Aperture's Blog, page 85

Can this Young Photographer Dissolve the Drama of Gender?

With his queer, neoclassical portraits, Michael Bailey-Gates wants to start a revolution.

By Horace D. Ballard

Michael Bailey-Gates, Los Angeles, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Akin to Caravaggio, the humanist Baroque painter of the double-edged scene, Michael Bailey-Gates serves ambiguity atop ambiguity to get at the underlying truths of living in a pre-apocalyptic world. This is accomplished most directly by Bailey-Gates’s capacious understanding of the work of the close-up and a refracted, almost restrained use of color. The close-up has become visual lingua franca in the age of the selfie. It was Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman in the 1970s and ’80s who borrowed the close-up from cinema to speak truth to power in a divided Thatcher-era, Reaganomics world. Whereas Goldin’s close-ups are of half bodies, writhing together so that the tail-end of one sits on the mouth of another in a Mobius strip of nonlinear, undefinable narrative arch, Bailey-Gates’s close-up always includes the eyes of the subject(s) and often the knees. This redoubled fixation on the computational apertures onto human experience and the joints which propel action through the world is startling.

 

Michael Bailey-Gates, Self-Portrait, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Through Goldin and Sherman, we learned that the close-up lends a humanist lens with which to view an event, but occludes knowledge of everything else in the frame. The close-up provides deep information about a single situation, but renders everything else in fractals. The close-up under their respective kneading became symptomatic of Western culture’s slippage into the postmodern. Bailey-Gates flips this existential form born of cultural angst on its ass—turning transgression into emo transliteration for this new post-postmodern milieu. The close-up in the social media era is now referential of the early-modern painted allegories that were neither sacred texts nor portraiture, but instead a third genre, one conscious of the subject’s transition from human to critical referent. Whether in studio shots, movement studies, genre scenes of bodies in nature, or staged images lit by candles and studio lights, Bailey-Gates frames a close-up that is neither the caress of a third lover nor the blatant impatient stare of the voyeur, but rather the wink of collusion by a knowing accomplice.

Michael Bailey-Gates, Jane and Me, 2018
Courtesy the artist

The existential drama of gender and being dissolves before Bailey-Gates lens. Bailey-Gates’s photographs don’t so much interrogate gender as bypass it. With these photos, I’m not just unconcerned with reading the gender of the bodies before me, it’s also futile. The photographic close-up is now an opportunity to collaborate, to collude, to build the little life of a narrative where there was none. The subject becomes less important for who and what they are and dearer to us because of the network of intimacies and experiences they represent.

 

Michael Bailey-Gates, Zoe covered in mud, 2017
Courtesy the artist

This post-postmodern matrix of ever-expanding intimacies and experiences is what links and distinguishes Bailey-Gates’s attentions to and from the lush austerity of George Dureau or the slick provocations of Robert Mapplethorpe. There is something quintessentially New York about Mapplethorpe; something indelibly Cajun about the New Orleans born-bred-and-died Dureau. There are no tell-tale signs of where Bailey-Gates’s images are conjured from, only a decisive when: the now of our imaginings. I can’t help but see this distinction as one of color, that shifting and shifty attenuator of form and light. Both Dureau and Mapplethorpe are hip to the close-up game: using intimate acts as a way to turn the circus tent and the bathhouse into a studio. Both employ light as a way of rendering the nude or leather-clad body as sculpture, with all the tricks and displacements neoclassicism provides in a postcolonial world.

 

Michael Bailey-Gates, Los Angeles, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Yet both photographers were decidedly male and decidedly gay, with a decidedly uninterrogated male gaze. Both men often photographed their subjects against light backgrounds so the formal taxonomy of limb-to-limb ratios could be enacted. This doesn’t mean their work sucks or is unimportant, it just means the images have no desire to appeal equally to canonical and individual standards of beauty. Their work is not interested in providing a modulated, inclusive vision of truth. Bailey-Gates does not fall into this myopia. Entanglements of power and dependency — electric, historic, proximate — form the compositional landscapes of Bailey-Gates’s formal intersubjectivity. Whether shooting from above and looking down on subject(s) giggling on a bed, or from below with subject(s) carousing above, or shooting bang dead-on, the camera’s aperture filling with the light from subject(s) eyes, Bailey-Gates gives us an expansive gaze — often photographing against dark or riotous backgrounds so that the composition is sonic rather than lucrative and tight.

Michael Bailey-Gates, Saskia and myself, 2019
Courtesy the artist

And while Mapplethorpe and Bailey-Gates are both referential (Mapplethorpe to Thomas Eakins; Bailey-Gates to Marc Jacobs looking at Mapplethorpe looking at Thomas Eakins), only Bailey-Gates is able to mobilize color as a way of referencing past and coeval commercial and editorial modes of looking. These images capture the criticality of pop culture citation and the body’s relation to luxe fashion as both an experience of material and an imagined fluidity of pigment. It seems to my eye that color and citation function in a Bailey-Gates photograph as analogues to critical relations to gender: something we step in and out of, something we try on, wear, perform, then discard if it prevents the kind of encounter we crave.

Michael Bailey-Gates, Torraine Futurum with a white horse, 2017
Courtesy the artist

It is the worst-kept secret in culture that sculpture, fashion, and the photograph are the same boi in a new wig. The triplets arise from the same impulse to capture and sustain the body mid–free fall as it navigates Time. These three visual modes provide a body or a subject added dimensionality as it moves. Judith Butler reminds us that gender is constituted in these visual and material mediations through time and space. Neither fixed nor periodically stable, gender is for Butler a tenuous “locus of agency” that provide an illusion of coherence via a stylized sense of repetitive acts. To put it more succinctly, gender is its own dimension through which the human subject as form walks in and out of with every word, act, and thought.

Michael Bailey-Gates, Bobbi and Me, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Back to color. For Bailey-Gates, color is applied across these photographs conscientiously in order to suture the photographic event in Time. The black-and-white images do not read as matte or neutral, but as substantial poetic forms in which our expectations are meant to be affirmed then subverted. The photographs with warm palettes leave the realm of deep time and position us in the immediate present where a decision is about to be made and we are about to bear witness to its unfolding. Color implicates the viewer in the mutual creation of a communal gaze that is joined and spread digitally. I cannot tell where the spiraling web of fashion affecting Instagram affecting ourselves and our posts to Instagram affecting what’s on trend begins. What Michael Bailey-Gates’s images convey, however, is the enduring importance of this ever-widening gyre to include more narratives and more bodies in the “visual tectonics” of culture. But where will it lead?

Michael Bailey-Gates, The Rosemont Girls, 2019
Courtesy the artist

In a future time, say two, three generations from now, cyborgs will recover the photographs of Michael Bailey-Gates as the first flourishing of themselves. Cyborgs, you understand, don’t have sex. They don’t need to, as the network they are all tuned into for their being is a constant and consistent matrix of connection and interrelationality. They also don’t do clothes. But the cyborg body is a pleasuredome of expanse served in circuited refractions of genderplay and agency, and the digital photograph serves this up with all the jolt of mainlining caffeine. They keep their humanoid shape as homage to us, their great grandparents.

Michael Bailey-Gates, Rob, Shun, Yves, Tzef, and Bobbi on my table, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Bailey-Gates knows this. Bailey-Gates’s surname will flicker in neon Helvetica across the cyborg chest—between the on and reset switches of memory. The transmodalities of the cyborgian mind-space continuum allow them to conjure the pages of MATTE from thin air in order to learn when the photograph in the digital age stopped serving facets of reality and began inventing futurities. Bailey-Gates is going to be a band name of epic post-hip-hop-punk potentiality in this future age. Draft an email to your children’s children. Tell them you peeked this visual revolution first.

Horace D. Ballard is Curator of American Art and Research Curator for Photography at the Williams College Museum of Art. 

This essay originally appeared in  MATTE magazine, issue 53, 2019, and is republished courtesy the author.

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Tilda Swinton Guest Edits Aperture’s “Orlando” Issue

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Vivane Sassen, from the series Venus & Mercury, 2019
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg. All sculptures belong to Musée du Louvre and Château de Versailles

Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), perhaps the author’s most whimsical, begins as a tale of a young nobleman in the age of Queen Elizabeth I. Orlando, improbably, lives for centuries and along the way mysteriously shifts gender, a radical plot point that is rendered—in an even more radical gesture—as a nonevent. After having Orlando traverse time and geographies, Woolf concludes the narrative in her present day, October 1928, on the eve of the book’s publication.

In 1992, director Sally Potter adapted the novel for the screen and cast Tilda Swinton, the guest editor of Aperture’s summer issue, in the role of Orlando. The film version, like all translations of a story from one medium to another, takes its liberties, extending Orlando’s life decades further, leaving her in the early 1990s.

With this issue, Swinton continues that journey.

She calls upon Woolf’s central themes—gender fluidity, limitlessness, and the deep perspective that is earned from a long life—and connects them to our present day. The film Orlando arrived at a moment when debates around identity, representation, and society shook the culture, notably with the controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial, referenced in a conversation between writer Maggie Nelson and artist Shannon Ebner. Those debates still resound as a new generation of photographers push to challenge institutions and representational codes, insisting on their own narratives, their own visions.

In “Orlando,” we move through portals and across time. Reflections by the acclaimed authors Michael Cunningham, Marina Warner, and Lynne Tillman underscore the prescience of Woolf’s playful experiment from the 1920s, while filmmakers and critics Sally Potter, Isaac Julien, and B. Ruby Rich—who, along with the iconoclastic auteur Derek Jarman, defined queer cinema aesthetics in the 1980s and ’90s—consider the power of rendering narratives like Orlando on-screen. Lynn Hershman Leeson melds art making and futurism. And Viviane Sassen approaches classical statues at Versailles as if they were living subjects, creating hybrid bodies for her newest series Venus & Mercury (2019). “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 says. “My images are like a hall of mirrors; they reflect back at you what you already have inside.”

At Swinton’s prompting, a group of artists made work expressly for this issue. Mickalene Thomas’s Orlando-inspired portraits unite fashion, the classical muse, and nineteenth-century painting. Paul Mpagi Sepuya confronts the depiction of the Moor on the first page of Woolf’s book. Elle Pérez, channeling Woolf’s devotion to her lover Vita Sackville-West, for whom Orlando was written, makes portraits that read as love letters to fellow artists. Carmen Winant assembles collages that layer the images Woolf originally selected to illustrate the pages of Orlando. Jamal Nxedlana travels through Johannesburg with the gender binary–flouting artist duo FAKA. And Walter Pfeiffer and Collier Schorr delve into their own archives to create revealing new image sequences of bodies in states of youthful transition.

“Woolf wrote Orlando,” Swinton notes, “in an attitude of celebration of the oscillating nature of existence. She believed the creative mind to be androgynous. I have come to see Orlando far less as being about gender than about the flexibility of the fully awake and sensate spirit. This issue of Aperture will be a salute to limitlessness, and a heartfelt celebration of the fully inclusive and expansive vision of life exemplified by the extraordinary artists collected here.”

Today, when many are turning inward, or calling for borders, when suspicion abounds about those unlike ourselves, a story such as Orlando, which celebrates the expansiveness and possibilities of human experience, is a much-needed parable.

Pre-order Aperture, issue 235, “Orlando,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue. “Orlando,” an exhibition guest-curated by Tilda Swinton, is on view at Aperture Gallery from May 24–July 11, 2019.

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Free Zine-Making Workshop with 8-Ball Community

Join Lele Saveri, founder of 8-Ball Community, for a free one-day workshop intended for young professionals, students, and creatives who are interested in creating and producing zines. Throughout the day participants will experiment with sequencing and editing, as well as learn about different printing, binding, and formatting techniques that go into zine production. Participants will look at both current and past issues of Aperture Magazine to draw inspiration for their own zines.

The first session, June 15, is reserved exclusively for students, ages 15–24. You will be asked to show a student ID upon registration.

The second session is open to all.

Materials will be provided. Light refreshments will be served throughout the day.

8-Ball Community Inc. is an independent not-for-profit organization that—through free, open-access platforms and events—nurtures and supports a community of artists. We provide virtual and physical meeting sites for people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. Our mission is to generate collaborative and educational exchange through public access television and radio stations, an imprint, a self-publishing fair, a public library, an internship program, a residency, and a series of workshops in art-related trades. 8-Ball Community operates free of elitism and is governed by its participants.

 

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Materials to Bring:

Participants are encouraged to bring printed or digital photographs they would like to include in their zine

Tuition:

Tuition for this one-day workshop is FREE. Please note, there are only 20 spots for each session.

 

 

REGISTER HERE

 

 

Registration for Session 1 ends on Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Registration for Session 2 ends on Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Please refer to all information provided regarding individual workshop details and requirements. Registration in any workshop will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

If participants choose to purchase Aperture publications during the workshop they will receive a 20% discount. Aperture Members of all levels will receive a 30% discount.

 

RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY

Aperture reserves the right to take photographs or videos during the operation of any educational course or part thereof, and to use the resulting photographs and videos for promotional purposes.

        By booking a workshop with Aperture Foundation, participants agree to allow their likenesses to be used for promotional purposes and in media; participants who prefer that their likenesses not be used are asked to identify themselves to Aperture staff.

 

CANCELLATION

If you choose to withdraw from the workshop, please do so 2 days before your scheduled session to allow Aperture to fill your seat. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date.

 

LOST, STOLEN, OR DAMAGED EQUIPMENT, BOOKS, PRINTS, ETC.

Please act responsibly when using any equipment provided by Aperture or when in the presence of books, prints etc. belonging to other participants or the instructor(s). We recommend that refreshments be kept at a safe distance from all such objects.

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Barbara Ess is Always Watching

An artist investigates the aesthetics of surveillance at home and on the U.S.-Mexico Border.

By Izzy Leung

Barbara Ess, Peekaboo, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

“There’s something very odd about trying to stop the world,” Barbara Ess says. Ess began her career not as a photographer, but as an experimental filmmaker and musician, engaging with mediums that embrace time rather than trying to stop it. While participating in international collectives and film festivals, Ess began using single-frame stop-motion cameras to create films, which she then turned into zines. A fresh dedication to photography was born as she then began self-publishing books featuring isolated still images such as This Happened Yesterday (1979) and Human Life (1979). Ess became fascinated with the divisions between movement, stillness, and sound.

Barbara Ess, Fire Escape, 2011, from the series Shut-In
Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

Ess is also interested in the distance a camera creates and what viewing life from afar accomplishes, or as she describes, the chasm between self and other, the “in-here” and “out-there.” She has tackled this subject in past work, most notably in the book I Am Not This Body (1991), published by Aperture. Someone to Watch Over Me, recently on view at Magenta Plains in New York, features work made over the past nine years that explores themes of distance, subjectivity, and mediation. (Ess was my teacher when I was a student at Bard College.) Spanning both floors of the gallery, the exhibition included seventeen photographs, two videos, and a sound piece. Three series—Surveillance, Remote, and Border—employ photographs captured from live-stream footage; another body of work on view, Shut-In (2018–19), was created while Ess was isolated in her apartment for a month with bronchitis.

Barbara Ess, Beach (from Balcony), 2016
Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

Someone to Watch Over Me explores the divide between where you are and where you are not—what it’s like to witness events outside one’s window or one thousand miles away. “I asked someone once, how is the world where you are not? You never know,” Ess told me when we spoke recently. “When you walk out of a room, what’s it like when you’re not there?” In Someone to Watch Over Me, Ess captures images in unorthodox ways: placing a small telescope before a lens, using a broken point-and-shoot camera and taking screenshots from her computer. Each method of image-making derives from a source of mediation, distancing Ess further and further from the actual world in which her subjects reside.

Barbara Ess, Kitchen, 2011, from the series Shut-In
Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

In Shut-In, which was installed in the basement level of the gallery along with several images taken from traffic and weather cameras, Ess depicts details of her apartment and the view into neighbors’ windows, only to show that their blinds are drawn. Vases and air conditioning units become the focus, obstructing viewers from gaining entrance into their lives, and drawing the attention back to Ess. These are the only photographs directly representative of the artist’s personal life. Ess created the images using a standard inkjet printer, drew on them with crayons to alter the texture, rescanned them, and then printed them large. Even Ess’s still images feel as if they are moving. The lo-fi quality vibrates in its graininess, producing the same stir-crazy feeling one might experience after a month of being stuck inside an apartment.

Barbara Ess, Attenti al Cane (Cyan Dog), 2007
Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

To Ess, the thematic center of the show was in two photographs, most visible when exiting the gallery, Peekaboo (Seeing Not Be Seen, 2014/2019) and Attenti al Cane (Cyan Dog) (2007). Peekaboo, a silvery self-portrait of Ess, was the only image in the exhibition depicting a full face, yet Ess has drawn two Xs marking out her eyes, negating the ability to see her image fully. The two black Xs are both a punk gesture, as well as a reference to Rosalind Franklin’s photograph of DNA, Photo 51 (1952), according to Ess. Here, she is both fact and fiction, present and not, captured in a fog. Sitting below Peekaboo is Attenti Al Cane, or “Beware of Dog” in Italian, a blurred image of a German shepherd. The dog “acts as both a protector as well as some kind of surveillance, a watch dog, a seeing eye dog,” Ess explains. The original function of the dog is buried in the layers of distance from the dog itself. “This separation gives you some emotional and mental distance, from your subject, to roll around in your mind and your eye,” she says.

Barbara Ess, Rio Grande, 2012
Courtesy the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

Back on first floor were images from the Surveillance and Border series, all pulled from livestream footage on the U.S.–Mexico border. To have access to cameras monitoring the border along Texas, Ess signed up as a “Deputy Sheriff,” where she was tasked with reporting suspicious behavior. The resulting video from a heat-sensitive camera, Crossing (2011), is shockingly pastoral in comparison to a neighboring image, a sign warning passersby of an electric fence. The camera pans across trees blowing in the wind, and down a river, catching a pack of galloping horses, all while following a man as he tries and ultimately succeeds­ in entering the United States by crossing the Rio Grande. While Ess didn’t have any agency in what she saw, aside from what she decided to record, the video embraces the beauty in the mundane, of watching and waiting from a distance. It’s easy to imagine that someone who would sign up to survey the border would be eager to report illegal activity. Instead, Ess found interest in the forms of the water and the trees, and the deceptively small narratives of the people she encountered.

Izzy Leung is a photographer and former Aperture work scholar based in Brooklyn.

Someone to Watch Over Me was on view at Magenta Plains, New York, April 7–May 12, 2019.

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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Camp

James Bidgood’s queer and candy-colored photographs were camp before camp was stylish.

By Jesse Dorris

James Bidgood, Bullfighter, ca. 1960s
Courtesy ClampArt, New York

Reveries, the Museum of Sex’s retrospective of James Bidgood’s photographs, film, and ephemera, tells the story of an American narcissus, a boy entranced by the beauty of his own vision. Largely self-taught, Bidgood transformed tricks both male and mechanical into proofs of better, queerer worlds. Forced perspective mixed with male-on-male affection, with smears of glitter and Vaseline that blurred the male gaze into a horny swoon. It won him immortality, but became all that he could do.

James Bidgood during World War II, standing outside his father’s tavern with his dog, Jack, ca. 1940s
Courtesy James Bidgood

Bidgood seems to have been born (in 1933) the way certain boys are: an early personal photo in the show offers him smiling near a dog and looking somewhere over the rainbow. In Madison, Wisconsin, during the depths of the depression, he harangued his mom to buy him an expensive paper doll collection; he spent afternoons watching the Technicolor Follies fantasias. Then, at the age of eighteen, he moved to New York, ready for stardom, and while he was homeless for a while, he always says that his tight pair of Levi’s kept him out of the rain.

James Bidgood as Terry Howe “mixing” at Club 82 as Carol Channing, ca. 1950s
Courtesy James Bidgood

In the 1950s, Bidgood made himself at home at Club 82, a drag club in the Village that an article in the March 1968 issue of Man to Man magazine recalled as a favorite of Judy Garland, Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher, and the Gabors. “Male couples are usually in evidence,” notifies author Raoul MacFarlane, “but they are vastly outnumbered by heterosexual pairs, and to the surprise of management and everyone else, the 82 has become a favorite with suburban women’s club groups.”

Costume for Junior League Mardi Gras Ball Pageant designed by James Bidgood, ca. 1960s
Courtesy James Bidgood

Perhaps they were window shopping. Bidgood frothed his Follies memories into elaborate set and lighting designs for the stars of Club 82, and his costumes for them and his own drag alter ego, Terry Howe. A delightful image of Howe has survived, boothed among vast heterosexuals in a clenched pose. The appeal is irresistible. By the early 1960s, the women took his gowns uptown, gentrifying them into jaw-dropping creations paraded around the Junior League Mardi Gras Ball, prefiguring similar appropriations by the recent Met Gala.

Backstage during the filming of Pink Narcissus. Contact sheet, ca. 1960s
Courtesy James Bidgood

They probably didn’t ask, and Bidgood probably didn’t tell, but after the party was over the couture would trickle downtown—well, West really, to his flat in Hell’s Kitchen—where he’d refashion his vision with wit and thrift into glamourous backdrops for gay porn. Left cold by the aw shucks naturalism of Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial shots of twinks in posing straps, Bidgood desired his hustlers as noir heroes, photographing Jay Garvin from below in a clam-shell G-string with bejeweled nipples and a lobster in each hand that looks made of lamé. Bruce Kirkman beckons from behind chiffon boughs of willow; it made the cover of Muscleboy, a magazine subtitled Incorporating Demi-Gods that not only was the closet thing to porno the government allowed, but also offered sets of slides or art prints for a small fee, thereby seeding queer imaginations wherever the post office delivered.

James Bidgood, Setting Down White Boot, First Cover, ca. 1960s
Courtesy of ClampArt, New York

Like Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures (1963), Bidgood’s magnum opus Pink Narcissus is less a slice of life than a smorgasbord of candy-colored novelties; like Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), no definitive version exists. It’s a feast, starring Bidgood’s likely lover Bobby Kendall as a hero among homemade urinals that baptize the faces of bikers who themselves almost drown in pools of pseudo-semen and also threaten toreadors while Charles Ludlam hawks and licks “pissicles” from a cart. The film does have an odd puritanical streak, in which pleasures of the flesh inevitable lead to ruin—but what pleasures!

James Bidgood, Willow Tree, ca. 1960s
Courtesy ClampArt, New York

Sadly, by the time the government allowed hardcore porn, Bidgood was still hypnotized by his vision, and hadn’t or couldn’t yet finish. “The big boom of porn culture,” says curator Lissa Rivera, “wasn’t his style. It wasn’t elaborate. It wasn’t something that was going to take seven years to shoot and have jewels.” It was, as they say, just too much. Producers wrenched the film from him and made a lousy 1971 print Bidgood took his name off. Meanwhile, audiences lapped up Warhol’s faux verité and the hedonism of Wakefield Poole. Bidgood went back to window dressing, and has shown little work since.

James Bidgood, Smoking, Sandcastles, ca. 1960s
Courtesy ClampArt, New York

The bud of Pink Narcissus would bloom in the work of Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle and Ryan Trecartin and Greer; its gauzy shimmer shines in films like Blade Runner and Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Exotic Video Show and Prince’s Sign o’ the Times. The pink-and-blue palette prefigures the “bisexual lighting” lately gracing Janelle Monáe. While drag queens have for decades mined his work for their art, it must also be noted the exclusive focus on male bodies in racialized fantasias would likely get the film “cancelled” today.

James Bidgood, Valentine, ca. 1960s
Courtesy ClampArt, New York

But the ripples of Bidgood’s influence appear in most every artsy earnest queer on Instagram who gazed into Bidgood’s pool and saw themselves. And what remains is a wide-eyed, world-building tribute to the beauty of narcissism. “He wasn’t being ironic,” says Rivera. “He was interested in the fantasies he had since he was a boy. He’s elevating men who don’t get elevated: queer men, hustlers, people from the drag world. He loved them in this emotional visual sense. He still loves that way.”

Jesse Dorris is a writer based in New York.

James Bidgood: Reveries is on view at the Museum of Sex, New York, through September 8, 2019.

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The Enduring Legacy of Frederick Douglass

Isaac Julien’s latest film explores the life and work of a man who believed in the power of photographs to transform American society.

By M. Neelika Jayawardane and Phillip White

Isaac Julien, The Lady of the Lake (Lessons of The Hour), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

Isaac Julien’s latest multiscreen film installation Lessons of the Hour–Frederick Douglass reflects on the life and work of the nineteenth-century abolitionist, as well as Anna Murray Douglass, Helen Pitts Douglass, and several other powerful, single-minded women involved in campaigning against slavery. Commissioned and acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, where it was presented this spring concurrently with an exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, Lessons of the Hour asks audiences to engage in call-and-response with Douglass, and the wealth of images and self-constructed narratives he left behind. It is both an homage to the enormity of Douglass’s sacrifice in the service of his “race” and a reflection of the limits of attempting to transform the violence inherent in racism using rational approaches.

Isaac Julien, The North Star (Lessons of The Hour), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

Today, it is widely accepted that Frederick Douglass was the most photographed person of the nineteenth century—even more so than Abraham Lincoln, whose portrait had pride of place over the Douglass-Murray household’s fireplace, along with photographs of fellow abolitionists and supporters of women’s rights. In 2016, a new Douglass photograph was rediscovered during routine repairs for a scrapbook, which had been stored in the Special Collections of Rochester Public Library’s Local History and Genealogy Division. The scrapbook was created by William H. James, a postal carrier who lived in Rochester, New York, where Douglass and his first wife, Anna, lived from 1847 to 1872. Like all Douglass photographs, this latest find also portrayed a man fashionably dressed, poised, a gentleman of his era.

Between 1841 and 1895, Frederick Douglass sat for about 160 photographs. He viewed photography as a “democratic art” and praised its ability to bring the power of image-making and self-representation to a greater public. Douglass recognized that new photographic technologies made it possible for a larger public to enjoy images in their own homes, and allowed us to project, to the world, the self as we wished to be seen. He also understood that just as modes of travel and transport gave the Western subject freedom to be mobile—and thus further solidified their subjectivity—so too had the mobility of images: “The facilities for travel has sent the world abroad, and the ease and cheapness with which we get our pictures has brought us all within range of the Daguerreian apparatus.”

Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour Project Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (After Fredrick Douglass II), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

But as Thulani Davis reminds us, in the foreword to For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Maurice Berger (2010), “In every decade since escaped slaves began to produce narratives of their lives in bondage, there have been one or two African-Americans whose lives and images have appeared in the mainstream and have been characterized as representing our experience.” These couriers had to bear the burden of taking with them, wherever their image and narrative journeyed, a message intended to show white America (and fellow Black people) that to be Black was in opposition to prevailing white supremacist views, while—as Davis argues—anticipating how white audiences would likely receive one’s image and one’s person.

Isaac Julien, J.P. Ball Salon 1867 (Lessons of The Hour), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

Julien’s video work does not allow audiences to walk away with an untainted perspective about photography, as would a man who came into his full subjectivity at the moment when the technology was made more accessible to the public. Rather, it is a painful reflection of the ways that photographic technologies, in which Douglass so fervently believed as a tool for transforming racist views, continue to be used—by individuals, institutions, and structures under which we all live—for subjugating Black communities. Instead of aiding our efforts at directing and amalgamating our subjectivity, photography continues, in the twenty-first century—just as it did within the early years of invention—to be used for surveillance, documentation, and further denigration of those regarded as racialized others.

Isaac Julien, Lessons of The Hour London, 1983
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

The photographic images in the entryway of Metro Pictures gallery were both intimate and expansive, consisting of small tintype portraits that harken our collective historical memory of nineteenth-century photographs, and large, lush color stills from the video works. To these, Julien added black-and-white photographs documenting protests that followed the killing of Colin Roach, a twenty-three-year-old black man who was shot to death at the entrance of an East London police station in 1983. (Julien’s 1983 film, Who Killed Colin Roach? engages more fully with this brutal incident.)

But the main attraction is Julien’s new video installation, filmed at the Royal Academy of Art in London, which splices reenacted montages of Douglass’s glorious, powerful presence, and samples three of his most powerful lectures: “Lessons of the Hour,” where Douglass addresses lynching in the South; “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” where he questions the meaning of freedom to those in bondage; and “Lecture on Pictures,” where he marvels at the power of photography to empower its subjects, giving them autonomy over how wished to represent themselves. He believed that these “truthful” depictions would win over stereotypical depictions that aided white supremacy.

Isaac Julien, Serenade (Lessons of The Hour), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

When Douglass reflects on freedom, or lynching, we also see footage of cotton fields that fill the screens, or a great, hulking tree, which creaks with its burden. Toward the end, as Douglass questions the legitimacy of the Fourth of July as a universal celebration for all Americans, we see some of the screens fill with grainy, contemporary video. This is aerial surveillance footage, made by the FBI, of the Baltimore riots of 2015 following the acquittal of all police officers involved in the death of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray, who suffered a severe spinal cord injury while in the back of a police van in Baltimore on April 12, 2015, and died a week later as a result.

Isaac Julien, Helen Pitts Class of 1859 (Lessons of The Hour), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

In order to provide a more complex view of Douglass, Julien worked on developing what he calls his tableaux vivants in which he details Douglass’s relationships with the women in his life. These intimate, intertwined portraits indicate that this great man’s accomplishments were accompanied primarily by the kindness, financial support, intellectual companionship, and emotional care of women. Douglass’s first wife, Anna Murray, a born-free black woman, was married to Douglass for forty-four years, bore their five children, and maintained their home and family while Douglass traveled throughout the United States, and during a two-year journey in Great Britain. Following Anna’s death in 1882, two years later, Douglass married Helen Pitts—educated, white, raised in an abolitionist family, twenty years his junior.

Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour Project Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (After Anna Murray Douglass), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

Anna Murray appears in several of Julien’s photographs, sometimes accompanying her husband on a train or together with a group in a parlor. In one sumptuous image, she is seated on her own; she appears as a woman as determined and forward-thinking as any of her counterparts—though she did not have the advantages of being able to read and write in a world that made literacy a requirement for proving one’s humanity. That Murray and Pitts were not only facilitators in Douglass’s journey, but collaborators in the political work of self-fashioning, is evident in scenes where Anna Murray is shown at her hand-cranked sewing machine, attending to a royal blue velvet garment, which allows Douglass to carry himself regally as he gives public lectures. We know that Douglass’s life and work were financially dependent on others and their charity. When Julien’s video work shows Helen Pitts at her desk, reading correspondence and writing, we know a small part of what it must have taken to generate that support.

Isaac Julien, J.P. Ball Studio 1867 Douglass (Lessons of The Hour), 2019
© the artist and courtesy Metro Pictures, New York

Douglass maintained his complicated perspective—which, in the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois named “double consciousness”—throughout his life. Douglass seemed fully aware of where he came from, and what his extraordinary education, along with others’ financial and emotional support, allowed him to accomplish. He often contrasted his life as a barefoot child of slavery, dressed in rags, to the well-dressed visitor of the White House, an exemplar of respectability. Julien’s film adds necessary complexities to versions of history that often portray great men like Douglass as exceptions. Julien also complicates Douglass’s laudatory commentary on photography, showing how this remarkable tool—so often subverted by powerful systems of authority—can still move us to reclaim freedom and dignity.

Neelika Jayawardane is associate professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design, University of Johannesburg. Phillip White is a former lecturer in the School of Education & Human Development at University of Colorado Denver.

Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour–Frederick Douglass is on view at Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, through May 12, 2019.

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Introducing: Karolina Karlic

For the second installment of our new series, “Introducing,” Aperture speaks with a photographer tracing the globalization of rubber from the Amazon to Ohio.

By Annika Klein

Karolina Karlic, Emilly Farias in the Michelin rubber groves, Bahia, Brazil, April 2014

In 1987, when Karolina Karlic was four years old, her family moved from Wrocław, Poland, to Detroit. Her father had been hired as an engineer, and Karlic spent her childhood in a city troubled by racial tension and economic decline. Later, in California, Karlic studied with photographer Allan Sekula, whose work traces the connections between labor, industry, and the environment. Karlic’s first major body of work, Primer (2008–13), reflects upon growing up in the motor city, and investigates the industry that first brought her to the U.S.

“In the Ford archives, I located many photographs that were made with the intent to report back to headquarters,” Karlic recalls. Her research on American auto manufacturing eventually led her to the archives of tire companies back home in Michigan, and in Akron, Ohio. These corporations fuel the economy and enable globalization: commerce would break down without jets and trucks to deliver goods, and these vessels still rely on rubber tires. Though some rubber is synthetic, a surprising amount—about half, some thirteen million tons annually—comes from a rubber tree indigenous to the Amazon.

Karlic has made this blight-prone and economically essential plant the focus of her latest series, Rubberlands (2014–ongoing). “Plantations are precise, calculated machines of replication, ecologies devoted to repetition and production, not very different in concept from the assembly line,” Karlic says. A photograph of the multibillion-dollar Minha Casa, Minha Vida (my house, my life) development in Brazil, at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers, similarly emphasizes a commitment to efficiency: identical white houses stretch to the horizon in perfect rows, like trees in a plantation.

Rubberland combines Karlic’s black-and-white, documentary-style pictures with the photographs and drawings from the archives of Ford, Goodyear, Goodrich, General Tire, and Firestone. “Rubber and photography were both integral components of the second phase of the industrial revolution,” Karlic explains. “I am thinking about the ways in which photography can open a dialogue to the past and become meaningfully constituted in the present.”

Traveling throughout Brazil’s Amazon basin, Karlic photographed manufacturing plants in Salvador and Itaparica, a fishing village in Bahia, and the ruins of Fordlândia, where Henry Ford attempted, and epically failed, to create an American-style town deep in the jungle. Karlic spent most of her time, however, at a Michelin-owned ecological reserve in the Atlantic forest. The reserve also functions as a plantation, and is known for successfully cloning blight-resistant rubber trees.

At the Michelin plantation, Karlic photographed not just plants and landscapes, but also collaborated with families living and working there, including the daughters of the Farias family. An arresting portrait reminiscent of Sally Mann’s 1990s-era photography shows Emilly Farias, a teenager, standing in a grove of rubber trees. Emilly wears a simple white dress, her black hair falls down her back in ringlets, and her long limbs echo the pattern of tree branches behind her. In another picture from 2014, two of Emilly’s sisters play with a cousin in the backyard, where laundry is hanging out to dry on the porch. “My intention in the making of photographs picturing adolescent women was to depict the female body as an occupant in the environment of labor,” Karlic says.

Karolina Karlic, Brazil’s multi-billion dollar Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life) housing program at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers No. 1, Santarém, Pará, Brazil, May 2014

 

Karolina Karlic, Fábio Santos resting on car with birdcage, Itaparica, Brazil, March 2014

 

Grafted Rubber Tree, Fordlândia, Brazil, 1940

 

Karolina Karlic, Sisters Ivna and Ingrid Souza playing with cousin Monick Farias in the family backyard at company housing complex, Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil, April 2014

 

Karolina Karlic, Incised rubber tree latex No. 1, Michelin Rubber Plantation, Bahia, Brazil, May 2014

 

Karolina Karlic, Olaria do Mocambo workers (clay brick factory workers), Itaparica, Brazil March 2014

Karolina Karlic, Hevea brasiliensis, rubber tree canopy, Michelin Rubber
Plantation, Bahai, Brazil, April, 2014

Annika Klein is assistant editor of Aperture magazine. All images courtesy the artist; Grafted Rubber Tree image courtesy the collection of Ford Motor Company.

 

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How to Capture an Intimate History

For Jane Evelyn Atwood, who has photographed sex workers and prisoners, it’s all about the balance between intuition and occasion.

By Claire Debost

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Blondine in front of the door, Rue des Lombards, Paris, 1976–77
Courtesy the artist

Jane Evelyn Atwood is not the kind of documentary photographer who leaves once she has the right pictures. Instead, Atwood spends years getting to know her subjects and their communities. Atwood’s bodies of work are photographic essays, perhaps in their purest form—where the power of each image lies in the seemingly impossible balance between an intimate instant and a glimpse of history.

An American born in 1947, Atwood moved to Paris in 1971, and has been based there ever since. In 1975, after encountering a woman named Blondine, Atwood began photographing sex workers on rue des Lombards and in the Pigalle neighborhood by night, while working at the local post office by day. Atwood received her first W. Eugene Smith award for this work in 1980. Other major personal projects have included an eighteen-month reportage of a French Foreign Legion regiment (1983–85); a three-year project in Haiti (2005–8); and a ten-year investigation of women in prison across North America and Europe (1989–1999).

In early 2019 Atwood’s photographs of James Baldwin were part of the exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, curated by Hilton Als, at David Zwirner gallery in New York. A series depicting transgender sex workers, Pigalle People (1978–79), was shown at the 2018 edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, and is currently on view at the Maison Doisneau, Gentilly. I recently sat down with Atwood to look back on forty years of not only image making but also activism, love, and loss.

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Prisoner in the prison workshop, Les Baumettes prison, Marseilles, France, 1991
Courtesy the artist

Claire Debost: Last spring, Too Much Time (2000), your book focusing on the condition of women in over forty prisons throughout Europe and America, was adapted into a play by Fatima Soualhia Manet, an actor and director. Could you talk about these translations or adaptations from the experience of these women in prison, first to photographs and then a play?

Jane Evelyn Atwood: It was a fantastic experience. I was fearful, but even when I was actually doing the work, there was something so surreal and unbelievable about what I was witnessing and experiencing that it felt theatrical. A playwright couldn’t have made up better stories, yet they were real, they were real people. When I was working on the project, I would have these women in front of me and they would tell me everything because—and I say this without pretension—they knew that I was a way that they could have their voices heard, and they had never had that before. That’s why I made a book that was so full of captions and text. I felt that if I had a “duty” (and I dislike that word), it was to not betray those women with all the information I had gathered from them, and to tell it to other people who know nothing about prison, to tell what it’s really like to be inside.

For the play, I thought a simple mise-en-scène would make this even more theatrical, would work on the stage, and it would prolong the life of the book. What was really intelligent about Fatima was that she realized that it wasn’t just the story of prison and the women who were in there; it was also the story of the photographer who goes into these prisons and has this experience. So, she incorporated that into the prison stories, and that’s what makes this play different from everything else out there. Our play stands apart because it combines video, photography, and theater. And nothing is made up, so it’s that much more shocking, that it’s not fiction—and it’s still completely up to date, because conditions have only gotten worse. It’s timeless, for the moment.

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Street scene, Gonaïves, Haiti, 2005
Courtesy the artist

Debost: A lot of your work touches on social issues, such as domestic abuse or prostitution, yet the images are sensitive and personal. How do you begin to work on a project and how does it evolve?

Atwood: I see something. All of my projects start with a visual cue. That can be in real life, in a newspaper, in a magazine, or even on TV sometimes. Every once in a while, I have an assignment that turns into a personal project. For example, Haiti was originally an assignment but it wasn’t enough for me, so it became a personal project. Then I get “bitten” by the subject and very quickly I know whether I want to begin the personal project or not. As soon as I know that I want to do it, I do everything I can to organize my life around the project: finding the money, finding where and when I can do it. With most of my subjects, I want to photograph because I have a lot of questions myself. My photography is about interrogations: it’s always questioning and wanting my questions to be answered.

This is contrary to what a lot of people say about me. They say I’m an activist and I’m a feminist—of course I am a feminist, as all intelligent women must be today. But, really, the very first activist story I did was quite late in 1987, with the photo-essay on a French man named Jean-Louis, who was dying of AIDS. He was the first person in all of Europe to allow himself to be photographed and published in the press saying he had AIDS. Before that, there was nothing contentious about prostitutes when I was making the work Rue des Lombards in 1975, even though later some feminists made it their cause. But it was a testimony—it was like, wow! I saw these incredible women and this is what I experienced with them and I’m giving it to all of you. I wasn’t trying to change anything or take a position on it.

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Jean-Louis, the first person with AIDS in Europe who allowed himself to be photographed to appear in the press saying, “I have AIDS.” Paris, 1987
Courtesy the artist

Debost: Even as you discuss your process, it is clear that you spend years on every project you work on. Too Much Time, for example, took almost ten years to complete. Have you developed deep relationships with some of the people you have photographed along the way?

Atwood: Well, it’s true that, with many of the projects, I’ve had some sort of “bonding experience” (as you say in the States) with certain people. Blondine, who I met while working on Rue des Lombards in the ’70s, was the most important; not only because she was such a remarkable person but also because the prostitutes on the rue des Lombards were the first people I photographed. I didn’t know what I was doing, and Blondine was very patient with me; she would wait while I was trying to focus my camera. But I think also that was maybe the reason that she let me in; I wasn’t a threat to her. I didn’t have a carte de presse or a ton of equipment, and I could hardly speak French. She was curious about me just as I was curious about her.

I continued that very privileged friendship with Blondine until she died in 2013. It was Leonard Freed who told me once, “You’re choosing a kind of photography that is very lonely; you can’t take these people home with you.” I never forgot that. He meant that it’s a special kind of friendship. I was privileged that Blondine let me into her world, and I let her into a part of my world, the photography part. But she’s the one who said, “Don’t invite me to your house.” She protected me from herself at the beginning. She said, “You’re a cavette,” meaning a “straight” person, someone not in the milieu of prostitution, “and I’m a street prostitute.” She was setting the boundaries, and she was right because it wasn’t always la vie en rose. Sometimes she threatened me; she was an irrational person who had no rules.

Then there was Jean-Louis, the man I photographed for my AIDS project in the late ’80s, who was very special. Our friendship only lasted four months and ended because he died. I said to him once, “You know, I’ve only seen you once not wearing pajamas.” We went out one night because he wanted to show me a gay restaurant. The effort to do that almost killed him. That was the only time I ever saw him in real clothing. We were in this creative bubble, making photos, but when somebody is dying there is no bullshit. If you get along, immediately everything is out there. He talked about things that were very intimate that he probably would never have talked about with other people without knowing them for a long time, but he didn’t have a long time.

I do feel it’s important to have some kind of boundary as a photographer or you can get in trouble, especially as a woman. I know other photographers who have no boundaries at all, that’s their way of doing it. I try to always impose myself as The Photographer and not as something else.

Jane Evelyn Atwood, James Baldwin with a bust of his likeness by Lawrence Wolhandler in his hotel room, rue des Grands Augustins, Paris, 1975
Courtesy the artist

Debost: Some of your photographs were recently included in the exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, curated by Hilton Als. What was your relationship with James Baldwin? Can you tell me more about these intriguing photos of Baldwin with a sculpted bust of himself?

Atwood: I was so lucky. It’s thanks to Larry Wolhandler, who is one of my closest friends and who was in Paris studying sculpture at the Beaux-Arts. It was at the very end of 1975. I had just bought my camera, and suddenly he called me one day and said, “You’ll never believe who I’m sculpting.” “Who?” I said, and he answered, “James Baldwin, and he said that you can come with your camera and photograph him!” In high school, and at Bard, I had studied James Baldwin, and he was a huge star. He was like a hero to me. He used to stay in a very fancy hotel on rue des Grands-Augustins. Larry and I went there often; he was always with a group of guys who worshipped him. We would go to this one restaurant in Saint-Germain-des-Prés: we would all drink whiskey and smoke, and listen to Jimmy. We had many nights like this. You could listen to him all day and all night. He was an extraordinary person.

He died on December 1, 1987. Jean-Louis had also just died. A friend of mine who was also a photographer called me and said, “Have you heard about Jimmy?” I was still devastated by Jean-Louis’s death, and was very fragile, and then there was the news about Jimmy. I felt like the world was coming to an end.

Jane Evelyn Atwood, Blondine in the hallway. Rue des Lombards, Paris, 1976–77
Courtesy the artist

Debost: You talk about the boundaries between you and the people you photograph. What about the responsibility that you owe to them and to yourself when putting the photographs out in the world? Are there times when you have questioned whether to publish a photograph or not, and how do you work with that?

Atwood: The truth is, when you ask permission to take photographs, it can’t be conditional; you can’t let other people make decisions about which photograph you can and can’t use. It’s difficult but that’s the truth. You have to earn enough trust from the people you photograph so that they trust you to choose the right photographs. That means you have to follow the photographs for the rest of your life; you have to become a control freak and follow how and when those photos are being used, with what captions, et cetera—and that’s a whole lot of work that many people aren’t ready to do. And now with the internet, it’s practically impossible because you can’t really control images, but you can do your best.

You can never satisfy everyone. Even people who may have loved you when you photographed them might be angry at you about which photograph you use. There was a prostitute in my very first book, Daily Nightlife (Nächtlicher Alltag, 1980), who’d signed the release, who I had spent a lot of time photographing. But when the book came out she was furious. She yelled, “You bitch! You put me in a pornographic book!” It was no secret that she was a prostitute; everyone knew it, and my book was a book about prostitutes. But I didn’t put her photograph in the second book because I didn’t want to have any problems, and I certainly didn’t want to make her life unhappy. Who knows, really, why she said that; maybe it made her see what she’s doing, and she was confronted with the reality of her life.

When I make a book, I try to be very fair about how many of a certain kind of photograph I’m going to use. I’m not going to overdo the horrible, grotesque pictures. For Jean-Louis, I had a lot of photos that I didn’t use because he was so thin, he was like a skeleton. I included a couple of photographs like the one of his back, which shows how sick he was, and that’s enough—but you have to show it, too. You can’t be sentimental about AIDS or cancer, you have to show what it is. But one or two photos is enough. It’s dosing, and dosing is very important.

Claire Deboost is an editorial work scholar in Aperture’s books department. 

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Aperture and LensCulture Celebrate the Opening of “Beyond Boundaries”

On Thursday, April 26, LensCulture and Aperture communities gathered at Aperture gallery for the opening of a wide-ranging exhibition.

© Thomas Rommé

© Thomas Rommé

© Thomas Rommé

© Thomas Rommé

© Thomas Rommé

On Thursday, April 26, the opening reception for Beyond Boundaries: LensCulture Discoveries in Contemporary Photography was held at Aperture Gallery. Beyond Boundaries is a wide-ranging group show that doubles as both a celebration and a survey of global image making today. With 101 participating photographers hailing from over thirty-four countries, this exhibition is a visual reflection of the beating hearts and curious minds of LensCulture’s vibrant community.

It was thrilling for guests to welcome a number of the participating photographers to the opening, who had flown in from all corners of the globe to see their images hung in Aperture’s exhibition space. If you didn’t make it to the opening, the show is on view through Thursday, May 2, 2019.

AnneCharlotte Guinot, a Juror’s Pick from the LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2018, traveled from Mexico. “Encountering my photograph on the wall among all the other amazing photos from all over the world, executed in such a beautiful design in such a wonderful space, was an experience that I will remember forever,” she says. “Photography is an art form with infinite possibilities, and this exhibition gave us all a taste to explore those possibilities even more. I am so proud to be part of this unique and beautiful exhibition.”

Marc Ohrem-Leclef, an Art Photography Awards Juror’s Pick, reflects, “As an image maker, it is wonderful to see your work shown on gallery walls and be able to share the work with a wider audience. This is especially true and meaningful with Aperture Gallery, the famed gallery and foundation in NYC. The history and gravitas attached to this space is especially humbling, and encourages me to continue my work and set the highest standards for its future iterations.”

LensCulture is one of the most far-reaching resources for discovering the best in contemporary photography around the world. Beyond Boundaries is part of an ongoing commitment to offer recognition, exposure, and career-changing opportunities to photographers of all levels.

Participating Photographers:

Alexander Sobol / Alexandre de Mortemart / Alison Romanczuk / Alla Sokolova / Amy Friend / Anne-Marie Weber / AnneCharlotte Guinot / Antigone Kourakou / Antonio Pulgarin / Ash Shinya Kawaoto / Aude Carleton / Balder Olrik / Beth Caron / Brett Leigh Dicks / Camila Berrio / Camillo Pasquarelli / Carol Allen-Storey / Cassio Vasconcellos / Cate Wnek / Charlie de Keersmaecker / Damion Berger / Daniel Chatard / Daniel Lyons / Danielle Dean / Dario Calmese / David Pace / David Wadelton / Diana Thorneycroft / Dick Sweeney / Dustin Thierry / Edgar Martins / Ekaterina Zershchikova / Elena Paraskeva / Emrah Karakoç / Evelyn Bencicova / Feiyi Wen / Fernando Morales Roca / Florian Ruiz / Garrett Grove / GIllmar villamil / Ingvild Kristine Melby / Jacob Burge / Jacopo Brunello / Jan Ung / Javier Arcenillas / Jayesh Joshi / Jeannie O’Connor /Jerry Takigawa / Joan Sorolla / Joshua Sariñana / Julia Fullerton-Batten / Juul Kraijer / Karine Roué / Katerina Stratos / Klaus Lenzen / Laura Pannack /Lebohang Kganye / Luciano Díaz Godoy / Magda Kuca / Marc Ohrem-Leclef / Mariagrazia Beruffi / Marina Black / Marinka Masséus / Mary Berridge /Matjaz Krivic / Maxine Helfman / Michelle Rogers Pritzl / Mikhail Grebenshchikov / Myriam Boulos / Oli Kellett / Oluwasegun Oladele-Ajose / Pablo Solórzano / Paolo Galletta / Peggy Washburn / Peter Franck / Rachel Liu / Rafael Goldchain /Rebecca Najdowski / Rene Habermacher / Rhiannon Adam /Rick Olivier / Roberio Braga / Rodd Owen / Sara Jurado / Seunggu Kim / Sonya Whitefield / Soomin Ham /Sophie Gabrielle / Stanislava Novgorodtseva / Szymon Barylski / Tabitha Barnard / Tania Franco Klein / Tania Ruda / Tobin Jones / Tonay Roy Sagar / Vanessa Filley / Vikesh Kapoor / Vladimir Zivojinovic / Walter Plotnick / Yorgos Yatromanolakis / Zhou Chengzhou

International Jury:

Alona Pardo, Barbican Art Gallery

Anne Farrar, National Geographic Traveler

Bruno Ceschel, Self Publish, Be Happy

Catherine Edelman, Edelman Gallery

Corey Keller, SFMOMA

Cristina de Middel, Magnum Photographer

Daphne Palmer, Fraenkel Gallery

Deborah Klochko, Museum of Photographic Arts

Francesca Morosini, GQ Italia & WIRED

Francis Hodgson, Prix Pictet

Hannah Watson, Trolley Books

Ihiro Hayami, T3 Tokyo International Photo Festival

Jennifer Murray, Filter Photo

Jim Casper, LensCulture

Joanna Milter, The New Yorker

Karen McQuaid, The Photographers’ Gallery

Laura Moya, Photolucida

Lucy Conticello, Le Monde’s M Magazine

Manila Camarini, D La Repubblica

MaryAnne Golon, The Washington Post

Michael Famighetti, Aperture magazine

Molly Roberts, National Geographic magazine

Mutsuko Ota, IMA Magazine

Richard Renaldi, Photographer

Shoair Mavlian, Photoworks

Stephen Mayes, Tim Hetherington Trust

Todd Hido, Artist

Xavier Soule, Agence VU & Galerie VU

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The Woman Behind the First-Ever Photograph of DNA

Under-appreciated during her lifetime, physical chemist Rosalind E. Franklin’s mysterious and groundbreaking photograph helped transform the science of genetics.

By Marvin Heiferman

The first image of a black hole, 2019.
© Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

After weeks of a well-orchestrated media build-up, the recent release of the first image of a black hole proved to be as stunning as promised. The minimalist image—depicting the gassy orange fumes of a Dunkin’ Donut–shaped celestial event, wrapped around a bottomless void of deep space—is spectacular and resonant with meaning. The emptiness at its center presents a powerful symbol of the malleability of time and space and the startlingly fragile nature of the present.

Among the fascinating aspects of the image is that much of the work in developing the algorithm that made its capture possible is credited to Dr. Katie Bouman, a twenty-nine-year-old scientist. Historically, women’s visibility and the proper crediting of their work has been a controversial issue in the sciences, but Bouman became Internet-famous as soon as the black hole image was released. Just as quickly, she became a victim of online trolling, as naysayers set out to undermine her contribution to the making of what is certain to be one of the twenty-first century’s most consequential images. This recalls another ground-breaking picture and woman, physical chemist Rosalind E. Franklin, who for most of the twentieth century was under-appreciated for her pioneering work in producing the X-ray diffraction “double helix” image of cell DNA, aka Photo 51, which helped transform the science of genetics.

In the following short essay, “The Story of Photo 51,” historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, writes of Franklin’s 1952 accomplishment and her iconic image’s genesis and import. This essay appears in the forthcoming book, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe by Marvin Heiferman (Aperture, Spring 2019).

Raymond G. Gosling and Rosalind E. Franklin, Photograph 51, 1952.
© 2015, Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA, Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University Libraries

Peer deep into this photograph’s heart, eye, vanishing point. Despite the beauty, no hammered stare, of any length, unlocks meaning or maker. The image (inviolate) defies casual analysis. Perhaps, you wonder, identification of topic or photographer is irrelevant. No clues visible (except perhaps to a biologist). Ah, now you read the label. The shoulders sigh (aesthetic surmises fade), the eye winks (no joke), and a scientist strides onto the stage and grips the podium (serious stuff).

This is the iconic X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA taken by physical chemist Rosalind Elsie Franklin and PhD student Raymond G. Gosling. The genetic material glimpsed in Photo 51 connects all living things and the image thus metaphorically captures human past, present, and future. It also marks an important milestone in science. In the last half-century, research that drew from Franklin’s photograph has brought advances in biology, medicine, paleontology, and many other parts of life.

Under a microscope, cells reveal their own truths, possessing the potential to separate conception from context. By convention, science (which makes the invisible visible) renders the visualizer invisible. Discoveries are disassociated (divorced) from he (or she) who stained the cell, mixed the reagents, pushed the buttons, coded the data. In an era when cameras record every baby step and every entertainer’s misstep, it may be difficult (if you are outside that world) to comprehend a culture in which (in theory) the photographer does not attach to the image. Analysis matters. Publication matters. Claiming credit first matters. The photographs themselves are allegedly, well, just part of the work.

This particular image had led Franklin to conclude in 1952 that the strands of DNA might form a helical structure but she was cautious and wanted more data. And therein lies the back story: Franklin’s own vanishing point.

Novelist Josephine Tey once accused historians of flattening the past into a “peepshow,” drawing historical actors as “two-dimensional figures against a distant background.” Let us pull Franklin into the foreground, replace the center of the image with her face (three-dimensional), and consider whether knowing about the photographer matters.

Photographer unknown, Rosalind E. Franklin, ca. 1956
© World History Archive/Ann Ronan Picture Library

In January 1953, Maurice Wilkins, one of Franklin’s colleagues in the laboratory at King’s College, London, shared her photograph (without her knowledge) with two other scientists also in the DNA hunt. James Watson and Francis Crick (the men who, in another famous picture, seem to be ogling a curvy “double helix” model as if it were a naked Venus) interpreted the image (and other material attributed to Franklin). Watson, Crick, and Wilkins raced into print, pushed Franklin aside, and achieved fame and fortune. Franklin was allowed to stand at the back of the stage: her article was the third in the journal issue. Watson’s arrogant dismissal of Franklin’s work continued for decades after her death. Credit should go to the flyboys, the creative geniuses, not the others. “Technical stuff” was “woman’s work.”

Franklin had grasped the image’s essential truth, before others saw it, but the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Die too soon and you never get to wear a fancy dress. Watson, Crick, and Wilkes made the list four years after Franklin’s death. It is left to history to reconsider (some would say “redress”) such matters. Scientific encyclopedias up through the 1990s included “Franklin, Benjamin” but not “Franklin, Rosalind.” Newer works now recognize Rosalind’s contributions and dissect the social and cultural attitudes that reinforced and stood silent at her marginalization.

The notion that a photographer’s identity might, as a matter of cultural practice, be detached from her photograph may seem an anathema within the world of art, where exhibitions celebrate the vision of those who hold the cameras, even if their names are unknown. Credit is a cultural practice: a matter of grace and humility when shared, a matter of despicable boorishness when unfairly stolen. Fortunately, there is a form of historical geometry: a line (reinforced) attaching Franklin to this photograph and its meaning in time.

At first glance, such context remains obscured from the viewer. The photograph’s mysterious, cloudy strands loop themselves around our eyes and engender thoughts of beauty. But for those who value integrity, well, pull on that line and reach for Rosalind E. Franklin. No vanishing point to memory or to our common humanity. Credit due.

Marvin Heiferman is a writer and curator based in New York.  Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette is a historian who explores the boundaries of science, politics, and the public.

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