Aperture's Blog, page 80

Bad Cop

Heji Shin aims her penetrating gaze at newborn babies and gay policemen.

By Evan Moffitt

Heji Shin, Basic Precinct, 2018
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York

The miracle of birth has never looked so gruesome as in Heji Shin’s Baby (2016), a series of portraits currently on display in the Whitney Biennial. The newborns’ oxygen-starved faces are bruised deep purple and dripping with blood. Their squashed, elongated crania—the result of soft skull tissue being squeezed by the cervix—resemble grapes fit to burst. Some have been captured between cries, as if stillborn, while others stare straight at us, mouths cracked open in anguish or relief, as they complete their violent escape from the womb. They may not remember this moment, but it’s eerie to think that the first thing these kids will have seen is the dull, unblinking eye of Shin’s camera.

“The procedure of birth is very similar to death,” Shin said in a brief audio didactic recorded by the Whitney. “It is excluded from social life, from public life—because it’s violent, it includes a lot of aggression.” Shin connected with midwives and expectant mothers, who invited her to shoot on delivery day. Shin considers herself a classical portraitist, and all of these babies are centered in the frame, their mothers’ thighs and labia cradling them like starched collars, pale against the muddy slick of blood and amniotic fluid.

Heji Shin, Baby 5, 2016
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

The works are a far cry from Carmen Winant’s My Birth (2018), the star work in last year’s Being: New Photography 2018 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. There, two thousand archival photographs of women giving birth spanned a long corridor wall, where Winant pasted them with blue painter’s tape. The fine-grained detail of Shin’s photographs was absent: instead, mothers themselves were foregrounded, in tender scenes of intimacy and elation. By contrast, we can’t see the mothers’ faces in Shin’s work; our attention has been focused on the slightly warped, seemingly alien bodies they’re ejecting from between their legs.

In her latest book, Motherhood (2019), Sheila Heti spends 304 pages reconciling with her desire not to have children—what she ultimately considers “a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.” Shin’s photographs have no room for such sentimentality. She loves to trash the stereotypes we use to simplify our many cultural contradictions. The more removed from her own experience these subjects are, the better she seems to maintain a critical distance in depicting them. In a presentation at the February 2019 Engadin Art Talks, Shin explained her decision to shoot a gay pornographic film in Reena Spaulings Fine Art for her 2018 show there: “For two months I tried to become a gay man as much as possible.” A statement like that might raise the specter of Rachel Dolezal, the woman who claimed to be “transracial,” but the photographs that emerged are a beautiful, highly explicit indictment of fascism and misogyny in the gay community.

Heji Shin, We Live in a Society, 2018
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York

Through a Craigslist ad, Shin found two male models and posed them in the starched navy uniforms of the NYPD. Embodiments of “New York’s Finest,” these hot cops recline on a casting couch in nothing but their caps and gun holsters, and fornicate on a table lit by the glare of a policeman’s flashlight held just outside the frame. In remarkable close-crops, including one cyanotype, their anal penetration resembles birth: a cheeky nod to gay barebacking culture and its vulgar references to “breeding.”

With PrEP use increasingly widespread in the gay community, and the historic precedent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s S&M photographs now forty years past, it’s not the barebacking that offends in these images, but the uniforms. The NYPD is infamous for its brutality, from the death of Eric Garner to the “broken windows” policing that has torn apart communities of color across the city since the 1980s. (On the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a splinter queer march was held parallel to the city’s official pride parade; its organizers noted the perversity of allowing cops to march in the main celebration of an uprising against police violence.) This perversity is what directs Shin to her subjects—what she shoots must be difficult; good art is anything but easy—and indeed, these bootblacks are irresistible.

Heji Shin, Book ’em, Danny 2, 2018
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York

“Bad cop” is a familiar role-play fetish, handcuffs a common bedside prop. Shin based at least one of her photographs directly on a drawing by Tom of Finland, who worshipped uniformed men and cruised Nazi soldiers in the parks of Helsinki during World War II. While associations to power, especially military force, have become less salient in queer circles lately, Tom still enjoys his spot in the gay pantheon uncontested. In two of the photographs, one of Shin’s boys in blue is reading Arthur Schopenhauer’s On Women (1851): a misogynistic screed whose racist authoritarian author, obsessed with ancient India and its Vedic culture of spiritual self-conquest, influenced the Aryan nationalism that gave rise to Hitler. Shin’s police porn also owes a debt to Collier Schorr’s many photographs of young men dressed as Nazis, which Schorr took in Southern Germany in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As Theodor Adorno observed in Minima Moralia (1951), “Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together.”

Heji Shin, KW5, 2018
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

The theme of penetration, well, penetrates Shin’s work: from a child’s rupturing of her mother’s birth canal to the probes of an X-ray. Shin’s photographs pry deep into our individual and cultural subconscious, stripping bare contradictory layers that, once exposed, can’t be unseen. In 2018, Shin chose her toughest—and, incidentally, most notorious—subject for her show at Kunsthalle Zürich, which presented earlier this year. Billboard-sized prints of Kanye West filled the galleries of the Swiss museum. The resulting photographs—two of which adjoin the Whitney cloakroom as part of the Biennial—are a study in celebrity cool. Their hypersaturated yellows and reds seem fit for a punchy album cover. Accompanying the portraits were X-rays Shin had taken of herself, holding small dogs. “I thought I could suggest to the viewer that, when you see these very huge Kanyes that show only surface, and are very impenetrable, then you see my self-portrait, with complete transparency,” she said at Engadin. “It raises the question that, if you see much more, you may see even less.”

Evan Moffitt is associate editor of frieze.

The post Bad Cop appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Michael Jang’s American Dream

The photographer revisits his deeply funny and idiosyncratic images of suburbs, celebrities, and California in the 1970s.

By Will Matsuda

Michael Jang, Lucy Watering at Night, 1973
© the artist

Michael Jang has kept much of his work hidden in a box at his home in San Francisco for the last forty years. Luckily for us, he decided to drop a selection of photographs off at SFMOMA for consideration in 2002. His early photographs from the 1970s, especially the ones of his very suburban, extended Chinese American family, made an impression on the curators at the time. Deeply funny and idiosyncratic, Jang’s images feel relevant to many of the national conversations happening right now about immigration, assimilation, and the elusive American dream.

Ahead of the publication of his first monograph and a major retrospective exhibition opening at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco in September, I spoke with Jang about photographing his family, the restrictions of intentionality in photography, and what it takes to sneak into Hollywood parties. 

Michael Jang, Living Room Scene, 1973
© the artist

Will Matsuda: I want to start with your series The Jangs, which you made in the summer of 1973. Why did you make those pictures then, and how do you feel about them now?

Michael Jang: Old pictures often just look like old pictures. So what is it that makes these photos interesting still? The vintage rugs? I honestly don’t know. Erik Kessels, in the intro to my book, Who Is Michael Jang?, talks about the humor in the work, and how that’s somewhat of a rarity in the fine-art photography world. Humor wasn’t totally intentional in these photos.

I felt out of place in art school because in critiques, you are supposed to put up your work and talk about your intentions. I was uncomfortable with that. Someone thirty years later told me, “Michael, you’re just a responder.” That’s what I do, I respond. Let’s suppose you have an idea for a photo, and then you go out and make it. Then the photo is only as good as the idea. It’s missing magic.

Michael Jang, Study Hall, 1973
© the artist

Matsuda: That’s interesting for me to hear, because I work in the complete opposite way. I spend a long time thinking about my intentions with a photograph, and then I set out and it either meets those intentions or it doesn’t. That’s what makes a photo successful for me. But it is agonizing sometimes.

Jang: That’s the limitation. In movies, too, if a filmmaker captures an unscripted scene, there’s the magic. Same with music and improvisation, like in jazz. That’s what I’m looking for.

Michael Jang, Onlookers at the George Moscone funeral, 1978
© the artist

Matsuda: Can’t a preplanned photo, or one with a clear intention behind it, have magic too? It doesn’t matter how much you plan, a photograph never happens perfectly. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Jang: I’ll meet you halfway on this one. Yes, you’re right, it’s good to have an outline of a plan. But it’s also about having an open mind to allow yourself to see what is actually there. Seeing can be done with the heart as well as the eyes.

I respond to pools of energy. It’s sort of a parallel way to look at the world. You shoot without looking through the camera. Robert Frank shot from the hip in that photo of the cowboys (Bar, Gallup, New Mexico, 1955) in The Americans. That’s feeling something. You’re feeling energy. There’s juice in the picture.

Michael Jang, Aunts and Uncles, 1973
© the artist

Matsuda: I think the reason your photographs are successful and timely is that there are serious implications in them, even if you didn’t intend it.

Jang: Well, I didn’t think these pictures were very good when I took them in the ’70s. I put them away in boxes. A few decades later, I dropped them off at SFMOMA and they liked them. Over the last ten years, I’ve brought them out in little pieces in zines or do-it-yourself pop-up exhibitions. So I’ve been testing the water in San Francisco, but it’s kind of like if your mom likes your pictures. It’s not really a test; this book and exhibition are a real test. I have no idea what people are going to think. I will be just as surprised as anybody if someone has a special interest in them. It feels kind of like a miracle that the pictures aren’t still in boxes.

Michael Jang, Kylo Kylo playing trumpet with Sami Campbell watching outside the CalArts Dorm, 1973
© the artist

Matsuda: If you didn’t think they were very good and you had them boxed up, what made you bring them to SFMOMA?

Jang: When you’re young, you are very sensitive to critiques. Your work gets torn apart. It doesn’t take much to think, “These pictures probably have no future.” I wanted to move on and try to make a living off of photography. I never was in the game either. You’re supposed to get your MFA, then become a teacher, then get a National Endowment for the Arts or Guggenheim grant, and make some coffee-table books. In a way, my career is happening in reverse. Here I am in my late sixties and just now gaining some notice. It’s a gift. A lot of people my age are done and forgotten about.

Michael Jang, Ramones Free Concert, Civic Center Plaza, 1979
© the artist

Matsuda: The reason these photos are meaningful in this moment, to me at least, is that you are directly questioning the exclusivity of who gets to be American and who can live out the American dream. There’s a sort of jaded irreverence in the photos, and I think therein lies their power.

Jang: People have said we look like the Chinese Brady Bunch.

Matsuda: Right, and when you talk about these photos not being serious, I disagree. I think they are totally serious.

Jang: You’re right. Sometimes artists deflect questions, because they don’t want people to get too close. But please understand, when I made them I wasn’t serious. It was pure fun. It is only now that they are being looked at critically. Others have deemed them “serious,” not me.

One gallerist was looking at the photos, and told me, “You have David Carradine on the TV in a photo, who was a white guy playing a Chinese guy in the show Kung Fu. I mean c’mon. You knew what you were doing.” I had to laugh. Subconsciously, yes, but at the time it was done without thinking. And also done without planning to show it to anyone. But I think when you put pressure on yourself to have a statement about your family, it could become a problem. It might be a little boring even.

Michael Jang, Self-Portrait, Financial District, San Francisco, 1973
© the artist

Matsuda: I also want to talk about your self-portraits, which are peppered throughout the book. These were some of my favorite pictures. We get an idea of the type of person you are from the type of photographs you take, but it really comes across in the self-portraits. The slyness, the smirk. Are you still making self-portraits? What do you think about them now?

Jang: I’d like to plead the fifth, but also bad memory. It’s been forty years!

Well, actually, one of the self-portraits is on the cover, and there are six people spread across the frame. That’s hard to do when you are composing the shot by looking through the camera. But I was just hand-holding it and hoping for the best. That’s the game of it, as well as the beauty.

In school, I wasn’t really interested in academics talking to me about what a photograph should do. Lee Friedlander said to go out and shoot, to have fun, and that it is just a game. That resonated with me.

I still have my notes from Friedlander’s class at CalArts in 1973. One of them says, “My pictures have no use for anything except my own pleasure. It’s not their function whether you like them or not. If I exhibit, that’s someone else’s problem. They ask me.”

Michael Jang, David Bowie Signing Autographs, 1973
© the artist

Matsuda: While you were at CalArts, you were fabricating press passes to get into parties with the Hollywood elite. You must have some wild stories from that time.

Jang: I checked out a Leica from school and took it into town, and I saw Bowie at the Beverly Hilton. I found out that every Saturday night, there was a major Hollywood party or event, so I kept going back.

The events are all the same. The stars arrive, the paparazzi are there waiting outside, they pose for a picture, and then they go in. I thought, hold on, that’s where the pictures are. So I had to get inside. I did that any way I could. I dressed up in a suit and snuck in through the back door, but I usually got kicked out.

The series was about the adrenaline rush of sneaking in just as much as it was an essay on parties in Hollywood. I know that now these pictures are impossible. If Jay-Z was at the Beverly Hilton in 2019, would you be able to sneak in?

Matsuda: Probably not . . .

Jang: But could I sneak in? Maybe.

Will Matsuda is a photographer and writer based in Portland, Oregon.

Michael Jang’s California is on view at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, from September 27, 2019–January 18, 2020.

The post Michael Jang’s American Dream appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Graciela Iturbide: Dreams & Visions

The life and work of Latin America’s most revered photographer.

By Ramón Reverté

Graciela Iturbide, Self-Portrait at My House, 1974
Courtesy the artist

For more than fifty years, Graciela Iturbide, recognized today as the greatest living photographer in Latin America, has envisioned the diversity of life in her native Mexico. Her lyrical, black-and-white images of street scenes in Mexico City, of Seri women in the Sonoran Desert, of political rallies in Juchitán, and of details inside Frida Kahlo’s bathroom are revered throughout the world. At the age of twenty-seven, aspiring to be a filmmaker, she enrolled in a university class with the maestro of modern Mexican photography, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The experience was formative. “More than being my teacher of photography,” she recalls, “Don Manuel taught me about life.”

Earlier this year, the editor and publisher Ramón Reverté visited Iturbide at her home in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán. One wall of her living room is lined with soaring shelves full of beloved photography books. In her studio located across the street—built by her son Mauricio Rocha, a noted architect—she keeps altars of objects and books that belonged to Álvarez Bravo and Josef Koudelka. At the time of Reverté’s visit, Iturbide had recently opened two major solo exhibitions, one at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and another at the , in Mexico City’s historic center, which drew hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Here, Iturbide speaks intimately about her beginnings, her passion for photography and books, her long-standing interest in Mexico’s Indigenous cultures, and her favorite photographers, including Álvarez Bravo, who has been, as she says, “her guru.” On one occasion, Iturbide told Álvarez Bravo that she was traveling to Paris to visit museums. “But why,” he replied, “if you can see it all in books!” Iturbide, a relentless reader, took his advice, but only partly: she has never stopped traveling.

Graciela Iturbide, Aky, Mexico City, 1972
Courtesy the artist

Ramón Reverté: I’d like to ask about the beginning of your career—I’m sure you’ve probably gotten the same question a thousand times—how did you come to photography? And I’m curious whether from an early age you enjoyed painting and photography, or is it an interest that was ignited as a result of your meeting Manuel Álvarez Bravo?

Graciela Iturbide: In my family, there wasn’t an affinity for any of those things. I wanted to be a writer from a young age. My father, who was very conservative, wouldn’t let me attend university because women were supposed to stay at home. I married very young. I quickly had three children. I wanted to study philosophy and literature, but I couldn’t because, with three children, I had no time.

At an early age, I had a camera, and I took photographs because my father was an amateur photographer. I loved to go into his closet and steal his photographs, which led to various punishments, but my father should have been proud I was stealing his photographs.

In 1969, when I was already married and twenty-seven years old, I heard on the radio that there was a university where you could study film, and I enrolled. It was very easy to get admitted; everyone got in because it was when the film school was just getting started. That’s where I met Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was giving photography classes. I had the book he had published during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico and brought it to him so he could sign it. I asked if I could take his classes, and he said yes. No one went to his classes because everyone wanted to be film directors. After two days, he said, “Listen, I’d like you to be my achichincle,” and I said, “Of course.” An achichincle in Mexico is the person who assists the construction worker and does a bit of everything.

That’s how my life changed. We spoke a lot about painting. We listened to a lot of music. It was my salvation in life because he had a very different way of thinking than my family. On one occasion, he told me, “You know what, Graciela, divorces help because one can start anew.” It was like he was opening me to life. Within a year, I was divorced, without any struggle, without any issue.

Reverté: Tell me about your parents. Did you go to exhibitions when you were little?

Iturbide: Not so much to exhibitions, but we went to concerts, to the opera, to musical things. Sometimes my father would take us to the Cervantino Festival. I was very young then and was somewhat interested in cultural things. My parents’ parents had haciendas. With the revolution, and then under President Lázaro Cárdenas, they lost everything. My father had to work from a young age to support his family. At the age of sixteen, he started working in Oaxaca with the archaeologist Alfonso Caso, strangely enough, as his assistant. He never had a formal profession. My mother played piano recitals when she was young, and she loved classical music. She also drew. She was more sensitive to those kinds of things. But I wouldn’t say it was a cultured family. It was a bourgeois family.

Graciela Iturbide, Carro (Car), 1972
Courtesy the artist

Reverté: When you decided to study film, was it because you liked film, or because you saw some kind of escape? Was it a conscious decision?

Iturbide: Yes, because I wanted to. I told myself, In film, there is a script, and I want to study literature, so I might as well study film and see what I can do from there. I did it out of my need to study something because I had never been allowed to. It was an urgent need within myself.

Reverté: So photography wasn’t an interest of yours at that time?

Iturbide: I took photographs as a child because my father gave me a camera when I was eleven years old. But I took photographs of things like churches, from the bottom up, stranger things than my cousins and siblings photographed. I always saw my father taking photographs, and he did a bit of film, but just as a hobby.

Reverté: So it’s really Don Manuel who introduced you to the world of photography?

Iturbide: More than being my teacher of photography, Don Manuel taught me about life. I was already developing my own film because I had taken some photography classes before taking lessons with Manuel. So one time I asked him, “Maestro, how do you properly develop a roll of black-and-white film?” And he responded, “You know, Graciela, go to the photography store, buy yourself a roll of film, read the instructions, and that’s how you do it.” He never told me whether my photographs were good or bad. Never. But he spoke to me a lot about painting. He spoke to me about literature. We listened to opera in the afternoons.

He made me see life in a different way than I had lived it as a child. When I lived with the father of my children, who was a more liberal man than others I had known, it also helped a bit in my development. In my time, it was unlikely for husbands to say, “Yes, yes, of course, go study.” It wasn’t very easy.

Graciela Iturbide, Mexico City, 1969
Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Reverté: How long were you working with Don Manuel?

Iturbide: I worked with Don Manuel for about two years. But I stayed near him all my life, that’s why I live here. When I separated from my partner, I came to live here [the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City] because Álvarez Bravo told me, “They’re selling a little plot of land over there, Graciela. Come here to Coyoacán.”

Reverté: Photography wasn’t an easy path to making a living.

Iturbide: I’ve had money, I’ve had no money, but when I didn’t have money, there were rolls of film in my refrigerator. I’ve always been taking pictures. At the very beginning, and when I got divorced, the only work I had was for hire for magazines like Mundo médico (Medical world) and Médico moderno (Modern doctor) to go photograph operations.

Reverté: And what did you photograph?

Iturbide: Births. Once I won an award for a cover that I shot. They paid me monthly. I didn’t have to be there the whole time, only when they commissioned things. It’s the only work I’ve ever had for hire, and I loved it.

Reverté: What was your first contact with the photography world? Was it at the INI [National Institute of Indigenous Peoples] that you first began?

Iturbide: I only did a project with the ethnographic archive at the INI. They made various films and published seven books about this archive under the direction of Pablo Ortíz Monasterio. It was my job to go to the desert with the Seri, and I was fascinated.

Graciela Iturbide, Carnaval (Carnival), Tlaxcala, 1974
Courtesy the artist

Reverté: The first exhibition you had was in Mexico, and then it traveled to New York.

Iturbide: My first exhibition was at the Orozco Gallery with Paulina Lavista and Colette Álvarez Urbajtel. And then it traveled to New York, with a photographer named Larry Siegel, who had been my teacher here in Mexico before I went to study with Álvarez Bravo. He was the director of the gallery in New York.

Reverté: So that exhibition had nothing to do with Don Manuel?

Iturbide: Yes, that exhibition came about thanks to Manuel because Larry spoke with him and Manuel decided that it should be three women: Paulina Lavista, Colette, and me. After that, I started to have solo exhibitions.

Reverté: How did you manage to maintain a family at such a complicated time, in addition to being a woman on your own, in that era in Mexico, with three children?

Iturbide: At the beginning, I had the help of my husband, then I worked for Médico moderno, and then I worked taking photographs of people who asked me to take photographs.

Reverté: Portraits?

Iturbide: Lots of portraits, even weddings. I managed. I made money, but I never stopped taking my own photographs. I loved going to the country to be with Álvarez Bravo.

Reverté: You continually saw Manuel Álvarez Bravo?

Iturbide: Always. Until the end. I always went to see him to speak with him, to listen to music. The thing is that I didn’t want to be his assistant anymore because I didn’t want him to influence me. I had to cut the umbilical cord.

Graciela Iturbide, Seri Woman with Her Portrait, Sonoran Desert, 1979
Courtesy the artist

Reverté: Even though Don Manuel’s influence is present in your work, in the most positive sense, you had a personality all your own in your photography from the very beginning. What is it that truly moves you to take photographs? If you go somewhere now, what motivates you? What is it you want to photograph immediately?

Iturbide: It’s never clear to me what I want to photograph. I always go out walking, even when I’m asked to go photograph something in particular. Surprise is what gets me to pull the trigger on the camera. If I say, “Ay! What a wonder!”—then I press the trigger.

Reverté: Do you take lots of photographs?

Iturbide: A normal amount. I’m not like the people who came from Magnum. When I took them to Manuel’s house, they saw a dog on the rooftop and started to take a ton of photographs. Manuel always said to me, “Chaca chaca chaca chaca, why so much junk, Graciela? For what?” I learned a different way of taking photographs from Álvarez Bravo, because he always took one or two shots. If, by chance, he took two, it was already too many. In my case, if I come across something and I like it, I could even take three or four photographs, but I’m not a compulsive photographer. Sometimes I’d take more than one shot in case the negative gets scratched. I always took photographs calmly and enthusiastically and with surprise.

Reverté: If I were to go with you to photograph for two days in Oaxaca, what would the process be like?

Iturbide: I went to these villages with my camera so that people would know that I was a photographer, and I lived with them, which created solidarity. If I go to a festival where photography is allowed, then I take photographs because it’s allowed. If I see that it isn’t allowed, that people don’t want me to take photographs, I don’t. I don’t have a telephoto lens, nor a tripod, nor flash. It’s how I’ve always worked, with a handheld camera but always with people’s complicity. Sometimes, people ask me to take their photographs, like with Magnolia [the iconic photograph from the 1979–89 series Juchitán de las Mujeres]. I was at a cantina, and she was there, and she saw me with my camera and said, “Ay, ay, my love, take my photo.” I went upstairs with him, or with her, to the room, he got dressed, he made himself up, and I went on taking photographs as he wished, exactly as he wished.

Reverté: It’s obvious that you share empathy with people.

Iturbide: Yes, it’s beautiful when people ask you to take their photograph. When I go to Juchitán or when I am with the Seri, for me they are not “the other” because they also come to visit me at my house, the same with the Mayo [the people of Sinaloa] as with the Juchiteco. These are people of my country, just like me.

And yes, I have a capacity to feel empathy. I try not to hurt people. That’s why I just have a normal lens that allows me to come close to people, and somehow they accept me even if I don’t ask permission. In some way, with the camera, I am asking. There is an implicit permission.

To continue reading, buy Aperture issue 236, “Mexico City,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Agenda: 4 Photography Exhibitions to See in Fall 2019

From Duane Michals’s first New York retrospective to the swinging nightlife of London’s Soho, here are this fall’s must-see exhibitions.

Alinka Echeverría, Fieldnotes for Nicephora, from the series Nicephora, 2015–ongoing
© the artist

Alinka Echeverría

During a 2015 research residency at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce—a French museum devoted to Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce, who is often credited as the inventor of photography—Mexican British artist Alinka Echeverría employed an intersectional feminist lens to recontextualize the museum’s colonial archives. With a background in social anthropology, she studies historical representations of women in photography, using collage to liberate and reframe these images. Echeverría’s upcoming show at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Simulacres, revisits her work on Niépce to pose critical conversations between archival images of women and vases from the museum’s collection. “Alinka’s work not only addresses questions of the feminine but also the question of the ‘other’ as objects of colonial study,” says María Wills Londoño, curator of the exhibition. “She works in collages—tearing images, taking objects, and making fragmentations—to question the semiotics of the feminine and how society and history are constructed.”

Simulacres: Alinka Echevarría at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, September 5–December 1, 2019

Duane Michals, Warren Beatty, 1966
© the artist and courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York

Duane Michals

Duane Michals never really studied photography. When he started experimenting with pictures in the 1960s, he felt free to live and make work any way he wanted. He began to explore cinematic devices and multiple exposures, staging multipart photographic sequences that consider mortality and desire. He embraced technical errors. And he wrote in the margins of his prints. “Writing allowed Michals to find his voice in photography,” says Joel Smith, curator of photography at the Morgan Library & Museum, which is presenting Illusions of the Photographer, Michals’s first full-scale New York museum retrospective. Covering five decades of Michals’s photography and short films, the exhibition will be accompanied by an artist’s-choice show, selected by Michals from the Morgan’s collection, featuring works by Eugène Atget, Auguste Rodin, and Joseph Cornell. “Illusions,” Smith says of Michals’s work, “allow a photographer to believe in the vision of the world he’s got and make it real.”

Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, October 25, 2019–February 2, 2020

Jan Groover, Untitled, ca. 1978
© Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne/Jan Groover Archive

Jan Groover

“Formalism is everything for Jan Groover. It is a motto, true from the first work to the last work,” says Tatyana Franck, director of the Musée de l’Elysée. Groover is best known for her kitchen still lifes from the 1970s and ’80s, a body of work that became a postmodern classic and helped make the case for color photography as art. Two years after Groover’s death in 2012, Franck visited the house in rural France that the artist had shared with her husband and was astonished to discover forty years of Groover’s work there. In 2017, the museum acquired the archive, which contains some twenty thousand objects: sketches, Polaroids, negatives, contact sheets, test prints, technical equipment, and Groover’s own photography collection. Laboratory of Forms, curated by Franck, is Groover’s first survey in over thirty years and includes portraits, still lifes, and landscapes from 1967 to the very last negative Groover printed.

Laboratory of Forms: Photographs by Jan Groover at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland, September 18, 2019–January 5, 2020

Anders Petersen, London 150, 2012
© the artist

Shot in Soho

P. D. James once said that London’s Soho district was a “cosmopolitan village” with good food, great shopping, and sordid crime. Before its more recent polished incarnation with boutique hotels and a new Crossrail transit line, Soho was a magnet for disobedience and debauchery, yet it still remains a destination for artists of all types. Shot in Soho presents images by photographers such as Anders Petersen, William Klein, and Corinne Day, who profiled the infamous neighborhood. Not simply an exercise in nostalgia, the exhibition also looks at present-day Soho through images of romantic connections in a new commission by the emerging Irish photographer Daragh Soden. Together, Shot in Soho celebrates an ever-changing, one-square-mile enclave that contains, as James noted, “all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy.”

Shot in Soho at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, October 18, 2019–February 9, 2020

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The Publisher at the Forefront of Photographic Literature

Image Text Ithaca is leading the way in experimental and hybrid image-text photobooks.

By Olga Yatskevich

Jo Ann Walters, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1988, from Wood River Blue Pool (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2018)
© the artist, courtesy Image Text Ithaca Press

The Image Text Ithaca (ITI) Press at Ithaca College is a publisher with a unique vision that brings together, in an innovative and experimental form, writing and photography. It was founded in 2015 in Ithaca, New York (as the name suggests), by Nicholas Muellner and Catherine Taylor, both of whom feel that literary and photographic visual worlds run parallel in certain ways but rarely speak to each other well. Muellner and Taylor have different backgrounds, areas of expertise, communities, and insights, yet their roots are shared and their differences turn into strengths. Taylor is at the forefront of experimental literature, the world she has been immersed in for a long time, and the same is true in regard to Muellner’s involvement with photography. As they work on publications, they equally participate in both aspects of the books while respecting each other’s larger field of knowledge. The press is an integral part of a broader Image Text Ithaca initiative at Ithaca College, which includes an MFA program, workshops, and symposia.

Jodie Herbage, Untitled, 2015, from Tessex? (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2015)
© the artist and courtesy Image Text Ithaca Press

Nicholas Muellner has been experimenting with text and images for over a decade now, finding innovative ways to initiate conversation between these two artistic fields. He has authored five of his own photobooks, and each of them offers a thoughtful body of work where visual and textual narratives overlap, creating exciting layers and dialogue. Muellner’s latest book, In Most Tides an Island (SPBH Editions, 2017), is a clever example of photographic literature, bringing together an interlocking set of short stories and images. He also eagerly plays with form, as in the Self Publish, Be Happy Pamphlet series he curated and edited. Each pamphlet, designed by Antonio de Luca and published by Bruno Ceschel, combines a commissioned photographic work with a short original text. For one of them, photographer Jason Fulford and writer Chris Mills separately visited the apartment of a photobook collector. Their photographs and text on the visit, published on a single sheet, provide an example of a simple yet effective platform for a conversation between the two forms. Muellner also organizes performance-like book launches that mix readings with visual slideshows, expanding viewers’ experience of image and text-based work.

Words are Taylor’s territory. She is a writer and editor working in a wide range of nonfiction forms, including journalism, lyrical essays, poetics, and other hybrid-genre writing. At the beginning of her career, Taylor worked as a producer and writer on a number of documentary film projects in New York City. She completed a PhD at Duke University, and her time there had a profound influence on her work; her book Apart (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) mixes archives, history, family memoirs, and personal reflections in a complex discussion of the political history of South Africa (where she and her family are from). In 2017 she released her third book, You, Me, and the Violence (Ohio State University Press), a memoir and analytical essay on “drones, power, and feelings of powerlessness.”

Bobby Scheidemann, Untitled, 2015, from Tessex? (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2015)
© the artist, courtesy Image Text Ithaca Press

When Muellner and Taylor were introduced, both were teaching at Ithaca College; they immediately discovered a mutual interest in each other’s work. Initially they planned to work together on a book, but their collaboration ended up going way beyond that: in 2014 they started an experimental workshop, held in a restored barn in Ithaca, as they decided more conversation was needed around the intersection of photography and writing. They brought together an inspiring group of both established and emerging photographers, publishers, writers, editors, and artists. It was a unique opportunity for these groups to engage in a meaningful dialogue, as the two fields rarely intersect, especially in the academic world. It was a collaborative exercise and participants were each asked to come up with an idea for a publication; the workshop thus served as the first step in the foundation of the Image Text Ithaca initiative.

ITI Press was officially launched during the 2015 LA Art Book Fair with the release of a limited-edition poster, an adaptation of the 2014 video poem Zidane produced by poet Claudia Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas. The poster’s concept, which was also conceived during the workshop, set the relationship between text and image to boldly reflect Rankine’s poetic pace in the video.

Andre Bradley, Untitled, 2015, from Dark Archives (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2015)
© the artist, courtesy Image Text Ithaca Press

Now in its fourth year, ITI Press has published ten titles to date, ranging from monographs and posters to pocket-size series of image-text collaborations, collective titles, and a thesis sampler. ITI Press works with Elana Schlenker, whose vision and sensitivity help successfully unite writings and photography in the book format. In 2015, ITI published Dark Archives by Andre Bradley, a book that brings together the personal and the private as Bradley revisits childhood memories through writings, photographs, and the family photo archive. Another title, Tessex? (by Emma Kemp and Daniel Wroe, Bobby Scheidemann, Analicia Sotelo, and Thomas Whittle), was the first collaborative publication that evolved from the 2014 workshop, described as “equal parts manifesto, fiction and travelogue, wrapped in a glossy tabloid package.” Grind (2016) is an art-text collaboration between Muellner and poet John Keene, which takes as its foundation found text and images from the queer online dating scene. Muellner and Taylor mindfully consider the people and projects ITI Press takes on. Their recent publication Wood River Blue Pool (2018) brought together photographer Jo Ann Walters; Laura Wexler, a cultural historian; and Emma Kemp, a young experimental nonfiction writer. Walters’s photographs, taken between the late 1980s and 2016, pay nuanced attention to the overlooked lives of women and children in small, working-class towns; the text by Wexler provides a contemporary take on the historical and social context of the photographs. For this project Kemp was sent on a writing assignment to Alton, Illinois, Walters’s hometown. She was given complete freedom, and her text, which integrates art criticism with a murder mystery, couldn’t be more exciting. It has been published in a companion volume Blue Pool Cecilia; the two books complement each other while functioning as individual publications, a type of collaboration that brings together diverse voices and invites multiple audiences into conversation.

Another ITI book released in 2018 is My Birth by Carmen Winant, copublished with Self Publish, Be Happy. Winant’s work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Being: New Photography 2018 exhibit, as an archive of images installed on two facing walls with strips of ripped blue painter’s tape. While the floor-to-ceiling installation created a visually striking experience, the book treats the material quite differently, deliberately intertwining images and texts in a format that allows for a more intimate and engaged experience. Taylor, who herself has published a book on a related subject, Giving Birth: A Journey into the World of Mothers and Midwives (2002), was excited to work closely with Winant on the text. Winant’s spare but impactful writing sets a powerful and engaging tone for the photobook narrative: it opens with a number of direct questions, instantly grabbing our attention and then pushing us into the visual sequence. The text is also used to break up the intense visual narrative, bringing in a pause and a continuation of the verbal conversation about the experience of giving birth.

Carmen Winant, Untitled, 2018, from My Birth (Image Text Ithaca Press and SPBH Editions, 2018)
© the artist, courtesy Image Text Ithaca Press

From the very beginning, collaboration has been vital to the ITI philosophy, which was essentially born out of a collaborative experience. Taylor and Muellner always envisioned their publishing enterprise being closely connected to the Image Text Ithaca MFA Program, which was established in 2016 as an exploratory and innovative program focusing on the cross-disciplinary and experimental integration of creative writing and photography. While the program takes advantage of the academic environment, it is not constrained by academic models, creating a unique learning space. Every year Taylor and Muellner invite additional faculty members, artists whose practice complements the ITI vision, among them Lucas Blalock, Bruno Ceschel, Justine Kurland, Tisa Bryant, Melissa Catanese, and Ed Panar. While students don’t necessarily have to work in both fields all the time, they learn how to operate with and share a common language. The MFA program works closely with ITI Press, allowing students to get involved in and learn certain stages of the publishing process. The first class graduated in the summer of 2018, and as a part of their graduation project, students jointly released a publication including eight booklets, housed inside a fabric-wrapped case, showcasing the work of each student.

ITI Press sees its mission as opening up the audience across visual and literary spaces, creating new vibrations and expressive possibilities across reading and seeing. As they work on publications, Muellner and Taylor keep asking: “How do you ensure language is not an afterthought to image, and image is not an afterthought to language? How do you make them interdependent and stronger than the sum of their parts?” This is the challenge. Considering that three of their monographs were shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards (by Andre Bradley, Jo Ann Walters and Emma Kemp, and Carmen Winant), and that Bradley’s book was also shortlisted for the 2016 Photo-Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, ITI appears to be meeting that challenge, by bringing publications to the photobook community that are urgent and new.

Jo Ann Walters, Brandford, Connecticut, 2001, from Wood River Blue Pool (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2018)
© the artist, courtesy Image Text Ithaca Press

Ultimately, Image Text Ithaca Press wants people to look at what they publish and feel like “I haven’t seen this before,” “I haven’t felt this before.” On their to-do list is to publish a novel with no pictures, and a book of images with no text at all; Muellner says that they want to prove that thinking about language and images together can also mean that sometimes you may decide that one of them is unnecessary. With its continuous push to find innovative approaches to integrating words and photos in thoughtful and bold ways, and to collaborate with both established and emerging artists, ITI Press is one of the publishers that not only sets a particular and focused agenda for the bookmaking scene, but also uses its resources to create an engaged community around its practice.

Olga Yatskevich is a cofounder of 10×10 Photobooks, a multiplatform project that highlights photobooks and engages the photobook community. She coedited the most recent 10×10 publication, How We See: Photobooks by Women (2018).

Read more from The PhotoBook Review Issue 016 or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Aperture Capital Campaign Auction, presented by Christie’s, Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Lot 229
Paolo Ventura, Domenica Pomeriggio, 2019 Courtesy the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Lot 221
Richard Misrach, Untitled (20402#FC), 2011Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

Lot 203
Imogen Cunningham, Banana Plant in Garden, late 1920s
Courtesy the Imogen Cunningham Trust

Lot 227
Judy Glickman Lauder, Bird Migration, Quebec, 1998
Courtesy the artist and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Lot 231
Todd Hido#2319-b, 1999, from House Hunting
Courtesy the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

Lot 230
Matthew Brandt, 000263751, Demolition of L.A. High School, 2013, from DustCourtesy the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Lot 241
William Wegman, On and On, 2015 Courtesy the artist

Lot 243
Laurie Simmons, How We See/Anmari (Pink/Black Shirt), 2015
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York

Internationally acclaimed artists, collectors, and gallerists have generously donated works for a special photography auction, to be presented by Christie’s New York on October 2, 2019. All proceeds support Aperture’s 20/20: A Bold Vision capital campaign, directly funding Aperture’s purchase of a new space in Manhattan—a flexible meeting, education, and event space and HQ for its global publishing operations.

Since its founding in 1952, Aperture has propelled the vision and dialogue that have shaped the course of photography, and your support will enable Aperture to serve the next generation of artists and thinkers, driving the medium forward. The auction features fifty-four lots, including photographs by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Todd Hido, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, William Klein, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Vik Muniz, Paul Outerbridge, Herb Ritts, Stephen Shore, Laurie Simmons, Paul Strand, and Hank Willis Thomas.

 

View a catalogue of photographs offered by Christie’s to benefit Aperture here.

View the full details of the Christie’s sale here.

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Announcing the 2019 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist Jury

We are happy to announce the jury of the 2019 Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist:

Amanda Maddox is associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She has curated or cocurated numerous exhibitions, most recently Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story and Dora Maar. Her publications include Thomas Annan: Photographer of Glasgow (Getty, 2017) and Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows (Getty, 2015).

Joanna Milter is the director of photography at the New Yorker, overseeing all photography for the print and digital versions of the magazine, in addition to Photo Booth, the magazine’s photography blog. Previously, Milter spent eleven years as a photo editor at the New York Times Magazine; for the last four of those years, she was the deputy photo editor.

Drew Sawyer is the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, where he recently organized the exhibitions Garry Winogrand: Color and Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha (both 2019). Previously, he served as associate curator of photography at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Lesley A. Martin is the creative director of Aperture Foundation and publisher of The PhotoBook Review. In 2012, she cofounded the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

Christoph Wiesner is the artistic director of Paris Photo.

Enter the PhotoBook Awards here! Books must arrive at Aperture by September 13, 2019.

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On the Cover: Aperture’s “Mexico City” Issue

Iñaki Bonillas, Adiós fotografía (Bye bye photography), Mexico City (detail), 2018
Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York

Ghost-like hands reach out from a dark background and create the outline of an invisible camera in Iñaki Bonillas’s Adiós fotografía (Bye bye photography), the cover of Aperture’s fall 2019 issue, “Mexico City,” the fourth in a series of city-focused issues, following São Paulo, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. The staging of this mysterious photograph echoes the relationship between artist and subject. “Here I asked an actress to portray, with her hands only, a photographer in action,” says Bonillas, in an interview with Iván Ruiz for Aperture. “What we see is nothing but the gestures of the hands while taking a picture and the voids that form around those hands where a camera no longer is used—yet it is somehow still there.”

As a young photographer, Bonillas worked for his uncle, the photographer Carlos Somonte, as the assistant to Somonte’s assistant. In that role, he was responsible for preparing every step in the photographic process, aside from actually taking the photograph itself. “This limit allowed me to begin to work in the margins of the notion of the photographic, and to become more interested in the extra-photographic aspects of the medium,” Bonillas recalls. That early education guides the defining works of Bonillas’s career, from the phantom camera in Adiós fotografía to his inventive reworking of the photographic archive he inherited from his grandfather, who moonlighted as a conceptual artist while working as an aluminum salesman.

Bonillas describes himself as an “attic photographer,” adding, “I spend a lot of time looking for traces of images that are hidden somewhere.” Aperture’s “Mexico City” issue is full of photographer-detectives like Bonillas—artists who reconsider the past to tell new narratives, from the personal to the collective. Throughout the issue, artists like Graciela Iturbide, Gabriel Orozco, Miguel Calderón, Jesús León, Pablo Ortíz Monasterio, and Tania Franco Klein, and writers and curators Chloe Aridjis, Álvaro Enrigue, Kit Hammonds, and Sarah Hermanson Meister examine the diversity of Mexico City and its vibrant cultural scenes, reflecting on the ways Mexican photographers are pushing new visions for the medium.

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

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What Can Photographs Tell Us About the History of Redlining in the US?

Zora J Murff reflects on the intertwined legacies of segregation and violence in Black communities.

By M. Neelika Jayawardane

Zora Murff, Jerrod (talking about hoods), 2019
Courtesy the artist

Zora J Murff’s new photobook, At No Point In Between, traces the history of redlining in US cities—systematic discrimination that has been implemented over decades as a result of decisions made by individuals, businesses, communities, and local governments to refuse services to Black, low-income, and otherwise marginalized communities. Although Murff reflects on the spectacle of sudden violence—as well as the legacy of segregation and slow violence—that redlining was designed to engineer, his work allows audiences to read images against a background of social conditions and individual lives. Crucially, he shows the myriad ways in which invisible policies continue to operate and impact Black communities. (Murff’s other, concurrent project, which informs his work for At No Point In Between, explores the intersections between historical structures of violence that targeted Black individuals and communities in the US, and how that structural violence is perpetuated today through the juvenile correction system.) Murff acknowledges that his foundational education in counseling and psychology contributed to how he conceptualized his book, likening it to what effective therapy can do. “When you go to see a therapist, they already know what’s wrong with you,” he noted recently, via email. “But they understand that if you find the answer yourself, you can take ownership over it, learn from it, and grow from it.”

Zora Murff, Bound, 2019
Courtesy the artist

M. Neelika Jayawardane: How did you begin to think about redlining? How do you go about photographing something that is not really tangible, a system that is purposefully and systematically designed to not be visible? How does one “picture” something that businesses and policy-makers work hard (perhaps unconsciously) to bury under the rhetoric of security and safety?

Zora J Murff: A little under a year after being deeply impacted by seeing violent video footage of Laquan McDonald shot and killed by a police officer, I visited North Omaha. It was the first time since moving to Nebraska that I entered a new environment as a stranger, and I found that everyone else looked like me. I was also in an environment, for the first time in my life, where that Black majority had existed for a substantial period of time. I was fascinated by that feeling; this was a place where my mere existence was positively acknowledged and affirmed without question. As I passed through, I also noticed many vacant lots that stood as gaps in the landscape; more deeply, they were gaps in time. To me, these vacant lots laid bare truncations in memory within the community. I had a desire to know more, to fumble around in the dark spaces, those amputations in memory.

What I found was that amputations in memory exist so that we “forget” the actors in repetitive acts of racialized terror—but not the terror itself. I came first to the story of Will Brown, who in 1919 was lynched by a white mob for being accused of raping a white woman. Through Will Brown, I found Vivian Strong, the fourteen-year-old girl whose life was stolen by a police officer in 1969 for running away from him.

Next came the articles on the implications of the term “race riots” and how those events critically shaped communities. Then the publications on redlining (John McKnight in the 1960s) and the legal disenfranchisement of communities through the denial of access to wealth-building tools (primarily through homeownership). That led me to reflect on slow violence—insidious legislation, done on behalf of the federal government, which would prove to be an effective (and less identifiable) implement of harm, just as effective as bullets or nooses.

Last came the dissection of lynching photography. I saw photography’s resolute function as a mirroring device: how the image collapses onto itself, all at once reinforcing hatred and buttressing proof of injustice. In that dark space, I ran my finger along the edge of that dichotomy, and what I felt was akin to a Möbius strip, an edge that begins, ends, and brings you back to the beginning. I wanted the path through my work to feel the same way, with the complicated connections between images, histories, and contexts being my key to use photography as an implement to “plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time,” as Rob Nixon states in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

Zora Murff, Stripped, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: You use two appropriated images from a violent crime scene—stills from a phone video of a police killing—as “bookends.” The first image in the book (a tiny, five- or six-square-centimeter color insert positioned at the lower spine of the book) serves as an opening salvo. It shows a grainy image of a man in a turquoise shirt and black trousers running through an open, grassy area. It is Walter Scott, who was chased, shot, and killed by Michael Slager, a white police officer, following a daytime traffic stop for a nonfunctioning brake light. The last image in the book is another postage stamp-size still—that of Slager aiming his gun. The inclusion of these images is sort of an intervention into the traditional format of glossy photobooks. Although one might miss these images if one were carelessly flipping through the book, the power and impact of the narrative they carry—the moment one recognizes them—is unmistakable. Why use these two appropriated video stills to bookend your work?

Murff: My interest in using found or archival footage began as a result of the police killing I mentioned earlier—that of Laquan McDonald, who was shot by Jason Van Dyke, a white police officer; it was recorded by a dashcam. I became preoccupied with the McDonald case once the footage was released to the public. I decided to watch it; this was my first time watching any such footage, and it opened up a type of fear that I hadn’t felt before. I thought about my mom (for various reasons), but one primary reason was because I learned fear through her. The fundamental difference between those two types of fear is the fact that the fear I learned from my mom is based in love: a fear Black parents often instill in their children, because it is necessary for us to have the ability to recognize danger. The fear I felt from the footage was different. It had such depth that it seemed bottomless. With the acknowledgement of his name, Laquan McDonald, I acknowledged those names that were already written and those that would come after. It was in this moment that I was defining myself as an artist. Meanwhile, photography was clearly showing me that white supremacy is at the core of how the technology has been (and still is) used, and an essential part of many US institutions—including those that supported photography itself.

In my book, I chose to use a still from the video of Walter Scott, who was also killed by a white policeman, even as Scott was attempting to run away. I decided to split the still, because it’s the moment before Slager begins shooting. When I speak of layers of history, I think a better term to use might be distention, a statement that Terence Washington makes in his text in At No Point in Between: “the most radical thing is to choose time and its distention.”

The first half of the image establishes photography’s many potentials (specifically as evidence, as archive unto itself, as an object in service to an archive). Hopefully, that gesture carries forward, influencing how everything to come is seen. The second half of the image, of course, reinforces that idea, but brings with it a sort of weight or snap (a connecting of dots, perhaps). I found it crucial to lead the viewer back to the beginning, to recognize that with splitting the image, a fissure is opened, and they can begin to see all of those things that exist underneath images, moments, decisions. I’m asking, “What is the difference between a spectacle lynching, between a murder committed by police, between redlining?” If we retrace our steps back in time, all of those things (to me) become one and the same, stones in the foundation that set the trajectory of the larger, violent structure.

Zora Murff, A Point (3), 2019
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: Can you speak more about your interest in creating an archive?  

Murff: When I began entertaining using this specific still in the book, I was thinking about how time and context shift the understanding of images, as well as the concept of archive building. When we look at images or archives, the intent of the maker, I believe, can never fully be erased. I would further posit that time is also always present: both the archive and the image are understood both in and out of time. For these reasons, I always saw this work as my creation of an archive: part archive of a specific place at a specific time, and part my interpretation of things happening in the American sociopolitical landscape between 2015 and 2018.

My motivation for including these images was to try and work through and present pathways to theorizing memory and time, and the gaps I found in both when Black communities have been subjected, long term, to racialized terror.

Recounting the day on which Scott was shot by Slager, Feidin Santana (the citizen who recorded the footage) stated that he “recorded the video so that maybe he [Scott] can feel that someone is there. . . . There were just the three of us in that moment. I couldn’t tell what was going to happen, so I just wanted him to know that he’s not by himself.” Santana made himself a witness, and with the dispersion of the video, made those of us who watched it witnesses too. He was also gathering evidence (thankfully) that would contradict the official story, and possibly lead to Slager’s conviction. The images will always hold that value.

The gravity of the situation, and the constant appearance of Santana’s video on news shows between 2015 (when the shooting occurred) and 2017 (when Slager was convicted), solidified the resulting images as icons. They become ingrained into our collective conscious. Such iconic images have the potential to define a time period. I can almost say with certainty that thirty years from now, many of us alive today will recall this image with ease. These ways of memory-keeping resonate with the way Shawn Michelle Smith, in Photography on the Color Line, describes an archive as something that exists not only as “a record of the past,” but as an entity that “makes a claim on history . . . [as] a vehicle of memory.” 

Zora Murff, Jhalisa (talking about self), 2019
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: Your work reveals the rarely documented and rarely examined slow violence that redlining brings about—creating the conditions for the spectacular violence that we see on the news. The smallness of the image of Scott highlights the smallness of his worth—his physical matter, his political power, his social value—to the state. It becomes a metaphor for the perceived smallness of Black lives—redlined into invisibility in America. 

Murff: The creation of images—specifically in colonial and American history—has been used to create the perception of an “other.” From prints with renderings of Native peoples in the 1600s to soap advertisements promoting imperialist ideology, images were meant to promote white superiority, a tool to oppress. The white privilege of deciding how nonwhite people were seen, thereby promoting white supremacy, is deeply ingrained in the practice of image-making. Photography is not exempt from that. This isn’t a fatalistic view, because we can, of course, look back and clearly see errors in thinking on both societal and personal levels.

I think about this moment in Lisa Riordan Seville’s afterword in At No Point in Between: “I ask myself what it takes to perpetrate a casual act of photography amid the smell of burning flesh. But I do not ask why I do not see myself among the faces in the crowd. I could come up with reasons other than the truth, which is that because they are white and I am white, I can convince myself our stories are not conjoined. I can write around it. I know that is a failure of sight.”

The photograph she references here is the lynching photograph of Will Brown. In that picture, the men depicted all implicate themselves by appearing in the picture, many of them seeing their presence at this “event” as a point of pride. Their hubris was, of course, met and welcomed; a few of them were tried but eventually acquitted (a narrative too common at that time). Seville’s reflection reminds us that the reading and understanding of images is not absolute, and in that, there’s always hope.

Zora Murff, Jerrod and Junior (talking about fatherhood), 2019
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: There is no directive introduction by the photographer in your book, and no text by contributors that provides factual information that contextualizes the images. One is a poem; the other a reflection. Why these oblique texts?

Murff: When I asked Lisa and Terence to write the texts, I asked them to write around the work rather than writing about it. I didn’t want to give too much away, and both writers found really subtle ways to implicate the viewer: Terence, through masterful, staccato pacing; and Lisa, through a skillful navigation between past, present, self, and society. I felt that to honor the spirit of the work, it was important to me to see their genuine interpretations of the collection of images. They didn’t disappoint.

Zora Murff, Young Man (talking about his future), 2019
Courtesy the artist

Jayawardane: Your photography makes me think about the labor that engages in powerful, difficult forms of memorialization—labor that resists forgetting, and rather, encourages remembering that moves us to acknowledgement, accountability, and possibly, action. What forms of negation and forgetting is your work attempting to interrupt?

Murff: The early versions of this work were very heavy-handed. I remember hosting a studio visit with a faculty member at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and he spoke a lot about the “volume” of the work. He suggested that I had it up way too loud. He showed me Emily Jacir’s installation ex libris (2010–12) and pointed me to a review of her work written by Cynthia Cruz, who states: “Her photos document the echo of a people; they inhabit the emptiness of that echo.” Before he left my studio, the last thing this faculty member said was, “We already understand this at a high volume. The video footage is loud. The protests are loud. Why does your work also have to be loud?”

For me, the silence is nuance. Rather than tell the viewer exactly what I’m thinking, it is more important to ask them, from the outset, to approach the work with a high level of investment and critical engagement. After all, I think that’s the most that we can ask from audiences. 

M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg.  

Zora J Murff’s photobook At No Point In Between was published by Dais Books in July 2019.

The post What Can Photographs Tell Us About the History of Redlining in the US? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

From Teju Cole, an Exhibition as “Tone Poem”

Drawing from a Chicago photography collection, the writer continues his interest in presenting the beauty of black skin.

By Emma Kennedy

Whitten Sabbatini, Couple Embracing, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Teju Cole’s first major curatorial project, Go Down Moses, is a triumphant presentation of the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection. Founded in 1976 by Columbia College Chicago, the MoCP began collecting in 1979 and now has over 15,000 objects. For Go Down Moses, Cole, a writer and photography critic, selected a range of photographs from this vast collection, creating what he calls a “visual tone poem.” Divided between three floors, the show is a visual feast of compositionally striking work and unlikely, yet captivating pairings.

In the first room, Cole intersperses images of landscapes (presumably American ones) with those of body parts. While the juxtaposition is compelling—instigating visual associations between the human form and land—each work is powerful enough in its own right. Cole includes Dorothea Lange’s Toquerville, 1953, Belle Bringhurst and neighbor children, which depicts the back of a gray-haired woman’s head, her tight, twisted bun drawing the eye. In a photograph by Esther Parada, the back and base of the neck of a black person in a simple cloth shirt become a landscape of textual detail. These pieces are compositionally brilliant, yet utterly quotidian.

Christian Patterson, 24th Street Road (Road at Night), 2007
Courtesy the artist

Cole has long thought about photographic representations of black people, as evidenced in his earlier musings on the delicate touch of photographers like Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks, who harnessed the camera’s technology to capture black subjects. Cole’s selections for Go Down Moses illuminate his continued interest in presenting the beauty of black skin. Stephen Feldman’s 1966 Portrait, for example, situates a black man against an entirely black background, where the only visible light is reflected off the sweat on his face; in the resulting profile, only a mouth, nose, and eye are clearly discernible. There are also several works from Myra Greene’s arresting 2007 series Character Recognition; glass ambrotypes present sectioned parts of her body and consider the black body’s role in identity formation.

Myra Greene, Untitled #38, from the series Character Recognition, 2007
Courtesy the artist

The last room of the exhibition features two walls. On the first, longer wall, photographs hang floor-to-ceiling salon-style and range from iconic to lesser-known images, and from banal, everyday visuals to those of violence and destruction. Danny Lyon’s historic 1964 image of the National Guard assaulting photographer Clifford Vaughs is more or less centered in this grouping: a moment of uniquely American violence at the center of Cole’s mini-history of photography. The photograph’s modest size, however, renders it just one small part of a larger whole, especially in relation to its much larger neighbors by artists like An-My Lê, Anthony Haughey, and Alec Soth. The all-too-common nature of violence in the US is on display in Lyon’s striking image, as well as in Cole’s other selections, featuring overturned cars, burning buildings, and even planes in the process of destruction. Alongside these, Cole includes photographs of environmental degradation, American military force, and American consumerism.

On the final, jet-black wall of the gallery, under low light, is Roy DeCarava’s Man in Window (1978). The image is almost too dark to be seen at first glance; under low light, the print’s presentation is radically different from the rest of the exhibition. DeCarava is known for his stunning play of light and darkness and his ability to sidestep the technical camera limitations that typically favor pale skin—and Cole has previously expressed a deep admiration for DeCarava’s use of shadow to reveal the texture, depth, and beauty of black skin. Man in Window is a quiet conclusion. It is an image that encapsulates many of the themes of Go Down Moses, while simultaneously existing outside of the narrative. Cole fittingly considers the image to be his “grace note.”

Melissa Ann Pinney, Selan’s Beauty School, 1988
Courtesy the artist

Go Down Moses asks a timely question: is hope still possible, given the chaos of our present moment? Cole’s words and his curation remind us that moments of change, of upheaval, are not new: this archive tells us that the state of disruption—the chaos in our environmental, political, social, and cultural worlds—has happened before. He also reminds us that photographers have sought hope through their medium since its invention. At the conclusion of his curatorial statement, Cole proposes a new definition of hope, one in which hope is hospitality exchanged in solidarity between the weary. The images in Go Down Moses show us how brilliant and terrifying the world can be—how immense beauty exists with immense pain and destruction. In the end, what Cole offers us through his careful selection of photographs is this hospitality—this hope.

Emma Kennedy is an art history PhD student at Northwestern University. She is a former editorial work scholar at Aperture magazine.

Go Down Moses is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago through September 29, 2019.

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