Aperture's Blog, page 77

Aperture Releases New Edition of Josef Koudelka’s Seminal Photobook, “Gypsies”

Koudelka’s foundational body of work offers an intimate glimpse into Europe’s Roma communities.

Josef Koudelka, Slovakia, 1967
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

In 1962, Czech French photographer Josef Koudelka began documenting the everyday lives of Europe’s Roma communities. Carrying only his equipment and a rucksack, Koudelka would spend the next decade moving between different Roma settlements and villages in then-Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain. His resulting images offered an intimate glimpse into these largely marginalized communities, exploring themes of alienation and displacement.

Josef Koudelka, Romania, 1968
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

In 1975, Aperture and Josef Koudekla collaborated with French publisher Robert Delpire to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies in the English-language edition), a tightly edited sequence of sixty black-and-white photographs made between 1962–71 in various Roma settlements. In the book, curator John Szarkowski wrote, “Koudelka’s pictures seem to concern themselves with prototypical rituals, and a theater of ancient and unchangeable fables. Their motive is perhaps not psychological but religious. Perhaps they describe not the small and cherished differences that distinguish each of us from all others, but the prevailing circumstance that encloses us.”

Josef Koudelka, Slovakia, 1966
© Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

In 2011, Aperture released a new extended version of Gypsies. This revised and enlarged edition included 109 images from Koudelka’s series Cik´ni, lavishly printed in a unique quadratone mix by Gerhard Steidl. Unlike the traditional horizontal format of Delpire’s book, with only one photograph per right-hand page, the extended edition’s layout is much closer to Koudelka’s original maquette from 1968, prepared with graphic designer Milan Kopriva, and includes full-height vertical pictures and horizontals spread across two pages.

From left: Gypsies, 1975; Gypsies expanded edition, 2011; Gypsies mini paperback edition, 2019

Today, Gypsies remains a seminal photobook of the twentieth century. This fall, Aperture once again revisits this series in a new mini paperback edition, making the foundational body of work newly accessible to the larger public. Roma scholar and sociologist Will Guy, who wrote for both the 1975 and 2011 editions, updates his analysis of the condition of the Roma today, including recent upheavals in Europe. Stuart Alexander, photo historian and newly appointed editor in chief of Delpire Éditeur, contributes a brief historiography of the evolution of the body of work in book form. In his introduction, Alexander writes of the importance of Koudelka’s continued examination of this work: “Unlike most photographers, Koudelka has refined the presentation of an early body of work over a fifty-year period. In widely varying formats, he has modified the sequence and presentation to achieve the greatest impact of his intentions. As with any work of art, it is up to the viewer to complete the interpretation.”

Click here to purchase Gypsies.

The post Aperture Releases New Edition of Josef Koudelka’s Seminal Photobook, “Gypsies” appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Gabriel Orozco Isn’t Interested in the Decisive Moment

For the Mexican artist, it’s all about the sculptural form—sweat, shadows, futons, and tortillas. (Visita gatopardo.com para leer este artículo en español.)

By María Minera

Gabriel Orozco, Buddha and Lemon, 2013
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

Walter Benjamin described Eugène Atget as a photographer who “always passed by the ‘great sights and so-called landmarks’” but instead was attentive to “a long row of boot lasts … or tables after people have finished eating and left, the dishes not yet cleared away.” We could go on: nor would he overlook a flowery carpet hanging from a window to dry under the sun, or a bakery display with piled-up bread forming peculiar geometric patterns. That is, Atget was the rare kind of photographer who was interested not in human beings, but rather in the traces they left in the world.

An artist like Gabriel Orozco fits comfortably into this category. Instead of following in the steps of Mexican photographers dedicated, above all, to trying to penetrate “the country’s soul”—as French Surrealist André Breton would say—by means of its people, Orozco focuses on the footprints of those people, or of others abroad, as he is a tireless traveler. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, in Los agachados (The crouched ones, 1934), portrays a group of laborers wearing ragged and dusty clothes, sitting on benches chained to the bar of an old diner. The men have their backs to the camera and the shadow produced by the metal curtain of the place cuts off their faces, making them appear crouched (with the double meaning of agachado because it refers also to people who allow themselves to be subdued).

Gabriel Orozco, Nubes de espuma, 2014
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

Orozco, in turn, creates an image, Sillas de espera (Waiting chairs, 1998), that could almost be the same image, except in his work everyone is gone. On a visit to India, he captured a row of four empty plastic chairs, each one positioned under a dark circle on the wall—marks left by the sweaty heads of individuals who have waited sitting on those chairs throughout the years, now almost replaced by their own ghosts who sit patiently in that deserted space. In his approach, Orozco resembles Atget, preferring to show an unpopulated world, where there are only vestiges of human life.

The significant difference is that, for Orozco, all these traces function, above all, as sculptural matter. The photographic image is secondary. What primarily interests him is what is happening not as a photographic instant, but as a form. To him, that shot of a waiting room in India is only indirectly photographic. One could call it collateral, in that it accompanies a sculptural event.

Gabriel Orozco, Pollo pescuezo, 2016
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

Since the beginning of his career, back in the 1980s, Orozco saw himself as an artist whose working materials were not inside an atelier but rather out on the street. The type of sculpture that seemed possible to him was not made with a chisel, but discovered in the configurations taking place randomly in the world, without the artist’s intervention—or, at most, subtle intervention. Like that mattress left on a sidewalk (Futon Homeless, 1992), which the artist perceives as a sculpture not because of its being a mass—which it is—but rather for the way it is rolled up on itself to the point of completely challenging the idea of a mattress as an object used to sleep on, and turning it into some sort of involuntary Henry Moore sculpture left to its fate on a New York street. Yet, Orozco does not take the mattress into an exhibition space—first of all, because he would need a moving truck. Rather, he takes a photograph that, while being a sign of something we can perceive happening in the real world, is also a signaling: literally, a way of pointing out that peculiar organization of matter in space, which is nothing but sculptural.

And, as a matter of fact, he sometimes decides to alter what is happening in order to precisely highlight the condition of an object. Another example, Tortillas y ladrillos (Tortillas and bricks, 1990): next to a gas cylinder, the artist finds a series of piled-up bricks. This composition could have been enough to him; these volumes of clay have sculptural traits on their own but, at the same time, lack specificity: they are nothing but towers of ordinary bricks, like the ones you would see anywhere. The artist then proceeds to place a tortilla on top of each pile. A minimal gesture, but one that gives the scene that strangeness, bringing together, at the same time—as Benjamin would say—the absence of intention and the most absolute intentionality.

Gabriel Orozco, Knife on Glass, 2000
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

But is photography then not the work itself but a mere record? “It is the work indeed,” says Orozco. “As, in some cases, it is the only way I have to present something, an idea, an experience. I do not use an image as a ‘patronizing’ document intending to show something important to the others. . . . That doesn’t interest me. My intention is that the image presents itself as a chair, a tree, a fact: it is there.” The thing is: that which “is there” is indeed there, but in an unsustainable present outside the photographic image. That is to say, it does not operate in the same way as does a statue in the park, which will be there every time you return. Orozco’s statues are only there when he sees them. Afterward, they disappear, like that egg (Sunny Side Up, 2015) that has just been poured on a plate, which most probably ended up fried and in someone’s stomach. However, for a few seconds, that sunny-side up could boast of being a colorful, viscous planet. Here we are seeing an image act as a transportable doppelgänger of a momentary sculpture.

It is the photographic image that allows us to put ourselves in the sculptor’s place and see what he saw, from where he saw it. The gravity-defying knife in Knife on Glass (2000) is there, floating in the air, but only if one looks at it from a very precise angle. Look a few centimeters beyond, and the trick of the glass that holds it is revealed. In that sense, photography can be seen as a second act that, while closely participating in the creation of the form, does not stop being an ulterior reflection that adds, through its unique point of view, a new condition of possibility to the work. To Orozco, not only does photography capture, but it also sculpts.

Gabriel Orozco, Piñanona en el muro, 2013
Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

Orozco’s work is about identifying the sculptural quality of certain spontaneous formations in space, and also about creating structures that express their sculptural value only when being captured. Nowhere does this become clearer than in Piñanona en el muro (Piñanona in the wall, 2013), an image in which the sculpture is made half of leaves, half of shadow, something that could by no means translate into sculptural volumes due to the elusive nature of the shadow. One begins to understand what Orozco has said about photography: that rather than a window, it is “like a ‘space’ that tries to capture situations.” This is how his images are to be seen: as receptacles of transient and fragile, nonetheless forceful, material incidents.

María Minera is an art writer based in Mexico City. Translated from the Spanish by Enrique Pérez Rosiles.

Read more from Aperture issue 236, “Mexico City,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Gabriel Orozco Isn’t Interested in the Decisive Moment appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Laura Aguilar Was a Proud Latina Lesbian, and She Flaunted It

What do the late artist’s emotional photo-text letters reveal about the craft of self-expression?

By Yxta Maya Murray

Laura Aguilar, Personal letter to Pat Martel, October 5, 1992
Courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

In September 1982, then-twenty-three-year-old photographer Laura Aguilar wrote a letter to her teacher and mentor Suda House. “Im not sure do you feel or do you learn how to feel?” she wondered,

And went you learn how to feel is that really how you feel or is it what you learn? Went your not sure about your feelings or how you feel about people and things. How do you know what you feel and what you think you feel is how you feel? How do you learn to understand things you don’t understand?

This letter, along with a large cache of others, is stored today in Stanford University’s Special Collections, which houses many of Aguilar’s papers and ephemera. In these and other documents, Aguilar expresses her anguish over her perceived inability to understand herself and other people, and over whether others could understand her. They form a key part of Aguilar’s oeuvre, as they document emotions and practices that would help shape a critical phase in her artistic development. From roughly 1988 to 1993, Aguilar became one of the most radical innovators of “photo-text,” a style that she embraced in order to confront her anxieties about being overlooked and misconstrued. Aguilar experienced auditory dyslexia, which caused her to write in a unique style; she also wrestled with fears of misunderstanding and being misunderstood as a consequence of her Mexicanness, her lesbianism, her large physical size, and her poverty. Together, the letters constitute a feminist photobook, detailing Aguilar’s interior life and marking her as a photo-text pioneer.

Laura Aguilar was born in 1959 to Mexican American and Irish Mexican American parents; she was raised with her older brother Johnny in the Los Angeles County neighborhood of South San Gabriel. As art historian Sybil Venegas has documented in an oral history, Aguilar formed one of her closest relationships with her grandmother, Mary Salgado Grisham, who often brought her to a local river where they would collect rocks and study the natural landscape. A young girl with a learning disability and a queer identity, Aguilar grew up in a hostile environment, and her parents did not always support her artistic leanings. (The first major study of dyslexia would not be published until the 1960s, and California would not begin to dismantle its anti-sodomy laws until 1976—in 1986, the United States Supreme Court upheld such statutes’ constitutionality, a ruling that lasted until 2003.)

Laura Aguilar, Personal letter to Joyce Tenneson, September 7, 1991
Courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Aguilar attended East Los Angeles College. There, a teacher told her that she was wasting her time trying to be an artist when she could not even read. Aguilar transferred to Pasadena City College, which had a better program for people with learning difficulties, but she was already experiencing intense feelings about her fraught relationships with language and people. In a 1983 paper that she wrote for a Pasadena composition class, Aguilar confessed: “I don’t know why I even deny the fact that I have a learning disability. I know better than anyone else that I do . . . . All I ever saw was that I am inadequate it hurts to much to admit to anyone.”

People with auditory dyslexia have difficulty processing the basic sounds of language, and the syndrome can result in a strained reading process. In a 2009 study, psychologists concluded that dyslexic people who have issues with self-esteem are more likely to experience emotional and behavioral problems—a perhaps unsurprising finding that Aguilar herself, in an undated videotape titled Work In Progress, commented on in blunter terms: “No matter how hard I try I can’t prove I that understand things in a way that you need to in this society. . . . when you’re at a function and people have nametags on and I’ve met them before and the nametag’s right there and I can’t read it, and I hate myself . . . I want to die.”

What is surprising is that a person with this fractured rapport with writing would choose to incorporate text so prominently into her artwork. In 1987, Aguilar embarked on her Latina Lesbians series, a suite of black-and-white portraits of queer Latinas framed by large white margins that contain notes written by the subjects. Carla Barboza (1987), for example, portrays a fit woman sitting in a wing chair while smoking a cigarette and wearing stylish black boots. Beneath the image, Barboza wrote in clean, black-inked cursive: “I used to worry about being different. Now I realize my differences are my strengths.” Similarly, in Cookie (1987), we see a dramatic, curly haired woman clutching her chest. In exclamation point-inflected script, Cookie inscribed: “I am a proud Latina Lesbiana and I do flaunt it.”

Laura Aguilar, Personal letter to Joyce Tenneson, September 7, 1991
Courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Aguilar incorporated writing into her art even as her reading problems made her feel “inadequate” and suicidal; this choice creates tension and even mystery in her work. In May 1987, Aguilar offered some insight into her methods in a letter to photographer Jim Goldberg, who created the landmark series Rich and Poor (1977–85), black-and-white images of San Franciscans living on either side of the economic divide, with notes written by the subjects. Aguilar’s association with Goldberg indicates his influence on her, but she reflected on her independent motivation for combining words and images in this beguiling passage:

The series is called Latina Lesbian . . . [It shows] a positive image of Latina Lesbian . . . its hard when I have had a lot of years of thinking of myself as being mexican as being negative as being inferior I do feel poud of my culture and who I am but the past and the past thinking and feeling is still around it take time for the hart heart and the bring brain to get together and belive at the same time and truly belive. So the only to say something about being Latina and a Lesbian through photos was to add language.

What was the “something” that Aguilar was trying to say? When Aguilar embarked on her photo-text work, she became part of an artistic heritage radiant with luminaries who joined words and images, such as Goldberg, André Breton, W.G. Sebald, Carrie Mae Weems, Martha Rosler, and Lorna Simpson, to name a few. Goldberg used words and images to humanize economic inequality, Breton did so as part of his Surrealist project (Nadja, 1928), Sebald to confound his readers about the nature of reality (Emigrants, 1992; Austerlitz, 2001), Weems to punctuate atrocities committed against Black people (From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995; Colored People, 1989–90), Rosler to reflect on photography’s inadequacies (The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, 1974–75), and Simpson to narrate her complex studies of the Black female experience (Necklines, 1989). Aguilar’s letters underscore that she pursued the marriage of script and photo to fulfill social projects akin to those of Goldberg, Rosler, Weems, and Simpson—she engaged photo-text to bring the heart and the brain together to generate positive images of her sisters.

Laura Aguilar, Personal letter to Joyce Tenneson, September 7, 1991
Courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Still, Aguilar’s letters unveil such a thrashed relationship with written texts that they offer proof that in making this work, she tried to smash public stereotypes but simultaneously strove to cope with very private harms. In connecting her beloved photography with the threats of written script, she hurtled toward the very thing that she feared would destroy her.

In 1990, Aguilar wrote a letter to her close friend Pat Martel, in which she described how she felt: “lest then [less than]. . . knowing that to pick up a book and to be ably to read it and . . . knowing that I have this Lim A ta tion that stop me that eat at me and that at time turn into hate.” In January 1992, Aguilar sent Martel another letter, written on glossy photo paper and illustrated with ghostly images of stone angels from her ongoing Cemeteries series (1990–96): “I felt like killing myself again Im anger cause what made me get out of this place was cause I had to fight again deg deep? [dig deep] my feet down and fight Im anger for always having to fight for myself.”

Aguilar’s torment certainly did not come solely from reading problems, but also from her poverty and health. In 1991, she was diagnosed with diabetes—which would kill her in 2018. She suffered intensely as a result of the deaths of her mother and brother, and, as her later work would show, of her feelings of invisibility in the art world. (Her doctor prescribed helpful antidepressants that she feared would be taken from her when her insurance ran out.) Aguilar used letters as a laboratory to express her rages in the language that she both loved and feared, and to see how her writings paired with her images. As her friend and estate administrator, photographer Christopher Velasco, remembers: “Laura told me that her Letters were her way to express herself because it was so hard to explain to people in person, because she was so shy to say it in person. It was another way to showcase her work to her friends and artists she admired.”

Laura Aguilar, Personal letter to Pat Martel, January 20, 1992
Courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Aguilar’s most famous photo-text work may be her incendiary four-photo series Don’t Tell Her Art Can’t Hurt (1993), which shows Aguilar brandishing a gun; as the pictures progress, she removes her clothing and sticks the barrel into her mouth and closes her eyes. At the bottom of the photos, she wrote a narrative about being shut out of the art world: “The believing can pull at one’s soul. So much that one wants to give up.”

But these photos had an earlier airing—as illustrations in an October 1992 letter to Martel. Here, Aguilar told the story of how, at the opening of her group show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a rich white woman insultingly ignored her. These feelings of inaudibility developed into a more generalized anxiety that motivated her to pantomime her own suicide: “I feel a lot of pain Im scared of losting my grip.” Her handwriting sprawls all around the pictures. The letters engage a propulsive use of text to underscore both Aguilar’s feelings of fragility as well as her talent for leveraging her supposed weaknesses into unforgettable representations.

The letters and essays that Aguilar wrote from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s show her contending with intense mental suffering, both caused and expressed by language. In Latina Lesbians and Don’t Tell Her, and in the letters where she practiced photo-text, Aguilar dealt with her fears and her disability at the same time. They are acts of survival, experimentation, and courage. But at some point, Aguilar had a breakthrough.

Laura Aguilar, Personal letter to Joyce Tenneson, February 22, 1993
Courtesy the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

In a November 1993 letter to photographer and teacher Joyce Tenneson—which Aguilar illustrated with more images from her Cemeteries series—Aguilar wrote about her burgeoning work with nude self-portraiture, which began around 1990. During this process, Aguilar began to feel differently about herself:

I think a lot about why I photography myself nude I know it started at a place of shame . . . before I don’t think I really every look at myself no one else look at me notice me so I just pick up that I don’t exist. . . . Now somedays I find myself just standing there looking at myself naked in front of the mirror thinking, looking to find something new to photography and there come this big smile on my face and I think yes you are crazy and its ok.

It would be too much to say that Aguilar’s work with nude self-portraiture created an immediate transformation that allowed her to freely read herself. Nevertheless, the feelings of self-acceptance and happiness that she first began to experience during these sessions later blossomed into her series Clothed/Unclothed (1991–94), which shows lovers and families in states of dress and undress.

These later branched into masterpieces, which depict Aguilar nude in the natural landscapes that harken back to her riverside musings with her grandmother—Nature Self-Portrait (1996), Stillness (1999), and Motion (1999). The photographs reveal Aguilar and her friends wandering loose and exultant through the deserts and woods; they are very beautiful. These images contain no text at all.

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

The post Laura Aguilar Was a Proud Latina Lesbian, and She Flaunted It appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Introducing: Garrett Grove

Against the backdrop of the US presidential election, a photographer documents growing cultural tensions in the Pacific Northwest’s rural communities.

By Cassidy Paul

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Jack’s Cowboy Hat), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

On a snowy night, against a midnight-blue sky, a single cowboy hat flies above a landscape of trees. The camera’s flash freezes a dizzying array of snowflakes dancing around it, resembling confetti bursting from a magician’s hat thrown up during a magic trick. It was the first photograph I saw from Garrett Grove’s series Errors of Possession—and I was hooked.

As a native to the Pacific Northwest, I was drawn to Grove’s portrayal of the region’s rural towns and communities. Though the area is widely seen as liberal and strictly blue, a larger cultural and political divide exists between the eastern and western sides. Growing up, we called this the “Cascade curtain,” referring to the dividing line through Washington, Oregon, and Northern California made by the Cascade Mountains.

Born in California, Grove’s family moved to the Pacific Northwest at an early age, settling north of Seattle. He went on to receive his MFA in photography from the University of Hartford in Connecticut, before moving back West and settling in Skagit Valley, Washington. “I have always been more drawn to rural communities, even though I wasn’t raised in one,” he says. “I am much more at ease in a natural environment with more wide-open spaces.”

In the years leading up to and following the 2016 US presidential election, Grove began photographing in and around small coastal, farming, and logging towns in Oregon and Washington. Despite being made against that backdrop, Errors of Possession (2015–17) features no direct political imagery of the controversial event, instead offering a more poetic look at the growing cultural tensions alongside an economic and agricultural depression. “With the election gaining momentum, it was apparent that the polarization of our country was making this divide bigger, and I wanted to travel between these two psychological realities,” Grove says.

Initially inspired by early black-and-white archival photographs of agriculture and industry workers during the cultivation of the American West, Grove intentionally plays within the documentary genre. By setting classical, black-and-white images alongside color photographs often taken with a harsh flash, he assembles images that are anxious, humorous, strange, and deeply ambiguous. Tracks in a field create extraterrestrial-like symbols, a man slides down a mountain of potatoes, halos of light outline a mother and daughter, and lines of men and women walk through abandoned fields. Although the world Grove captures features familiar scenes of the American West, each frame gives the sensation that something is not quite right. “I am interested in taking the viewer into a psychological state filled with unknowns and non-answers,” he says.

Bryan Schutmaat, photographer and publisher of Trespasser Books, which recently released a photobook of this series, was drawn to the sublime yet perplexing quality of Grove’s images. “In the grandeur of the American West, [Grove] points out little oddities that are often poignant or humorous. His look into the Northwest relays disappearing wilderness, transformed agricultural land, and people among it who are rugged and peculiar,” Schutmaat says. “It does what work in this American genre does best—tells us in a unique voice what we’ve done to the landscape and to each other.”

Errors of Possession captures a moment of unrest and shifting landscapes and mythologies. “I don’t think it provides any answers, but it does take the confusion that I was—and am—feeling and infuses it into the work,” Grove says. “I’d hope that this work offers a new way of looking at and thinking about the American dream.”

Garrett Grove, Untitled (José & Potatoes), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Farmers & Scientists), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Spinning Brodies), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Honeycrisp), 2015, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Man & Combine), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Okanogan Complex), 2015, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Crystal & Daughter), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

Garrett Grove, Untitled (Man & Lumber), 2016, from the series Errors of Possession

Cassidy Paul is the social media editor of Aperture Foundation. All images courtesy the artist.

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

The post Introducing: Garrett Grove appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Announcing the Winners of the 2019 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. “At Paris Photo, the photobook is thriving, and in the eight years that we have partnered with Aperture Foundation, we have seen a tremendous evolution in the field with a multiplicity of new forms and diverse content,” said Paris Photo director Florence Bourgeois and artistic director Christoph Wiesner. “We are proud to play a role in the recognition of these authors and publishers, and to bring together the photography community in celebration of this art form.”

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

Enghelab Street, A Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983

Hannah Darabi

Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany, and LE BAL, Paris

Iranian artist Hannah Darabi’s catalogue Enghelab Street, a Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983 (Spector Books, Leipzig, Germany, and LE BAL, Paris), winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year, is a comprehensive and smartly designed book about books, pinpointing the burst of photobook production in Iran between the fall of the Shah’s regime in 1979 and the postrevolutionary introduction of the Islamic State in 1983. Irene Attinger described the book as an important addition to the narrative of the photobook with its focus on underground protest and propaganda books in Iran. “It’s a critical work by a female artist and scholar; it brings together specialized research and an artist perspective with a very strong design.”

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Sohrab Hura

The Coast

UGLY DOG (self-published), New Delhi, India

The Coast (UGLY DOG [self-published], New Delhi, India), winner of PhotoBook of the Year, is Indian photographer Sohrab Hura’s fourth photobook. The unsettling and graphic nature of the images alludes to rampant violence—religious, caste, sexual, or otherwise—and the increasing normalization of it. The images follow a propulsive, if elusive, narrative that guides the book using the structure of repetition. Nina Strand spoke highly of The Coast for its presentation “almost as a novel or a thriller in its format, cover, and design; it’s a photobook that works on the same level as a challenging work of fiction.” The jury was also impressed with the adept use of repetition in the sequence and structure of the book; Emma Bowkett praised it as “a lyrical, political narrative with a strong, determined voice.”

Winner of First PhotoBook ($10,000 prize)

Gao Shan

The Eighth Day

Imageless, Wuxi, China

Gao Shan is a Chinese photographer who was adopted eight days after he was born. The Eighth Day (Imageless, Wuxi, China), winner of the First PhotoBook Award, was born out of his desire to connect with his adoptive mother, who he shares a roughly-seventy-square-meter apartment with. Shan was praised for the simple yet thoughtful and emotionally potent design and sequence. Takashi Homma observed that while the work appears on one hand to be straightforward documentary, it also employs “performative and conceptual approaches in a sophisticated way.” As Homma noted, “This is someone who seems to know their history of photography and photobooks. I would like to see his next book!”

Juror’s Special Mention

Drew Nikonowicz

This World and Others Like It

Fw:Books, Amsterdam, and Yoffy Press, Atlanta

This World and Others Like It (Fw:Books, Amsterdam, and Yoffy Press, Atlanta), the Jurors’ Special Mention, showcases Drew Nikonowicz’s ongoing exploration of the divide between traditional and emerging modes of photography. Osei Bonsu described it as “a strong example of an artist working at the interstices of art and science, asking pertinent questions about photography in the contemporary world.”

A final jury at Paris Photo selected this year’s winners. The jury included: Irene Attinger, curator; Osei Bonsu, curator of international art at Tate Modern; Emma Bowkett, director of photography at FT Weekend Magazine; Takashi Homma, artist; and Nina Strand, editor and founder, Objektiv Press.

This year’s shortlist selection was made by Amanda Maddox, associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Joanna Milter, director of photography at the New Yorker, Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, Lesley A. Martin, creative director of Aperture Foundation and publisher of The PhotoBook Review, and Christoph Wiesner, artistic director of Paris Photo.

The shortlist was first announced on Aperture Online and at the New York Art Book Fair. The thirty-five selected photobooks are profiled in issue 017 of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture Foundation’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook. Copies will be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore. Subscribers to Aperture magazine receive free copies of The PhotoBook Review with their summer and winter issues.

The post Announcing the Winners of the 2019 PhotoBook Awards appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Tania Franco Klein’s Magic Spells

Inspired by Mexico City’s Sonora Market, the photographer’s cinematic new series depicts an unshakeable belief in enchantment. (Visita gatopardo.com para leer este artículo en español.)

By Chloe Aridjis

Tania Franco Klein, Mercado de Sonora, 2019, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

Many of Tania Franco Klein’s photographs depict female figures who seem lost in the vastness of an inhospitable landscape or in a moment of contemplation, the edges of the self contained within those of a geometrical interior. Her images are bathed in a warm cinematic light, boudoir red, and suffused with a Lynchian sense of menace—they resemble film stills taken midnarrative, though it’s unclear whether the climactic moment has yet taken place.

For her newest series, Mercado de Sonora (2019), Franco Klein focuses her gaze for the first time, after many photographic projects abroad, on her native Mexico. In the past, she has often donned a wig and turned the camera on herself; in this body of work, her mother and grandmother become the models in an extended form of self-portraiture that captures the ways in which beliefs are passed from generation to generation.

The Mercado de Sonora, a vast traditional market in southeast Mexico City, is a space, Franco Klein explains, where class boundaries dissolve: a cross-section of society, from the house servant to the industrialist’s wife, comes here to find esoteric cures. The politics of the marketplace are evident in its gender distribution: women sell spells, men sell animals. For alongside the stalls of abracadabra and Santa Muerte figurines is a squirming menagerie of trafficked wildlife, a vast array of fauna crammed into cages, heaped on one another, struggling for air and space. Around 70 percent of creatures transported to the market die en route, and those that survive often meet their end in a gruesome Santeria ritual or, in the case of the more exotic species, as pets to narco juniors. For decades, authorities have turned a blind eye toward this lucrative hub of illegal trafficking.

Tania Franco Klein, Mercado de Sonora, 2019, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

Because of the rampant criminal activity, photography at the market is strictly forbidden. Franco Klein decided to shift the context and bring the spells, the promises being sold, into a more private realm, in order to explore what happens once these products are taken home. In doing so, she has created spaces of longing and atmospheric ambiguity, where every detail is freighted with forensic significance. Over and over, the viewer is invited to imagine the psychodrama unfolding within.

In one disquieting photograph, a hand appears to hold down the shoulder of a woman in a silky dress and black wig, while the other hand runs an egg over her head as part of a limpia, or spiritual cleansing, the negative energy extracted condensing into shadow. Elsewhere, the components of an abandoned magic spell are strewn across a carpeted floor in a palette of dusky reds and greens—a small voodoo doll, a lock of hair, a burnt candle. Nearby, the feet of a woman soak in a green bowl; it’s unclear whether this is part of the ritual. Another photograph shows three perfume bottles, one resting on a two-hundred-peso note, on a linoleum floor; meeting them head-on is the white shoe of a woman. Both images suggest a schism between the magical product and the human subject, an abyss between expectation and fulfillment.

Tania Franco Klein, Mercado de Sonora, 2019, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

Animals, the most troubling “items” for sale at the Mercado de Sonora, feature in the two darkest photographs. A piglet perches on a table covered by a red cloth; it stares at the camera, accompanied only by its shadow, like a stage prop missing its magician. In the other, a green velvet sofa is juxtaposed with the curled tail of a (presumably dead) crocodile. Torn from their habitats, these animals, decontextualized in the marketplace, appear now even further estranged from nature.

The most hopeful composition—should faith be correlative to levels of brightness—shows a green soap and its box, which bears the words Ven a mi (Come to me), resting on a bathroom shelf alongside a plastic green comb and a bright red dustpan. The playful primary color scheme, set against a blue-tiled wall, evokes an optimism absent from the murky incertitude elsewhere.

Throughout this series of lyrical and unsettling mise-en-scènes, Franco Klein deconstructs the human subject and the magic charm. Female figures—defamiliarized by wigs or disembodied—interact with spells that have also, in some way, become fragmented. In our Mexico, a country beset by violence, poverty, and environmental crisis, these images depict an unshakable belief in enchantment, however tenuous its promise.

Tania Franco Klein, Mercado de Sonora, 2019, for Aperture
Courtesy the artist

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican writer based in London and the author, most recently, of the novel Sea Monsters (2019).

Read more from Aperture issue 236, “Mexico City,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Tania Franco Klein’s Magic Spells appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

What is a Feminist Photobook?

Carmen Winant on feminism, photobooks, and the radical gestures of world-building.

Centerfold by Carmen Winant for The PhotoBook Review, Issue 017, 2019

Carmen Winant, the guest editor of the latest issue of The PhotoBook Review, is an alchemist when it comes to books—her practice as an artist is one of creation and transformation, an Ouroborus in which printed material is both created and destroyed. In the following conversation, I am joined by my colleague and contributing editor Brendan Embser, who has worked closely with Winant on other projects for Aperture. We spoke to her by phone as this particular issue developed, to talk about how her thoughts about bookmaking have been informed by her deeply held commitment to feminism and a critical approach to the depiction of women via the photographic image.—Lesley A. Martin

Brendan Embser: Carmen, two years ago, you and I were at a symposium on feminism and image making at the FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati, and we were discussing this idea of “emergency feminism”—basically the idea that we all have to be feminists now. I wanted to start there, and ask you how you’re feeling about feminism right now, especially in relation to art, photography, and books.

Carmen Winant: That’s not a small question! I am of many minds about where I see feminism now. On one hand, I feel, as I did then, really energized by the cross-generational commitment of people, not just women—but of all people, and ranging in age—to this thing that we call feminism. I understand feminism to have, in some sense, risen from the dead; it’s no longer seen as pass. to call yourself a feminist. And that is what we need: bodies in the room working toward coalition. On the other hand, there is a certain radicality that has, in my opinion, become rather dilute. We no longer have an agenda of “liberation.” We no longer understand world-building to be a part of the picture. That was once the feminist imperative, to believe that another world was possible.

Lesley A. Martin: I’m interested in your use of the word world-building. I’m curious, especially, about its application to art, photography, even to bookmaking.

Winant: One thing that my current project, Notes on Fundamental Joy [Printed Matter, 2019], has taught me is that imagination belongs to organizers and policy-makers as much as to artists: the act of world-building is nuanced, messy, and to collaborative. As an artist and art educator, I am intent on pushing my students to access channels of their own imagination. And that means not only to imagine superficially—a shape or a color—but to be sensitive to their world, imagining whole new systems that don’t exist, or could exist in parallel. Working on this book, which is comprised of photographs made by lesbian separatist artists in the early 1980s, enabled me to witness a kind of imagination I’d never seen, a literal world-building. These projects—the aesthetic work of imagining, and the political work of imagining—are indelibly connected. It’s no coincidence that the women/womyn in this book were artists and feminists, were world-builders and separatists. All of those things remain connected in a functional sense.

Carol Newhouse, Untitled, from Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression though the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us (Printed Matter, 2019)
© Carol Newhouse; Courtesy the artist

Embser: Lesley and I were excited to work with you on this issue, in part because of your attention to the history of women in photography, and pictures of women in your own artworks. But we also wanted to ask how you make photobooks, and how you have been thinking about making “feminist” photobooks.

Winant: In her book Living a Feminist Life, the writer Sara Ahmed qualifies the feminist movement as both a philosophical and an embodied movement; something that can move between people and something that physically moves people. What occupies that potential more than books? They can be shared, packed up and moved between countries, sent cheaply in the mail. Feminists have long been inclined to making books, leaflets, and pamphlets; this way of working runs hand in hand with, as Ahmed said, an agenda of the movement.

In terms of my own work, I make feminist books about women’s lives, largely in relationship to what we might call sexual politics. I’ve been particularly interested lately in the potential of women’s imaginations. I am perpetually thinking about how photobooks function to transmute, or fail to transmute, our agendas and our insides.

Our work in this issue orbits these ideas, probing this question: what is a feminist photobook? What do we do with a feminist photobook?

Carmen Winant, My Birth (Image Text Ithaca Press and SPBH Editions, 2018)

Martin: In your own work, you’re also using books as source material. There’s a tension between the physical and the symbolic that plays itself out in the book form. Is this important and where do you find this imagery?

Winant: People often assume that either I’m printing images out myself, finding them on the internet or in magazines. But for My Birth [Image Text Ithaca Press and SPBH Editions, 2018] and this new book, it is important to me that they originate as bound, physical objects—which I’m undoing in order to make a new physical thing. The books are truly destroyed by the time that I’m done with them. In that sense, there’s a strange cycle of destruction and regeneration. It’s a private thing that occurs in the studio, from book to book to book. It’s not without some sadness that I destroy some of the books, if I’m being perfectly honest.

That physicality is important, because that’s how I read books, especially books of images. They have a feel, a texture. They have patina. When I was working with Bruno Ceschel of Self Publish, Be Happy, he finally said to me, “Just make something in the studio. Put together a book the way you would produce something with your hands, in the way that your cuts would be uneven, your placement would be off-center, and we’ll reproduce that as the book without interference.” That was really liberating, and frankly, opened up some possibilities for me in what bookmaking could be.

Honey Lee Cottrell, Untitled, from Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression though the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us (Printed Matter, 2019)
© Honey Lee Cottrell; Courtesy the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

Martin: I do think that trace of the human hand is something that comes up a lot in feminist work, and I’m wondering how you see that as a feminist gesture as well as a practical matter—that you end up seeing the tape on the page or the jagged edges of the appropriated images. It makes me think of Abigail Heyman’s Growing Up Female [Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974], in which the handwritten text performs as such a concrete and specific gesture of feminine identity.

Winant: I have always worked in an explosive way, but I used to “clean up” the work before it left the studio. I would smooth out the edges, take off the tape, disguise the hand. It took me a long time to understand that impulse as reflecting my own inculcated sexism about what might be considered “serious” artwork. I was worried that my work would be read as “crafty,” which for me meant feminized.

I had to understand that impulse; I had to figure out why I was embarrassed in the first place. I’ve come to realize that it had to do with my own expectations of wanting my work to look more—be perceived as what I understood to be—masculine.

Martin: More polished.

Winant: Yes. People work in all sorts of ways, of course. But I will say, there is an echo between lives. Many artist mothers I know have described similar shifts across their working methods after having children; their art became smaller, looser, or quicker along with the limited time. I’ve certainly felt that to be the case—I work at home when my kids are asleep—and now I recognize it as a kind of critical evolution. There are certain tendencies or gestures like this that we fail to acknowledge, that are superimposed by our gendered positions in the world.

Carol Newhouse, Untitled, from Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression though the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us (Printed Matter, 2019)
© Carol Newhouse; Courtesy the artist

Embser: In one of the features in this issue, you’ve posed the question to various writers and curators: what gesture or spread or moment in a book strikes a reader as feminist? How would you answer that yourself?

Winant: When I was in college, one night I discovered, in the UCLA Library, a book about Valie Export. I hadn’t learned about her in any of my classes. The book was full of photographs, because she makes photographic objects and photographic collages, and uses photo-documentation as an element of work. And I was stunned by it. I felt like it was a new way to be an artist and a new way to be a feminist. It was so fearless.

Jo Spence is another person whose books appear as part of this feature. I was surprised that I didn’t know about Spence sooner. I learned about her books The Final Project [Ridinghouse, 2013] and Putting Myself in the Picture [Real Comet Press, 1988] through Drew Sawyer, who writes about Spence in this issue. Her work felt unfamiliar to me, and wildly brave. There is something about her vulnerability, her testimony in photographs and text—an understanding of those things as a way to research our interior lives. And to recognize that our interior states are valid to mine as subject matter, and to take seriously.

Honey Lee Cottrell, Untitled, from Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression though the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us (Printed Matter, 2019)
© Honey Lee Cottrell; Courtesy the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

Martin: Carmen, I want to talk more about your newest project, Notes on Fundamental Joy, which is constructed in response to images created by and for queer women. What does it mean for a cisgender woman, partnered with the father of your children, to work with this material? And how do you deal with the essentialist critique that these are not “your” images to work with?

Winant: I address this in the essay in the book. For me, these images form a map to a world that I didn’t know existed. Here were women who sidestepped the patriarchy altogether. This was the actualized work of world-building. I was really attracted to the joyousness of that, to its possibility beyond the metaphorical.

I had to ask myself, “Why do I feel that I belong here? Is this a kind of imposition? Am I trespassing?” I really wanted to take these questions seriously, without letting them overwhelm the photographs themselves, or the power of this history. I was in touch with every single photographer whose work was used in the book. Everyone was credited. Everyone was paid. Same goes for the photographs that were in institutions, institutional archives, the estates of women who passed away. One by one by one, every permission was granted. It was important that people have the credit that they deserve, but also in a larger sense, that those conversations were had with the women who were still alive and working, and that they felt like they could be collaborators on the project, and that they felt as though their own authority was not being stripped away. Those conversations—which are ongoing—were sometimes affirming, sometimes difficult or uneasy. The stakes are very real. Taken together, they form the foundation for this project.

Embser: By the same logic, how do you want people coming to this issue of The PhotoBook Review—who may not consider feminism “for them” and don’t normally read about feminism—to feel that this topic is their topic as well?

Winant: Basically, I never stop talking about feminism. I’m sort of relentless about it. I believe this is how we elevate consciousness, by lacing it through our everyday lives: through the way we talk about art and art history, parenting, heath care, and so on. You can’t just talk about feminism when it’s convenient, or when the moment strikes. And my students are receptive! Slowly, we build a coalition. That’s how, eventually, we’re moved.

Embser: Finally, could you tell us about your Linda Lovelace centerfold?

Winant: I have been collecting these centerfolds of Linda Lovelace—who was the star of Deep Throat [1972], the first feature-length pornographic film—that appear as a removable centerfold in her first of five autobiographies. Lovelace died in her early fifties, tragically. She was a pornographic film star who became a radical antiporn feminist, then an antifeminist, and finally—having felt that she was used on both sides—an evangelical Christian. She orbited through the full set of ideological positions of her day. She came to symbolize every side of the fight around sexual politics, particularly around the issue of so-called pro-sex and antipornography feminism, and came to embody the question: in what ways is desire itself a feminist issue?

In her book The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace [1974], this centerfold appears in the middle of the book. And so, when you approached me about doing a centerfold, I thought, this could be the moment to work with this material, and revive this person—someone who is critical to the history of sexual politics in the twentieth century. It is notable that this picture was made in the year before she renounced hardcore pornography and embraced feminism.

Embser: Is it your wish, then, that all of the readers of The PhotoBook Review hang up your centerfold, contemplate Linda Lovelace, and then make feminist photobooks from here on out?

Winant: I would hope so.

Carmen Winant is an artist and writer based in Columbus, Ohio. Her books include Notes on Fundamental Joy (Printed Matter, 2019), My Birth (Image Text Ithaca Press and SPBH Editions, 2018), and My Life as a Man (Horses Think Press, 2015). Brendan Embser is managing editor of Aperture magazine. Lesley A. Martin is publisher of The PhotoBook Review and creative director at Aperture Foundation.

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

The post What is a Feminist Photobook? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

On the Cover: Wolfgang Tillmans Guest Edits Aperture’s “Spirituality” Issue

Wolfgang Tillmans, Flatsedge, 2019
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Maureen Paley, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin

“At this time I feel a strong need for the affirmation of spirit in photography in published form,” Minor White wrote to a colleague in 1966. “Aperture is the only place it can possibly be published at this time. Too bad for photography but that is the way it is.” A photographer and influential educator, White also cofounded this magazine and served as its editor from 1952 to 1976. His approach to seeing and making images was deeply informed by a belief in the possibilities of transcendence, by a longing for the metaphysical. More than four decades on, when we asked Wolfgang Tillmans to guest edit an issue, he proposed a theme resonant with this history. “I immediately knew that it should be spirituality,” he says, “because I strongly sense that the political shifts in Western society in the last ten years stem from a lack of meaning in the capitalist world.”

Throughout his work, Tillmans has examined the modes and messages of photography. His vision is capacious. He has trained his endlessly curious and often-loving gaze on everything from blue jeans splayed over a railing and fruit arranged on a light-splashed windowsill to friends and lovers, a Shaker community in Maine, the Concorde gliding across the sky, and astronomical phenomena. His large-scale abstractions delight in color, pattern, and the chemical foundations of the medium. This inclusive way of seeing unfolds in dynamic constellations of pictures in his self-described “multi-vectored” gallery and museum installations. Small, framed images hang beside large, bull-clipped prints. His varied processes encompass inkjet prints, photocopies, and tear sheets from magazines—a reminder that Tillmans often worked with influential music and style publications, like i-D, in the 1990s. “There is no definite or permanent answer in photography,” he has said. “I like the way it’s constantly in flux.” But what is never in flux is the discipline, precision, and ethic of care Tillmans brings to his art.

Recently, that care has extended to activist work around political crises unfolding in Europe: migration, Brexit, the uncertain future of the European Union. As guest editor, rather than consider spiritual awareness as an inward-looking exercise of self-betterment, or as a feature of organized, hierarchical religion, Tillmans poses the questions: How is human connection a form of spiritual engagement? And what is the relationship between spirituality and solidarity? The answers take many forms—protests in Hong Kong, dance floors in London, or spiritual healing in Johannesburg. In the hours following the release of the first-ever image of a black hole, a billion people shared the astounding picture that reminds us of the staggering scale of the universe, and of our own fragility, our finitude, our need to make meaning through experience. “Solidarity,” Olivia Laing writes in this issue, “is founded on the notion that what connects us is more powerful than what keeps us apart.”

Pre-order Aperture, issue 237, “Spirituality,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post On the Cover: Wolfgang Tillmans Guest Edits Aperture’s “Spirituality” Issue appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

A Look Inside the Opening of The New Black Vanguard Exhibition

Last week, in partnership with Airbnb Magazine, Aperture celebrated the opening of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion curated by Antwaun Sargent.

Antwaun Sargent
Zach Hilty/BFA

Micaiah Carter, Justin French, Antwaun Sargent, Quil Lemons, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Adrienne Raquel, Daveed Baptiste, Jamal Nxedlana
Zach Hilty/BFA

Veuve Clicquot
Steven Davis/Aperture

Jermaine Daley, Micaiah Carter, Shibon Kennedy
Zach Hilty/BFA

Sarah McNear, WM Hunt, Catherine Evans
Zach Hilty/BFA

Quil Lemons
Zach Hilty/BFA

Arielle Bobb-Willis, Adrienne Raquel, Daveed Baptiste
Zach Hilty/BFA

Jamal Nxedlana
Zach Hilty/BFA

Kerby Jean-Raymond, Antwaun Sargent, Kennedy Yanko
Zach Hilty/BFA

Lesley Martin, Antwaun Sargent, Isabelle McTwigan
Zach Hilty/BFA

Ben Kasman, Brooke Williams, Natasha Lunn, Lesley Martin, Jamal Nxedlana
Zach Hilty/BFA

Cathy Kaplan, Mfon Usoro, Eno Usoro
Zach Hilty/BFA

Flo Ngala
Zach Hilty/BFA

Matthew So, Kristen Joy Watts
Zach Hilty/BFA

Quil Lemons
Zach Hilty/BFA

Roze Traore, Corey Stokes
Zach Hilty/BFA

Arielle Bobb-Willis
Zach Hilty/BFA

Lazarus Lynch, JiaJia Fei
Zach Hilty/BFA

Lesley Martin, Campbell Adu
Zach Hilty/BFA

Jari Jones
Zach Hilty/BFA

Jordan Robson, Amina Ibrahim, Campbell Adu
Zach Hilty/BFA

Vincent Rutherford, Michael Umesi
Zach Hilty/BFA

Daniel Levi, Mark Hsu
Zach Hilty/BFA

Zach Hilty/BFA

Christine Hollingsworth
Zach Hilty/BFA

Trevor James, Xya Rachel, Tyler Artiss
Zach Hilty/BFA

Arnold Beretta, Katie Booth
Zach Hilty/BFA

Becky Akinyode, Quil Lemons, Jade Lee
Zach Hilty/BFA

Henny Garfunkel
Zach Hilty/BFA

Isabelle McTwigan, Ben Kasman, Sally Carmichael, Mike Steele
Zach Hilty/BFA

Joshua Kissi
Zach Hilty/BFA

Tyler Mitchell
Zach Hilty/BFA

Miriam Sall, Justin French, Amy Sall
Zach Hilty/BFA

Anastasia Simpson
Zach Hilty/BFA

Chi Vengia, Yannis Davy, Marie-Ange Zibi
Zach Hilty/BFA

Boram Lee, Frances Nguyen, Stephanie Johansen
Zach Hilty/BFA

Javone Armada, Micaiah Carter, Bella Barnes
Zach Hilty/BFA

Antwaun Sargent, Tyler Mitchell
Zach Hilty/BFA

Akeem Rasul, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson
Zach Hilty/BFA

Brandon St. Regis, Desmond Sam
Zach Hilty/BFA

Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, Antwaun Sargent
Zach Hilty/BFA

Antwaun Sargent, Mickalene Thomas
Zach Hilty/BFA

Valerie Blaze, Andrew Grace, Zachary Tye Richardson, Cassandra Angelique
Zach Hilty/BFA

Antwaun Sargent, Miles Greenberg
Zach Hilty/BFA

Calvin Reedy, Katie Booth
Zach Hilty/BFA

Erica Olson, Jamal Nxedlana
Zach Hilty/BFA

Antwaun Sargent, Oscar Nñ
Zach Hilty/BFA

Antwaun Sargent, Tyler Mitchell
Zach Hilty/BFA

Addis Boyd, Bella Barnes, DeRay Mckesson
Zach Hilty/BFA

Monique Long, Maria Carrasquillo
Zach Hilty/BFA

Mickalene Thomas
Zach Hilty/BFA

Zach Hilty/BFA

Catherine Matteo, Valen Brana, Adrienne Raquel, Chas Chevonne
Zach Hilty/BFA

Miles Greenberg, JiaJIa Fei
Zach Hilty/BFA

Noreen Ahmad, Mike Brisa
Zach Hilty/BFA

Myla Williams, Ashia Williams, Ash Felder
Zach Hilty/BFA

Tyler Mitchell, Jeremy O. Harris
Zach Hilty/BFA

Jeremy O. Harris
Zach Hilty/BFA

Anzie Dasabe, Al Green, Nico Kartel, Imani Shante
Zach Hilty/BFA

Trevor Begnal, Jonathan Samedy, Joshua Edwards, Ali Williams
Zach Hilty/BFA

Al Green, Nico Kartel, Imani Shante
Zach Hilty/BFA

Zach Hilty/BFA

Faith Couch
Zach Hilty/BFA

On Thursday, October 24, guests gathered at Aperture Gallery to celebrate the opening of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, curated by Antwaun Sargent. The exhibition presents an expanded view of the book, featuring works by forty groundbreaking contemporary photographers.

Framed photographs are presented alongside vitrines of publications, past and present, that contextualize the images and chart the history of inclusion, and exclusion, in the creation of the commercial Black image, while simultaneously proposing a brilliantly reenvisioned future.

Guests included Mickalene Thomas, Miles Greenberg, Natasha Lunn, JiaJia Fei, Zachary Tye Richardson, Dig Ferreira, and New Black Vanguard artists Tyler Mitchell, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Jamal Nxedlana, Micaiah Carter, Campbell Addy, and Adrienne Raquel. Attendees enjoyed champagne by Veuve Clicquot.

Welcoming the crowd, Chris Boot, Aperture’s executive director, thanked Antwaun Sargent and project editor Lesley A. Martin; he also extended thanks to Aperture’s board of trustees, members, patrons, and staff, as well as Airbnb Magazine, Veuve Clicquot, and BFA, which photographed the event.

Lesley A. Martin, Aperture’s creative director, reflected on the inception of the project. “I do think it’s an editor’s job (and something we do here at Aperture) to try to assess where things are changing related to the image and power, and to find the key people who have their finger on that pulse,” she said. “It’s really clear that the right person to tell this story was Antwaun Sargent—and that we should build a platform and get out of the way.”

Sargent thanked all the artists included in the book and exhibition. He told the audience, “I hope you all continue to engage with these artists. If you’re an editor, hire these artists. If you’re a collector, buy their work. If you’re a writer, write about them. The New Black Vanguard is really, for me, a spotlight that hopefully creates more opportunities.”

Following the exhibition opening at Aperture Gallery, guests made their way to The Top of The Standard for an intimate celebration, where they danced to a DJ set by Oscar Nunez.

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion is on view at Aperture Gallery through January 18, 2020.

The evening was photographed by BFA.

Supporters

The New Black Vanguard is presented in partnership with Airbnb Magazine.

Aperture also thanks The Standard and Veuve Clicquot for their support.

Click here to view the launch of The New Black Vanguard at NeueHouse on October 21, 2019.

The post A Look Inside the Opening of The New Black Vanguard Exhibition appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture Launches The New Black Vanguard with Antwaun Sargent at NeueHouse

Last week, in partnership with Airbnb Magazine, Aperture celebrated the launch of The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion by Antwaun Sargent.

Jamal Nxedlana, Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Jamal Nxedlana, Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Tyler Mitchell, Chris Boot
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Deborah Willis, Antwaun Sargent, Tyler Mitchell
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Jamal Nxedlana, Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent, Natasha Lunn, Lesley Martin, Chris Boot, Isabelle Mctwigan
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Chris Boot, Philip Gefter, Lesley Martin
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Deborah Willis, Chris Boot
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Brendan Embser, Michael Famighetti, Nicole Acheampong
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Michael Hoeh, Chris Boot, Philip Gefter
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Tanzania James, Jade Stuckey, Ian Coma, Megan Harris
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Deborah Willis, Antwaun Sargent, Tyler Mitchell, Jamal Nxedlana
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Julie Solovyeva
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Lesley Martin
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Jamal Nxedlana, Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Madison Voelkel/BFA

Jamal Nxedlana, Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Travis Hackett, Zachary Richardson, Cerrie Bamford
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Betsy Goldberg, Sola Biu, Ben Kasman
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Andrea Minarcek, Annette Farrell, Lisa Lok, Danji McCrory
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Antwaun Sargent, Miles Greenberg
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Tyler Mitchell
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Airbnb Magazine

Madison Voelkel/BFA

Maureen Chevalier, Laurent Chevalier
Madison Voelkel/BFA

JiaJia Fei, Antwaun Sargent, Julie Solovyeva, Miles Greenberg
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Jamal Nxedlana, Tyler Mitchell, Antwaun Sargent
Madison Voelkel/BFA

Books with Friends: The New Black Vanguard with Antwaun Sargent at NeueHouse

On Monday, October 21, guests gathered at NeueHouse in New York City for a book launch, cocktail, and conversation featuring New Black Vanguard author Antwaun Sargent and artist contributors Tyler Mitchell and Jamal Nxedlana. Sargent, Mitchell, and Nxedlana spoke about their work and the international scope of Black artists working today, and signed copies of the newly released book. Guests enjoyed whiskey and specialty cocktails by Glenfiddich.

Curator and critic Antwaun Sargent kicked off the discussion. “As someone who has been devoted to Black artistic production, particularly emerging voices, the only choice was to look at the ways in which young Black photographers were redefining space in photography,” he remarked. “I wanted to create a book that held that space. That not only looked at the moment, but also looked at the past, and possibly a future.”

In The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, Sargent addresses a radical transformation taking place in fashion and art today. The publication opens up conversations around the role of the Black body and Black lives as subject matter. Collectively, the fifteen artists featured celebrate Black creativity and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image.

“You have to be so radically committed to highlighting people who look like you. Highlighting friends, people who are unknown, who are not models, who aren’t traditional models, who live in the middle of nowhere, who you found on Instagram,” said Tyler Mitchell of his approach to casting in his work.

Johannesburg-based Nxedlana is similarly unorthodox in sourcing his material: “Joburg is a subject for me, not just a backdrop,” he remarked. “I try to showcase its subcultures in the work that I create.” Nxedlana, a cultural entrepreneur and visual artist, is cofounder of Bubblegum Club, a platform for alternative narratives on South African art and society. “We’re living in a place with a colonial history, and a history of oppression. So, my work tries to contest that,” he shared. “It’s about creating your own spaces,” added Mitchell. “To take control of the image, which is to say, to take control of Blackness.”

The evening was photographed by BFA.

Supporters

The New Black Vanguard is presented in partnership with Airbnb Magazine.

 

Aperture also thanks NeueHouse and Glenfiddich for their support.

 

Click here for a look inside the opening of The New Black Vanguard, Curated by Antwaun Sargent on October 24, 2019.

The post Aperture Launches The New Black Vanguard with Antwaun Sargent at NeueHouse appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.