Aperture's Blog, page 82

Father Figure

Masahisa Fukase transformed the ritual of the family portrait into a source of play—and a memento mori.

By Tomo Kosuga

Masahisa Fukase, From the upper left: model A, Toshiteru, Sukezo, Masahisa. From the middle left: Akiko, Mitsue, Hisashi Daikouji. From the bottom left: Manabu, Kyoko, Kanako, and a photo of Miyako, 1985, from the series Family, 1971–89
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

The Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase is best known for his celebrated photobook Ravens (1986), a work in which he projected his sense of isolation and sadness, arising from his 1976 divorce, onto the figures of ravens. More than thirty years have passed since the publication of Ravens, and it is still lauded as one of the most monumental achievements of Japanese photography. But in 1992, Fukase suffered a traumatic brain injury that brought an end to all of his creative endeavors; it also resulted in the greater part of his photographic works, excepting Ravens, falling into oblivion for the next twenty-five years. Considerable scope remains for reassessing what Fukase was trying to accomplish in the course of his forty-year-long career as a photographer. Two works made over long stretches of his life, Family (1971–89) and Memories of Father (1971–87), are essential for any understanding of his photographic art.

Masahisa Fukase, Untitled, from the series Memories of Father, 1971–87
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

Fukase, who died in 2012, left a large and varied body of work, both personal and ludic. He was born in the small town of Bifuka, in the Nakagawa district of Hokkaido, the eldest son of a family that ran a provincial photography studio, which had been in operation since his grandfather’s time. His father, Sukezo, had hoped that Fukase would take over the family business, and made his son help with the processing of prints from the tender age of six. In one recollection, Fukase notes that “the grudge” he harbored toward photography had its beginnings around this time, suggesting an ambivalence about his first encounter with photography and the way his life seemed to have been decided for him. In 1952, at age eighteen, Fukase left home in order to get formal training, entering the photography department of the College of Art at Nihon University, in Tokyo. After graduation, he stayed on in Tokyo and took a job as a commercial photographer—not, in the end, going back to run the family business. While working at this position, Fukase threw himself into improving his photographic expression, and gradually started making a name as a conceptual photographer, getting his works published in magazines like Camera Mainichi and Asahi Camera.

In 1964, he married Yoko Wanibe. The autobiographical photographs he took of his domestic life with her have often been compared to Japanese I novels, with their self-revealing, confessional tone; his images were, in fact, the cause of continual friction between husband and wife. Wanibe stated, in 1973, that “in the ten years we lived together, he really only looked at me through the lens of the camera, and the photographs that he took of me were unmistakably depictions of himself.” As Fukase himself noted: “In the end, a kind of paradoxical situation came about in which we seemed to be together only for the sake of my photographs. This by no means made for marital bliss.”

Masahisa Fukase, Untitled, from the series Family, 1971–89
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

In 1971, suffering considerable existential torment, Fukase began making periodic journeys back home to Hokkaido, after a long absence. In the locale of his native village—the very starting point for his whole being—Fukase started to explore the source of the creative energy that poured endlessly out of him, the compulsion to obsessively take photographs of the people he loved—even to the point of hurting them. The photographs he made over this roughly twenty-year period include the ones seen in Family and Memories of Father, both published in book form in 1991. Family is essentially an album of commemorative family portraits, all taken inside the family’s studio on anniversaries. Memories of Father is a collection of photographs, taken over a decade and a half, of his father, following Sukezo’s life and death through to cremation, interspersed with shots of the family’s daily life.

Masahisa Fukase, Untitled, from the series Memories of Father, 1971–87
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

Having in the 1960s turned his personal life with his wife into art, Fukase now took up the most ordinary, mundane, and everyday format: the family album. Yet in Family, he includes a number of nude and seminude women, photographed in the 1970s, who have nothing whatsoever to do with his family. He seems to be inviting the viewer to enjoy a kind of joke—at the same time perhaps performing a type of self-parody, underlining how he is the failed, degenerate, third-generation son. In 1985, after a blank of ten years or so, once again his father appears in the photographs, by now markedly older. Fukase understood, as he himself wrote, that “every member of the family whose inverted image I capture on the film inside my camera will die. The camera catches them, and in that instant it is a recording instrument of death.” He elaborated on this idea: “Time passes inexorably, and death comes to us all. It comes to old people, to young people, to children, to me. For me, everything is a commemorative photograph, to be eventually stuck in a battered old photo-album.”

For Fukase, a photograph was not something to record the successful moments of a life fully lived: rather, it was to record the time spent until the unavoidable day of death eventually provides a fitting end point. Fukase was surely well aware from early on that Memories of Father would be brought to a final full stop by Sukezo’s death. He saw photography as a macabre art, one that allows the viewer to exist, in some sense, unbound by the progression of time.

Masahisa Fukase, From the upper left: Masahisa, Toshiteru, a photo of Suzeko, Takuya. From the middle left: Akiko, Mitsue, and Hisashi Daikouji. From the bottom left: Manabu, Kyoko, Kanako, and a photo of Miyako, 1987, from the series Family, 1971–89
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

In 1987, Sukezo died, after having succumbed to pneumonia. On the night before the funeral, a heavy snowstorm covered the town of Bifuka in snow. Fukase gathered the whole family together, some dressed in their mourning clothes, and once again took a commemorative photograph. In the position his father used to occupy, he placed a photographic portrait of Sukezo, which Fukase had taken in 1974. The person in the photograph has a restrained smile, even though the occasion is now his own funeral. The suggestion seems to be that commemorative photographs have to be taken of all family events, and all commemorative photographs have to be marked by beaming smiles. Even though Sukezo himself is deceased, he has been brought back to life by that instrument of death, the camera. Now he is being photographed again—allowing him to stare out at the viewer, even though he exists only within a photograph—death canceling out death.

Two years later, in 1989, Fukase’s brother divorced, and the brother’s wife and their two children moved to Tokyo. Fukase’s younger sister and her husband moved away to Sapporo. His mother took up residence in a nursing home for the elderly. What had begun in 1971 as a lighthearted parody of a family photo-album had gradually changed over the course of twenty years and met an entirely unexpected end: the family itself scattered to the winds, their photographic studio closed—the end of an era that had lasted eighty years.

Masahisa Fukase, from the series Family, 1971–89
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

In these works, Fukase uses the camera as a kind of pistol, puncturing the boundaries of time. The bullet moves at an extremely slow speed, seemingly almost motionless, eventually reaching its desired target. The dead body that lies on the ground is the corpse of the past. Fukase pulled the metaphorical trigger over and over again, first on his wife, then on his family. His shots pass through them all over a period of several decades. In effect, what we look at when we view Fukase’s photography is a heap of the remains of the past, a grave marker composed of layers upon layers of images. The viewer gets an intimate sense of the disintegration of Fukase’s father, of the photography studio, and of the entire family, but also becomes conscious of the strange, rather macabre ease with which the photographer invites us to go back and forth through time with these photographs, the only thing left to us now that he—the practitioner of this art—is also dead. In the same way that the reappearance of Sukezo in a photograph of his own funeral seems to negate the effect of death, the members of Fukase’s family actual corpses of the past—come to life in these photographs and stare unflinchingly straight out at us.

Masahisa Fukase, From the left: Hisashi Daikouji, Kanako and Miyako, Manabu, Mitsue, Sukezo, Kyoko, Akiko, Takuya, and Toshiteru, 1974, from the series Family, 1971–89
© Masahisa Fukase Archives and courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

Tomo Kosuga is founder and director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives. His book,  Masahisa Fukase, was published in 2018 by Éditions Xavier Barral.  Translated from the Japanese by Lucy North.

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

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How “Earthrise” Changed the Way We See The World

One of the most influential environmental photographs ever taken almost didn’t happen. In this excerpt from Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, Marvin Heiferman tells the story of William Anders’s Earthrise.

William Anders, Earthrise, 1968
Courtesy NASA

Earthrise—one of the best known and most widely reproduced of all science photographs—was a fluke. On Christmas Eve, 1968, after three days of space travel, America’s Apollo 8 spacecraft was on its fourth orbit around the moon when Frank Borman, the commander of the mission, began to reposition it so that the topography below could be better filmed to document potential future landing sites. During the brief time that the capsule’s windows faced away from the lunar surface, astronaut William Anders looked through them and was startled by what he saw: “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” Anders grabbed a Hasselblad camera, loaded it with 70 mm Ektachrome film, and hastily shot off a couple of frames to capture an unanticipated and spectacular sight: Earth’s seeming ascent above the moon’s rough surface.

After splashdown on Earth and once Anders’s film was processed, one image from it, circulated worldwide by the media, left viewers awestruck. Serene, if a little disquieting, the photograph presents the marbled, blue-and-white planet’s fragile beauty that, seen from a distance, hints at Earth’s insignificance in the vastness of space. Wonder and intimations of the sublime are the frequent by-products of science photography, and the most paradigm-changing of images can be simultaneously mind-boggling and sobering. “Wonder is tinged with awe . . . and it’s also tinged with fear,” science historian Lorraine Daston wrote. “It’s an uncomfortable emotion. You don’t have wonder. Wonder has you.” Once it does, and thanks to photography, we keep on looking.

Click here to learn more about Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe.

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Introducing: KangHee Kim

Unable to leave the United States due to visa restrictions, this South Korean photographer makes images of surreal escapism.

By Cassidy Paul

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim wants to take you to another world, one where single palm trees emerge from a sea of clouds, perfectly crescent moons appear in cotton candy-hued skies, golden rays of light shine over streetscapes and domestic interiors, and clouds peek through windows and scaffolding. Kim is most widely known by her Instagram handle, @tinycactus. While her dreamlike, otherworldly images perfectly capture the digital aesthetic of today—soft color palettes, minimalist compositions, and an almost uncanny, eerie quality—they were the result of something much deeper.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Kim immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of fourteen. When her lawyer missed critical deadlines in applying for Kim’s green card, she was unable to secure citizenship. Eventually, she was granted protection under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), but it came with the major caveat: due to visa restrictions, Kim has been unable to leave the U.S. for over a decade. Her images of “surreal escapism,” as she refers to them, have since become a form of visual therapy. “To be in DACA is living in limbo,” Kim says. “I desire to be unbounded in my photographic practice. Creating these fictional scenes allows me to feel a little bit liberated.”

Kim studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2014. It wasn’t until her senior year that she began using photography as a creative outlet, enjoying the freedom that came with the minimal equipment required. One of her ongoing series, Street Errands, began in 2016 and was born out of the mundane daily encounters of living in New York. “I realized, instead of waiting for miracles, I could instead create the magical moments in my imagination,” Kim says. “I construct my own form of escapism.” To create these photographs, she uses Photoshop to merge and manipulate multiple images from her travels in New York, California, Colorado, and Hawaii. Rather than preplan the scenes, Kim lets intuition guide her—creating cohesion with a uniform aesthetic and color palette, and the returning motifs of moons, clouds, oceans, and skyscrapers.

The early years of Kim’s Instagram feed feature standard day-to-day documentation—she joined in 2012—with hints of her future experiments intermixed in the form of non-photoshopped, early versions of her dreamy photographs. Now, with just under 300,000 followers on Instagram, Kim is among a generation of photographers for whom the platform has become their main source of notoriety. As a result, her images have proliferated across the Internet, earning her commissions from brands such as Adidas, American Express, Air France, and Nike, as well as publications ranging from TIME and the New York Times, to Bloomberg Businessweek.

But for Kim, widespread popularity has a double edge, and she now feels conflicted about showing her work on Instagram. “It’s certainly helped me in many ways to get where I am now. At the same time, the flow of the Internet is uncontrollable,” she says, noting that the deeper, more personal ideas can get lost. However, she adds, “It’s fine with me if some people are missing out on the backstories, as long as they can relate their own experiences.”

Navigating the line between the everyday and fantasy, Kim’s photographs make the impossible possible: they create a space for her desire for freedom, while accepting the reality of her situation. Ultimately, Kim explains, her work “seeks to actively create something new with what I have for myself. These images give me illusions of traveling to unknown places that are familiar yet totally new. I’d like to remain optimistic and hopeful. Appreciating what I have in the present seemed to be one of the ways to do that.”

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

KangHee Kim, from the series Street Errands, 2016–present

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

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

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One Giant Leap for Mankind

Fifty years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong made history as the first person to set foot on the moon’s surface. In Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, author Marvin Heiferman reflects on the significance of the photographs made during the Apollo 11 mission.

Boot prints with camera on the Lunar Surface, 1969
Courtesy NASA

One of the simplest and most haunting photographs ever made was taken on July 20, 1969, when astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off Apollo 11’s lunar module and placed his left foot on the surface of the moon. The image was taken by fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin. It was Richard Underwood, NASA’s chief of photography in the 1960s, who taught the astronauts how to expose, frame, and focus their shots.

“Your key to immortality,” he said to motivate them, “is in the quality of the photographs and nothing else.” The images they captured—on six missions over the course of a three-year period—ranged from workaday documentation to the extraordinary. And as more astronauts landed on and explored the moon’s surface, the more footsteps they left behind. What was startling and novel the first time it was photographed became a pictorial constant. In 2011, conspiracists who claimed that these pictures were faked were proven wrong when a NASA lunar orbiter captured the sharpest images of landing sites ever taken and revealed the astronauts’ footsteps to still be there—where, it is estimated, they will remain for at least a million years.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin Deploys Apollo 11 Experiments, 1969
Courtesy NASA

Neil Armstrong, An Apollo 11 Hassleblad image from film magazine40/S–EVA, 1969
Courtesy NASA

Buzz Aldrin, An Apollo 11 Hassleblad image from film magazine 40/S–EVA, 1969
Courtesy NASA

Marvin Heiferman is a writer and curator based in New York. 

Click here to learn more about Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe.

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Revolutionary Roads

From Addis Ababa to Johannesburg, Guy Tillim photographs the streets named for Africa’s military leaders.

By Sean O’Toole

Guy Tillim, Leopold Takawira Street, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2016, from Museum of the Revolution (MACK, 2019)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Guy Tillim’s new book of color photographs, Museum of the Revolution (MACK and Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 2019), gathers his ambulatory work made on walking excursions along major avenues in several African cities between 2014 and 2018. Extending on the drift initiated in his book Avenue Patrice Lumumba (Prestel, 2008) and enabled by his receipt of the 2017 HCB Award, his new photobook contains numerous diptychs or triptychs—as if one frame is insufficient to contain the quotidian abundance of postindependence life in such major African cities as Addis Ababa, Harare, Johannesburg, Libreville, Luanda, and Nairobi.

Guy Tillim, Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 2016, from Museum of the Revolution (MACK, 2019)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

The book opens with a fractional view of a military parade in Maputo, martial pageantry being a feature of Tillim’s work since the 1980s. It is followed a few pages in by a four-part study taken in 2017 at a busy intersection in the Mozambican capital. It has just rained in this photo; Avenida 24 Julho, a major artery named for the day (July 24, 1975) Mozambique’s month-old socialist government nationalized education, health, and legal services, is waterlogged. In one frame a woman wearing a floral skirt and pink heels purses her lips as she waits to cross the uneven tarmac; in another a pudgy man with a lanyard tucked into his shirt pocket is caught midstride, ignoring the red light. In postsocialist Mozambique, some people jaywalk.

Strikingly, none of the Maputians appearing in Avenida 24 de Julho, Maputo (2017) seems remotely aware of or even interested in the white South African photographer looking at them. The same is true of Tillim’s photographs taken on Haile Selassie Avenue in Nairobi, or Boulevard du Général de Gaulle in Dakar, where he witnessed a military procession. None of Tillim’s photos exhibit that reciprocal involvement and recognition—or even conflict—that defines Garry Winogrand’s in-your-face street photography. Paul Graham’s indifferent pedestrians come to mind, although Tillim’s invisibility and irrelevance to his photographic subjects is piquant in liberated Africa.

Guy Tillim, Boulevard du Général de Gaulle, Dakar, Senegal, 2017, from Museum of the Revolution (MACK, 2019)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Tillim was in his early teens when, in June 1975, Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal following a decade of strife and armed conflict. In 1986, working as a photojournalist, he visited Maputo to document the funeral of Samora Machel, the rebel fighter who became Mozambique’s first president. Machel had just died in a mysterious plane crash in neighboring South Africa. His death was deeply felt. Among the photographs Tillim took during his press trip, one somehow foreshadows his preoccupations in Museum of the Revolution. It portrays a group of female mourners, many wearing headscarves, queuing to view Machel’s body as he lay in state in Maputo’s colonial-era city hall.

Guy Tillim, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2016, from Museum of the Revolution (MACK, 2019)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

This early photo anticipates Tillim’s current interest in cityscapes and the human bodies that activate them. But this photo is important for another reason. The endpapers of Museum of the Revolution reproduce a large painting housed in a four-floor museum along Avenida 24 Julho. Produced by North Korean artists for the 1978 launch of the Museu da Revolução (or Museum of the Revolution, from which Tillim’s book derives its title), the painting describes a jubilant crowd of black Mozambicans greeting a parade of soldiers in neat olive fatigues led by Machel.

Writing about this painting in 1983, New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld—a friend and supporter of photographers Ernest Cole and David Goldblatt—revealed that Machel had been “unhappy” with the painting, in particular the artist’s rendering of eyes, which “looked more Korean than African” and required “considerable retouching at the President’s behest.” Pyongyang remains a prominent sculptor of memory in postcolonial Africa, its artisans famously contributing to the production of architect Pierre Goudiaby’s puzzling African Renaissance Monument in Dakar.

Guy Tillim, Simmonds Street, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2014, from Museum of the Revolution (MACK, 2019)
Courtesy the artist and MACK

In some places, notably Luanda, where Tillim wandered around Avenida 4 de Fevereiro in 2016, the African metropolis now more resembles China than Europe. But the pervasive influence of forces beyond the continent is not the focus of Tillim’s roaming, detail-interested study of time and progress in urban Africa. If there is a defining image, it is a diptych from his forsaken birth city, Johannesburg. Taken in 2013, it records a car park slowly being demolished. Passersby don’t even look at the spectacle. Of course, Johannesburg is not alone in feeling the bite of diesel-driven excavators; cities everywhere are continuously atrophying and being remade. Tillim’s book records this infrastructural life force, both with marked dispassion and an affecting curiosity.

Sean O’Toole is a writer and editor based in Cape Town. He has contributed essays to photobooks by, among others, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Margaret Courtney-Clarke, David Goldblatt, Jackie Nickerson, and Mikhael Subotzky. He has published one book of fiction, The Marquis of Mooikloof and Other Stories (Double Storey, 2006).

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

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A Look Inside Aperture’s Third Annual Patron Weekend in Hudson Valley

Aperture patrons and friends gather at the “Apple House.” Photo courtesy of William Kahane.

Lyle Ashton Harris discusses his work at his Germantown studio. Photo by Kodie-Ann Walcott.

Chris Boot holds Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs, an Aperture publication, with Lyle Ashton Harris. Photo by Amelia Lang.

Amelia Lang introducing Letha Wilson at her studio in Craryville, New York. Photo by Kodie-Ann Walcott.

Letha Wilson sharing images with the Aperture group that reflect the confluence of nature and architecture in her work. Photo by Amelia Lang.

James Casebere in his studio, surrounded by the architectural models that he uses as props in his work. Photo by William Kahane.

Back balcony at Simon Lince and Cary Leibowitz’s home. Photo by Kodie-Ann Walcott.

Aperture patrons and friends together at Simon Lince and Cary Leibowitz’s farmhouse. Photo by Emily Grillo, editing by Steven Hurwitz.

Dining room—inspired by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown—at the home of Simon Lince and Cary Leibowitz. Photo by Kodie-Ann Walcott.

James Casebere, at the home of Cathy Kaplan and Renwick Martin, reviewing prints with Aperture patrons and friends. Photo by Kodie-Ann Walcott.

Elizabeth Kahane addresses the Aperture group in her studio. Photo by William Kahane.

From June 21–23, Aperture trustees, patrons, artists, and friends enjoyed an inspiring weekend of events in New York’s Hudson Valley, with visits to the Norman Rockwell Museum and artist studios and collections throughout the region.

Patrons started the weekend reflecting on American culture with an inside look at the work of artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell, in an exhibition tour of Private Moments for the Masses at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Autobiographical aspects of Rockwell’s art and imagery are incorporated into the exhibition, including the artist’s famous cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, and Rockwell’s later series on racism for Look magazine. Following the tour, the group enjoyed an evening outdoors with cocktails and dinner, in the courtyard at beloved Hudson restaurant, Le Perche.

Lyle Ashton Harris hosted the group on Saturday morning at his serene cabin and work space, where he discussed pieces from his latest series honoring his late father. Harris also shared a grouping of self-portraits shot in Africa, among other works and publications. Harris noted that his Untitled (DAD), recently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum, will be included in the museum’s upcoming show, Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, Part 2, opening July 24 in New York.

Later that day in Craryville, the group met at Letha Wilson’s airy studio to learn about her reliefs and site-specific installations, bringing together architectural and natural elements. A meet up at James Casebere’s studio followed, where the artist, a recipient of the 2019–20 Rome Prize, showcased his colorful architectural models and surrealist landscapes, revealing his technique for blurring lines between fiction and fact. A visit to Simon Lince and Cary Leibowitz’s 1795 farmhouse, redesigned by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, was the last activity of the day, featuring whimsical furniture, decor, art, and curiosities, including a rotating mechanical painting. At sunset, dinner and a spectacular view of the Hudson Valley was enjoyed at the home of Aperture trustee Cathy Kaplan.

On Sunday afternoon, photographer and filmmaker Ayana V. Jackson presented her newest body of work as the first artist-in-residence in a series established by Aperture trustee Elizabeth Kahane and her husband, William Kahane. The group delved into a deliciously authentic Jamaican summer lunch after a viewing of Wigstock 1995, a presentation of color works by E.A. Kahane, in tribute to Stonewall 50.

Click here to join Aperture at the Patron Circle, Benefactor Circle or Paul Strand Circle level, and enjoy access to trips like this one.

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The Private Lives of Italians, as Seen Through Their Windows

A continuation of her series, Out My Window, Gail Albert Halaban’s Italian Views (Aperture, Spring 2019) features intimate domestic portraits set against the backdrop of Italian cities. To obtain each image Albert Halaban collaborated with local residents, having them restage activities that their neighbors might normally spy through their windows. Her cinematic, mysterious photographs explore the conventions and tensions of urban lifestyles, feelings of isolation in the city, and the intimacies of home and daily life. “There has been a big loss of the face to face connection,” Halaban states. “I am trying in this work to reclaim that, and give people a motive to go meet their neighbors.”

Here are ten images and accompanying vignettes written by Albert Halaban that invite viewers to thrill in what the artist describes as “friendly voyeurism.”

Gail Albert Halaban, Superman and Elsa, Piazza del Popolo, Rome
© the artist

We live in a fairly upmarket neighborhood where people value privacy. You don’t really get to see your neighbors except for this one small moment when people turn on their lights before they remember to close their shutters. A light may go on for just a few minutes, perhaps just a matter of seconds. That’s when you can glimpse your neighbors like fireflies. If you blink for too long you miss them.

Gail Albert Halaban, Birds, Piazza dei Ponziani, Rome
© the artist

When the shutters are open, the music floats across the piazza. She dances joyously, her feet barely touching the floor. At dusk it’s enchanting, as if she conjures the birds from the sky to join her in her reverie.

Gail Albert Halaban, Scooter and Headphones, Via Titoni, Rome, Italy, 2017
© the artist

If they’re lovers I’d be surprised—they rarely talk to each other. When he hears her Vespa pull up outside, he quickly puts on headphones and pretends he’s been watching movies for hours. Are they roommates? Does he owe her rent?

Gail Albert Halaban, Necklace, Via Pietro Maestri, Milan
© the artist

He puts the necklace on her every morning. Sometimes he must pinch her with the clasp because I see her fussing and pushing him away. He smiles at her lovingly no matter what.

Gail Albert Halaban, Masked Ball, San Polo, Venice
© the artist

For three months every year the palace sits empty, its furniture shrouded with dust sheets, but in January the owner’s son returns from college to wake the place from its hibernation. Tonight he has swapped his usual cargo pants and polo shirt for a black tuxedo and a mask. How wonderful to see the guests arrive by gondolier, the joie de vivre they bring! The palace is alive with the sound of laughter and tinkling piano music, while the prosecco flows like the Canale Grande.

Gail Albert Halaban, Reading with the Chandelier, San Polo, Venice
© the artist

I bumped into her once at the theater in the Borghese gardens. Twelfth Night. I greeted her warmly, as if we were old friends. It threw her, I could tell. She was embarrassed, admitting she had a terrible memory for names and faces. I smiled and walked away. I didn’t want to tell her that for over ten years I have gazed from my breakfast table directly into her reading room.

Gail Albert Halaban, Family Dinner, San Marco, Venice
© the artist

On Saturday mornings she draws up a shopping list. She checks the fridge and cupboards, returning periodically to scrawl another item on her list. She and her husband do the shopping; her daughters unpack. Each of the girls has a role in these humble rituals—the littlest puts together the insalata while the older girl places the flowers carefully in a vase.

Gail Albert Halaban, Red Kimono, San Marco, Venice
© the artist

The first time I glimpsed her I was drawn to her like a Renaissance painting in the Uffizi. There was an unrealness about her. The terra-cotta tiles and pale bricks became the neutral background upon which she had been painted, a perfect counterpoint. She reminds me of Botticelli’s Simonetta Vespucci—the fine features, the way she tucks her hair into the nape of her neck, the red gown.

Gail Albert Halaban, Grandma Comes to Babysit, Kalsa, Palermo
© the artist

They were a family—a mom, a dad, two small kids. Of course they still are a family, but the husband? I don’t see him anymore. When he lived there, they used to throw these lavish dinner parties. There was noise and laughter and dancing, then a year of shouting. Now it’s mostly quiet, or at least I don’t hear anything. I don’t see a lot of visitors come and go, just her mother on Tuesday afternoons. She stays until bedtime while her daughter goes out.

Gail Albert Halaban, Pasta Lunch, Kalsa, Palermo
© the artist

Every evening she spends alone, except for the weekends when her grandson visits. She cooks the same thing for him—roast chicken. It must be a plump bird, because she picks at that carcass all week until he comes around again.

Click here to learn more about Italian Views.

Collect Limited-Edition prints from Italian Views. Contact prints@aperture.org for more information.

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Two Artists Interrogate the “White Gaze” of National Geographic

Pairing archival images and text, Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê pose a razor-sharp critique of colonialism.

By Khairani Barokka

Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê from White Gaze (at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books, 2018)
Courtesy of at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books

In early 2018, National Geographic ran a piece entitled “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge This.” However, the magazine’s archival behemoth of denigrated bodies and minds still exists, imbuing its photographic subjects with racist notions that still need wider acknowledgment. The National Geographic archive is the cause of true harm on a mass scale, and dehumanizes, exploits, and perpetuates the worldview of our lands as resources for plunder, and our lives as classifiable, capturable, translatable only through the white gaze.

Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê from White Gaze (at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books, 2018)
Courtesy of at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books

Artists and scholars Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê’s book White Gaze (at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books, 2018) is a work that exposes the National Geographic lens with razor-sharp textual acuity. The authors work harmoniously, with Dizon providing photos chosen from the magazine’s issues and Lê juxtaposing them with original and found poetic text. Their cut-off point for mining the archives was the 1960s: Dizon explains that this is because a more neoliberal version of racism emerged in the 1970s, and in the 1980s text became embedded within the magazine’s images, which doesn’t fit White Gaze’s aesthetics of image-text interplay. Lê, meanwhile, contributes word choice and, crucially, visual spacing, to induce pauses and rhythm for the reader and sustain intended engagement with the photography. The size and positioning of the archival photos in relation to the poetry, timelines, and archival texts are always intentional; the results are deft, cutting. Captions note people “Scrubbed by their missionary guides until they shone” and a woman dancing bare-chested against “the / collector.” A transcribed letter from US President Eisenhower to Indian Prime Minister Nehru, encouraging peacemaking policies, lies opposite a large photograph of what appears to be a white man and woman driven by a South Asian man in a rickshaw—power dynamics persisting through the whiteness of gaze. The text at times excoriates the destructive processes of colonization, and at others adopts the language of the colonizer, or straddles the line between complicit and noncomplicit language. This brings up a slight tension in the act of absorbing the image-text interchange, requiring a subtlety of appraisal.

Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê from White Gaze (at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books, 2018)
Courtesy of at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books

In a discussion between Dizon and Lê that ends the book, it is noted that scholar Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “impossible stories” resonates in the dead’s inability to contribute their words to the conversation. I was struck by this impossibility, particularly in the image of the beautiful Polynesian woman captioned “She was destroyed by . . . US military operators.” Would the subject and her loved ones perceive this as a reinscription of violence? Is finding this out impossible, or could she or her family know she is being used in this book—and why or why not? The line between pointing out violent dehumanization in photos and reinstating that harm becomes blurry here; captioning children who could be our own ancestors with “little natives sing and play” is clearly a statement of the photo’s sinister subtext, but also a potential pain for those involved as subjects here, tangentially or otherwise. It is a credit to Dizon and Lê that this lack of power is addressed in their interview, but I found myself craving further discussion on how this affected their process and decisions.

Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê from White Gaze (at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books, 2018)
Courtesy of at land’s edge, Candor Arts, and Sming Sming Books

For these reasons, I found White Gaze most brilliant when a caption turns to the white gazer as at least partial photographic subject, in the sense of bodies or belongings in a frame; for example, “watch / the daughter of an American who buys rubber here for Goodyear.” A pristine mansion’s front yard exists opposite a page proclaiming “Slave labor”; a family gathering of Caucasians watching a film reel is paired with “Absence.” Also significant is the portrayal of resistance to white occupation, whether through the word “Struggle” captioning brown bodies under a colonizer’s flag, or photos 206 and 420 evoking “blacker / English,” language itself as battleground and weapon–textual as well as visual language. At its best, White Gaze illuminates the truth, palpitatingly urgent: “the camera may be a gun.”

Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer, artist, and poet. She has published two books, Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis Press, 2016) and Rope (Nine Arches Press, 2017), and her last exhibition as artist was Annah: Nomenclature at the ICA, London (2018).

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A Human Cartography of Collective Struggles

In his recent photobook, Martín Weber negotiates the past and the future in Latin America.

By Andrea Jösch

Martín Weber, El mejor./The best., Texas, 1992
© and courtesy the artist

Map of Latin American Dreams by Argentinean photographer Martín Weber (Editorial RM and Ediciones Larivière, 2018) is the result of a long journey (1992–2013) through fifty-three towns and cities in Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia. In the book are 110 monochrome portraits and several personal stories, like diary entries, that are interwoven in the narrative, which includes an essay by artist and educator Robert Blake. The gold color of the cover and silver in the negatives printed in the preface lead us to think about the symbolic space around material/mineral resources and the tragic history of their domination.

Martín Weber, Quiero ser policía./To be a policewoman., Maclovio Rojas, Mexico, 2000
© and courtesy the artist

At the beginning of the book, Weber points out in the travel notes: “Someone once told me that for someone born in exile, every trip is an exile.” And in the postscript: “Perhaps because my parents weren’t part of any armed resistance group against the dictatorships they suffered under, but were instead part of a conscientious opposition, it took me four decades to understand why I was born in Chile, and forty years to accept that I was born in exile.” These phrases, which resonate in the memory of our troubled Latin America, give sense to the images we observe, because the work is not only a question of giving a voice to those who have been denied this possibility, and visualizing the physical and spiritual marks and vestiges that conflicts and struggles have left in people, but also a question of why there are so many abuses, so many silences.

Martín Weber, Viajar a Italia para visitar a mi hija que vive allá./To travel to Italy to visit my daughter who lives there., Cachoeira, Brazil, 2005
© and courtesy the artist

Exile and forced displacement have been, for different reasons, a constant in the reality of our continent for decades, but it is also true that many, most, live or survive in their territories, dreaming that one day something can be transformed. The cyclical worldview of life, on which the belief systems of many indigenous peoples are based, fixes the possibility of the future only if one is aware of the present while looking toward the past. This can be an analogy of the tension between dreaming and living without forgetting—with memory.

Weber stages his photographs with patience and care. Individuals or groups are invited to pose holding a wooden board on which they have written their dreams in chalk—longings, fears, and promises, though almost always colored by violence, poverty, and daily life. This work invites us to build, from the unavoidable relationship between images and texts, a human cartography of common stories and collective struggles.

Martín Weber, Deseo vivir para mi esposa, mis hijos y mis nietos./To live for my wife, my children, and my grandchildren., Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2008
© and courtesy the artist

This publication reiterates for us, both in the personal notes of the photographer and in his portraits, the failed policies and the fierce social inequality that invade us, while at the same time accounting for resistance and persistence. It proposes a reflection on time, both photographic time and history’s repetition of events, which seems more like a tragic song, as if dreams have been turned into supplications that are transmitted from generation to generation. The book is a sort of map between two times: the one of the archive and the one of the journey, of reality and dreams, photographs and texts, forgetfulness and memory.

Martín Weber, Mi sueño es morirme./My dream is to die., Medellin, Colombia, 2007
© and courtesy the artist

In 2007, Weber photographed Cristián, the Colombian teenager whose portrait is printed on the cover of this book: “My dream is to die.” He poses with his scars, staring fixedly at the camera; his shot body was found six months later. It’s a tribute, perhaps; a second title, also. It seems that the dreams—of having health, work, land, education, the return of loved ones and the missing, having a decent life, affection—written by the women, men, children, and elderly portrayed by Weber, make us wake up and understand that, for all the differences that exist between cultures and countries, the dream of the majority of Latin Americans is to be able to live with dignity.

Andrea Jösch is academic coordinator of the Master in Photographic Research and Creation program at Finis Terrae University School of Art, Santiago, Chile. She is also editor in chief and founder of the South American photography magazine Sueño de la Razón and coeditor of Ojo Zurdo magazine.

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Marc Feustel on Photobooks After 3/11

It has been four years since the Great Tohoku Earthquake

unleashed a series of tsunami waves which struck a vast area of Japan’s northeastern coastline, and caused a severe nuclear incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan is no stranger to natural and man-made disasters. However, since the 1960s the nation has, by and large, experienced peace and prosperity. Since the post-bubble years of the 1990s, much of Japanese contemporary art has been driven by self representation and aesthetics. But the events of March 11, 2011 (referred to in Japan as 3/11), have profoundly impacted the way art is both made and received in Japan, and today the social and documentary concerns that characterized the postwar years have risen back to the surface.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, photographers from around the country—and indeed the world—flocked to the devastated area. In the following months, book after book was published, seemingly documenting every inch of the devastated coastline. This photographic reaction is both natural and necessary, as if events of this magnitude require images to make it possible for us to begin to comprehend them. However, the sheer volume of these book projects quickly became overwhelming. It was difficult to feel anything but numb when faced with these endless images of devastated landscapes.

It was in this context that projects began to emerge with new approaches to this diffi cult subject. As early as April 2011, Rinko Kawauchi traveled to the earthquake-devastated towns of Ishinomaki, Onagawa, Kesennuma, and Rikuzentakata. From this journey she created the series Light and Shadow, based on her encounter with a pair of pigeons, one black, one white. This became the project’s theme: the dualism of light and shadow, good and evil. While the photographs depict destruction, Kawauchi’s work does not feel like a document, but rather a transcendence of the disaster, where despair already contains the seeds of hope. Two publications have emerged from the series, both titled Light and Shadow: a short, self-published book in 2012, and an expanded edit of the series published by SUPER LABO in 2014.

New approaches were also at work in two projects dealing with the Fukushima nuclear incident that resulted from the earthquake: Katsumi Omori’s Subete wa hajimete okoru (Everything happens for the first time, Match and Company, 2011) and Takashi Homma’s Sono mori no kodomo (Mushrooms from the forest, Blind Gallery, 2011—both of which were reviewed by Ivan Vartanian in The PhotoBook Review 002.) Fukushima is the least likely of photographic subjects as it demands the impossible: to photograph radiation—the invisible. Omori described the compulsion that drove him to Fukushima: “I must go to Fukushima. I must shoot the radiation (though it cannot be shot).” By employing a halation effect throughout his series, he lays bare the limitations of photography in the face of this invisible threat, while also giving that threat a form.

At first glance, Homma’s images of forests and wild mushrooms seem to bear no relation to the nuclear power plant, but their meaning is transformed by a brief text buried at the end of the book. In it, Homma explains that mushrooms absorb radiation faster than other living organisms; those he collected in the forests of Fukushima Prefecture contain much higher levels of radiation than elsewhere in Japan. The experience is unsettling, forcing the viewer back through the images with a very different eye. Tomoki Imai’s Semicircle Law (Match and Company, 2013) uses a similar device. His seemingly anodyne forest landscapes are transformed by a diagram at the end of the book revealing that his photographs were taken on either side of the twenty-kilometer security radius established by the Japanese government around the stricken nuclear plant. Imai himself has said that he thinks these images’ signifi cance will depend on which vantage point the future will bring.

Non-Japanese artists have also been drawn to the affected region. The German photographer Hans-Christian Schink traveled to Japan one year after the quake to photograph the coastline. Tohoku (Hatje Cantz, 2013) provides a complex view of the aftermath of 3/11, in which the tsunami’s impact ranges

from the imperceptible to the brutal—a landscape still caught in the midst of a long healing process. More recently, Antoine D’Agata produced a surprising new book on Fukushima. Over the course of six hundred black-and-white plates, Fukushima (SUPER LABO, 2014) presents a typology of those houses abandoned due to their proximity to the stricken nuclear plant. A far cry from D’Agata’s signature work, the uncharacteristic coolness of these images builds to a foreboding emptiness.

While all the projects mentioned above were created by photographers from outside the Tohoku region, for some the events of 3/11 were of a more personal nature. Iwate-born Kazuma Obara’s Reset Beyond Fukushima (Lars Müller, 2012) goes beyond a documentation of the catastrophe to become a call to action—the book’s subtitle is Will the Nuclear Catastrophe Bring Humanity to Its Senses?—in the grand tradition of the Japanese protest book.

Naoya Hatakeyama is also from Iwate, and his book Kesengawa (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2012; Editions Light Motiv, 2013) is concerned with the destruction of his hometown of Rikuzentakata. Kesengawa has two distinct halves. The first contains photographs that Hatakeyama had been casually producing over the years along the Kesen River, which runs through Rikuzentakata. The

book then shifts into the photographs taken in his hometown in the aftermath of the wave. In the book’s afterword he describes his aim to “bring the event closer to people, to compress the physical distance.” Whereas Homma and Imai’s images are altered by the text that follows them, in the case of Kesengawa, the photographs are transformed by the events themselves. Snapshots made only to be tucked away in a small box in Hatakeyama’s studio suddenly gained great significance—a profound illustration of the ever-shifting relationship between photography and the world.

Lieko Shiga was directly affected by the tsunami. In 2008 the young artist relocated to the small coastal village of Kitakama in Miyagi Prefecture, where she had been given a home and a studio in exchange for taking on the role of official photographer for this small community. Shiga had been working on an ambitious project about her adoptive home when the tsunami struck, destroying much of the community and her studio with it. She went on to fi nish the project, which became a book and an exhibition. Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Beach, AKAAKA, 2013—short-listed as PhotoBook of the Year in the 2013 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards) is not a book about the tsunami, but one whose course was profoundly affected by it. Like many of the projects referred to here, Rasen Kaigan is also concerned with bringing the invisible to light: rather than documenting the surface of her adoptive community, Shiga chose to focus on its fantasies, dreams, and memories—its “essence.” (Shiga also collaborated on the centerfold for this issue—see caption, bottom left.)

Of all the books that deal with the 3/11 tsunami, Tsunami, Photographs, and Then: Lost and Found Project (AKAAKA, 2014—short-listed as Photography Catalogue of the Year in the 2014 PhotoBook Awards) is perhaps that which says the most about photography’s importance at times like these. The book provides an overview of the work of the Lost and Found Project, a group that was formed to attempt to retrieve photographs that had been scattered by the wave, preserve them, and return them to their owners. Initiatives like this one sprung up all along the Tohoku coast, and are a testament to the vital importance accorded to photographs when all has been lost.

An extraordinary breadth of projects and approaches have emerged around 3/11 in the past four years. The books mentioned here all deal with the subject directly, but there are countless others in which these disasters are a powerful, if indirect, undercurrent; the many projects referred to in this piece only represent a beginning. Looking to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, these events remained key themes for decades after the events. Arguably the two most powerful bodies of work on the atomic bombings, Kikuji Kawada’s Chizu (The Map, 1965) and Shomei Tomatsu’s 11:02 Nagasaki (1966), were not published until twenty years after the fact. Today, the resurgence of social concerns echoes the artistic engagement of those postwar years. Perhaps the greatest photobooks to deal with 3/11 are still to come.

Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer, and editor based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he has curated exhibitions, including Tokyo Stories (2008), Japan: A

Self-Portrait, 1945–1964 (2009), and Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory (2010). He writes regularly about contemporary photography and photobooks. marcfeustel.com

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