Aperture's Blog, page 75
January 16, 2020
A Secret Cache of Polaroids Reveals a Trans Photographer’s Inner World
April Dawn Alison made thousands of pictures focusing on a single subject—herself. But, who was she?
By Glen Helfand
April Dawn Alison, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy SFMOMA and MACK
“April Dawn Alison was the private feminine persona of a photographer known to family, friends, and neighbors as a man named Alan (Al) Schaefer (1941–2008).” So begins curator Erin O’Toole’s carefully worded introduction to a book and exhibition of Polaroids by Alison. It seems straightforward enough, particularly in an era of gender expansion; and the images, costumed self-portraits, aren’t surprising in themselves. They plumb territory explored by numerous artists who’ve worked with the mutability of identity through disguise, persona, and alter egos. But there’s a slow burn of complex implications to Alison’s work.
Details about Schaefer are scant—he’s described as a commercial photographer who learned the craft in the military, and was reclusive later in life. Boxes containing 9,200 Polaroids were found in his home after his death. They were acquired, through an estate dealer, by artist Andrew Masullo, who donated them to the San Francisco Museum of Art. Alison’s pictures were made over the course of decades focusing on a single subject—herself. But who really made them?
April Dawn Alison, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy SFMOMA and MACK
As Hilton Als notes in his essay, one of three in the book, “April was a maker, and so was the guy who made April; these pictures are a record of a double consciousness, the he who wants to be a she and the she who is a model and photographer both.” It’s an intersectional double scoop: the range of exploration includes art, gender, fashion, aging, and loneliness. The visual pleasure of performance in utopian solitary space is swirled with a sense of isolation and literal restraints.
The undated Polaroids, which span the 1970s to the 1990s (though Alison’s wardrobe sometimes makes them appear decades older), are presented at actual size, making this a quasi-facsimile of a photo album, punctuated with some full-page enlargements. These are private pictures of Alison in different outfits—she’s a career girl in Qiana, a pearl necklace matron, a vacuuming housewife in green eye shadow, fishnet-stockinged seductress, party girl in vinyl hot pants, and a member of the Starship Enterprise clad in a red minidress. In the continuum of historical views, it’s difficult to know if Alison was trans or, as artist and trans activist Zackary Drucker offers in the book’s most extensive essay, “she seems to exemplify the category of ‘transvestite.’” Alison doesn’t always pass for a woman, but her pictures immediately convey the tropes.
April Dawn Alison, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy SFMOMA and MACK
Cindy Sherman comes to mind, naturally, as so many of the photos evoke classic female roles, enacted solo; but as much as she fits into various guises, Alison is a consistent, recognizable individual. She transforms situations, but not her face. The pictures were made in Alison’s nondescript apartment, with its pocket doors, burgundy velour couch, and a balcony where Alison poses salaciously with a phallic pink balloon. Often, she’s seen on the floor, legs spread, revealing her panties—thirsty.
For whom were these photographs made? Polaroids resulted in single images, selfies filed away. Did she spend evenings admiring them or share them with others? How would Alison have taken to Instagram—a venue where contemporary queer photographer Christopher Smith, who creates elaborate setups in his bedroom, shares pictures with thousands of people? Alison didn’t seem to need anyone else, including an audience, to “complete” these photographs. Or did she?
April Dawn Alison, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy SFMOMA and MACK
Alison used different formats of the instant film. Some are rectangular, black and white; others, square SX- 70s, elder cousins to Instagram phone-camera templates. As the formats evolve, so do the sexual overtones—the later pictures are kinkier than the more chaste looks presented earlier in the book. She’s gagged, hung by chains from the ceiling, sometimes upside down. (Was there an assistant or lover there to help? Or was Alison able to fake physics?) These images show wholesome Bettie Page– style BDSM, not the extreme brand of surrealistic erotica of Pierre Molinier’s more contorted, manipulated poses.
It’s only a modest conceptual stretch to connect the crimson cover of the Alison volume to Carl Jung’s The Red Book—a compendium of archetypes published in 2009, long after the psychologist’s death. Alison, like Sherman and Smith, worked alone with iconic selves. Drucker writes how Alison’s “solitude manifests an interior space where art and sexuality coincide.” In that way, the contained page is a fitting format to enter Alison’s intimate bubble. Drucker further amplifies the importance of location: “Many trans people never find spaces to express or manifest their true selves, and they let their authentic interior worlds die with their bodies.”
There is a hint of tragedy to the fact that Alison didn’t live to see the reception of her work, or her identity. But the authenticity, the realness, of these photographs is undeniable. They emerge directly from the source.
Glen Helfand is a writer, curator, and educator based in Oakland, California.
Read more from The PhotoBook Review, Issue 017, or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.
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January 6, 2020
In Protests from Standing Rock to Hong Kong, the Image of Solidarity
Protest is a form of communion.
By Siddhartha Mitter
Wolfgang Tillmans, Protest, Houston Street, a, 2014
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Maureen Paley, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin
Like all documentation work, protest photography has its habits. One default setting is confrontation. Bare hands linked in a human chain parallel to riot shields. Projectiles. The pregnancy of violence. Another, related, is heroism, frequently individual. The man who stopped the tank in Tiananmen Square. The woman in Baton Rouge, at once steely and angelic, before a row of riot police. In formal terms, there is the appeal of the frame—its necessity, if one is to illustrate the news. A grand boulevard packed with demonstrators as far as the lens can see conveys significance by virtue of the scale and the setting.
The images in these pages propose another method. The views they offer of protests—across Cairo, Istanbul, New York, Standing Rock, and Hong Kong—are more or less tightly framed or, instead, panoramic. But all center on humans. They confer no exceptionalism, no purpose that surpasses that of being present. These are not fight images; the antagonist is absent; there is no martial undercurrent.
Some, by Carl Court and Anthony Kwan in Hong Kong, are photojournalism, images circulated to news organizations by major photo agencies; they document this year’s protests that began in objection to plans to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China, but soon spread to broad demands for political autonomy. Wolfgang Tillmans’s images, from a Black Lives Matter protest in New York, are an artist’s response to the events and exist outside that professional economy. Larry Towell and Josué Rivas both photographed at Standing Rock. Rivas conducted a slow project, a months-long “offering,” as he put it, “turned … to the latent spirit” of the water protectors encamped against the permitting of a pipeline on native land.
Josué Rivas, North Dakota, 2016
Courtesy the artist
No matter what else it is, protest is communion. The authority and language of religion sometimes mobilize it explicitly, as in the mainstream of the civil rights movement in the United States. But, at root, this sacrament requires no liturgy. It is the work of collective imagination that invests meaning in the banner, the flower, the color, the candle, the cellphone torch beam.
It is resolve in numbers and the comfort of strangers. It is fluid, promiscuous, physical—even in a time of disembodied digital communications.
What binds these humans? Have they met before, traveled together to the meeting point from their campus or office, made a family outing of it, even a date? What small acts of care stitch them together? It matters what happens before and after, of course. People mobilize at cost—deserting schools and jobs, braving tear gas and beatings—in response to moral and material urgencies. But in the instant, there is a transcendence, an energy.
Carl Court, Hong Kong, June 14, 2019
© Getty Images
Care is the ultimate subject of these images, rather than what prompted each protest, what chapter it represented in an ongoing struggle, or what outcome it achieved. Care is the politics. It is what remains, since the advent of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the ideological unraveling of the idea of the public good and the attacks on the mechanisms of social solidarity throughout the industrial world, a process keenly emulated by predatory elites everywhere else and compounded by depersonalizing technologies.
Care is an antidote to the grotesquerie of unaccountable rule. It is what distinguishes the mass gatherings seen here from others fomented by demagogues, seething with hate. Another world is possible. Human dignity need not be a scarce resource; life is improvable, here and now, and, therefore, it is a duty to improve it. Beyond the news, the specifics, the local histories of outrage and demands for redress, that ethos pervades the images here—and arguably inhabits protest itself, all the more so now, in a time of rising awareness of planet-wide, cataclysmic crisis.
Questions of responsibility follow, not least for photographers, journalists, and all those who make it their craft to document. Dignity is also a practice.
In the meantime, the protests continue.
Larry Towell, Jewish Rabbi praying at Oceti Sakowin Camp, North Dakota, February 22, 2017
Courtesy Magnum Photos
Carolyn Drake, Women’s March, Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017
Courtesy Magnum Photos
Alex Webb, Women’s March, New York City, January 21, 2017
Courtesy Magnum Photos
Alex Majoli, Celebrating Mubarak’s resignation in Tahrir Square, Cairo, February 11, 2011
Courtesy Magnum Photos
Emin Ozmen, Gezi Park, Istanbul, 2013
Courtesy Magnum Photos
Siddhartha Mitter is a writer based in New York and a regular contributor to Artforum and the New York Times.
Read more from Aperture issue 237, “Spirituality,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.
The post In Protests from Standing Rock to Hong Kong, the Image of Solidarity appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
How John Baldessari Threw Three Balls in a Straight Line
The making of a now-famous series of photographs.
By Robin Kelsey
John Baldessari, 2015
Photograph by Molly Berman for Aperture
Ever since the onset of photography, the roles of the hand and the arm in making art have been subject to doubt. Once the definitive means of bringing an idea into form, these human appendages could seem feeble or quaint in an age of science and industry. Allowing gravity to participate in marking became a vital way to give art a deeper or more objective structure. Marcel Duchamp dropped threads to make the lines of his pivotal 1913–14 work 3 Standard Stoppages, and Jackson Pollock later dripped paint to push the limits of his control over line. These tactics called attention to art making as a performative grappling with chance and indifference.
In his 1973 series Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), John Baldessari brought his impish wit to this modernist turn. He threw three balls in the air in hopes that a snapshot might catch them aloft and aligned. Through the magic of photography, gravity was defeated, and the balls never had to come down. Although he playfully inserted his arm or his finger in other works, in Throwing Three Balls he kept himself out of the frame. Well, not quite: his balls were in the frame, and the playful reference they make both to his surname and to masculine anatomy is crucial. Throwing Three Balls spoofs the swagger of the Pollock myth of a man laying himself bare through his struggle with the elements. Whereas Pollock orbited his canvases on the floor with all the gravitas of a seminal creator, Baldessari sent his tiny planets skyward with a playful toss.
We should remember, however, that Throwing Three Balls was a game for two players. While Baldessari threw, his then-wife Carol Wixom operated the camera. Chance became the intersection of their performances, where the scattershot and the snapshot met. Each resulting image depicted a hanging sculpture made from dime-store materials that invoked, in the deadpan innocence of pop, both the lofty aspirations of the moon-shot era and the absurd randomness of the atomic age. As the catalyst of such images, Baldessari’s arm became one of the most disarming of his generation.
Robin Kelsey is the Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University. This article was originally published in Aperture issue 221, “Performance.”
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Sweat and Spirit on the British Dance Floor
In Dave Swindells’s photographs, nightclubs become spaces for community and belonging.
By Sheryl Garratt
Dave Swindells, Podium dancers at the Trip, the Astoria, Soho, 1988
Courtesy the artist
This is the British DJ Danny Rampling talking about the atmosphere in the early days of his nightclub Shoom, in 1988 London, at the start of the acid-house explosion that sent shock waves through U.K. youth culture, and eventually worldwide: “It was very spiritual. Some of those moments in the club were unbelievable. People literally went into trance states, including me. Not from the use of drugs, but from that music and the human energy that was going around [the room]. That’s not something that had happened in Britain for centuries. The feeling in that small space was so intense some nights.”
And this is the photographer Dave Swindells talking about that same club: “It was really hot, sweaty and steamy. There was dry ice, strobe lights going off and you’re thinking, ‘I’ve got to wait half an hour for the camera to warm up.’ You can’t use it until it’s at room temperature, because otherwise it’s just going to be fogged the whole time, and you’re not going to see anything. In Shoom, you could barely see the length of your arm sometimes, so it was a challenge! But it was also something you’d not seen before, so you just had to capture it.”
Dave Swindells, Bob’s Full House at Bagley’s Studios, Kings Cross, 1991
Courtesy the artist
At their best, nightclubs have always functioned as what the anarchist writer Hakim Bey calls “temporary autonomous zones”––safe spaces where we can experiment, express ourselves, and explore freedoms we may not be allowed in daily life. In clubs, we can find our tribe, feel a real sense of belonging and community. They are also often at the forefront of social change, encouraging racial integration and asserting gay rights. In the case of acid house, overwhelming numbers of clubgoers defying the police to dance all night at huge, illegal parties eventually led––after new laws failed to contain them––to a gradual loosening of the draconian restrictions on both club opening hours and the sale and consumption of alcohol in the U.K.
These characteristics have also made the nightlife scene hard to record. There are technical issues for photographers in clubs, but also issues of trust. Swindells has been able to take candid pictures in clubs like Shoom because he made himself part of the culture by turning up night after night, year after year, bearing witness without ever being intrusive.
Dave Swindells, Jenni Rampling dancing at Shoom, the Fitness Centre, Southwark, 1988
Courtesy the artist
Swindells started taking photographs while at university in Sheffield, inspired by a 1982 exhibition of Derek Ridgers’s nightclub portraits at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. After graduating, he moved to London and got a bar job in a club––until he was fired for spending too much time taking pictures and not enough time collecting empty glasses. In 1985, he started taking club portraits for the style bible i-D, then became nightlife editor of Time Out. Going out with his camera almost every evening, he remained at the magazine from September 1986 to January 2009, building up an unsurpassed archive on British club culture.
“Taking pictures definitely kept me going, because you had to keep on interacting with the people on the dance floor, and not just the DJ and the promoter, or hang out in the VIP room. You get detached from it all that way. And when electroclash and Nu Rave came along in the noughties, they reinspired me. It was 1980s clubbers re-creating ’80s nightlife, so those things were a lot of fun.”
Dave Swindells, Pendragon at the Fridge, Brixton, 2000
Courtesy the artist
The Internet has given us new ways of finding our tribe, but Swindells says that feeling of togetherness, of being part of something bigger than yourself, can still be found in the clubs on a good night. What is different now is that clubbers are more aware of his presence, often wanting to see the pictures and edit them on the spot. “They’re used to having control of their image, their brand, so they want to be much more involved. Which is fair enough. But what hasn’t changed is the joy on people’s faces when the DJ plays a tune they love, that sense of just pure joy. There’s still a massive buzz that people feel.”
Dave Swindells, The Spectrum Time Out Party in Jubilee Gardens, Waterloo, June 1988
Courtesy the artist
Sheryl Garratt has edited The Face and The Observer Magazine, and documented the rise of rave culture in her book Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture (1998).
Read more from Aperture issue 237, “Spirituality,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.
The post Sweat and Spirit on the British Dance Floor appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
December 29, 2019
Aperture’s Best Photography Features of 2019
This year we explored spirituality with Wolfgang Tillmans, revisited Virginia Woolf’s Orlando with Tilda Swinton, considered how Mexican photographers are expanding photography, and started Introducing, a series on exciting new voices in the field. Here are some of the year’s highlights in photography and ideas.
How Can Photography Represent Humanity’s Longing for Spiritual Connection?
Wolfgang Tillmans and philosopher Martin Hägglund grapple with ideas of faith and freedom.
What is a Feminist Photobook?
Carmen Winant on feminism, photobooks, and the radical gestures of world-building.
Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf and the Spirit of Limitlessness
Inspired by Woolf’s iconic novel, the artists in Aperture‘s “Orlando” issue explore the territories of identity, history, and consciousness.
When Women Photographers Went to War
From Gerda Taro to Susan Meiselas, a new book examines the ways eight women have expanded the field of war photography.
In the Pacific Northwest, Shifting Landscapes and Mythologies
Against the backdrop of the US presidential election, Garrett Grove documents the region’s growing cultural tensions.
12 Photographers on How They Conceptualize Their Work
What comes first–the idea for a project, or the images themselves?
Santu Mofokeng’s Pensive Visions of Land and Ritual
In a new series of photobooks, the revered photographer conjures the mysteries of faith in South Africa.
The Young Artists Who Transformed Mexico City in the 1990s
How Mexico’s capital became a backdrop for experiments in photography, film, and performance.
A Japanese Photographer’s Encounters with Natural Disasters
Eight years after a devastating tsunami, Lieko Shiga investigates Japan’s haunted landscapes.
Graciela Iturbide’s Dreams and Visions
The life and work of Latin America’s most revered photographer.
Mark McKnight’s Exuberant Tribute to Queer Tenderness
In the male body and the physical world, an unexpected seduction.
In Versailles, Visionary Sculptures and Royal Intrigue
Viviane Sassen’s new photomontages consider the limitless potential of the human condition.
Subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.
The post Aperture’s Best Photography Features of 2019 appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
December 22, 2019
Introducing: Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Years after the South African photographer’s sister mysteriously disappeared, his images become a public record of a private myth.
By Nicole Acheampong
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
The day his older sister Ziyanda disappeared, Lindokuhle Sobekwa was hit by a car. The two were walking together along a road in the Johannesburg suburb of Thokoza when Ziyanda began to chase the seven-year-old Sobekwa. Out of fear, he began to run, and then he was hit. Above him, he recalled before blacking out, was the blurry silhouette of a woman or girl. His sister vanished in the ensuing scramble, with no word as to why. “She was in a period of being a very secretive person,” Sobekwa remembers. She was thirteen years old.
Sobekwa would not see Ziyanda again for a dozen years. Then one day, he returned from school, and Ziyanda was at home. She was reunited with the family for a couple of weeks. At the time, in 2014, Sobekwa was coming into his own as a photographer. He was in his final year of high school and working under the mentorship of Magnum photographer Bieke Depoorter and filmmaker Cyprien Clément-Delmas through the Of Soul and Joy project, an artistic initiative based in Thokoza. He remembers walking into Ziyanda’s room one day; in that moment, he saw his favorite would-be portrait of his sister: “She was lying in bed, there was a beautiful light. She said, ‘If you take a photo, I’m going to kill you.’ A few days after that, she passed away.”
Sobekwa did not plan to make a series about his sister. In 2016, he was deep into his first photographic series, Nyaope, which chronicles the cycle of drug abuse that has afflicted Thokoza and takes its name from the heroin-based substance at the center of the crisis. In Nyaope, Sobekwa’s subjects are his peers, many of them childhood friends; he captures their makeshift, communal homes, rituals of abuse, and often frayed, sometimes fearful expressions with a documentarian’s precision, peppered with tenderness.
While photographing the surrogate family structures of nyaope users, Sobekwa came across a portrait of his own family, a photograph he had not seen in years. In it, Sobekwa is a young boy, alongside five family members. Ziyanda is there. She’s wearing a green cardigan and a matching skirt with a delicate floral pattern. The skirt disappears into the green shrubbery that frames the group. Her face has been completely cut out, leaving a sharp white square.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
The photograph prodded at Sobekwa. His sister had become a highly taboo subject in the family, with no one willing to discuss her, neither while she was missing nor after she reappeared. Sobekwa needed a map to trace her disappearance, her passing, and to fill in her missing years. He began to craft a photo diary for himself, gathering snapshots of the places she lingered—like the clothesline in their backyard, where her garments were still hanging.
Disappearances are not rare in South Africa, Sobekwa says. Most Black South African families are familiar with the trauma of disappearances, which date back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, the height of the apartheid crisis. During this time, an ethnopolitical war between two rival parties, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), suffused the townships with panic, as residents along the factional line were routinely vanished by violence. In Sobekwa’s family, the cycle began with his grandfather, who was the first of the line to come to Johannesburg, in the 1960s. He never returned to the countryside; his fate is still unknown.
In 2017, the Magnum Foundation named Sobekwa a Photography and Social Justice Fellow. Suddenly, he had the resources to expand his search for his sister and develop his personal journal into a full-fledged series, I carry Her photo with Me (2017–ongoing).
“I had my own unanswered questions, maybe guilt of some sort,” says Sobekwa. “I felt the need to go into these spaces and make the camera my excuse. I realized that going alone, it would be difficult.” With his camera in hand, he slipped once more into the role of documentarian.
His mother had been the one to find Ziyanda back in 2014, at a men’s-only hostel called Shaye Aze Afe, and so Sobekwa started there. At Shaye Aze Afe, he took photos of the landscape, the shaded exterior of the hostel. He found a cousin who knew someone who knew someone else; they lead him to a second hostel, where tenants had been friends with Ziyanda. He took portraits of these women. He took portraits of strangers, whom he imagined as stand-ins to fill out Ziyanda’s community. In his notebook, he wrote: “Some of my sister’s friends didn’t want me to show their faces. Like my sister who never wanted to take pictures.”
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
By contrast, other subjects pose on beds and stare straight into the camera with enigmatic expressions—outfitted in a polka dot dress, or a white brassiere-and-briefs set. One tenant scrawled song lyrics over the table of contents of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, and these pages rest between Sobekwa’s portraits. Alongside “Chapter 8: Within the Hurricane––Depression” and “Chapter 11: Sex and Violence” are slanted, bubbled words like “HATE” and “READ URGENTLY” and “I Demand My Privacy But That’s All A Dream.”
Cape Town–based writer Sean O’Toole says that Sobekwa shares an “obvious kinship” with Santu Mofokeng, the South African photographer known for his striking black-and-white photo essays on township life. Both artists offer examinations of race, class, and segregation that are as rigorously journalistic as they are rife with the intimacy of lived experience. For Sobekwa, the tactile, scrapbook format is essential to the project, and the photographs are as much a public record as they are the artifacts of a private myth. “Lindo’s practice is, in some ways, discontinuous with the performative leanings of much recent photography I’m seeing made here in South Africa,” O’Toole says.
Photographer Mikhael Subotzky calls Sobekwa—who became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2018—“preternaturally talented,” and he admires in the young artist’s work “a vision and a sensitivity that is already uniquely his.”
Sobekwa and his brother recently journeyed to the countryside, where his grandmother still lives, and where Ziyanda spent her childhood and is now buried. Sobekwa is continuing the series, hoping to unlock the secret of his sister’s disappearance by photographing this other landscape of her life––and afterlife. “If you arrive in the countryside early in the morning, you must visit your ancestors,” he says. “Ziyanda is now my ancestor.”
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, from the series I carry Her photo with Me, 2017–ongoing
Nicole Acheampong is the editorial assistant of Aperture magazine. All images courtesy the artist/Magnum Photos.
Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.
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December 18, 2019
How One Woman Helped Invent Modern Photography
Through her work with Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, the visionary writer Anita Brenner ushered in the Mexican renaissance.
By María Minera
Tina Modotti, Anita Brenner in profile, 1926
Courtesy Colección Ricardo B. Salinas Pilego
“I cannot find a way to live that will produce the two satisfactions that I seem to need,” the polymath Anita Brenner wrote in 1933. One of those satisfactions was primal—food, clothing, shelter, security. The other was intellectual, “the sensation that I am participating in and contributing to some common good.” Judging by her tireless commitment to the latter, one can suspect that for her, this was much more important than safety, and that “common good” was nothing less than the “Mexican renaissance,” a term she coined to refer to the flourishing of culture that made her birth nation “come to herself,” as she wrote in her brilliant 1929 book, Idols Behind Altars.
Brenner was born in Mexico in 1905. Raised in Texas, she returned to Mexico in 1923 at the age of eighteen, drawn by the artistic effervescence of the time. For her, the Mexican renaissance was not only contained in Mexican muralism, but in the blooming of all the arts, including photography, a medium that she saw as the perfect companion to her lifelong endeavor of introducing Mexican art and culture to American audiences. Brenner wrote innumerable articles—for publications such as Harper’s, the Nation, and New York Times Magazine—and several influential books about that moment in Mexican life, when “Revolution was still real in the world,” as she said in 1974.
Edward Weston, Maguey, 1927
Courtesy the Colección Ricardo B. Salinas Pilego
The exhibition Anita Brenner. Luz de la modernidad (Light of Modernity)—curated by Karen Cordero and Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, and currently on view at Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL)—is a precise and beautiful approach to the visual vocabulary developed by a group of photographers that Brenner deployed to tell the story of Mexican art’s rebirth after the Mexican Revolution—a rebirth that was in part defined by the very images Brenner commissioned. In that sense, Brenner’s books are both chronicles of the period and instigators of a new photographic style—she called it “spirit”—that was surging at the same time. In addition to a wide selection of splendidly preserved vintage prints, the exhibition features copies of Brenner’s books and magazines—such as Mexico This Month, which she founded in 1955—a display of original materials she collected for her publications, and even political posters that give an in-depth look into Brenner’s relationship to both Mexico and the art of photography.
Agustín Jiménez, Circus, 1932
Courtesy the Colección Ricardo B. Salinas Pilego
We need only look at the first page of Idols Behind Altars to recognize the relevance of Brenner’s enterprise. When the book was first published in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Company, its first page featured Edward Weston’s famous portrait of the hand of the potter Amado Galván, taken in Tonalá in 1925. The hand, as we know, is holding a huaje—the fruit of the Tecomate tree that artisans let dry and then paint with flower motifs.
For Brenner, it was impossible to approach modern Mexican art—with its unequivocal return to Native values—without going back to its roots, so much of her long essay is devoted to modern crafts, in which she thought traces of the pre-Hispanic world could still be found. The “taste for pure plastic symbol” and “the elegance and intensity that accompanies abstraction in Maya art” were, for her, present in objects like that exquisite huaje. That is why she went to the dean of the National University of Mexico to ask for his support carrying out a project to, basically, “study Mexicans, seriously,” as she put it in a journal entry of December 1925. In order to achieve this, she travelled a lot, and also gave Edward Weston a thousand pesos, so that he and his lover and fellow photographer, Tina Modotti, could roam around the country and provide Brenner with four hundred photographs of their travels—after a year, they delivered “some gorgeous stuff,” Brenner wrote.
Edward Weston, Nude (Anita Brenner), 1925
Courtesy the Colección Ricardo B. Salinas Pilego
Brenner chose Weston for this job because his work had “the quality of transmutation. The nude he did of me”—an iconic view of her back, from 1925—“looks like a pear. The hand of Amado Galván […] looks like something growing [and all] without the least alienating objects from their own naturaleza [nature].” She wrote this in her journal in early 1926, when Weston was still at the beginning of his career, so her words were not only prophetic but exact: Weston would soon become famous because of those transmutations. As the curator and photographer Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, explains, “maybe Weston wouldn’t have done that by himself, but it was a commission and he exceeded all expectations.”
Tina Modotti, Portrait of Anita Brenner, 1925
Courtesy the Colección Ricardo B. Salinas Pilego
“Brenner is a visionary,” Monasterio adds, “because she understood that photography produced images that are not only nice to be looked at, but more importantly, [they] speak and tell a story.” In Brenner’s books, he says, “photography is always as present as the text itself.” Or even more so, as in the case of The Wind that Swept Mexico, her wonderful account of the Mexican Revolution, where text occupies no more than a third of what ends up being primarily a collection of images of those years (1910–42)—images that George R. Leighton and Walker Evans, on Brenner’s suggestion, selected, carefully oversaw, and printed as magnificent photogravures.
Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Altars [Ídolos tras los altares], 1929
Courtesy the Colección Ricardo B. Salinas Pilego
What Brenner had asked of Weston and Modotti—and later of Agustín Jiménez, for Idols Behind Altars—was to go out and look for objects that overflowed with expression and history. The photographers did exactly that, and more: they simultaneously helped invent modern photography, a new way of looking that pushed things to the verge of abstraction. Monasterio talks about a strategy wherein something is portrayed “devoid of filters and mannerisms of all kinds.” The question was how to make a depiction of objects, crafts, and places that was as objective as it was modern.
Luz de la modernidad shows how Weston, Modotti, and many other photographers found an eloquent and exciting answer to that question, and how Anita Brenner acted as their perfect accomplice. In addition to being a sensible and intelligent writer, Brenner was in tune with the moment, “a time when the world was beginning,” she wrote in her journal. “We believed that you could actually do something.” And clearly, they did.
María Minera is an art writer based in Mexico City.
Anita Brenner. Luz de la modernidad is on view at Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City through February 23, 2020.
The post How One Woman Helped Invent Modern Photography appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
Revisiting African Portraiture, Through the Female Gaze
Sandrine Colard and Laurence Butet-Roch examine the history of how African women have been pictured, and in turn, how they look back at the viewer.
By Laurence Butet-Roch
A double entendre is at the heart of Sandrine Colard’s latest curatorial achievement, the exhibition The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, recently on display at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The title can indeed be interpreted in two ways. Immediately, it speaks to how a woman appears to us, the spectators, in an image; what we can infer from her style, her posture, her expression. Such a reading brings forth the responsibility we have, as members of the public, in interpreting these different cues to (re)construct the identity of the sitter, and to imagine the conditions of the photographic encounter. Yet moving through the three sequential sections of the show—“The Birth of a Gaze,” which covers colonial representations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; “The Visual Soliloquy,” which focuses on the studio work of celebrated mid-century African artists, such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere; and “Self-Possessed,” which highlights the different themes that contemporary photographers on the continent explore through portraiture—another understanding emerges. It is not only the way that the women look to us, but also the way they look at us, at the photographer, and what this gaze conveys. Colard explained to me exactly how this expanded understanding of the female gaze reframes the history of the medium.
A. C. Gomes & Sons, Natives [sic] Hair Dressing, Zanzibar, Tanzania, late 19th century
Courtesy The Walther Collection and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Laurence Butet-Roch: What makes this particular moment ripe for examining the history of African portraiture through the perspective of the female gaze?
Sandrine Colard: Looking back at the role of art, including photography, in depicting African women and women of African descent is very tied to the arrival of new curators from these very communities. In the last year, there was the exhibition Aunty! African Women in the Frame, 1870 to the Present at United Photo Industries Gallery in Brooklyn, cocurated by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Catherine E. McKinley—which showed a selection of images from McKinley’s collection and centered African women—as well as Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, based on Denise Murrell’s dissertation, which started at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and traveled to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. These exhibitions, which present a different view of photographic and art history, exist because the profession is changing thanks to the diverse profiles of new curators.
And, in regards to The Way She Looks, it harks back to when I was doing my PhD in art history at Columbia University. Each time there was a discussion about a Black character in art, especially a Black female character, it always revolved around issues related to the body and its exploitation. I’m a Black woman, and most of my peers and myself don’t think of ourselves as only that, a body. When we consider this disconnect, this show is both overdue and obvious. While the question of the body remains relevant, there’s room for another history of Black women, where we see that they had (and have), even in difficult circumstances, the power of shaping the way they want to be seen.
Butet-Roch: Your notion of the female gaze includes women photographers’ visions, but also the gaze that female sitters return to the photographer. What can be learned from paying attention to the gaze of the sitters?
Colard: When you look at colonial images of African subjects from the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, only one woman is named; the rest are labeled according to their ethnographic “type.” Yet if you were to ignore the captions, and when you really look at these people—not just glance—the range of expressions and gazes is a testament to their humanity, and it completely defeats the caption that tries to reduce them to a type. In fact, it ridicules the caption. Take the image by Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin entitled Bakgatla: when you look at how this woman poses, you see that there’s a lot more to her than what the caption suggests. Of course, since we were not there and we have no account of the photo session, we’ll never know exactly how the photographic transaction went. What we do know is that the photographer was undertaking the ambitious project The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, which was conceived as an encyclopedia of ethnographic “types” and “primitive” people. Many of his photographs don’t match the anthropographic aesthetic of the time. Maybe it was because the photographer deliberately strayed away from it, or, more likely, because the women he encountered, via their gaze, refused to be reduced and encapsulated by a type.
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, Bakgatla, South Africa, early to mid 20th century
Courtesy The Walther Collection, Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and The McGregor Museum, Kimberley
Butet-Roch: Beyond revealing the complexity of the relationship between the photographer and the sitter, how do these gazes involve the viewer and interrogate the act of looking?
Colard: I really love Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the responsibility that we have toward the images, even one hundred years later. When all the images were hung on the wall, I was deeply moved, because I felt that they were looking back to ask for meaningful engagement from the viewer. I’m a strong believer that we have a responsibility to the subject, not only when we’re the photographer taking the picture, but also in regard to how we use the photos afterwards, how we present them, how we frame them, and the discourse that we build around them. I’ve had a sense that in the last few decades, we have attributed so much power to the colonial gaze. We read images from Africa through that lens only, to the point that we became blind to anything else the subject within the image was expressing.
Bearing this in mind, it was very important for me to include a historical perspective in the exhibition, because so often, when we discuss the great contemporary photographers—such as Zanele Muholi, Joana Choumali, or Aida Muluneh—they are presented as if they came out of a vacuum, that there was nothing before them. Such a timeline is not doing justice to the agency of the sitter, nor to the work of some of these artists’ predecessors. Only very recently was the photographer Felicia Abban recognized in the Western Hemisphere. She was a portraitist who had her own studio in Accra, Ghana, from the 1950s on. This changes everything, and I’m sure that more research will demonstrate that she was not the only one.
Butet-Roch: How can that expanded notion of the female gaze disrupt our understanding of the role of women in photography, on the one hand, but also our perception of African women as “powerless” in their representation?
Colard: It actually also tells us a lot about the art world. Take for instance how Seydou Keïta has become this icon and darling of the art world in the West. For the longest time, he was considered an artisan, that is until he was adopted by the art world of the West and became an artist. Yet, when subjects were stepping inside his studio, they were as much of an author as he was. They picked him to photograph them, they often chose and created the clothes they were going to wear, they brought the person with whom they wanted to be seen, and so on. Take the image of the two women that came dressed in the same way; the patterns and textiles are not trademarks of Seydou Keïta, but rather an expression of the sitters’ bonds of friendship, kinship, and solidarity. You can see this agency of the subject in the work of another African portrait photographer, Malick Sidibé. These observations contradict the Western art discourse, which tries to package him as this author who was in total control of everything he was portraying.
Butet-Roch: Why is it important to prioritize the agency of the sitter?
Colard: When we don’t recognize people, it’s very dehumanizing. Last year, the book Sexe, Race et Colonies was released. It’s a collective work featuring the analysis of respected French historians on the visual sexual exploitation of non-Western women in the French colonies. Despite its good intentions, this book insulted me. The cover of this beau-livre featured the title in neon, referencing brothels. More importantly, the texts further victimized the women photographed by failing to recognize the power they had, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of African women as powerless.
Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, Nonkululeko, from the series Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 2003
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Butet-Roch: Speaking mainly about the colonial archive component of this show, you wrote for the wall text accompanying the exhibition that it promises to bear witness “to the emergence of an African female photographic gaze and subjectivity without ignoring or erasing the harmful objectifications of the past.” This rings true for the rest of the show as well. How did you balance these two objectives—especially given that you did not want to continue giving critical attention to works that have subjugated African women—in the colonial archive section, but also in the modern and contemporary sections?
Colard: I was very intentional in my selection, looking for images that geared toward this visual exploitation of the female body, but that also provide room for further reflection. In one corner of the exhibition room, there’s an image of an odalisque-like woman. She’s paired with an image of a woman who returns a very oppositional gaze, thereby suggesting the spectrum of responses to being photographed that existed in the nineteenth century. You had all kinds of situations in the studios, from consent to coercion. I’m dedicated to demonstrating that even in the sometimes small area in which these women could express themselves, they used varied expressions to convey how they felt about the situation.
Butet-Roch: The concept of dignity reverberates throughout the exhibition. You mention it in reference to Guy Tilim’s work where the “‘subjects’ dignified bearing diverges from the norms of humanitarian ‘crisis’ photography,” as well as in relation to an 1870s portrait by Barnard that presents his sitter in the formal setting usually afforded to European subjects.
Colard: Let’s start with Guy Tilim. I hesitated about including the image Fiorinda Ngoma, Her Mother Rosalia Nahamba (Holding Baby Filomena Lasinda) and Her Sister Rosali Sindali, Holding Baby Guerra (2002) until I read the 2014 article “One hundred years of suffering? ‘Humanitarian crisis photography’ and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” by Aubrey Graham. The article touches on photojournalists in warzones and how they sometimes perpetuate the very things they think they’re denouncing. The article was written from the standpoint of the subjects. The author notes how in certain images, the women changed the way they posed if they were in front of a foreign war photographer. In that choice—deciding to pose in a certain way—there’s agency, and therefore, dignity. In this case, the young woman in the foreground brings her hand to her face, which historically, within her culture, signifies sorrow. Even if this image presents her as a victim, which in some respect she is, she also made a choice of expressing that in the way that she wanted.
Samuel Baylis Barnard, Bushwoman [sic] and Children, South Africa (Portrait of !Kweiten ta //ken), 1874–1875,
Courtesy The Walther Collection and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Butet-Roch: While in the Barnard portrait, it’s arguably the photographer’s choice of placing the subject within a formal setting that is understood, through a colonial gaze, as “elevating” her.
Colard: In this image, the woman, whose name is !kweiten ta ||ken, is not represented in the usual anthropological codes of the time, but rather according to European codes, which make her appear “dignified.” However, what I think is interesting is that it makes us reflect on how the anthropological portrait is intended to entirely dissolve the subject. The subjects are never named, so they’re not commemorated, nor even presented as individuals. They’re a type. Sometimes, the more you are imaged, the less visible you become. Images of Africans at the turn of the nineteenth century were primitivizing in order to justify the presence of the colonizer as a “civilizing” force. Yet, this image by Samuel Baylis Barnard is valorizing her aesthetically, and the fact that the caption includes her name is very charged with meaning. When you are represented as a nameless “type,” you are generalized, and in fact, you are undergoing the exact opposite of a portrait session, which seeks to seize you and no one else. Naming her is individualizing her, recognizing her uniqueness, and therefore making her the opposite of a type.
Butet-Roch: Perhaps because I read it recently, I had the following quote by bell hooks in mind when going through the exhibition: “Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sign marking the despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being.” The photographs produced by African artists from the later part of the twentieth century until now seem to heed to that call in a variety of ways. Could you speak to that?
Colard: This quote reminds me of Frederick Douglass and the double consciousness. The “benefit” of being part of a marginalized or minority community is that you always have double insights into the world around you. Even though it’s painful, this position is an extremely rich one, as we can see in the works of many contemporary artists who are using the genre of portraiture to talk about more than simply the representation and interpretation of the body. Imagine if, as a Black woman artist, I was only allowed to talk about the body. That’d be extremely restrictive. Hence, it was important for me to show the diversity of what they could do with the portrait genre, how it could be used to talk about issues that concerned them. For example, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok talks about homecoming, the uncanny, and what it is like to look at your family members as strangers when you come back from somewhere else.
Butet-Roch: Mikhael Subotzky once recounted how he and Thabiso Sekgala discussed what makes a good portrait work. He said that they both felt that it was the “duality of the subject being both present and distant” that is “engaged with the photographer and comfortable, but also pining to be somewhere else and seemingly happy to display this longing in their manner and stance.” What do you feel makes a portrait work?
Colard: Indeed, it seems that what exceeds the control of the photographer is what is of interest for me in a portrait. The unexpected is what makes the portrait work, because it needs to be a collaboration. The photographer can’t and shouldn’t have all the keys.
Laurence Butet-Roch is a photographer, writer, and educator living in Toronto. She is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental studies at York University, examining the discourses perpetuated by visual representation of environmental contamination in mainstream media.
The post Revisiting African Portraiture, Through the Female Gaze appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
Revisiting African Portrature, Through the Female Gaze
Sandrine Colard and Laurence Butet-Roch examine the history of how African women have been pictured, and in turn, how they look back at the viewer.
By Laurence Butet-Roch
A double entendre is at the heart of Sandrine Colard’s latest curatorial achievement, the exhibition The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, recently on display at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto. The title can indeed be interpreted in two ways. Immediately, it speaks to how a woman appears to us, the spectators, in an image; what we can infer from her style, her posture, her expression. Such a reading brings forth the responsibility we have, as members of the public, in interpreting these different cues to (re)construct the identity of the sitter, and to imagine the conditions of the photographic encounter. Yet moving through the three sequential sections of the show—“The Birth of a Gaze,” which covers colonial representations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; “The Visual Soliloquy,” which focuses on the studio work of celebrated mid-century African artists, such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, and J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere; and “Self-Possessed,” which highlights the different themes that contemporary photographers on the continent explore through portraiture—another understanding emerges. It is not only the way that the women look to us, but also the way they look at us, at the photographer, and what this gaze conveys. Colard explained to me exactly how this expanded understanding of the female gaze reframes the history of the medium.
A. C. Gomes & Sons, Natives [sic] Hair Dressing, Zanzibar, Tanzania, late 19th century
Courtesy The Walther Collection and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Laurence Butet-Roch: What makes this particular moment ripe for examining the history of African portraiture through the perspective of the female gaze?
Sandrine Colard: Looking back at the role of art, including photography, in depicting African women and women of African descent is very tied to the arrival of new curators from these very communities. In the last year, there was the exhibition Aunty! African Women in the Frame, 1870 to the Present at United Photo Industries Gallery in Brooklyn, cocurated by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Catherine E. McKinley—which showed a selection of images from McKinley’s collection and centered African women—as well as Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, based on Denise Murrell’s dissertation, which started at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and traveled to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. These exhibitions, which present a different view of photographic and art history, exist because the profession is changing thanks to the diverse profiles of new curators.
And, in regards to The Way She Looks, it harks back to when I was doing my PhD in art history at Columbia University. Each time there was a discussion about a Black character in art, especially a Black female character, it always revolved around issues related to the body and its exploitation. I’m a Black woman, and most of my peers and myself don’t think of ourselves as only that, a body. When we consider this disconnect, this show is both overdue and obvious. While the question of the body remains relevant, there’s room for another history of Black women, where we see that they had (and have), even in difficult circumstances, the power of shaping the way they want to be seen.
Butet-Roch: Your notion of the female gaze includes women photographers’ visions, but also the gaze that female sitters return to the photographer. What can be learned from paying attention to the gaze of the sitters?
Colard: When you look at colonial images of African subjects from the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, only one woman is named; the rest are labeled according to their ethnographic “type.” Yet if you were to ignore the captions, and when you really look at these people—not just glance—the range of expressions and gazes is a testament to their humanity, and it completely defeats the caption that tries to reduce them to a type. In fact, it ridicules the caption. Take the image by Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin entitled Bakgatla: when you look at how this woman poses, you see that there’s a lot more to her than what the caption suggests. Of course, since we were not there and we have no account of the photo session, we’ll never know exactly how the photographic transaction went. What we do know is that the photographer was undertaking the ambitious project The Bantu Tribes of South Africa, which was conceived as an encyclopedia of ethnographic “types” and “primitive” people. Many of his photographs don’t match the anthropographic aesthetic of the time. Maybe it was because the photographer deliberately strayed away from it, or, more likely, because the women he encountered, via their gaze, refused to be reduced and encapsulated by a type.
Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, Bakgatla, South Africa, early to mid 20th century
Courtesy The Walther Collection, Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and The McGregor Museum, Kimberley
Butet-Roch: Beyond revealing the complexity of the relationship between the photographer and the sitter, how do these gazes involve the viewer and interrogate the act of looking?
Colard: I really love Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the responsibility that we have toward the images, even one hundred years later. When all the images were hung on the wall, I was deeply moved, because I felt that they were looking back to ask for meaningful engagement from the viewer. I’m a strong believer that we have a responsibility to the subject, not only when we’re the photographer taking the picture, but also in regard to how we use the photos afterwards, how we present them, how we frame them, and the discourse that we build around them. I’ve had a sense that in the last few decades, we have attributed so much power to the colonial gaze. We read images from Africa through that lens only, to the point that we became blind to anything else the subject within the image was expressing.
Bearing this in mind, it was very important for me to include a historical perspective in the exhibition, because so often, when we discuss the great contemporary photographers—such as Zanele Muholi, Joana Choumali, or Aida Muluneh—they are presented as if they came out of a vacuum, that there was nothing before them. Such a timeline is not doing justice to the agency of the sitter, nor to the work of some of these artists’ predecessors. Only very recently was the photographer Felicia Abban recognized in the Western Hemisphere. She was a portraitist who had her own studio in Accra, Ghana, from the 1950s on. This changes everything, and I’m sure that more research will demonstrate that she was not the only one.
Butet-Roch: How can that expanded notion of the female gaze disrupt our understanding of the role of women in photography, on the one hand, but also our perception of African women as “powerless” in their representation?
Colard: It actually also tells us a lot about the art world. Take for instance how Seydou Keïta has become this icon and darling of the art world in the West. For the longest time, he was considered an artisan, that is until he was adopted by the art world of the West and became an artist. Yet, when subjects were stepping inside his studio, they were as much of an author as he was. They picked him to photograph them, they often chose and created the clothes they were going to wear, they brought the person with whom they wanted to be seen, and so on. Take the image of the two women that came dressed in the same way; the patterns and textiles are not trademarks of Seydou Keïta, but rather an expression of the sitters’ bonds of friendship, kinship, and solidarity. You can see this agency of the subject in the work of another African portrait photographer, Malick Sidibé. These observations contradict the Western art discourse, which tries to package him as this author who was in total control of everything he was portraying.
Butet-Roch: Why is it important to prioritize the agency of the sitter?
Colard: When we don’t recognize people, it’s very dehumanizing. Last year, the book Sexe, Race et Colonies was released. It’s a collective work featuring the analysis of respected French historians on the visual sexual exploitation of non-Western women in the French colonies. Despite its good intentions, this book insulted me. The cover of this beau-livre featured the title in neon, referencing brothels. More importantly, the texts further victimized the women photographed by failing to recognize the power they had, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of African women as powerless.
Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, Nonkululeko, from the series Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 2003
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Butet-Roch: Speaking mainly about the colonial archive component of this show, you wrote for the wall text accompanying the exhibition that it promises to bear witness “to the emergence of an African female photographic gaze and subjectivity without ignoring or erasing the harmful objectifications of the past.” This rings true for the rest of the show as well. How did you balance these two objectives—especially given that you did not want to continue giving critical attention to works that have subjugated African women—in the colonial archive section, but also in the modern and contemporary sections?
Colard: I was very intentional in my selection, looking for images that geared toward this visual exploitation of the female body, but that also provide room for further reflection. In one corner of the exhibition room, there’s an image of an odalisque-like woman. She’s paired with an image of a woman who returns a very oppositional gaze, thereby suggesting the spectrum of responses to being photographed that existed in the nineteenth century. You had all kinds of situations in the studios, from consent to coercion. I’m dedicated to demonstrating that even in the sometimes small area in which these women could express themselves, they used varied expressions to convey how they felt about the situation.
Butet-Roch: The concept of dignity reverberates throughout the exhibition. You mention it in reference to Guy Tilim’s work where the “‘subjects’ dignified bearing diverges from the norms of humanitarian ‘crisis’ photography,” as well as in relation to an 1870s portrait by Barnard that presents his sitter in the formal setting usually afforded to European subjects.
Colard: Let’s start with Guy Tilim. I hesitated about including the image Fiorinda Ngoma, Her Mother Rosalia Nahamba (Holding Baby Filomena Lasinda) and Her Sister Rosali Sindali, Holding Baby Guerra (2002) until I read the 2014 article “One hundred years of suffering? ‘Humanitarian crisis photography’ and self-representation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” by Aubrey Graham. The article touches on photojournalists in warzones and how they sometimes perpetuate the very things they think they’re denouncing. The article was written from the standpoint of the subjects. The author notes how in certain images, the women changed the way they posed if they were in front of a foreign war photographer. In that choice—deciding to pose in a certain way—there’s agency, and therefore, dignity. In this case, the young woman in the foreground brings her hand to her face, which historically, within her culture, signifies sorrow. Even if this image presents her as a victim, which in some respect she is, she also made a choice of expressing that in the way that she wanted.
Samuel Baylis Barnard, Bushwoman [sic] and Children, South Africa (Portrait of !Kweiten ta //ken), 1874–1875,
Courtesy The Walther Collection and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Butet-Roch: While in the Barnard portrait, it’s arguably the photographer’s choice of placing the subject within a formal setting that is understood, through a colonial gaze, as “elevating” her.
Colard: In this image, the woman, whose name is !kweiten ta ||ken, is not represented in the usual anthropological codes of the time, but rather according to European codes, which make her appear “dignified.” However, what I think is interesting is that it makes us reflect on how the anthropological portrait is intended to entirely dissolve the subject. The subjects are never named, so they’re not commemorated, nor even presented as individuals. They’re a type. Sometimes, the more you are imaged, the less visible you become. Images of Africans at the turn of the nineteenth century were primitivizing in order to justify the presence of the colonizer as a “civilizing” force. Yet, this image by Samuel Baylis Barnard is valorizing her aesthetically, and the fact that the caption includes her name is very charged with meaning. When you are represented as a nameless “type,” you are generalized, and in fact, you are undergoing the exact opposite of a portrait session, which seeks to seize you and no one else. Naming her is individualizing her, recognizing her uniqueness, and therefore making her the opposite of a type.
Butet-Roch: Perhaps because I read it recently, I had the following quote by bell hooks in mind when going through the exhibition: “Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. If we only view the margin as sign marking the despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being.” The photographs produced by African artists from the later part of the twentieth century until now seem to heed to that call in a variety of ways. Could you speak to that?
Colard: This quote reminds me of Frederick Douglass and the double consciousness. The “benefit” of being part of a marginalized or minority community is that you always have double insights into the world around you. Even though it’s painful, this position is an extremely rich one, as we can see in the works of many contemporary artists who are using the genre of portraiture to talk about more than simply the representation and interpretation of the body. Imagine if, as a Black woman artist, I was only allowed to talk about the body. That’d be extremely restrictive. Hence, it was important for me to show the diversity of what they could do with the portrait genre, how it could be used to talk about issues that concerned them. For example, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok talks about homecoming, the uncanny, and what it is like to look at your family members as strangers when you come back from somewhere else.
Butet-Roch: Mikhael Subotzky once recounted how he and Thabiso Sekgala discussed what makes a good portrait work. He said that they both felt that it was the “duality of the subject being both present and distant” that is “engaged with the photographer and comfortable, but also pining to be somewhere else and seemingly happy to display this longing in their manner and stance.” What do you feel makes a portrait work?
Colard: Indeed, it seems that what exceeds the control of the photographer is what is of interest for me in a portrait. The unexpected is what makes the portrait work, because it needs to be a collaboration. The photographer can’t and shouldn’t have all the keys.
Laurence Butet-Roch is a photographer, writer, and educator living in Toronto. She is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental studies at York University, examining the discourses perpetuated by visual representation of environmental contamination in mainstream media.
The post Revisiting African Portrature, Through the Female Gaze appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
How a No-Frills Zine Transformed a British Town
For ten years, Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson have celebrated the hyperlocal through their expansive photo project.
By Holly Black
From Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019
Courtesy the artist
Britain’s ubiquitous graffiti-strewn carparks, rundown bus stations, and no-frills pubs might not seem like obvious subjects for artistic scrutiny. But these seemingly innocuous places hold a special kind of magic for Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson, who started documenting them a decade ago in Preston, the northern city where both artists lived and worked at the time. Now, the pair looks over the legacy of their collaborative project with a new book, Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019, presenting a slice of the huge amount of imagery they produced.
Murray and Parkinson met through University of Central Lancashire and quickly struck up a friendship through a mutual interest in photography, identifying the city’s relative lack of visual culture—particularly compared to its music and nightlife scenes. To fill this gap, they began producing a modest black-and-white, hand-stapled zine called Preston is my Paris as a way of celebrating largely overlooked areas of the city and the people that populate them (Murray is now a lecturer at Central Saint Martins and Manchester Metropolitan University; Parkinson still mainly works as a photographer). This DIY approach included new and found photos and random bits of ephemera, collated with little editorial intervention, along with modest distribution that consisted of handing the zines out for free.
From Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019
Courtesy the artist
“It was pretty simple, there wasn’t much concept—it was just for fun!” says Parkinson, who had no background in photography and only began shooting at Murray’s suggestion. “I picked up a camera two weeks after I graduated,” he adds, “and my first roll of film was in the first zine. We learned as we went along—simple things, like the fact you need multiples of four pages. We would print out a mock-up and everything would be out of sync. We had no idea about those things.”
This small-scale project—with a self-effacing title that Murray describes as “nicked off of a Clarks shoes advert that made British cities look like exotic places”—grew a local following, thanks largely to conversations initiated by the pair as they traversed the city looking for people and places to photograph, from young clubbers to older couples like Iris and John, who were snapped following a jovial chat in the pub. “It was a form of hyperlocal social media, because people would pick up the zine to see if they or anyone they recognized was in it,” Parkinson explains.
From Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019
Courtesy the artist
Murray and Parkinson’s self-published labors of love stand out because they are born out of two individuals who really understand the city that they live in. Their celebratory approach, with plenty of subjects actively embracing the presence of the camera, eludes any sense of voyeurism; it is unselfconscious and self-assured in a way that only comes from being comfortable in your environment—and perhaps a little bit naïve. In fact, Parkinson says that he is amazed by some of the images that he made with such a fresh eye, which can be hard to replicate “once you have trained yourself out of it.”
As the zine gained traction, so did new opportunities for Preston is my Paris to become a full-fledged imprint. Within their first year of publication, Murray and Parkinson mounted an exhibition in a disused shop, holding workshops and a pop-up portrait studio and relying on local foot traffic to get the message out. They also produced a newspaper showcasing the work of photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, whose images of Preston Bus Station celebrate its Brutalist architecture and the people who travel through it every day in alluring, saturated hues. Printing a paper both allowed for full color and was a format that many in the local community were familiar with and might be more likely to pick up. “It all comes back to understanding the city and how people might engage with what you’re doing,” says Murray. “In Preston, it is not necessarily on the top of people’s priority list to seek out art and culture, but that doesn’t mean they are not interested.”
From Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019
Courtesy the artist
As far as Parkinson is concerned, Preston is my Paris—a project that has gone on to produce over forty books and numerous commissions around the world—is a far cry from the platitudes that are so often offered by museums and cultural institutions in an effort to appear locally relevant. “There’s lots of talk of ‘socially engaged’ photography, which comes across as a bit elitist,” he says, “because when you think about it, that is what all people-focused photography is. If you’re taking their photos, you’re meeting them, talking to them, and getting their stories.”
The anniversary book reflects this outlook. “We had so much material,” says Murray. “But a lot of people haven’t seen the work, so we wanted to produce an edited portfolio of images, and also include our wider reflections on the project.” As a result, they invited a range of individuals to include their thoughts on Preston is my Paris and its legacy, including Jamie Hawkesworth (whose photos are featured) and Iris Lunt, who became a subject after she met the pair in her local pub. While their personal accounts exemplify the intimate, friendly atmosphere that Preston is my Paris fostered, City Council Leader Matthew Brown takes a broader view, commenting on the zine’s ability to capture “the reality of life in our city at that time,” as well as the changes the area has endured over the last decade.
From Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019
Courtesy the artist
For Murray and Parkinson, the new publication offers a chance to look back, but also to gain new audiences, who will hopefully feel inspired by the project. “One of the main purposes was to encourage people in Preston to do more. They might like what we’ve done or hate it, but either way, the hope was that it would encourage them to do their own thing,” says Murray. Parkinson echoes this sentiment: “We want people to really see the area. There’s something interesting in any town in Britain, you’ve just got to find it.”
Holly Black is a freelance arts journalist based in London and an editor at large at Elephant magazine
Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson’s Preston is my Paris: 2009–2019 was published by Dashwood Books in November 2019. More information about the project can be found on the Preston is my Paris website.
The post How a No-Frills Zine Transformed a British Town appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.
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