a writer based in New York.

Tim Greathouse: Albeit is on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, through February 29, 2020.

Laia Abril: Research, Narratives, and Platforms

 

Join artist Laia Abril for a two-day workshop to learn the best strategies and practices to use when developing a long-term project. Abril, whose research-based work revolves around the conceptualization and interpretation of facts, will teach participants how to enhance the investigation and construction of a photographic narrative.

Trained as a journalist, and through her experience as a photographer, bookmaker, and art director, Abril has developed a collaborative creative method to construct, analyze, and refine narratives across a number of different platforms. Examples of her work methodology will encourage participants to think laterally about their own projects.

This workshop will also look at how a combination of different media—such as photography, design, text, film, and illustration—can transform an idea into a wider artistic project. Participants will think about how a body of work can take shape in various forms, whether as a photobook, editorial piece, or exhibition. Participants are encouraged to bring an existing body of work, book mock-up, or installation proposal that they would like to evolve beyond the scope of photography. Participants that have projects or ideas at an earlier stage will focus on developing a research plan for the work.

Laia Abril (born in Barcelona, 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, text, video, and sound. Abril focuses on photography that raises uneasy and hidden realities related to sexuality, eating disorders, and gender equality. Her projects are produced across various media, such as installations, books, web docs, and films. Her work has been shown widely and published internationally. She has published several monographs—the highly acclaimed The Epilogue (2014) was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook Award, Kassel Photobook Award, and PHotoE SPAÑA Best Photography Book of the Year Award. After completing her five-year project On Eating Disorders in 2015, Abril embarked on a new long-term project, A History of Misogyny. Its first chapter, “On Abortion,” was first exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2016, and was the first recipient of the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro. Her book On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access (2018) won the 2018 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award, and was a finalist in the 2019 Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. Abril is currently developing the next chapters. She lives and works in Barcelona.

 

div.important {
background-color: #eeeff3;
color: black;
margin: 20px 0 20px 0;
padding: 20px;
}

Objectives:

Build a set of goals that will help further advance your project(s)

Strategize how to build out your narrative project

Plan a photobook project for your students

Materials To Bring:

A body of work, either in progress or finished. You can bring the work as prints, digital files, in book form, as an exhibition proposal, etc.

Tuition:

Tuition for this workshop is $500 and includes lunch and light refreshments.

Currently enrolled students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above receive a 10% discount on workshop tuition. Please contact education@aperture.org for a discount code. Students will need to provide proper documentation of enrollment.

 

 

REGISTER HERE

 

 

Registration ends on Friday, March 20, 2020
Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements. Please contact us at education@aperture.org.

If participants choose to purchase Aperture publications during the workshop they will receive a 20% discount. Aperture Members of all levels will receive a 30% discount.

 

RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

        By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

REFUND AND CANCELLATION

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run this workshop.

 

LOST, STOLEN, OR DAMAGED EQUIPMENT, BOOKS, PRINTS, ETC.

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture or when in the presence of books, prints etc. belonging to other participants or the instructor(s). We recommend that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all such objects.

The post Laia Abril: Research, Narratives, and Platforms appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

In This Film Series, Queer Sex Is Front and Center

From Andy Warhol to Marlon Riggs, MoMA presents film as a radical expression of sexuality and activism.

By Jesse Dorris

My Hustler, 1965
Directed by Andy Warhol
Courtesy Photofest.

Near the end of Marlon Riggs’s incendiary 1989 video essay Tongues Untied, the poet Essex Hemphill trains his focus dead on the camera lens and delineates the difference AIDS has made: “Now we think as we fuck,” he says. “This nut might kill. This kiss could turn to stone.” In this moment, we see gay liberation metastasized into paranoid self-reflection. The might of the gay community becomes the might of its survival.

Riggs’s masterpiece originally aired on PBS’s POV series—much to the outrage of Pat Buchanan, who illegally lifted clips from it for an ad for his white supremacist 1992 presidential campaign. Ever since, Tongues Untied has left many people in awe. Among them is Carson Parish, the current theater manager at the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film, who used Hemphill’s words as the title for a film series that resurfaces an astonishing collection of the museum’s queer holdings. “Now We Think as We Fuck”: Queer Liberation to Activism moves from the early sexed-up fever dreams of Fred Halstead, through GMHC’s frisky, grief-stricken sex-ed videos at the start of the plague years; from Barbara Hammer’s charmingly new age 1975 Moon Goddess, to her almost unbearably beautiful investigation of the limits and aesthetics of hard science, 1990’s Sanctus; from the grit of 16 mm, to the “high art” legitimacy of 35 mm, to the democratization of the video camera.

I recently spoke with Parish about the line between art and porn, film defeatism, and why Hemphill’s words now sound less like an elegy and more like a siren.

Tongues Untied, 1989. Directed by Marlon Riggs
Courtesy Photofest.

Jesse Dorris: Let’s start at the beginning. Why this series now?

Carson Parish: A few years ago, the film department began an initiative offering people who weren’t curators the chance to work out programs. I reached out with an interest in queer history, and we began looking through what the collection had. Initially, highlights were some of the Fred Halstead films: L.A. Plays Itself (1972), The Sex Garage (1972), and Sextool (1975). They hadn’t been preserved, and desperately needed to be, so we brought them, and thanks to an amazing conservation collection specialist, Peter Williamson, we were able to get them preserved in time to show.

Dorris: How did MoMA come to have them?

Parish: I think it was Larry Kardish who initially formed the relationship with Fred. His work has been shown at MoMA, but it’s been many years. They were shown in the ’70s at least a few times, and there are people I know who were there in person and say the curators gave very long introductions to the audience, describing what they were about to see—particularly in regard to the fisting—to give them a chance to prepare themselves. (Those were very boisterous things to see at the museum in their day.) When his films were later released on home video and in theaters, Fred always made sure to note they were “now in the collection of MoMA.” He wanted that in there. And I think that fact really informed the vision of Sextool, which was designed to be a crossover between pornography and the art-house market. It wasn’t, sadly. It was a commercial failure, to say the least. But he shot it on 35 mm with the intent that it could be marketable to a larger audience than the 16 mm that porn houses used.

Sextool, 1975. Directed by Fred Halsted
Courtesy Curtis Taylor and MoMA Film Archives

Dorris: A commercial failure, but I mean, what an outrageous artistic success.

Parish: Halstead’s films are remarkably ambitious. The cinematography is astonishing—I want to say in terms of porn films, but really in terms of anything. If you watch the first minute or two of Sextool, it’s immediately evident that you’re watching something that is critical both of pornography and of the art market. And of itself. And of cinema in general! It begins from a point of complexity that I think most porn films never even consider. The sex is graphic, of course. But L.A. Plays Itself has this strange, dream-logic narrative that mirrors a Maya Deren assemblage. It’s so bizarre that someone would think to structure a porn film this way. These films really do test the limits of consciousness, and they remain unique works on their own. There haven’t been a lot of copycats or reiterations.

Dorris: Why not?

Parish: If you’re making films classified as gay porn, that’s a niche audience, and it’s certainly scary to a lot of people to make work that excludes a large swath of the population just by its very nature. Fred never seemed concerned about that. He didn’t like alienating people, but he enjoyed making them a little tense in their seats. He enjoyed the idea that you would be sitting through something that would challenge you.

Amphetamine, 1966. Directed by Warren Sonbert
Courtesy The Estate of Warren Sonbert

Dorris: Speaking of challenging, let’s talk about Amphetamine (1966).

Parish: Warren Sonbert has a long history with the museum, thanks in large part to Jon Gartenberg, who did a lot of work getting his films preserved so we have access to them today. Amphetamine is one of my favorites, because it’s so hyper-specific in time. You can feel in it the shades of Warhol. Lou Reed percolating in the background. It’s such a quick shot of lightning.

Dorris: And just so, well, queer.

Parish: Even forty years ago, many of the people in the film department were queer. It’s been willing to test the borders, or the limits, of acceptability to an extent I didn’t realize. I knew about the Warhols and, say, Avery Willard’s 1967 Leather Narcissus, but I hadn’t realized how much the department invested in activism. The tapes we show later in the series are so tremendously important to queer history of the ’80s and ’90s. Some of the things we unearthed were a complete surprise to me.

Thank God I’m a Lesbian, 1992. Directed by Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona
Courtesy of Women Make Movies

Dorris: Like what?

Parish: GMHC’s Chance of a Lifetime is the most stunning thing. It’s a very early safer-sex education tape, released in 1985. Early sequences are somewhat silly, very much like a screwball comedy. And then there’s a sequence shot in the Mineshaft, that notorious leather bar. And then toward the end, we get this incredibly touching sequence on Fire Island that really does bring me to tears.

Dorris: Oh god, me too. It erases the difference between laughing and crying.

Parish: Seven of the main people who worked on it passed away within a few years of making it. It’s a humbling experience to watch, and I feel a lot of that weight of loss. And yet the first section is so silly; it’s closer to John Waters or even Bringing Up Baby (1938), and then the middle so closely resembles porn, and then the third sequence appeals to people dealing with HIV and learning to deal with partners who are dying. You have these different levels—having just seen something silly and then something pornographic—built up inside you. And then you’re pulled up into this world of loss. I hadn’t expected a safer-sex education tape to well up such deep emotion inside me.

DiAna’s Hair Ego, 1989. Directed by Ellen Spiro
Courtesy the filmmaker

Dorris: It’s from 1985, that moment when it suddenly became much easier, technologically, to represent yourself—thanks to the relative accessibility of video—and increasingly culturally possible to represent yourself as queer. How do you see those moments intersecting?

Parish: The amazing thing is just how much the work transitions from gorgeously composed shots—even watching Halstead, it’s so clear many of his shots were carefully constructed—to literally throwing you on the front lines of protests. Even saying you’re on the front line doesn’t do it justice. You’re in the middle of it. Once you transition to video, where you can take the camera out with you, there’s a whole new world. If you look at Jean Carlomusto’s 1988 Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say No to Cosmo, or Ellen Spiro’s 1990 DiAna’s Hair Ego, you’re seeing things never shown before in any sort of authorized form. It’s not even like down-the-street newsreel footage. This is in the middle of it. It might seem familiar to us now, with the prevalence of social media and cell phones, but at the time it was truly revolutionary.

Dorris: And it’s thrilling that it’s being digitally preserved.

Parish: Well, none of us is a film defeatist. We believe the original medium is just as critical as making sure it’s digitized. The two go hand in hand. Throughout history, when you forget, there are terrible consequences. So many of the artists in the ’80s and early ’90s knew the importance of documentation and making sure these images live on.

Dorris: Because they were seeing how quickly it could all vanish.

Parish: Yes.

Dorris: You’re showing Hammer’s work in tandem with Su Friedrich—two works each, made over fifteen years, sort of at the height and endpoint for 16 mm. What do you think that format allowed them to do?

Parish: Film is a degenerative medium in a different sense than video, particularly digital video. Like with Sanctus (1990), the film has such a fleeting, ephemeral texture. The prints are in great shape, but they’re worn, and those scratches are deeply entrenched in the DNA of this film, which is about loss. It mirrors archival practice. It’s about caring for the people and things you love, and how difficult that can be. So 16 mm is a perfect example of visual representation of what the film is also describing. There’s so much in the decision to stick to 16 mm and to allow all the things that will happen to the print to happen, as opposed to trying to control everything over time.

First Comes Love, 1991. Directed by Su Friedrich
Courtesy the artist.

Dorris: Su Friedrich’s First Comes Love (1991) really blew my mind, a document from the marriage-equality movement made around the time Andrew Sullivan turned marriage into a conservative, assimilationist mechanism for taming.

Parish: What Su puts out is so radical. I just love the factuality of the film. It’s completely rooted in literal fact. It’s almost purely objective, which is why it makes such a clear and concise argument. In an overarching view of the world, there’s really been a miniscule amount of change in the thirty years since it came out. And that’s enraging to see, but the point of art is, again, to well up emotion. And then draw you into action.

Portrait of Jason, 1967. Directed by Shirley Clarke
Courtesy Milestone Films

Dorris: Speaking of being drawn into action, there’s Shirley Clarke. Why did you choose to open the series with her 1967 Portrait of Jason?

Parish: It’s obviously a film about representation. And it’s so part of the conversation right now to talk about representation. You have a white woman who’s making a film about a Black hustler in 1967, and over the course of the film, she begins to seep into it more and more. As more alcohol is consumed, these lines between filmmaker and subject blur in really dangerous, scary, and exciting ways. There are so many possibilities of directions for this film to go, and yet somehow it goes in ones you never dreamed it could. And you’re peeling your wrists off the seats by the end.

Dorris: It’s like Alfred Hitchcock, but without the sets, the cinematography. The filmmaking even, sort of. Or like the best scenario of the Warhol idea of just turning a camera on and whatever happens, that’s the film.

Parish: And that’s what’s so brilliant about Clarke as a filmmaker. She had the restraint not to put everything in there. It would have been easy to edit in other ways, but she understood so well the idea that whatever happened is more interesting than what could have happened.

The Watermelon Woman, 1996. Written and Directed by Cheryl Dunye
Courtesy Photofest

Dorris: The series concludes, chronologically, with Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 The Watermelon Woman, a great leap forward in terms of both representation and filmmaking. We still haven’t caught up with it. Why did you want to give her the last word?

Parish: If the series is divided into two halves, sexual liberation and then activism, The Watermelon Woman is an amalgamation of both. It’s tremendously sexy, and also critically about representation. It deals with such heavy subject matter as important and vital, and yet it lends such a broad appeal. I have to stop and remember it has fairly graphic sex scenes in it, because I think of it in some ways as a family film.

Dorris: Our chosen families, maybe.

Parish: By that I mean open and readily accepting of any audience that approaches it. I love the idea of closing with something that’s unifying across communities, to an extent. And which obviously had its own legal battle and horrible conservative smear campaign against it. But the film is so tremendously willing to disregard any sort of noise around it. It’s just speaking directly to you.

Parting Glances, 1986. Directed by Bill Sherwood
Courtesy First Run Features

Dorris: Which brings us to Essex Hemphill and his words as your title. To me, he always clarified this idea that suddenly gay men, unintentionally, shifted from lovers to killers. But also, kisses turning to stone like graves, like monuments.

Parish: In the first half of the series, artists are trying to break out and break free. In the second half, they’re trying to break in, into being seen as people and not violent perverse aggressors. To me, “Now we think as we fuck” reads: “Now we’re mobilized.” I think it’s a forward-speaking line. Vivian Kleiman of Signifyin’ Works really helped inform how I view the title and its role, and how meaningful those words were to Essex as well. They allow you to suddenly grasp these abstract concepts that have been percolating in your head for years and now are concrete in front of you. And also the gestures throughout the film, and the editing—it all forms something truly queer. It truly is a subversion of communication by way of something much more expressive.

Dorris: The editing in these films embodies queerness in how it embraces narratives but constantly interrupts them. It’s beguiling. And using those words for the title also keeps a little bit of filth front and center.

Parish: Absolutely. That’s part of the intention. And the other part is to force you to immediately confront loss, a loss that communities of color and people in lower economic strata are dealing with right now. It might be a historical line, but it’s not a historical expression. It’s present moment.

Jesse Dorris is a writer based in New York.

“Now We Think as We Fuck”: Queer Liberation to Activism continues at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through February 5, 2020.

The post In This Film Series, Queer Sex Is Front and Center appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Photographing Tupac, Biggie, and Everything in Between

Dana Lixenberg revisits her portraits of pop-culture icons and everyday citizens.

By Stephen Hilger

Dana Lixenberg, Wilteysha, 1993, from Imperial Courts 1993–2015 (Roma Publications, 2015)
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

During the past two decades, Dana Lixenberg has produced an extraordinary collection of portraits of individuals and communities. Whether facing celebrities for editorial shoots or engaging with ordinary citizens, Lixenberg’s lens reflects her subjects with consistently measured sensibility. Throughout a range of subjects and social situations, Lixenberg maintains what late artist, educator, and photo editor George Pitts described as her “unvarnished” photographic style. To date, she has published eight books of photographs, a few of which have considered the culture and place of Lixenberg’s native country, the Netherlands, while the majority of the published material has focused on the United States. Much of this work originates as editorial assignments; and subsequently develops into long-term projects.

In each, Lixenberg’s commitment to her subjects results in an archive where the cultural meanings and narratives of the images continually expand. “I’m trying to make an image that really can tell a story and you can spend time with. An image that can live beyond the context of what it was shot for,” Lixenberg explains in her most recent publication, Tupac Biggie (Roma Publications and Patta, 2018).

Dana Lixenberg, Contact sheets from photoshoot for VIBE, Christopher Wallace (Biggie), New York, NY, 1996, from Tupac Biggie (Roma Publications and Patta, 2018)
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

In Tupac Biggie, Lixenberg revisits her photographs of the two pop-culture icons—made for Vibe in 1993 and 1996, during the early years of the influential hip-hop culture magazine. Signaling the magazine as the original vehicle for the images, the book displays Lixenberg’s portraits of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (aka The Notorious B.I.G.) on glossy pages, saddle-stitched into an oversized format. A progression of Lixenberg’s archival images of the twenty-two-year-old Tupac Shakur runs from the front of the book to the center—beginning with a facsimile of a black-and-white, 4-by-5-inch negative image, and followed by multiple pages of contact sheets from the shoot, an enlarged gelatin-silver print, and tear sheets of the original and subsequent issues of Vibe in which it appeared. In the well-known image, the two knot-ends of

Dana Lixenberg, Contact sheets from photoshoot for VIBE, Tupac Shakur, Atlanta, GA, 1993, from Tupac Biggie (Roma Publications and Patta, 2018)
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

Tupac’s front-tied bandanna descend down both sides of his face, accentuating his poised look. Small droplets of rain fleck his denim shirt, worn open and displaying his diamond-adorned crucifix. A parallel succession of archival images of Biggie expands from the back of the book toward the center. Lixenberg depicts Biggie in a range of poses: most often defiantly staring down the camera, at times appearing beside producer Sean “Puffy” Combs (currently known as “Diddy”), and—in one of the most memorable images—wearing a flamboyant Coogi sweater and shuffling a large stack of money. The division between Biggie’s right side of the book and Tupac’s left side recalls the East Coast vs. West Coast rivalry perpetuated by the performers, their crews, and the media at the time, while an essay by Vibe editor Rob Kenner recollects the prominence of the hip-hop magazine, as well as its complicity in fanning the flames of the feud between Tupac and Biggie before their fatal shootings, in 1996 and 1997, respectively. The book is dedicated to George Pitts, Lixenberg’s photo director at Vibe, who died in 2017.

Dana Lixenberg, Lisa Kudrow, Los Angeles, CA, 1999, from united states (Artimo, 2001)
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

Lixenberg’s ability to create subtly provocative portraits of public figures led to frequent editorial assignments for a variety of magazines, including Interview, Rolling Stone, Details, Elle, Esquire, Out, and many others, in addition to Vibe. United States (Artimo, 2001), a compilation of approximately eighty photographs Lixenberg made on assignment from 1994 to 2000, forms an unexpected, collective portrait of American culture. The book interrelates recognizable cultural figures with noncelebrities, photographed because of particular social circumstances they represented or were associated with—for instance sex work, college sororities, illness, incarceration, and homelessness. In the book’s afterword, George Pitts elucidates, “Virtually all celebrities portrayed by Lixenberg are rendered in a vulnerable way, and perhaps that’s why these images warrant repeated viewings . . . Lixenberg extracts their ordinary (yet richly human) qualities . . . It is almost the reverse of what she does with noncelebrities. With them, Lixenberg reveals their charisma.”

Dana Lixenberg, Snoop, 1993, from Imperial Courts 1993–2015 (Roma Publications, 2015)
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

The first Lixenberg photographs to appear in Vibe were not of celebrities, but rather portraits of residents of the Imperial Courts housing project in the Watts area of South Central Los Angeles—photographs that Lixenberg had shown to George Pitts. Remembering the context of the day, Pitts reflected on Lixenberg’s “tough non-pandering aesthetic,” in contradiction to “the slicker celebrity and fashion-oriented content,” which helped establish the visual tone of the magazine. Lixenberg continued to photograph the community there for twenty-two years, ultimately producing Imperial Courts 1993–2015 (Roma Publications, 2015), an extensive volume depicting generations of residents photographed on the grounds of the urban housing complex.

Dana Lixenberg, David A. Taylor, 2000, from Jeffersonville, Indiana (Artimo, 2005)
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

Lixenberg had first traveled to South Central to photograph the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots on assignment for a Dutch weekly, Vrij Nederland. Witnessing the extent of the damage in the city moved Lixenberg to return to the area and establish ties with the community, which lead her to Imperial Courts. Around the same time, Lixenberg embarked on another long-term project— photographing the homeless population in Jeffersonville, Indiana. While a handful of the people photographed in Jeffersonville appear in United States, Lixenberg’s collective portrait of a fragmented community culminates in her subsequent book Jeffersonville, Indiana (Artimo, 2005). The work originated as an assignment to photograph homeless women for Jane, yet it grew into a more extensive undertaking over the course of seven years, from 1997 to 2004. In both Imperial Courts and Jeffersonville, Indiana, Lixenberg approaches complex social realities with an austereness whereby she distills the human subject amid a reductive palette of visual signifiers. The accumulation of time past, and an emphasis on the shared presence of the photographer and subject, activate the singular frames beyond stasis toward a more elastic corpus of images, social exchanges, and meanings.

Centerfold poster from Tupac Biggie (Roma Publications and Patta, 2018), design by Linda van Deursen
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York

Lixenberg’s reexamination of her photographic archive for Tupac Biggie remembers history through the documentary temperament of its images. At the same time, the volume furnishes a mirror in which to glimpse a contemporary image culture in which the proliferation of images and their meanings stretch the imagination. Lixenberg’s material works, commissioned and distributed by Vibe, play out on the pages of the compendium as traces of their subjects (and simultaneously register the images’ usage by Vibe). Nestled within the book’s center, a giant foldout poster shifts the character of the work considerably. On the poster’s verso reads an explosive, free-form poem remembering “Tupac and Biggie,” by writer and activist Kevin Powell. On the front of the poster appears a graphic representation of the trajectory of Lixenberg’s images through their appropriation by a global mass image culture that has refashioned them during the last two decades into memes, taking such forms as murals, paintings, tattoos, and merchandise, such as T-shirts and figurines. Lixenberg’s gesture to include within Tupac Biggie the collectively constructed copies that succeed her original images acknowledges a greater conception of her photographic practice through the medium’s ever evolving social reception. At once, Lixenberg’s work fills the space of the photobook, the magazine, and appropriation by the public. Lixenberg continues to expand the possibilities of photography through a persistent and elongated practice across genres, in which a multiplicity of readings, including mourning and—at the same time—a playful examination of the image, are each evident.

Stephen Hilger is a photographer based in Brooklyn, where he teaches at Pratt Institute.

Read more from The PhotoBook Review, Issue 017, or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

American Images is on view at GRIMM, New York, through February 29, 2020.

The post Photographing Tupac, Biggie, and Everything in Between appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

In These Film Collages, Trump’s Washington Looks Just Like “The Shining”

John Pilson’s latest series reveals an uncanny resemblance between the U.S. president and Stanley Kubrick’s failed novelist.

By Sean L. Malin

John Pilson, Priority Magic, 2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

For the artist and educator John Pilson, the film director Stanley Kubrick was “the greatest twentieth-century Jewish comedian (and I’m not just talking Dr. Strangelove) and artist as Cold War psychosexual completist.”

It is no surprise that Pilson, whose 1990s photographs from his time working at Merrill Lynch transformed depressed, robotic office drones into clowns of the mundane, is able to laugh with Kubrick, “even at his darkest, especially at his darkest.” The legendary filmmaker was indeed funny, not only in his 1960s comedies—Lolita, Dr. Strangelove—but also at the apex points of his crueler films: the childlike sing-along performed by HAL 9000 as it (he?) deactivates in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the standing ovation Alex DeLarge receives after enduring the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman traumatically beating his platoon into submission in Full Metal Jacket.

John Pilson, Priority Magic, 2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, with its blood-flooded elevators and necrotic seductress, may have been his most torturous and grotesque work, and therefore, by default, also his funniest. It stars Jack Nicholson in a bravura performance as Jack Torrance, “a failed novelist” in Pilson’s view, who accepts the position of caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. Eventually, trapped by his failures, he descends into psychosis among the hotel’s ghostly staff, slashing through doors while hunting his own wife, Wendy, and their disturbed son, Danny.

In the winter of 2017, Pilson and his son were snowed in at their home in New York watching The Simpsons. At some point, “we slipped into CNN,” where news about President Donald Trump’s administration “triggered” in Pilson a ferocious anger not unlike what Torrance feels when he reassures Shelley Duvall’s Wendy that he won’t hurt her. Soon, Pilson was “literally yelling—not yelling, but barking, foaming.”

John Pilson, Priority Magic, 2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Pilson was also in that moment inspired. He began noting similarities between Jack Torrance and The Donald: both were “rootless, angry narcissists,” both had young wives and children, and both veered “between suspense and total incoherence.” In a quick Google search, Pilson found “endless analogues” between Kubrick’s masterpiece and the real world political environment. “It’s uncanny on top of uncanny. You realize that more or less with every single plot point in that film, every single theme, there is a pretty stark resemblance.”

From this creative binge emerged what Pilson has titled Priority Magic (2019–ongoing), a series of diptychs pairing scenes from The Shining with imagery from the Orange presidency. The series’ “charmingly ominous” title comes from the Freudian psychologist Fritz Redl’s description of “group behavior made possible when an authority figure, by example or through incitement, sets precedent, gives permission, and conjures a new normal.”

John Pilson, Priority Magic,2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Like Kubrick’s film, these split-screen photographs are amusing and horrifying in equal measure, indicators both of Pilson’s gift for pattern recognition and our collective ability to see evil in cinematic terms. Each diptych contains within itself a transformation narrative: Jack Torrance’s axe becomes Donald Trump’s golf club; Danny Torrance’s telepathic gifts are bestowed on Barron Trump; a concerned Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel’s chef, becomes a weary Barack Obama.

But while comic in tone and bite-size enough for Instagram, these images extend a critical legacy of social-resistance collage stretching from John Heartfield’s 1932 portrait of a gold-eating Hitler, to Lance Letscher’s deceptively quaint collage-covered guns from the early 2000s, to the artist couple known as Stephen and Vanessa’s 2012 headshot of the politician Rick Santorum made entirely of queer pornography.

John Pilson, Priority Magic,2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Like those artists, Pilson forcefully, directly rejects propagandism through the use of montage, explicitly aligning key figures from the contemporary American political elite with their ghastly (Stephen Miller/Lloyd the bartender), rotting (Kellyanne Conway/Mrs. Massey), or outright murderous (Donald Trump/ Jack Torrance) doppelgängers. In so doing, these totems of hypernationalism become horror archetypes within the Overlook Hotel that is America in 2019.

As Priority Magic has found fans in the mocking corners of the Internet, Pilson has further begun to explore connections with other iconic cinematic texts: Barton Fink, Star Wars, James Bond. These collages are available on his private Instagram feed, but as their creator readily admits, none offers the same electric thrill that comes with Trump’s spray frozen mop top imposed on Torrance’s frostbitten jaw. “If there’s anything that is cathartic about it,” notes Pilson, “it’s that violence meets with violent ends. What you’re seeing is so cartoonish, and because it is so cartoonish, you say to yourself, I’ve seen this film before. Then you are certain you’ve seen this film before. And, you know how it ends.”

John Pilson, Priority Magic,2019–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Sean L. Malin is a cultural critic whose writing has been published in LA Weekly, New York Magazine, Filmmaker Magazine, and the Austin Chronicle.

The post In These Film Collages, Trump’s Washington Looks Just Like “The Shining” appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Picturing the American Family, From Frederick Douglass to Jamel Shabazz

In this conversation, Rhea L. Combs and Deborah Willis speak to the power of photographs to envision love and connection for Black American families.

Jamel Shabazz, Twins, 1980
Courtesy the artist

“I have found no standard art history that refers to any Afro-American artist,” Deborah Willis wrote on November 14, 1973, in a statement about her intention to research the contributions of black photographers from 1840 to 1940. After approaching a number of collections and libraries, and drawing up a list that included Roy DeCarava, James VanDerZee, and Gordon Parks, she asked herself: “Could these black photographers receive the same recognition their white colleagues received?” This question has animated Willis’s groundbreaking books, essays, conferences, and curatorial projects concerning the relationship between African American identity and photography, and brought to the foreground the stories of black people as both makers and subjects of images, from Civil War-era portraits to contemporary photo-based art.

For Willis, a distinguished professor of photography at New York University, the image of the family has been central, and deeply personal. Two years after the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., where the story of the American family is told and presented through images, Willis spoke with curator Rhea L. Combs about the enduring legacy—and political resonance—of the African American family in photographs.

Notman Photo Company, Frederick Douglass with his grandson Joseph Douglass, ca. 1890
Courtesy Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Rhea L. Combs: For decades, you’ve been involved with and dedicated to the life and work of African American image makers. You’ve done groundbreaking research and helped shape and mold some of the brightest minds and thinkers in the field, past and present. What motivated you to do this work, and why photography in particular?

Deborah Willis: I grew up with a father who was the family photographer. As an amateur, he had a Rolleiflex. We had a lot of family events, reunions, and gatherings up until my first year in college, and my dad took most of the photographs. He had a cousin, Alphonso Willis, who had a studio about two or three blocks away from our home, and he took the official portraits with his big 4-by-5-inch camera. Our neighbor was Jack Franklin, who was a photojournalist for the black press in Philadelphia. I also grew up in a beauty shop, as you know, and having that opportunity to look at magazines most of my life, from Ebony to Life, meant that I was always looking at photographs.

Combs: Was there any distinction between what you saw in Ebony and Life and what you were experiencing in the family photographs that your father was taking?

Willis: I always thought that our family stories weren’t visible in the larger magazines, like Life and Look. Ebony definitely had images of black families, but mostly black celebrity families, as well as people who were successful in business or in politics. When I was younger and heading to college, I wanted to make visible some of the stories of the everyday experiences that I enjoyed watching in my neighborhood and within my family, like kids playing jump rope, people seated at a table. And what I found was The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), the book by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes. It excited me, even as a younger child, seeing that book. Having family images in the living room, on the mantle, on walls—family photographs were our art form.

Jan Yoors, Four African American women waiting outside a church before a wedding service, ca. 1962–63
© Yoors Family Partnership and courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, New York, and Gallery Fifty One, Antwerp

Combs: Same for me. Those were the visual cues that let you know you were home.

Willis: Absolutely.

Combs: A lot of your research projects and books expose people to the work of early African American photographers. Once you uncovered these jewels and these photographers, how did they influence your work or help you unpack these ideas around family?

Willis: My family were members of the NAACP, so they had a subscription to its magazine, The Crisis. Growing up with The Crisis in the house and then going to school and learning about W. E. B. Du Bois and his impact on photography was a nice kind of collaboration in my memory. When I started to think about studying photography and the history of photography, I noticed that there were no black photographers in the history books. Even in the 1970s, Gordon Parks was not in my history of photography book, and I had read his book A Choice of Weapons (1966) by then. So I thought, Okay, we need to make a change in this. A professor encouraged me to do a paper on the topic. As a result, I started going through the black press, looking at black newspapers and ads, and finding city directories that had black photographers. I wanted to start at the beginning of photography, because I believed that they were there, that they existed. I knew it. I was lucky enough to find early photographers who were working in the 1840s and 1850s, free men who were also activists and abolitionists. So that was the beginning of a research paper as an undergraduate, when I was looking to fill in the gap in my classroom. That’s how that happened.

Then what I found was that black photographers were photographing black families. At that time, there were a number of stereotyped—troublesome, to me, visually—images of black people in stereographs that circulated in the public, while, at the same time, in the black communities, there were images of successful, proud, happy—not grinning, but happy—black people, happy to be alive, living through a difficult time.

Burk Uzzle, Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral (Coretta Scott King, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte Jr.), Memphis, Tennessee, 1968
Courtesy the artist

Combs: When you think about photographs of Eva and Alida Stewart, Harriet Tubman’s great-nieces, or the carte de visite of Frederick Douglass and his grandson Joseph Douglass, or photographs of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, how do you situate these images within the context of your research?

Willis: In the image of Harriet Tubman’s great-nieces—we are familiar with women and adornment, in terms of hats and how they’re seen, and so we are reminded of a past that has been neglected, that has not been discussed in family photography. Women were dressmakers. They created patterns and styles. They looked at magazines. Black women were known as great milliners during this time of the 1890s and early 1900s. In the picture of Tubman’s great-nieces, we can see these prosperous, educated, happy women photographed together, and they’re wearing jewelry, and one has her head cocked to the side, and the other one is looking directly into the camera. Both were sending the message of success and strength—similar to the women in Jan Yoors’s photograph of a wedding in Harlem in the 1960s. The way that they’re wearing their hats—we can connect the fashion of women of that time to the fashion of the women in the 1890s.

I remember seeing the image of Frederick Douglass with his grandson when I was first working at the Schomburg Center, in New York. We know Douglass fought for his family, like the Civil War soldiers fought for their families. In this image, we see him with his grandson, who was a musician, and we see the story. But also, we know it’s in a fancy studio; we can see the furniture in the back. Douglass was using these studios to create a narrative about black life and black experiences.

John Johnson, Talbert Family (Rev. Albert W. Talbert, wife Mildred, son Dakota, and daughter Ruth), Newman Methodist Episcopal Church, Lincoln, Nebraska, ca. 1914
Courtesy the Douglas Keister Collection

Combs: To your point of Frederick Douglass and Joseph Douglass—you see them, as you stated, in this established studio, and there is a sense of prominence. You could juxtapose that with the print of the Talbert family standing in front of a photographic backdrop not in a studio, but outdoors, made around 1914 by the photographer John Johnson. But there’s still a sense of regality and pride and esteem that is established by this family.

Willis: Right. And it’s known to be of Reverend Albert W. Talbert and his family. So we know his station in the community. It’s probably a rural community, and we see that it was important for his family to be photographed, probably for an official church portrait.

Combs: This was in Nebraska.

Willis: One button closed. This is probably not the original one that Johnson, the photographer, selected. We see the scene beyond the backdrop—we see where the photographer could actually crop the image to just show the family as if they were standing in a lighted photographic studio. And the way Reverend Talbert’s son wears his hat—the way that he cuffs the brim—looks as if he is a bit rebellious. He’s wearing the style of the time of the young sporty man.

Combs: Totally.

Willis: The good daughter, with her bow, and the rebellious son, and the supportive wife. Isn’t it wonderful to see the complexity of families, and the stories that are told through photographs?

We see in an early 1950s image of Emmett Till and his mother the pride that his mother had in posing with her son. She is looking away from the camera; he is looking directly into it. He is happy to be with his mother, happy to be photographed. Think about this along with the image of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family at his funeral: here are two images of people who’ve lost family members in a violent manner. We see two mothers with sons. The sense of protection, the sense of having them as witnesses within that frame.

Zun Lee, Found Polaroid images, dates and locations unknown, from the series Fade Resistance, 2012–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Combs: How do you think family photographs have been utilized as a way of understanding the civil rights movement?

Willis: Black photographers like Gordon Parks, Ernest Withers, and Moneta Sleet took their cameras into these communities to look at injustice and asked: How do we educate our children? How do we think about the future of our children? Photographs helped to push the spirit of black people during that time, to think about the act of being photographed as a representative family member, to walk to church, to walk to school, to go to vote, to be activists.

Combs: What you said brings us to the work of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is committed to telling the story of America primarily through the African American lens. In many ways, its physical place becomes a space where families can gather, either literally or metaphorically, through images. I would love to hear from you how this notion of family and family photography, even photo albums, can help tell the American story.

Willis: I think about the images that we know from the movement, and about families who used the Green Book to travel safely, to know where they could rest, stop, and get food. They didn’t have social media then; they had word-of-mouth. And that’s how most families survived during migration and on vacation—it was because one sent a postcard photograph of a family member. The photographs in the museum are essential for showing a contemporary viewer that path. That’s why Du Bois, in the photographs he selected for the Exhibit of American Negroes at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris, included Thomas Askew’s photographs taken at homes: they show ownership by blacks. This is right after emancipation, and this was the hope of emancipation—that people could buy homes and perform the duties of family, church, and civic life.

Combs: There’s also an interplay between intimate moments and vernacular photography and interior spaces. I love one particular photograph in the museum’s collection of a young woman with go-go shorts and little heels, posing in the living room. And also another vernacular photograph that was found by photographer and collector, Adreinne Waheed, of this interior space of a family gathering down in, I’d imagine, a basement.

Willis: It reminds me of my house in North Philadelphia. They played cards. They sang and listened to music. They loved dancing. And all this is a memory that’s part of my memory of pure pleasure. Not just family members, but their family friends.

Zun Lee, Found Polaroid images, dates and locations unknown, from the series Fade Resistance, 2012–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Combs: How do you think an image is affected by who is taking the photograph? Especially as it relates to family photographs.

Willis: Jamel Shabazz is a person who loves photographing groups and people. You can see it in the way he uses that love as a sense of getting to know people through photographing them. Zun Lee’s collection of Polaroids is a way to think about textural memory and visual memory. The first car. The red shoes. Going to church on Easter Sunday. Going to a wedding. Just documenting the sense of joy. We can see what it meant for a black man to buy his child a gift and to pose for it.

Combs: What are the differences between Lee’s image of a man sitting on a toy car with his children and Frederick Douglass posing with his grandson? How do you see the arc shifting across the formal nineteenth-century photographs to the Polaroid photographs, which are so accessible?

Willis: I imagine that the impact is the same. They wanted to document and celebrate a moment and a memory. It’s part of that reflection on why photography of families is so important.

Photographer unknown, Group of people gathered around a bar, ca. 1970
Courtesy Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Combs: I also wonder what we are not seeing in these photographs. I recognize that families are complex and dynamic, and relationships can run the gamut. So when you see the range of images, intergenerational connections, and the role of family, is there a way in which you could surmise what issues these photographs are not engaging with?

Willis: Well, we think about divorce in families. Family photographs are remembered in certain ways. We think about abuse; who is the abuser in the photograph? When we think about what’s missing in family photographs, we often say that the queer or the trans family members are often not photographed. But sometimes you see that sense of love in those photographs, too. We know that a person is presented a certain way in the photograph. How do we tell that story about a queer family member or a trans family member, and the acceptance of that?

Combs: I was thinking about your recent TED Talk with your son, Hank Willis Thomas, and about how photography is instrumental to your work and his. You articulated so beautifully about love as a verb, and how that infuses and is incorporated in your art. When you think about your body of work and how family has been so critical to your research, I wonder if there’s a way in which your philosophy around love and family and photography filters into the things we’ve discussed.

Willis: The love that I find represented in family photographs—even if there’s abuse and there’s separation—is the initial part that is historicized, the love of family. I just had a death in the family, and we had to collect photographs. My aunt, who was eighty-eight, was a stylishly dressed woman for as long as I remember. All of her photographs show her sense of style, and her love of the camera and of people. We celebrate death with photographs, just as we celebrate life.

Rhea L. Combs is the supervisory museum curator of photography and film and director of the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Read more from Aperture, issue 233, “Family,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Picturing the American Family, From Frederick Douglass to Jamel Shabazz appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.