Aperture's Blog, page 81

Introducing: Steven Molina Contreras

Between Long Island, El Salvador, and Peru, an American family’s emotional reunion.

By Brendan Embser

Steven Molina Contreras, Mother & I, #2,  New York, USA, 2018

Lenin Mejorada was supposed to be away for two weeks. An immigrant from Peru, he was living on Long Island with his family for six years when he made a decision to obtain permanent residency in the US. On December 14, 2017, with short notice, Lenin, a maintenance worker at a Catholic church, left for Peru. His lawyers said the process wouldn’t take longer than two weeks. But after three weeks passed, Lenin missed his return flight home. “We didn’t have an answer,” his wife, Alma Contreras-Mejorada, said. “We didn’t have anything. And then, I was like, what’s going on?”

With her husband away, things were getting tight around the house. Alma asked her son, Steven Molina Contreras, to come home on the weekends to help out with babysitting. Steven, a photographer and student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, started commuting from Manhattan on weekends, mostly to look after his younger stepsister, Abigail—Lenin and Alma’s US-born daughter, who was three years old at the time—while Alma was working at a hair salon.

“My mom started to fill the gap when my stepfather was gone,” Steven told me in July, in a conversation with his mother, two days before Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a series of “raids” in the US. “Obviously, a young child doesn’t understand why they’re not seeing their family member every day,” Steven said of Abigail. “And her father was gone for those three months.”

“It was more than three months,” Alma corrected.

Steven was born in El Salvador in 1999 and moved to the US when he was six. “By all accounts,” he said, “I was as American as the Pledge of Allegiance I recited every morning in school.” As a child, he distanced himself from his Salvadoran heritage and raced toward assimilation, toward a sense of American identity. When people asked where he was from, he would confidently respond, “I’m from New York.” But his stepfather’s absence prompted a sudden shift in Steven’s relationship to his family. He had to step into the role of father figure; he had to figure out how to be a caretaker. Thinking of Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (1990) and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family (2014), he began to photograph his mother and stepsisters, making evocative black-and-white portraits that consider the dynamics of a household living in uncertainty.

“Molina Contreras’s photographs have the power of evoking total recall of private Latinx family moments,” said Yxta Maya Murray, a writer and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “His ability to capture that intimacy recalls Roy DeCarava’s best portrait work, as well as Paola Paredes’s and Laura Aguilar’s.” In his series Mi Familia Immigrante (2018), Steven envisions his family as both documentary subjects and collaborators. He photographed his mother at moments when she was exhausted, and he gently guided certain scenes with a “performative” eye on composition, as in one of his mother and stepsister at a table, with Steven himself reflected in a mirror, all three trading gazes of introspection and concern.

“The camera starts as an object, a way of making, but becomes another present member of the family, partaking in the in-betweens of her family experience,” Steven observed of Paredes, an Ecuadorian photographer who also works between documentary and staged images. The same could be said of Steven’s own process, and the way his camera is an expressive instrument and a silent observer.

Steven Molina Contreras, 9PM Dinner, New York, USA, 2018

More than three months after leaving for Peru, Lenin returned home. “It was like everyone could finally breathe,” Steven said. “He was a resident. He was here. There was nothing that anyone could’ve done to take him away.” To mark the occasion, Steven made a formal family portrait, even though he’s not in the frame himself; he still thinks of his role as “the photographer.” Signaling a transition, he switched to color, as if the lights had suddenly come on, or a new spectrum of experience had been revealed. He soon decided he wanted to go to El Salvador, to reconnect with his biological father and make photographs of his extended family. “I realized the only way to unobscure my childhood identity was to return to El Salvador alone, with my camera in hand,” he said.

Steven’s Salvadoran family became willing participants in his project. They were glad, he said, that Steven had taken an interest in their lives, and that he was making images that went beyond the typical media representations of violence in El Salvador, a country that faced a devastating civil war in the 1980s, and has in recent years been beset by gang violence—one of the reasons why thousands have attempted to seek safety in the US. In April, over the course of a week, Steven made portraits of his father and his stepmother, his aunt and grandmother, which he collected into a series called Home Again, El Salvador (2019). He visited his father at the car wash where he works and lives, and they went swimming together. He told me he hopes his mother and sisters will return to El Salvador together “as a family unit, in the place where our origins began. I’m continuing to fill out our family tree.”

In Spanish, the word volver means to return, to go back, to start again. Lenin had to go back to Peru in order to return to the US. Steven had to return to El Salvador so that he could go back to his origins, to the beginning of his story. Even though he and Alma were reunited with Lenin, Steven said, “We still face those consequences of being immigrants in this country, having to go through the citizenship process, and having to struggle with the chance that the family we have now is not the family we can always have.”

Yxta Maya Murray noted that Steven’s “eye for detail robs you of your breath.” But in that moment of breath-taking, Steven also gives something back: a window onto the present tension around immigration in the US, and a stirring vision of an American family.

Steven Molina Contreras, Wedding Day, August 2013, Te Extraño, New York, USA, 2018

Steven Molina Contreras, Libertad, Still Life, New York, USA, 2018

Steven Molina Contreras, Mi Familia, New York, USA, 2018

Steven Molina Contreras, New Light, New York, USA, 2018

Steven Molina Contreras, Summer at Home, Rebuilding #2, New York, USA, 2018

Steven Molina Contreras, Papi (Dad) Jimmy, Portrait #1, El Salvador, 2019

Steven Molina Contreras, Self Portrait #1, In My Abuelo’s (Grandpa’s) Home, El Salvador, 2019

Steven Molina Contreras, Papi (Dad’s) Jimmi’s Car Wash/Home #1, El Salvador 2019

Brendan Embser is the managing editor of Aperture magazine and the editor of Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018) and Ethan James Green: Young New York (2019). All photographs courtesy the artist.

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

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In “African Spirits,” A New Visual Vernacular

An exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery captures the dizzying array of post-independence African photography.

By Imani Noelle Ford

Hassan Hajjaj, Cardi B Unity, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Third Line Gallery, Dubai, and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

African Spirits, currently on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, presents an astutely and carefully crafted panoply of African photography, conveying the mastery and evolution of a bold and—I would add—fly visual vernacular. Juxtaposing approximately sixty-five works from the 1950s to the early 1980s with contemporary pieces by artists across the African diaspora, the exhibition initially overwhelms. Modern prints of black-and-white portraits seemingly clash with the yellowed, aged edges of vintage prints from both celebrated and little-known studios. The image sizes vary, pulling the viewers toward and away from the faces, clothing, and postures of their subjects. But who are these people?

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Untitled, from the series Citizens of Porto-Novo, 2018
© the artist and courtesy Jack Bell Gallery, London

Decidedly adorned and decisively posed. Or candidly photographed and sincerely expressive. They are citizens of a new social world, one defined by the transformations of the independence movements that swept Africa in the 1960s. There is motion and agency in these bodies, whether clothed or undressed, choosing if and how they are looked at. The works that constitute African Spirits embrace self-possessed subjects and a reverence for the quotidian, molding the inherently subversive foundation of postcolonial African portraiture.

Samuel Fosso, Autoportrait, 1975–78
© the artist and courtesy Jean Marc Patras Galerie, Paris

The title African Spirits is a reference to Samuel Fosso’s series of the same name from 2008, which was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and presented at its 2017 collection exhibition, Unfinished Conversations. The series is not on view here, but the exhibition does include some of Fosso’s earlier work, alongside that of Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Sanlé Sory, and J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, as well as contemporary artists such as Zanele Muholi, Morgan Mahape, Hassan Hajjaj, Pieter Hugo, Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, and Delphine Diallo.

Delphine Diallo, Afropunk – Pink Fur, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Fisheye Gallery, Paris

An openly queer artist, Diallo gives the show a pop of color with Afropunk – Pink Fur (2016). This portrait of a femme, embodying queer femininity and queer masculinity, complements Mohamed Bourouissa’s nearby image from the series Périphéries, of two men, a boxer and a coach. Pink Fur also converses with Agbodjelou’s Untitled (2012), from the series Musclemen, which depicts three bare-chested men, arms crossed, with different patterns on the fabric of their pants, the backdrop, and the floor. Fosso’s self-portrait works from the series 70’s Lifestyle portray the artist in various costumes of flyness that queer manhood, allowing him to literally and figuratively try on new identity “types,” ultimately fashioning a self as photographer and as subject.

Pieter Hugo, Mimi Afrika, Wheatland Farm, Graaf-Reinet, 2013
© the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Sidibé’s contact sheets ARROSAGE DES TROIS, ADMIS NIARELA, 28-9-68 (1968) and Nuit du 18-19-11-69 (1969) embody the exhibition’s impulse toward quotidian delights. In her book Listening to Images, Black feminist scholar Tina M. Campt defines the quotidian as “a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.” These images are fragmented archives of the subjects at their best, showing up and showing out on the dance floor, embracing the moment and one another. While the quotidian is not spectacular, it is special. African subjects fashioned agency in front of the camera and in everyday life. Hugo’s large-scale photograph Mimi Afrika, Wheatland Farm, Graaff-Reinet (2013), from the series Kin, amplifies the intimacy of Sidibé’s smaller vintages. Hugo captures an older African woman adorned in a pink collared shirt and ornate gold-print headscarf. Most would see her skin’s texture and the beauty in her naked wrinkles as the photograph’s punctum. However, I see the few locks of her hair that she has shed, subtle kinks sitting here and there atop her shirt. The photograph is immaculate in its presentation, yet especially beautiful in its mundanity.

Studio Degbava, Untitled, ca. mid-twentieth century
© Studio Degbava

Similarly poignant, one of the photographs from the lesser-known Studio Degbava depicts a woman throwing her head back in ecstasy. We cannot see her face. To get to know her joy, one must step in close. Arms akimbo, with her hands cinching her dress, she draws attention to her shoes. Left foot turned out, proud and feeling herself. What does it feel like to escape at just the moment of capture? Perhaps like this. Muholi and Mahape’s beaded portrait Somnyama Ngonyama (2019) continues this conversation of expansive feeling. Similar to Black American artist Mickalene Thomas’s Din, une très belle négresse #1 (2012), Muholi and Mahape employ a plethora of cultural artifacts and practices, suggesting that paint and print are no longer enough to communicate the fabulosity and complexity of the Black subject.

Hamidou Maiga, Untitled, 1973
© the artist and courtesy Jack Bell Gallery, London

The camera’s introduction to the African continent has fashioned a visual vernacular that persists even as it has morphed from the commercial photo studio of the ’60s and ’70s into the cross-cultural collaborations of today. African Spirits captures the specific aesthetics and ambiguities of African selfhood. We can look to the images of Fosso, Sidibé, their contemporaries, and their successors to access the worlds their subjects crafted in the aftermath of violence, migration, or political independence. Most importantly, we can bear witness to who these subjects decided to become.

Imani Noelle Ford is a visual artist, writer, and scholar from Chicago. Currently based in New York, they will begin a PhD program in English and comparative literature at Columbia University this fall.

African Spirits is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, through August 23, 2019.

The post In “African Spirits,” A New Visual Vernacular appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Art School Confidential

Matthew Finn’s photographs of London art students summon the innocent days of the 1990s.

By Lou Stoppard

Matthew Finn, from the book School of Art, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stanley/Barker

“England, 1997” reads the opening page of Matthew Finn’s new book, School of Art. On May 1 of that year, the left-leaning Labour Party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, won the general election. It was a landslide victory, one that, in numbers, has not since been topped, and it ended the party’s eighteen-year spell in opposition to the right-wing Conservative Party government. Infamously, in response Liam Gallagher, of the rock band Oasis, and his partner Patsy Kensit lay on crumpled Union Jack bedsheets in a photograph shot by Lorenzo Agius on the cover of Vanity Fair, under the headline “London Swings Again!”

Matthew Finn, from the book School of Art, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stanley/Barker

Times seemed good. It was the age of Britpop. The age of Girl Power. My parents watched Titanic. I read Harry Potter. We all listened to The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work,” which was eclipsed at Number One in the UK Singles chart by Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” which reentered the charts following his stirring performance at Princess Diana’s funeral (she died in a car crash that August). John’s song stayed there for five weeks before being toppled by the Spice Girls’ “Spice Up Your Life.” The year 1997 was one that changed the UK. The very notion of being British—the thought of what we had, who we were, what we’d lost, and what we could be—had never been so potent, so debated. That year, the nation wore its heart on its sleeve. We were proud but wounded. We were cocky.

Matthew Finn, from the book School of Art, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stanley/Barker

The subjects of Finn’s book are students of an unnamed art college in London (it’s actually Watford’s West Herts College), and their portraits show them in all their grungy, half-curious, half-insolent glory. But really, School of Art is about the way life changed, that special and strange year. Maybe the project wasn’t always focused this way—when he took the photos, Finn was likely just working instinctively, as capturing students he works with is a central part of his practice. But the choice to publish these now suggests a different, new motivation, a desire to focus the mind on the passage of time.

Matthew Finn, from the book School of Art, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stanley/Barker

It’s easy to read School of Art through the lens of Brexit. The year 1997 is just shy of two decades before the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, which saw the UK vote to leave the EU and thus plunge itself off a cliff into a sea of uncertainty and division. But it’s better to see this as a book about education, a policy area that receives woefully little airtime in Parliament today, as Brexit talks limp on. Here, 1997 was also a turning point. In November of that year, the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 was published (enacted in July 1998), which introduced tuition fees across the UK. Before that, university was a time of experimentation, of freedom. “We were able to expand our creativity in any direction we wanted,” writes former student Sonya Bhaji in the book’s foreword. Now, education is something altogether more transactional. Few can afford the luxury of failing, and thus few can afford to truly explore. Now, a young person’s path from school, to university, to endless internships, to work, is highly strategized, highly planned, highly valued.

Matthew Finn, from the book School of Art, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stanley/Barker

But beyond the politics, there are images. A boy wears a duster coat with “I’m not a trendy asshole, I do what I want”’ and “Pearl Jam” scrawled on the back. That typical angst—propelled by feeling so utterly unique, so totally separate, so smart—raises a smile. We were all young and livid once. In another photograph, a girl wears a Trainspotting t-shirt with the “Choose Life” monologue printed on it: “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. . . .” It goes on. That film, and that speech, is now a cliché in itself, a relic of a time when one had the security to perform rebellion. A time far before urgent news of more pressing issues than one’s own identity, like the imminent climate disaster. What a luxury to choose, or not choose, those things.

Matthew Finn, from the book School of Art, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stanley/Barker

It’s fitting that these pictures are being published now, not just for the reasons above, but also because the world of image-making, and image-sharing, is going through a moment of oppressive nostalgia. To a fresh eye, the past might look newer (and undoubtedly safer) than the present. And have the ’90s ever been so in fashion? Look to the runways, where the looks of that age dominate. Look on Instagram, where teens are happily re-gramming pictures of ’90s editorials from The Face or i-D. School of Art cannot simply be read as a savvy comment on all this backward glancing, as it’s undoubtedly shaped by the same impulses. Just then, I found myself tempted to make an Oasis pun, some terrible riff on “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” but maybe that’s apt for this book—a fitting touch of nostalgia, a touch of comradery, a touch of pride, a tiny shot of something that makes one cringe. For those who dream of the better days, of freedom, of opportunity, of a veneer of cool and confidence, and are happy to keep the rose-tinted glasses firmly on, this book will be a tonic.

Really, School of Art is about possibility, about the promise of the future. It lands its punch because, here in 2019, we know how the story went.

Lou Stoppard is a writer and curator based in London.

Matthew Finn: School of Art was published by Stanley/Barker in 2019.

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Max Pinckers is Raising the Stakes

In his latest book, the photographer asks how news media grapple with fiction and lies in the “post-truth” era.

By Stefan Vanthuyne

Max Pinckers, Untitled, 2016–17, from Margins of Excess, self-published, Brussels, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

With each new project that Belgian artist Max Pinckers has worked on, he has raised the stakes a little bit more in terms of questioning documentary photography, and how the genre relates to notions of truth and fiction. As a consequence, book concepts for these projects have become more complex and narratives more layered. And as the books become more ambitious, the role of text also becomes more important. This is evident not only in the amount of text being used, but also, and perhaps more important, in the different sorts of text being used, ranging from the didactic essay and interview (Lotus, with Quinten De Bruyn; Lyre Press, 2016) to found newspaper quotes (The Fourth Wall; self-published, 2012), as well as torn-out newspaper clippings and reprinted blog posts (Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty; self-published, 2014).

Max Pinckers, Untitled, 2016–17, from Margins of Excess, self-published, Brussels, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

News stories play a significant part in Pinckers’s work. How news media grapple with concepts such as truth, lies, half-facts, and fictions in what we now call a “post-truth” era is the subject of his praised book Margins of Excess. Self-published in 2018 and made between 2016 and 2017, starting in the midst of the Trump presidential campaign turmoil, the book brings together the stories of six individuals whose own personal beliefs and truths were dramatically exposed as false or deceiving in the mass media. In between these six main stories Pinckers strings together a freewheeling series of small but sensational tales of UFOs, cloned military dogs, crying Virgin Marys, suspicious white vans, accidental bombings, and fictional presidents.

Max Pinckers, Untitled, 2016–17, from Margins of Excess, self-published, Brussels, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

For Pinckers, text is primarily a way to contextualize the images, and a tool to steer the reader in a certain direction or interpretation. Margins of Excess is by far Pinckers’s most challenging book in terms of assembling a coherent narrative: he once again cleverly resorts to the use of news stories as a way to frame the work, letting it rub against and bounce off classic media discourse. However, in a very effective way he also uses these news stories as formal support elements to provide the book’s more than three hundred pages with the necessary structure. This is not the first time he’s done that—it’s also modestly present in Will They Sing—but here he takes this ingenious method to a higher level.

Max Pinckers, Untitled, 2016–17, from Margins of Excess, self-published, Brussels, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

Each one of the stories begins with a reproduced news article title and introduction on the right page, printed on a slightly thinner, light-gray paper. That these articles aren’t presented as full-on clippings was a deliberate choice by Pinckers. This way he avoided eclectic visual clutter, and instead created a unity between all the chapters’ opening texts on a formal level. After each news title, the following right page contains a portrait of the story’s protagonist made by Pinckers. Then comes a double spread with a full-bleed image and a quote from another news source, reversed out on the photograph and at the top left corner of the left page, as you would find in tabloid press and gossip magazines. Around halfway through each story comes a fully reproduced news article on the subject—on the same thinner paper used at the beginning of the chapter—clearly recognizable as such by a vertical line flanking the text on the left.

Max Pinckers, Untitled, 2016–17, from Margins of Excess, self-published, Brussels, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

Every separate story then concludes with a long interview conducted by Pinckers and his wife, Victoria Gonzalez-Figueras, with the protagonist, allowing them to tell their version of the story, followed by a small archive image given to the artists, on the bottom of the right page. These transcriptions are also printed on thinner—but this time yellow—paper. Lacking this interview portion, however, is the very first story in the book, as its hero, Herman Rosenblat, died in 2015, one year before Pinckers started photographing the series. (For the opening portrait, he used a stand-in.) In between the stories, the small tales also have their distinctive and recurring image-text layout.

Max Pinckers, Untitled, 2016–17, from Margins of Excess, self-published, Brussels, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

Equally noticeable in Margins of Excess is when Pinckers purposefully leaves out any form of explanation, as is the case with the meandering series of staged and theatrically lit scenes of people or couples in the street, looking shocked, stressed, anxious, or upset. They are all actors—professional mourners, Pinckers calls them—that he used to re-create the type of imagery the media publish when something horrific occurs, like a bombing or a tragic accident: emotionally charged close-ups of people reacting to the event. Except that such an event never happened, so there is no context to be provided. Here, lack of text is just as important as text.

Stefan Vanthuyne is a writer and photographer. As a researcher he is affiliated with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium, where his main topic is the contemporary Belgian photobook.

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

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Joan Jonas on Her Special Commission for Venice’s Newest “Pavilion”

The acclaimed multimedia speaks about her poetic call to action on behalf of the world’s oceans, the siren call of her long lost Leica, and why Robert Frank and Mary Ellen Mark loom large.

By Laura van Straaten

Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land, 2019, Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice. Performance with Ikue Mori and Francesco Migliaccio. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy
Photograph by Moira Ricci and courtesy Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas, who represented the United States at the Venice Art Biennale just before the last American presidential election season—when science and facts were still a given and a Trump presidency seemed far-fetched—has returned this go-round with a special commission for Venice’s newest “pavilion.” Though Jonas’s new project, entitled Moving Off the Land II (2019), evokes the form of the artist’s acclaimed image-laden, performative, musical, and sound-based installation from 2015, her challenge here was unique. And that’s because the space for which Jonas has designed the new site-specific work has a quite different mission.

Rather than serving one nation’s cultural—and often political—interests, this new venue is meant to represent the interests of the oceans around the globe in the threat of the climate crisis, caused by global warming, ocean acidification, plastics, and other forms of man-made harm. Ocean Space, as it’s called, is international, or transnational, to the core. Housed in the ancient Church of San Lorenzo, right on a canal, Ocean Space is the brainchild of Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, who has shifted her conservation-focused arts philanthropy TBA21 there from its former home in Vienna. Maja Hoffman’s Luma Foundation, another of the most prestigious European contemporary art foundations, has co-produced Jonas’s inaugural presentation.

Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo
Photograph by Enrico Fiorese

As a whole, Moving Off the Land II explores how oceans have cross-culturally served as a totemic, spiritual, and ecological touchstone. Presented in nonlinear fashion, the exhibition has video screens tucked into a loose array of different-sized wooden kiosks. I particularly appreciate the ones that are large enough to enter, so that Jonas’s aqueous imagery assumed my whole field of vision. All around the nave of the former church float Jonas’s paintings of marine life and banners with bits of poetry and scientific facts about the world’s oceans and the creatures of every shape and size therein. I spoke with Jonas shortly after the Benniale festivities surrounding her new project.

Rendering of Ocean Space, due to be completed in the next three years. Designed by Office for Political Innovation, the first phase of the project opened March 2019
Courtesy Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation

Laura van Straaten: I was struck by your use of underwater footage that was imperfect and murky with algae, sediment, and microscopic life. Were you specifically steering away from beauty shots, and a National Geographic or Jacques Cousteau style of underwater photography that draws attention to the craft of image making?

Joan Jonas: Well, I didn’t even think of going in that direction, actually. I wouldn’t want any like Planet Earth and all that. That’s not my thing. What I’m trying to do is very simple. It’s to show what I find interesting: the miraculous and wonderful nature of all creatures that live in the ocean. And for somebody like me, the most accessible place is the aquarium, which is sort of like a fish zoo, where much of this was shot. I don’t like zoos for animals, but I think it’s the only place that people who don’t dive can see many of these creatures.

Van Straaten: You also used underwater footage that was shot by the marine biologist David Gruber and is in fact quite beautiful, including these incredible almost neon-bright seahorses.

Jonas: I met David Gruber through TBA21. His footage shows some more exotic creatures because of what he studies, which is biofluorescence and how fish perceive the world. So he develops special cameras and lenses in order to film that. I’m interested in perception.

Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, 2019. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Luma Foundation
Photograph by Enrico Fiorese

Van Straaten: What was left on the proverbial cutting-room floor when you were mining his archives of footage? 

Jonas: I didn’t look at tons of stuff. He sent me some things and then one day, he brought over a whole file. The ones that I chose are all beautiful and fascinating to me—really incredibly beautiful footage of these creatures.

Van Straaten: There’s a nonlinearity, a multiplicity to how you layer images here, where some of the most poignant parts of the Venice exhibition—and the related performances I’ve seen—are when we see you interacting with moving images of underwater creatures not only on the screen behind you, but also projected onto your garments and your face. There are moments where you dance and dart and sway, as if mimicking the movement of the marine life in the swells of the sea. And then in some parts, it’s as if you’re trying to embrace or embody the creatures on the screen behind you—it reads almost as a longing on your part. Can you talk about what you are trying to achieve with your movement in relation to the images behind and quite literally on you? 

Jonas: Yes. I’m interested in the surface of the projection. And how do you interrupt that in an interesting way? How do you change the picture? So by bringing other materials in front of an image, and by moving bodies in front of it, that’s one way. This idea of layering—I did it in the piece very elaborately, but it’s the way I’ve been working for a long time. Here, I got more and more into interacting with the fish with my body. It affected me.

Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, 2019. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Luma Foundation
Photograph by Enrico Fiorese

Van Straaten: And that visual layering is compounded with the layers of linguistic narrative from various sources.

Jonas: Yes, I read the newspaper and included facts about what’s happening in the ocean and the environment, poems about the ocean, written texts. It’s like a lecture demonstration with me. And I’m juxtaposing one image against another and creating a different narrative by doing so.

Van Straaten: And the still images you used are all pulled from video grabs?

Jonas: Right. I use video because the fish are moving, and I think their movement is so beautiful and works so well with the sound and music.

Van Straaten: Your work has obviously been multimedia for so long—you are a pioneer in video and you employ performance, installation, drawing, painting, music, sound, text, you know, everything you can imagine, but no still photography? What is your stance regarding shooting stills?

Jonas: I don’t have a stance. It’s something that greatly interests me. I’ve always been interested with all of my video projections in the framing device, how to make or alter an image by framing it, just as photographers frame their images. Look at Robert Frank as an example. He sees the everyday and he frames it in a very incredible, beautiful way. So often when I’m working on a piece, I experiment with still imagery and the idea of making a still and framing it. I think that would be the main connection to photography.

Joan Jonas, Moving Off the Land, 2019, Ocean Space, Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice. Performance with Ikue Mori and Francesco Migliaccio. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy
Photograph by Moira Ricci and courtesy Joan Jonas

Van Straaten: No camera though?

Jonas: I used to have a Leica a long time ago. In my archives I keep stills that I’ve taken over the years. I almost bought a Leica a few years ago, because I wanted to experiment with digital and analog and work more with stills. I’m very interested in it, and I’m going to return to it probably at some point, in some way. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot for a long time, and I never can get around to it, frankly. And Mary Ellen Mark, who was a friend of mine, was totally enthusiastic about that decision and was actually helping me to buy a new Leica. But, I never followed through.

Van Straaten: Did the mission of TBA21/Ocean Space around the climate crisis make you feel that your image making for this project had to be rooted in documentation? 

Jonas: Documentation is just part of my general thinking, part of my language naturally. But I don’t think of it as “I’m going to make this poetic documentary,” like the way Robert Frank works with documentary.

Van Straaten: You mentioned Robert Frank twice now. I understand you were in an early film of his, in 1975?

Jonas: Yes, it was a film called Keep Busy (1975), where there were a group of artists [including Richard Serra] up in Cape Breton. He made it with a man called Rudy Wurlitzer. And we went out on an island and spent like four or five days. There was a lot of improvisation going on. I did some movement. It was funny.

Laura van Straaten is an art journalist based in New York. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Joan Jonas’s Moving Off the Land II is on view through September 29, 2019 at Ocean Space, Campo San Lorenzo, 30100, Venice, Italy.

The post Joan Jonas on Her Special Commission for Venice’s Newest “Pavilion” appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

In Film, Are Millennials Having a Moment?

A series at BAM attempts to make a canon of cinema for a generation more interested in dismantling them.

By Jesse Dorris

Fransley Hyppolite, Patrick Declie, and Ashton Sanders in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, 2016
©A24 and courtesy Photofest

Once upon a time—let’s say, oh, between the years 1981 and 1996—eighty million or so Americans were born. In their childhood and early adolescence, both the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers fell. In classrooms and nightclubs, their peers murdered each other at unprecedented, incomprehensible rates. They grew up on the Internet, a commercial space posing as a communication network, and they occupied “third places,” zones neither work nor home but pay-to-be-there hangouts. They claimed unfixed genders or no genders at all, saw AIDS become undetectable for the wealthy and connected, sodomy legalized and abortion criminalized, Britney Spears shave her head and Lady Gaga don a cowboy hat, land a Vegas show, win an Oscar. They heard the dial-up moan-and-grown ghost into the vibration of an iPhone.

Greta Gerwig in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, 2012
Courtesy IFC Films

The world called them Millennials, and they are having a moment. We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film, a series curated by Ashley Clark at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, tracks this generation’s imprint in and on cinema. Clark has gathered more than two dozen documentaries, web series, indie gems, classics, disasters, and even a masterpiece or two, in an attempt to make a canon for a generation more interested in dismantling them.

Jesse Eisenberg (as Mark Zuckerberg) in David Fincher’s The Social Network, 2010
© Columbia Pictures and courtesy Photofest

Gen-X lodestar David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), a lightly fictionalized biopic of Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is the origin story of a technology—and a habit—that defines us. Not quite the centerpiece, but a key film of the era, it depicts the digital displacement of reality itself in deeply conservative ways. The Social Network, full of young men on their hero’s journeys and presented at angles as if posing for busts, is fueled by Aaron Sorkin’s Boomer babble and scored by Gen-X fury Trent Reznor, allowed only to just tickle the tasteful ivories. “It’s thematically about the changes in technology, rather than an embodiment of them,” Clark told me, pointing to Millennial Eduardo Williams’s 2016 global-minded cybersex thriller, The Human Surge, as a better example of art both of and about its moment.

Natalie Portman in Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, 2018
© Neon and courtesy Photofest

Vox Lux is another attempt, as Clark puts it, to examine “whether [Millennials] can process bad news at the rate we consume it.” They can’t. There’s just too much of the former and not enough time for the latter, at least in director Brady Corbet’s 2018 fictional biography of a Millennial monster born in gunfire and forged by the markets of commerce and art. Natalie Portman, herself just on the elder edge of the generation, acts as hard as she can as various genres, styles, and tones fail to cohere around her. (Actually, that might accurately sum up the entirety of our strange zeitgeist.)

Lindsay Lohan in Chris Silverston’s I Know Who Killed Me, 2007
© Sony Pictures and courtesy Photofest

It’s tempting to view Portman’s character as an ersatz Lindsay Lohan, who haunts We Can’t Even in three forms: first, as a teen whose eyes are as clear as her skin in Mark Waters’s infectious Heathers-­but-make-it-earnest instant classic Mean Girls (2004); then as a Hitchcockian woman in trouble in Chris Sivertson’s outrageously despicable 2007 I Know Who Killed Me; and finally, as ruins to be plundered, a victim of fame-obsessed teenage girl robbers in the banal The Bling Ring (2013), in which Sofia Coppola attempts to eviscerate the vapidity of unearned wealth.

Hamza Meziani in Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, 2016
Courtesy Grasshopper Film

“I Know is a bad object,” Clark says. “But it interests me to have obviously compromised and deeply unpleasant work next to prestige Oscar winners, and have that conceptually make sense.” It does. A Millennial point of view—rattled and jittery, paralyzed neither by fear of death nor by irony, but instead by sheer overload of self-reflection—begins to come into focus. Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 ode to terrorist chic is shimmering and morally ambiguous but utterly itself. His pack of teenagers blows up buildings and hides in a shopping mall, gathering in wait like The Breakfast Club’s bad apples, as cool as Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation, but so lost in capitalism’s hall of mirrors that all they can do is die, paralyzed by indecision, as they blow up the world.

Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in Sean Baker’s Tangerine, 2015
© Magnolia Pictures and courtesy Photofest

Or not. Sex work, the ne plus ultra of capitalism, might be failing the trans women of color in Sean Baker’s riotous Tangerine (2015)—the rest of their world is surely failing them—but their charisma is so concentrated and specific, it feels like it could only be captured via the tiny funnel of the iPhone camera, on which Baker filmed the feature. More lusciously traditional, if just as radical in content, is Barry Jenkins’s exultant 2016 film, Moonlight. Replete with references to still photographers, like Earlie Hudnall, Jr. and Viviane Sassen, Jenkins not only breathes new life into the hallowed queer coming-of-age-and-out format, but astonishing richness and vitality into the often muddy format of digital film. Meanwhile, Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother (2009) enlists actual still photographs to freshen up its tale of an abused queer teen. Once the narrator’s sexuality is revealed, a larger-than-life poster of River Phoenix, the tragic thinking man’s hunk of Gen X, is shown to have been hanging over his bed the whole time. Like much of Dolan’s work, it’s unsubtle, but it works.

Still from Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s Whose Streets?, 2017
Courtesy Magnolia Pictures

The documentaries in We Can’t Even argue that if you’re going to rebuild a world in your own image, you must first know who you are. Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s 2017 Ferguson documentary, Whose Streets?; Seyi Adebanjo’s heartbreaking 2013 short for a life cut short, Trans Lives Matter! Justice For Islan Nettles; Cecile Emeke’s 2015 oral history of the modern African diaspora, Strolling; and Wu Tsang’s WILDNESS (2012), a fabulous examination of how representation and gentrification intersect in a Latinx bar for LA’s queer and trans communities (fiercely narrated by the bar itself) all demonstrate what might be Millennials’ true gift: nerve. If awarding children with an endless parade of trophies gives them the confidence to tell these crucial, complicated stories with such prowess and zeal, let’s build trophy factories across the land.

Zoe Renee in Nijla Mumin’s Jinn, 2018
Courtesy Park Circus

“Older generations misunderstand the idea of identity politics,” says Clark, a Millennial himself. “They see representation as self-absorption. And there’s an idea that narrative storytelling devices are played out and conventional. But it’s like, for whom? I’ve never seen a black Muslim girl’s coming-of-age story.” So he programmed one: Nijla Mu’min’s Jinn (2018), a highlight of the series.

Keire Johnson in Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, 2018
Courtesy Kartemquin

Other highlights include Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012), in which Greta Gerwig somehow seems to be in Technicolor, despite the black-and-white film stock, as she problematizes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl into a kind of manic depressive Holly Golightly. Today, it seems wiser and weirder than ever. But few works of art in the past twenty (or forty) years have the empathy and aesthetic pleasure of Minding the Gap. Bing Liu’s rightfully beloved 2018 documentary was assembled in real time as he and his skater buddies grew up and fell apart. Shot over a dozen years and set in the golden hours of impossibly tender, doomed light, it deconstructs masculinity more nimbly than gender studies master classes, and for sure will be studied in them. For Liu, manhood arrived in cahoots with cheap editing software, and his careful eye for both the perfect shot and the fearless prompt posit reality television as conscious-raising seminar. It’s the best-case scenario for a life documented from the jump, and a glorious sign of the artistic potential of a generation rewarded and lambasted for just being, and seeing, themselves.

Jesse Dorris is a writer based in New York.

We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film continues at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through August 6, 2019.

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From an Italian Photographer, the Bygone Days of Bohemian New York

Ugo Mulas captured the swinging 1960s art world defined by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

By Jesse Dorris

Ugo Mulas, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, 1964
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

It often takes an immigrant to show America to itself. Italian photographer Ugo Mulas only visited here, but his view of New York in the mid-1960s changed the way we see the city and the bohemian enclave it stands for. That world—with its sizable lofts, oversize ambition, and stance that life could be art and vice versa—only barely exists today (if at all) in neighborhoods like Chelsea, where more than one hundred of Mulas’s images hang at Matthew Marks Gallery in Ugo Mulas: New York–The New Art Scene, a thoughtful exhibition organized by curator Hendel Teicher.

Ugo Mulas, Roy Lichtenstein, 1964
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Born outside of Milan in 1928, Mulas thought he’d become a lawyer, but he abandoned school after falling in love with Milanese nightlife, photographing people posed at the infamous Bar Giamaica with a borrowed camera. By 1954, he was the Venice Biennale’s official photographer; ten years later, he’d developed a style: inquisitively formal, full-frontal, and based on long nights watching theater rehearsals. He made definitive portraits of Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Lucio Fontana. And he formed crucial friendships with figures like Leo Castelli and Andrew Solomon, whom he met at the 1964 Biennale and who convinced him to take a trip to New York.

Ugo Mulas, Jasper Johns, 1964
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

“He didn’t speak much English,” Teicher told me, “but you don’t have to speak much English as a photographer.” Instead, Mulas sat in artists’ lofts, around dinner tables, and in studio rehearsals, galleries, and clubs. “I feel impersonalized,” Mulas once remarked. “Thus I try to understand what is happening around me, doing it through my photos.” He returned in 1954 and 1967, and produced an epochal catalogue of what he saw, 1967’s New York: The New Art Scene. Teicher pulls from this book and unpublished work from the time for her show, which greets viewers with fascinating maquettes of the manuscript, before opening into zones for Mulas’s studies and collaborations with a who’s who of New York’s midcentury artistic characters.

Ugo Mulas, Roy Lichtenstein, 1964
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Each zone centers one of Mulas’s formal innovations: printing an entire roll of film as a single image, thus transforming time spent watching an artist work into a flip-book, or a skyscraper with parties or workspaces glimpsed through rows of windows, or even from a distance, a kind of Mondrian grid. Favored images earn pride of place next to contact-sheets-as-photographs: Marcel Duchamp, Mulas’s first artistic love, standing between drapes like a magician appearing; Barnett Newman, standing stiffly in a suit and pointing to a vast, empty canvas as if to say, “that’s enough.” A series of action shots of Roy Lichtenstein integrates fascinating photographs of comic book scraps taped to the walls with glamor shots of the artist pressing his face to dotted busts and other merchandise, a self-conscious blurring of the lines between product and producer. Mulas’s portraits of Andy Warhol manage to find something new in someone overexposed even then, with a 1964 photograph drawing attention to the fragile veins in his hands, those physical tools Warhol worked so hard to make irrelevant.

Ugo Mulas, Police stop a dancing party at Andy Warhol’s Factory, 1964
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

“Mulas always gives you enough information to understand what kind of character you are dealing with,” Teicher says. And what characters! Juxtaposing photographs of Warhol’s world—a police raid on the Factory with a man thrusting his ass out beside another man pounding a bottle of beer—with those of Robert Rauschenberg’s tells you everything you need to know about the difference between the two artists. Rauschenberg’s vast loft includes domestic clutter and a long table of friends invited for Thanksgiving dinner; other photos study Trisha Brown arranging her body in practice, or Rauschenberg half-naked in shadows, mid-thought and yet in costume (for Spring Training). In these images, life and work are as carefully balanced as Mulas’s compositions.

Ugo Mulas, Jasper Johns, 1965
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Watching Jasper Johns changed Mulas’s idea of what should be shown. In as intimate a moment as is possible between two artists, Mulas captured Johns from behind in the act of creation. The power dynamic—one artist transforming the labor of another into work of his own—unnerved him. “If the painter agrees to be shot, the photo is purely for public relations purposes,” Mulas later explained. “If the painter refuses and I succeed in convincing him, the photograph is an act of violence.” Mulas rarely photographed artists at work again; his portraits of Johns instead show Johns wrapped in sweaters and staring down his gaze, or pressing a sweating face into the canvas as if it were a pillow or a lover.

Ugo Mulas, Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol, 1964
© Ugo Mulas Heirs and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Mulas left New York and returned to documenting the Italian art world; an accomplished writer and critic, he finished the series Verifications, a kind of meta-manifesto, shortly before he died of cancer in 1973. The images in The New Art Scene now look like arguments for—more so than evidence of—a world that takes artistic practice seriously. One hopes someone new is able to come to New York today and not only make this argument, but win it. But it’s surely more difficult now than it was for Mulas. “One needs to realize that my point of view is not only optical, but mental above all,” he once said. Which is to say that maybe this world was a state of mind after all.

Jesse Dorris is a writer based in New York.

Ugo Mulas: New York–The New Art Scene is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, through August 16, 2019.

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Delirious Cities: The 2019 Aperture Summer Open

The city is an ever-changing landscape, a place of contested freedom, a laboratory of identity, a supermarket of desires. When the architect Rem Koolhaas first published his 1978 manifesto, Delirious New York, he wrote of density and ecstasy, of the epic visions of Manhattan skyscrapers and the otherworldliness of capitalist congestion. Through their photographs, videos, and lens-based installations, the twenty-three artists selected for the 2019 Aperture Summer Open propel Koolhaas’s curiosity into the present, defining the contours of metropolitan life in the twenty-first century. Together, they offer urgent statements about how images are shaping the contemporary city as an endless project, a delirious machine for living.

Sara Abbaspour, Untitled, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

Sara Abbaspour

Originally trained as an urban designer, Sara Abbaspour makes photographs in the Iranian cities of Tehran and Mashhad, as well as on Hormuz Island. Her lush and cinematic images, characterized by crystalline highlights and a mysterious sense of drama, explore mental states of connection and contemplation. Abbaspour is influenced by the American photographer Mark Steinmetz and the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, whose poetic films were associated with the Iranian New Wave of the 1960s. “In my work, I wonder about entanglements of life rippling outside the frame of my vision and the silent internal conversations of the people I photograph,” Abbaspour says. “I study the poetics of spaces and states in transition, the concealed burden of history on a nation’s back, and the wonders of a people floating in precarious eternity.” In these images from an ongoing series, Abbaspour is also thinking through the idea of psychogeography, first proposed in 1956 by the French theorist Guy Debord. A member of the movement Situationist International, Debord and other artist-flaneurs were keen to think about how urban spaces inform behavior and feelings. A flaneur herself, Abbaspour is aware of the undercurrent of political tensions in her work. “But,” she says, “in an era of intergovernmental and political hostility and projected identity politics, I believe that an apolitical or poetic expression can be the most profound political response.”

Laura Barrón, La Paz, 2016, from the series Absentia
Courtesy of the artist

Laura Barrón

“All my work has been a continuation of a discourse about nostalgia, absence, and loss—themes that constitute moving targets in one’s life,” says Laura Barrón. In 2013, after a decade of living as a Mexican immigrant in Canada, Barrón decided to learn about the cities that her fellow Latino Canadian friends grew up in. She participated in residencies in several cities, usually for about seven weeks at a time. La Paz City, a subseries of Absentia, explores “vertigo in relation to the precariousness of its territory and urban landscape.” The dizzying upside-down images of dense urban spaces verge on abstraction, making one wish for the stability of understanding—and of home. Absentia, she says, “has become a meditation on historical trauma, national or cultural identity, and the desire to change one’s life forever by changing one’s surroundings and nationality.”

Rydel Cerezo, Undercover, 2019, from the series Am I a Sea
Courtesy of the artist

Rydel Cerezo

The sin and the service, the modesty and the majesty. Since Spaniards celebrated the Philippines’s first Catholic Mass in the island town of Limasawa on March 31, 1521, the contradictions of Catholicism have been ever present in Filipino life. For Rydel Cerezo, a queer Filipino from an immigrant family, the inability to fully escape the religion is a consequence of the holy entanglement of colonial enterprise and Catholic imperialism. “I am interested in the history of the church that served as a tool involved in the colonial mission and now acts as a space for bodies to commune with one another in the Diaspora,” Cerezo says of his autobiographical series Am I a Sea, which considers the trauma and love delivered by the Catholic Church. Cerezo uses his family members and a palette of bold primary colors to restage moments of Catholic ritual in an attempt to “probe the familiar space of the church in relation to the living post-colonized body.” Although church leaders speak of compassion and forgiveness, respect for the fully realized lives of queer Catholics often falters before the reverence for tradition. Cerezo’s photographs, blending the staged with the documentary, renew what Catholics call “the mystery of the faith.”

Alex Huanfa Cheng, A boy with a flower, 2018, from the series Chinese Wonderland
Courtesy the artist

Alex Huanfa Cheng

Seven years ago, Alex Huanfa Cheng left his hometown in Hubei, China, to study photography in France. From a distance, Cheng began to see his home from a new perspective. “China is an evolving country and is full of contradictory duality,” he says. In his series, Chinese Wonderland, created while visiting home and traveling throughout the country, Cheng pictures scenes of leisure and everyday life in playful juxtapositions. In one image, a boy brushes up against a small tree of pink flowers, blossoming amid a landscape of half-demolished buildings and rubble. In another, Buddhist statues and temple furnishings stand before an industrial background. Telephone wires crisscross behind them through a hazy, gray sky. With wry humor, Cheng photographs small moments layered with inconsistencies, noting that “this kind of complexity is precisely what makes contemporary China so exuberant and fascinating.”

Rose Marie Cromwell, Bike Accident, 2016
Courtesy of the artist

Rose Marie Cromwell

Miami is Rose Marie Cromwell’s subject and canvas. She photographs in Little Haiti, Liberty City, Allapattah, Bay Point, Edgewater, and Wynwood, each neighborhood and district filled with people from different countries, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and each—perhaps with the exception, more recently, of the rapidly gentrifying Wynwood— underrepresented in the media. “I want to convey the sense of disorientation that I feel in Miami,” says Cromwell. To create that feeling, Cromwell sometimes stages scenes of her own, as she looks for the “performative” in the everyday. “I’m interested in how we create space for intimacy, spirituality, and a sense of community in these areas meant more for industry and commerce.”

Esther Hovers, Overview E – Timeframe: 0’ 04”, 2015–16, from the series False Positives
Courtesy the artist

Esther Hovers

Created in collaboration with intelligence surveillance experts, Esther Hovers’s series, False Positives, pictures eight different algorithmic “anomalies” around the business district of Brussels, mimicking images used to detect social deviance in public spaces. Described as “signs in body language and movement that could indicate criminal intent,” the “anomalies” rendered in Hovers’s photographs and pattern drawings become like blueprints of potential state control. In their banality and clarity—businessmen on sidewalks, joggers on streets—the images are all the more sinister, especially in Brussels, the capital of the European Union, whose stated goals are to “offer freedom, security and justice.” “False Positives is set around the question of normal behavior,” says Hovers. It’s an investigation of “how power, politics, and control are exercised through urban planning and the use of public space.”

Mateo Gómez García, Fruits, 2017, from the series Paraiso
Courtesy of the artist

Mateo Gómez García

Since 2009, when he returned to his native Colombia after studying cinema and photography in Buenos Aires, Mateo Gómez García has documented the changing visions of Colombian society—both subtle and dramatic—often driven by the politics of drugs and violence. His 2014 series, A Place to Live, considers the complexities of life in suburban Bogotá, which over the last decade has seen a rise in new housing developments and shopping centers. A 2016 commission for the California Sunday Magazine profiled religious communities in Bello, a town near Medellín. In his newest series, Paraiso, Gómez García deploys a language of absurdity as a riposte to ideas of optimism propagated by the Colombian media. “I refuse to consider the image shared by the media as the mirror of my reality,” Gómez García says. His photographs become enigmatic metaphors, with a kind of visual flexibility that moves between documentary truth and fiction. “This work is an approach to the new Colombia,” says the artist. “A fragile and ephemeral paradise, a folkloric dream of a society without memory.”

Délio Jasse, Darkroom, 2019
Courtesy of the artist

Délio Jasse

Before moving to Portugal at the age of eighteen, Délio Jasse grew up in Luanda, the capital of the oil-rich nation of Angola, routinely named one of the most expensive cities in the world for expatriates. Angola’s fortunes have traveled with the velocity, the sudden rises and hurtling falls, of a roller-coaster: three decades after a catastrophic civil war, the country rebounded with an oil rush only to be followed, in 2014, by a crash with the collapse of oil prices. In 2013, Jasse began making photographs in Luanda, tracing how architecture, as curator Marta Jecu puts it, “is a container of time.” Working in a variety of analog formats, Jasse photographed Luanda’s colonial relics, its modernist architecture, and its new “international corporate style”—buildings constructed in the era of rapid globalization—which together create a palimpsest of streetscapes and memories. Jasse’s images of Luanda, he says, “point to the past” while also alluding to “a utopian architectural future for one of the fastest-expanding African cities.”

Lilly Lulay, Still from the video Istanbul, up and down, 2015
Courtesy the artist

Lilly Lulay

Lygos, Byzantium, Constantinople, and now Istanbul—for three millennia, Turkey’s iconic metropolis, once the largest in the Western world, has been the capital of an empire and a bridge between worlds. In 2015, ninety-two years after the founding of the Republic of Turkey, Lilly Lulay created a moving “collage” while at a residency in Istanbul. She gathered images ranging from iPhone snapshots, to black-and- white analog prints, to slides from the 1970s. She reproduced the images at postcard size and made cutouts and interlayered prints. Some viewpoints are unique, she notes, whereas others are just the stereotypes of the city, repeated across time and throughout individual albums. Lulay’s resulting video, Istanbul, up and down, traverses the city’s streets and is attuned to a spirit of change, architectural mashup, and constant movement as scenes from different eras overlap and merge. “Setting the cutouts in motion was a means to reflect this constant process of deconstruction and new construction,” says Lulay. It’s a tribute, a portable museum, a postcard sent to no one in particular and everyone at once.

Noritaka Minami, Facade I, 2011, from the series 1972
Courtesy the artist

Noritaka Minami

In the 1960s, emerging from the devastating impact of World War II on Japanese cities, a group of architects began to develop a visionary movement called “Metabolism.” Based on the idea of growth and regeneration of organisms, the manifesto “METABOLISM/1960–Proposals for a New Urbanism” became a signal text of postwar urban design in Japan, with its dynamic master plans and prefabricated housing. Since 2010, Noritaka Minami has photographed the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a thirteen-story tower designed by Kisho Kurowawa and comprised of “removable” cubes, each one only 107 square feet. Built in only thirty days in 1972, the tower became the most prominent of the Metabolist structures, at first a symbol of progressive design, but years later a retro-futuristic relic. Some capsules retain their original furnishings, whereas others are uninhabitable; after Kurokawa’s death in 2007, residents voted to demolish the building. Minami’s images describe the irony of individuality under a once-optimistic regime of structure. “The building is a reminder of a future that was never realized in society at large and exists as an architectural anachronism within the city,” Minami says. “Despite Kurokawa’s plan to mass-produce the capsules, this structure became one of a kind in the world.”

Alice Quaresma, Ocean Sound, 2018, from the series Tempo
Courtesy the artist

Alice Quaresma

Known for its sweeping views and golden beaches, Rio de Janeiro has in recent years been beset by recession and political upheaval, and an uptick in narcotics-related violence and police killings. Alice Quaresma, in attempting to process her relationship to her homeland, culls black– and-white photographs of downtown Rio de Janeiro from her personal archive, and paints shapes, often in primary colors, on top of them, thereby transforming the city’s architecture. Tempo, Portuguese for “time” and the title of Quaresma’s series, invokes the relationship between past and future. “The geometry hides the past, the old Brazil, opening a gate for new possibilities and new horizons,” says Quaresma, whose use of bright hues brings to mind similar interventions by the late painter Ellsworth Kelly. “The bold colors come to provoke action and attitude.”

Adam Pape, Untitled, 2013–18, from the series Dyckman Haze
Courtesy the artist

Adam Pape

Dyckman Street divides the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. Named for the Dutch farmer William Dyckman, the street is also the byway between Fort Tyron Park and Inwood Hill Park, enclaves in the city that form the backdrop for Adam Pape’s photographs in his series, Dyckman Haze. “The park is the city’s subconscious, where its citizens can indulge in the desires and urges not meant for the public streets,” says Pape. This land was once occupied by Native American tribes, and Pape notes that his title “juxtaposes the colonial past with contemporary intoxication”—“haze” is a state of mind and a potent strain of marijuana famous in the Heights. Like the artificiality of natural spaces in the city, Pape’s black-and-white images stage a theatrical view of everyday “performances and private rituals.” His dramatic, glassy lighting transforms the banal gestures of smoking, sitting, kissing, sleeping—even the ominous lurking of a skunk—into dream states. As a series, Pape says, Dyckman Haze is like a fable about the precarious public spaces in cities today and the impulsive thrills of the night.

Carlo Rusca, Untitled, 2015-2019, from the series Turistica
Courtesy the artist

Carlo Rusca

Locarno, Switzerland, a town at the northern tip of Lake Maggiore, boasts pristine views and a balmy climate, where palm trees grow at the foot of the Alps. Carlo Rusca—who grew up there, and after some time away, moved back in 2016— presents a more complicated vision. Turistica is “a visual journey dedicated to all the small tourist destinations and to their lonely citizens,” says Rusca. His silvery photographs show darkness, nighttime, fog, and a noirish mist. In one, sheep crowd into a paddock, and a truck with a ramp looms ominously in the background. In another, two figures float on a sidewalk grate that disappears into fog. Through Rusca’s use of black and white, his images withhold the lushness of Locarno’s landscape; there are no sapphire lakes or royal– blue mountains. Instead, he portrays modern apartment buildings, lit by streetlamps, where the only sign of life is two dimly glowing windows. As Rusca says, “I always felt my nights in Locarno monochromatic. I’m still searching for my colors.”

Josh Schaedel, Peacock & Cat, 2018, from the series It’s Almost Not Worth Talking About
Courtesy the artist

Josh Schaedel

“In a city as dictated by car culture as Los Angeles, there is no way of escaping the billboards, window vinyl, flashing signs on top of cars in traffic, whole painted sides of buildings, and advertisements in all shapes and sizes that flash by as you drive around,” says Josh Schaedel. As Thom Andersen argues in his 2003 film Los Angeles Plays Itself, which compares the real- life city to the way it’s portrayed in cinema, LA is a city built on its own mythologies—and on its images. Schaedel’s series, It’s Almost Not Worth Talking About, interrogates the validity of making new images of LA. Looking for the in-between, the unexpected, or the overlooked, he hopes to break the spell cast by the self-conscious staging of events and experiences for instant broadcast on social media. “I try to flatten the space and time that separate the fabricated realities of the constantly shifting representations found in advertisement, from real experience,” Schaedel says. “I want to create a space where the banal feels surreal.”

Michele Sibiloni, Hoima, 2017, from the series Nsenene Republic
Courtesy the artist

Michele Sibiloni

Since 2010, Michele Sibiloni has lived in Kampala, where he has made photographic projects about night guards in the Ugandan capital, as well as about Kabalagala, a neighborhood known for its raucous nightlife. While making the photographs in Nsenene Republic, his latest series, Sibiloni became captivated by the world of the nsenene, or grasshoppers—a delicacy, basis of income, and potential food resource for the future. Twice a year, after the rainy season, grasshoppers migrate en masse, and each night people stay up late to gather and sell them. “The ubiquitous presence of the grasshoppers, the overall green shade dispersed by the night mist, and the smoke of bonfires create an otherworldly scenario, enhanced by the oddness of the hunting techniques and self-made equipment,” Sibiloni says of these pictures, made in Kampala and the city of Masaka. The hunting of grasshoppers is located “on a very precarious edge between past and future, tradition and innovation, and can shed some light on Ugandan identity as well as on new prospects for the whole planet.”

Chanell Stone, Potted Earth, 2019, from the series Natura Negra
Courtesy the artist

Chanell Stone

In her practice, Chanell Stone explores the “re-naturing of the Black body in the American landscape.” Stone’s self-portraits and environmental studies—made in Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York, locations where she has lived—seek to reconnect Black subjects in inner-city environments with what she calls “urbanized nature.” Scenes that appear like verdant, rural landscapes in Natura Negra I are actually tenements in Oakland. The seemingly archetypal high-rise buildings in Natura Negra II are from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles and Chelsea in Manhattan. “I was motivated by a sense of ownership and reclamation of these structures, no matter how monolithic they are in American society,” Stone says. “I am invested in showing the beauty of these environments and the Black presence within them.” By collaging Mylar prints and fragmented impressions, Stone also comments on the interlayering of urban experience and guides the viewer to what is seen and unseen. The collages float from their backgrounds in order to “call to the liberation of these environments from their restrictive settings” and to reclaim spaces of imagination and memory against waves of gentrification. As Stone says, “I create dialogues around these themes in my work to create space for the Black body in the canon of photography.”

Leonard Suryajaya, Arisan, 2017
Courtesy of the artist

Leonard Suryajaya

“I had to make something happen there,” Leonard Suryajaya says of the apartment lobby in Medan, Indonesia, where he made the riotous tableau Arisan. Visiting his home city after the 2016 US presidential election, and noticing elaborate Chinese New Year decorations everywhere, he invited a group of subjects to pose in traditional Indonesian costumes in response to the Women’s March in Washington, DC. “I strive to show solidarity and the many different possibilities of rendering femininity, while also defying the rigid traditional views of what’s feminine,” Suryajaya says, noting that the title refers to a type of microloan in Indonesia. Suryajaya, who moved to the US at the age of eighteen as a queer immigrant in a same-sex marriage, uses photography to test definitions of family, community, and selfhood. Whereas Arisan rises to Kabuki-level theatrics, in Good Neighbors, Suryajaya employs spectacular textiles and masquerade to describe an undercurrent of racial tension during a residency for artists of color in Woodstock, New York. The subjects, including Suryajaya himself and his partner, Peter, riff on cultural stereotypes, including the fad for Asian beauty products such an “expensive pacifier” that’s like a “face workout.” Good Neighbors, he says, with its offering of flowers, is a way to say, “Hi, guys. We come in peace.”

Dustin Thierry, Crowd of onlookers at the Candy World Ball, Paris, September 2018, from the series Opulence
Courtesy the artist

Dustin Thierry

In the 1970s and ’80s, turning away from the increasingly white-dominated drag balls that were once part of a multiracial, queer demimonde in New York City, black and Latinx performers began to organize ballroom houses and dance subcultures of their own. Based on traditional family structures, but fiercely competitive, houses would go head- to-head in “voguing” balls, where performers “walk” in categories such as Town and Country, High-Fashion Evening Wear, and Executive Realness. The phenomenon was introduced to mainstream audiences through Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and more recently by the television series Pose, which is set in the 1980s and centers the stories of trans and queer people of color as gender pioneers two decades before the contemporary visibility of trans politics. In 2018, Dustin Thierry began to track how the ballroom voguing scene has expanded to Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, and Paris in his series, Opulence. Although LGBTQ+ activists have successfully fought for equality in cities and countries around the world, Thierry notes that homosexuality is still strongly stigmatized within the Caribbean community, and Caribbean people are often objectified in places as seemingly open-minded as Amsterdam. Opulence, for Thierry, is therefore a “living archive of feelings,” a testimony to the energy of queer life, and an international connection to the spectacular presence, beauty, and diversity of the African diaspora.

Bryan Thomas, Larry and Laron, 2019, from the series Sunrise/Sunset
Courtesy the artist

Bryan Thomas

“Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering,” the poet Claudia Rankine wrote in 2015, “there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed simply for being black.” Rankine’s searing essay appeared in the New York Times Magazine only days after the shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine African Americans. But her words about mourning as a “condition” of black life in the United States continue to resound for the photographer Bryan Thomas, a Florida native who, in the aftermath of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, began to wonder about grief, personal memorials, and the recognition of African American life and death in the United States. For his series Sunrise/Sunset, Thomas pictures the production and frequent appearance of custom-made T-shirts commemorating individual lives lost to gun violence in Miami. Many say “Sleep in Peace” and mark dates of birth and death with the words “Sunrise” and “Sunset.” Screen-printed with vibrant pictures and worn by family members and friends, the T-shirts become, as Thomas notes, “an act of protest against the ways in which African American lives are often misrepresented and, sometimes, entirely forgotten.”

Sally Tosti, from the book Distressed Cities, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Sally Tosti

The rise and fall of Detroit has been treated as a bellwether for politicians and a metaphor for artists, especially since the recession of 2008. But Sally Tosti’s recent photographs of the city and its streetscapes, with their clarity and open-ended, nonjudgmental tone, move away from the spectacle of decay toward an evolving archive-in-the-making that allows buildings, as she says, “to speak volumes about the lives lived in and around them.” Since 2014, Tosti has photographed Detroit, assembling her images into photobooks that become miniature exhibitions. This book, the fourth on Detroit and the latest addition to her ongoing project Distressed Cities of America, examines how redevelopment initiatives attempt to improve the city. Tosti photographed in multiple locations, including Eastern Market, Seven Mile, Hamtramck, and Highland Park. She found abandoned houses, but also colorful murals—signs of life and small gestures that signal a form of commitment to the place. “When I return to a city that I have previously photographed, I look for changes since my last visit,” she says. “By photographing these neighborhoods, I strive to bring attention to their plight and hope this attention will initiate change.

Shelli Weiler, Balloon Wishes, 2018, from the series ENJOY house
Courtesy the artist

Shelli Weiler

Is every destination now just a backdrop for an Instagram post? The photographs in Shelli Weiler’s series, ENJOY house present escapist amusements as settings for enacting bizarre performances and what she calls “readymade fantasies selling the idea of immersive art experiences.” For these high-gloss images, Weiler photographed dogs and slides, children and balloons, boxers posing for a fight and stairways to nowhere. Lifted was taken at the Museum of Pizza in the William Vale hotel in Brooklyn, as a boy rises into Pizza Heaven—another photo-op. Balloon Wishes, taken inside the Color Factory in SoHo, centers on a girl being scolded for deflating balloons emblazoned with children’s dreams. These made-for-Instagram “selfie factories,” meant both for “influencers” and common citizens (sometimes at a cost upward of $38), act as “film sets devoid of narrative.” Such environments, Weiler says, “codify the semblance of perfection through symbols and mass, and yet remain a sort of semantic desert.” By imposing an illusion of objectivity, Weiler turns the impulse of documentary fact-finding on its head, creating portals for new, perhaps futuristic experiences in the social-media hall of mirrors.

Yana Wernicke, Untitled, 2017–18, from the series Bombay Dream
Courtesy the artist

Yana Wernicke

In 2015, while at a residency in the Indian city of Pune, Yana Wernicke was working on two projects centered on women, when she kept hearing about young people moving to India’s film capital. “Mumbai has a magnetic pull on young men and women who are moving there from all over the country to become actors or directors or work in the film industry,” she says. Three years later, she began photographing aspiring actors in Mumbai, mostly women “doing smaller jobs—like regional Marathi TV, commercials, theater, and online productions.” Wernicke collaborates with the actors in their often-spare apartments to allow for a more intimate exchange. As a young woman herself, Wernicke can relate to the challenges they face. “The idea of taking a risk and trying to work in a creative business environment has some strong parallels to the photography world.”

Hal Wilsdon, It’s Milk, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Hal Wilsdon

An Art Deco tumbler, adorned with lilies, sits in the corner of green velvet upholstery, perhaps the arm of a plush chair or sofa. Two pale hands grasp each other behind a pinstriped suit. A leather checkbook, complete with an antiquated calculator, lies on a wooden desk next to a gold pen. Each of these photographs speaks to Hal Wilsdon’s reckoning with authority, with traditional ideas of success: the marble lobby, the executive suite. “This ‘path to success’ doesn’t really exist for me, or for a lot of people,” says Wilsdon. “Whether it’s because of their gender, age, race, or class, this hypermasculine power trip of big business is effectively inaccessible.” For these photographs, marked by their clarity and geometric precision, Wilsdon sought out archetypal settings of corporate life: board rooms of major corporations, country clubs, courthouses, and horse-racing tracks. Wilsdon thought she would find lavish design, an alluring world of important people doing important things. But it was just a trove of fool’s gold: “I forced my way in to see what I missed, and there wasn’t much there.”

The 2019 Aperture Summer Open is on view at Aperture Gallery through August 29, 2018.

Delirious Cities is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor, Aperture magazine; Matthew Leifheit, artist and editor of MATTE magazine; Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor, Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue; Azu Nwagbogu, director of African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto; and Guadalupe Rosales, artist and founder of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz.

Collect works from Aperture’s Summer Open artists today. Proceeds from the sale of prints directly support the participating artists in addition to Aperture’s publications, public programs, and exhibitions. Click here for more information, or contact prints@aperture.org.

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Hellen van Meene Wants You to Fight Your Fears

Revered for her portraits of young women, the photographer speaks about the poetics of intimacy and the rewards of taking on a challenge.

By Heval Okcuoglu

Hellen van Meene, No. 470, 2015
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

For more than twenty years, Hellen van Meene has been making photographs of teenagers, capturing the mystical nature of their transitional stages of physical and psychological development in all its introverted glory. Each van Meene photograph inhabits that famous distinctiveness of a classical Dutch painting, as if a secret is being revealed in a small whisper only to the gazing eye under an exquisite light. Working in analog and principally in small format, the sense of intimacy in each of her portraits is palpable. In the later phase of her career, the Dutch photographer explored the subject of intimacy through portraying dogs, as she considers that they share the same kind of intrigue and kinship as her beloved teenagers.

I recently spoke with Van Meene following the opening of her latest exhibition, The Bird in Borrowed Feathers, her first solo show in London since 2008. Comprising new works presented together with a number of pieces from the past decade, the exhibition finds glimpses into these intimate inner worlds and brings their fragility to light in ways that are sometimes surreal and unsettling, often uncomfortable and challenging, but always deeply sensitive and sincere.

Hellen van Meene, No. 357, 2010
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

Heval Okcuoglu: I have always wondered why you photograph young people in the way you do.

Hellen van Meene: As an artist, I have spent over twenty years making the work that I do. In all these years that I have been making photographs, I have never made decisions based on commercial angles. I always followed my heart to make photographs. I have always focused on teenagers because that was my first instinct. Teenagers are still that for me. A teenager for me can be eight years old to twenty-five; sometimes you don’t really see someone’s age on their face. I always felt I related more to young people, not because they are young and people say young is beautiful, but because of the transparency and openness they have. I love to capture these younger faces.

Okcuoglu: What have you learned from decades of experience photographing young people?

Van Meene: The biggest surprise was that even though they are from different countries, have different upbringings, or are subjected to different rules, in the end, happiness, sadness, or shyness is the same for everyone. It is only the way one approaches them that is completely different. In some countries, I couldn’t communicate in their language, but they still understood what I wanted from them. That was an eye-opener that convinced me that I could do this anywhere. I can still make the photos I want, even though I don’t have the right words for it. That’s very liberating. It comes back to intuition and connection.

Hellen van Meene, No. 458, 2014
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

Okcuoglu: Your fascination with dogs is also very well documented in your work. In what way is it different from your work with young people?

Van Meene: It’s actually the same. I never realized how easy it was to photograph them because I was afraid of dogs. Dogs can read people so well. Their ability to sense things is the same as that of children. It is because they haven’t learned to distrust their instincts by behaving themselves in the way that adults do. Children are very close to their senses. We still have them too, but we have learned to make them flat, because in day-to-day life people don’t appreciate it so much. Dogs and children do have a lot in common, because they are true to what they are and what they feel.

Okcuoglu: Materials and textiles are an echo from traditional painting that finds expression in your work. Many of your subjects are dressed in exquisite fabrics. In that sense, how does fashion manifest in your work?

Van Meene: It’s just an extra detail in the photos that is necessary. I don’t use clothes like jeans or T-shirts because they are very modern in a way, and that’s something I don’t want in the pictures. I don’t want the clothes to draw attention, that’s about it. Jeans are not so poetic. I try to find vintage clothes or new clothes that looks vintage, and clothes help me to draw the photos more into my story. I want the clothes to be there, but they should also disappear at the same time.

Hellen van Meene, No. 501, 2017
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

Okcuoglu: You always exhibit your work in small format. Why is that?

Van Meene: The format is based on intimacy. I have always believed that this intimacy works with the photos that I make. It is not about revealing so much. If I print them really large, it doesn’t make so much sense. I like the fact that they are not big.

Okcuoglu: Do you have rituals you repeat before or after every shoot?

Van Meene: I have this crazy thing. After the photos are done, I never make a contact sheet. I should be the first one to see the photos myself and if I do a contact sheet, then I may not get to be the first one. It’s just a feeling. Once the photos appear and I see the negatives, it really makes me happy.

Hellen van Meene, No. 503, 2018
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

Okcuoglu: Do you think photography can help confront our fears and overcome them?

Van Meene: In 2016, my mother got ill and the next year, she passed away. I couldn’t make any new photos, and I needed to find a new way of making them. I was taking care of her before she died, so I felt very lost and sad, and then I was depressed once she was gone. I love costume drama, so I was watching Lady Macbeth one day. It’s a dramatic film about death and murder. In one scene, she murdered her father-in-law with poison. The coffin was upright with the dead body in it, and she was standing next to it in a beautiful dress. I saw this image and I thought, Oh, my god, I need to do that. I need to make photos of people in stand-up coffins.

I researched where this phenomenon came from and then found out that around 1839, when photography was just being invented, in America, people made photos of the deceased, not when lying in coffins as we do now, but by raising it upright with the dead body in it, positioning the family members around it, as they felt it was the last time to make a photo of the deceased. Photography was new and no one had the money to make photos like we do now, so that was the last moment to have a picture taken with the deceased. They only did this for a short while in that period. It was very caring. Nowadays we are very much afraid of working with the dead, but back then it was normal, maybe because people died more often then. It was the combination of my mother’s death and these coffins that made me think that I have to do this.

So I called the undertaker who organized my mother’s funeral, and I said I wanted to borrow a coffin. He said, “Yes, it’s fine come over,” and I remember I felt very awkward going there because six months ago, we carried my mother’s coffin. And here I was now, asking for a coffin to make photos with it. I put the coffin in my car, and the next day I had to get some groceries because the photo shoot was a day later. After I had placed the groceries next to the coffin, I thought, “What the hell am I doing? This is insane. Driving around with an empty coffin.” It is a very good thing to take care of your fears. I made the photos, not with deceased people of course, because that’s too much of a struggle. It was like remembering someone for the last time. It was such a poetic feeling. I loved it. When I started making the photos of the dogs, I was afraid of dogs because I had been bitten. I always think you have to challenge and fight your fears. You can’t run away from them; instead, you confront them.

Hellen van Meene, No. 497, 2017
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

Okcuoglu: What does it mean to be free in photography?

Van Meene: Looking back at my career, I never made decisions based on making photos I knew would sell a lot. I always followed my instincts. Two weeks ago, I was in Berlin and it has been nine years since I asked girls in the streets myself if they wanted to be photographed. Around 2010 I started to work with magazines for editorials, and you work with a model agency in order to find new faces. I pick the ones that give me a certain chemistry, but I don’t go into the streets myself anymore. You only have two days and you don’t have the time to find great faces, and so that spoilt me. It was easier. When I was working on my latest project, Seven Sins, there, I felt how tough and great it was at the same time, because I still get to find great faces. When you follow your instincts and what makes you happy, it doesn’t feel like a job. Sometimes it’s a bit silly, but I go and push myself into these difficult situations, because I know in the end, I will be rewarded.

Hellen van Meene, No. 423, 2013
Courtesy the artist and James Freeman Gallery

Okcuoglu: Finally, I would like to ask you about your experience as a woman in the industry.

Van Meene: Sometimes it’s a bit distressing that men the same age as me get more chances than women, especially in photography, as there are a lot of very famous, good women photographers. Men do get more exhibition opportunities than women. If the curator is a man, he always looks for a person who resembles him, that’s the way it works. It is kind of disappointing when you Google museums and see how many solo shows of women there are compared to the male solo shows. I think it should be about the quality of the work.

Heval Okcuoglu is a writer and translator based in London.

Hellen van Meene: The Bird in Borrowed Feathers is on view at James Freeman Gallery through August 3, 2019.

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Venus & Mercury

Roaming the halls of Versailles, Viviane Sassen’s new photomontages consider royal intrigue and the limitless potential of the human condition.

By Jerry Stafford

Viviane Sassen, Venus & Mercury, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

The Palace of Versailles has been fetishized by photographers since Eugène Atget—“a Balzac of the camera,” in Berenice Abbott’s words—first fixed the crumbling statuary of its gardens in his romantic gaze early in the twentieth century. More recently, Luigi Ghirri created photographic puzzles of the place that shift between fiction and fantasy, Candida Höfer explored its social architecture, and Robert Polidori captured its epic decorative constructs. For her most recent work, Viviane Sassen has applied her distinctive visual style to the storied location.

Versailles, as imagined by Louis XIV, began to take form in 1661; in 1682, it became the principal royal residence of France until the start of the revolution, in 1789, under Louis XVI. It offers a visual history of French architecture from the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. The centerpiece of the monumental palace is the Hall of Mirrors, commissioned by Louis XIV to prove the artistic and political superiority of France to the world. Its seventeen mirror-clad arches reflect seventeen arcaded windows that overlook the extensive gardens, with their symmetrical flower beds and classical statuary, landscaped by André Le Nôtre.

Viviane Sassen, Venus & Mercury, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Over six months, and on those privileged occasions when the palace was closed to the thousands of daily visitors who invade the grounds, Sassen roamed the empty mirrored halls of the palace alone, detailing the rococo chambers and the extravagant gardens, exploring both its most famous attractions and those secret spaces inaccessible to the public, including the private rooms of the king’s mistresses, the small libraries, the servants’ quarters, and even the Galérie des sculptures et des moulages, where weather-worn sculptures are repaired or shrouded from the bite of winter. Her body of work (or rather her work of bodies), titled Venus & Mercury (2019), was commissioned by the Palace of Versailles and curated by Alfred Pacquement, the palace’s curator of contemporary art, and Jean de Loisy, director of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, as part of an ongoing series of artist collaborations with the estate.

Viviane Sassen, Venus & Mercury, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

By her own admission, Sassen is an intuitive photographer who does not always come to a project with a specific concept or strategy, but allows the work to evolve over time and take on meaning as the process unfolds. However, she was immediately intrigued by the systems and signifiers of power and sexuality at play in the royal court, and particularly those inherent in the omnipresent statuary that populates the interiors of the palace and punctuates the geometry of its gardens. The rigidity and the restraints of court etiquette, with its hierarchical structures, became the entry point for an exploration of historical division and conflict, while at the same time conjuring in the artist memories of her own adolescent sexual awakening. “I had been there once before as a young teenager, when I was about fourteen,” Sassen recalls. “It was the first time I had visited Paris with my parents, and the palace made a huge impression on me. There was something about the statues in the garden. I found it an extremely romantic place and fantasized about what had happened there.”

Viviane Sassen, Venus & Mercury, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

As suggested by her photomontage techniques, which are reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s disjointed fantasies and Hannah Höch’s subversive collages, Sassen has always been drawn to the surreal. During her research, Sassen was particularly captivated by metal prosthetic noses from the period that were used by victims of syphilis—an affliction rampant in the royal court—whose own noses had been eaten away by the disease. This forbidden and forgotten relic of sexual decadence and deformity acted like a talisman for the artist. Sexuality and decay, disfigurement and dilapidation permeate Sassen’s vision as she gazes on these frozen totems of privilege, class, and power and liberates them from the sociopolitical and historical codes to which they have been bound by convention and academia.

Viviane Sassen, Venus & Mercury, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Venus & Mercury proposes its own vertiginous mirrored labyrinth in which disembodied halves are reflected and morph into unexpected wholes; bodies are severed and faces sliced in direct conflict. Sassen seems to be proposing new mutations within her gallery of biomorphic, almost hybrid creatures. Her photomontages echo the assemblage sculptures of German artist Isa Genzken, which transform and transfigure familiar objects and invite the viewer to consider a new way of being, a new way of seeing beyond the constraints of a binary system of values and aesthetics. They welcome us into a nonlinear narrative as a tribute, a reminder, and an open question. In the same way that Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, which follows the long life of a young nobleman across centuries and genders, plays with possible realities and challenges social impossibilities, Sassen’s work on Versailles infiltrates historical corridors of power to offer a more universal consideration of the limitless potential of the human condition. “I try to make images that have the ability to free your mind in some way and to look at something from a different perspective,” Sassen reflects. “I always try to avoid too much context. I isolate these things in order to make them more abstract. My images are like a hall of mirrors; they reflect back at you what you already have inside.” In her own visionary sculpture garden, these figures are no longer frozen in time and space. Restored and repaired, they are alive and resonant with new meaning. Stripped of wealth, gender, and history, they inhabit an ambivalent space, a world in-between.

Jerry Stafford is a writer and creative consultant based in France. All sculptures belong to Musée du Louvre and Château de Versailles.

Read more from Aperture issue 235, “Orlando,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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