Aperture's Blog, page 86

Aperture Announces Free Publication for Historic Convening at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute

Download the free curriculum, including thirty-one texts on topics ranging from civic space and memorials to the intersections of race, technology, and justice.

Samuel J. Miller, Frederick Douglass, 1847–52
© The Art Institute of Chicago

Aperture is pleased to present “Vision & Justice: A Civic Curriculum,” a free publication released on the occasion of Vision & Justice: A Creative Convening on Art, Race, and Justice, a landmark two-day conference taking place at Radcliffe on April 25–26, organized by Professor Sarah Lewis. In 2016, Lewis guest edited Aperture’s summer issue, “Vision & Justice,” a monumental edition of the magazine that sparked a national conversation on the role of photography in constructions of citizenship, race, and justice.

The 80-page “Civic Curriculum,” edited by Lewis, will be made available at the conference, and includes thirty-one texts on topics ranging from civic space and memorials to the intersections of race, technology, and justice. Highlights include a wide-ranging conversation between filmmaker Ava DuVernay and cinematographer Bradford Young; an interview between Lewis and Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative; and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s essay on Frederick Douglass. Amanda Gorman, first Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote for the publication; “Vision & Justice: A Civic Curriculum” also includes contributions by Elizabeth Alexander, Alexandra Bell, Robin Bernstein, LaToya Ruby Frazier, For Freedoms, Doreen St. Félix, Naomi Wadler, Darren Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deborah Willis.

“Vision & Justice: A Civic Curriculum” takes its conceptual inspiration from Frederick Douglass’s landmark Civil War speech “Pictures and Progress,” about the transformative power of pictures to create a new vision for the nation, and addresses both the historic roots and contemporary realities of visual literacy for race and justice in American civic life.

“American citizenship has long been a project of vision and justice,” said Lewis, who is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard. “When I was asked to guest edit a special issue of Aperture magazine, inspired by my course, which has led to this convening, I could think of no other theme. Understanding the relationship of race and the quest for full citizenship in this country requires an advanced state of visual literacy, particularly during periods of turmoil.”

“Sarah Lewis’s work literally has transformed the way we see American history, especially with regard to citizenship,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Click here to download “Vision & Justice: A Civic Curriculum”.

“Vision & Justice: A Civic Curriculum” was made possible by generous support from the Lambent Foundation. Vision & Justice: A Creative Convening is supported by the Ford Foundation, and cosponsored by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Harvard Art Museums, and the American Repertory Theater.

 

The post Aperture Announces Free Publication for Historic Convening at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Pain and Pleasure of Queer Life in Egypt

Mahmoud Khaled considers the legacy of the “Cairo 52,” the men who were arrested in 2001 at a gay-friendly nightclub.

By Brendan Embser

Mahmoud Khaled, Splashed Memory of a night Out (detail), 2010–18
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

For gay men, the nightclub is often a place of refuge and revelry. But one night in May 2001, the Cairo police raided the Queen Boat, a gay-friendly nightclub on the Nile, and dramatically upended the lives of fifty-two men. They would become known as the “Cairo 52.” In jail, they were told to strip off their clothes to show if they were wearing colored underwear, thought to be a sign of gayness, although all were wearing white. They were then subjected to invasive procedures by doctors to “determine whether or not they were gay.” Some were forced to record confessions admitting to their homosexuality. Images of the Cairo 52, covering their faces with white cloth to protect their identities, would become emblematic of the persecution of gay men in Egypt, where homosexuality isn’t explicitly outlawed, but where gay people can be arrested for “debauchery.”

The Queen Boat incident, and the images of the Cairo 52, have long been on the mind of Mahmoud Khaled, a young Egyptian artist based in Cairo and Oslo. In 2017, for a commission by the Istanbul Biennial, Khaled made a project called Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man (2017), a fictional tribute to one of the Cairo 52, who, in Khaled’s imagined biography, relocates to Turkey and makes a new life for himself in Istanbul. Two photographs from the collection of the “proposed museum” were included in Khaled’s solo exhibition I want you to know that I am hiding something from you (the title is a reference to Roland Barthes’s 1977 book A Lover’s Discourse), presented at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York in fall 2018. The exhibition included numerous beguiling works that meditate on queerness in the Middle East and beyond—a staged conversation between two men on Grindr, a series of photographs from the now-shuttered gay nightclub Splash in New York, a video of a man getting a tattoo scored with Jacques Brel singing “Ne me quitte pas”—and announced the arrival of a formidable talent in contemporary art.

I recently spoke with Khaled about the legacy of the Queen Boat incident and the politics of revelry and desire in queer life.

Mahmoud Khaled, Perfect Lovers (Alexandria), 2014, from the collection of The Unknown Crying Man House Museum, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Brendan Embser: Were you aware of the Queen Boat incident at the time it happened? And how has that episode influenced your thinking and some bodies of work that you’ve made? 

Mahmoud Khaled: Yes; I remember waking up one day in the morning and reading about the raid in all the newspapers. I was in university, and I saw the images of the fifty-two men all over the place that day. I think this memory is very iconic for my generation. The incident was more reduced to a very abstract image for me; then the Human Rights Watch report was released afterwards with all the details of torture and investigation—all these horrific details made that reduced image very politically and emotionally charged.

The image I’m referring to is the “crying man,” dressed in white and covering his face with a white fabric to protect his identity; we only see his hand and his ear and a tiny part of his hair. This image later became the point of departure for a project I did in Istanbul. The image became established in the newspapers, and because the media was orchestrated by the government, everything was very well planned in terms of outing and destroying the reputation of the fifty-two men who were arrested by releasing all their information, names and professions and addresses and everything, even before the court finalized the case.

This image of the crying man, which is of course a very anonymous person, became representative, and up until now the New York Times, the Guardian, whenever they wanted to write a story about the gay scene in Egypt they would use this image. It became like a stock image for the political situation of the gay scene in Cairo. This crying man became almost like the “Jesus” of the community.

Mahmoud Khaled, Gift Shop at The Unknown Crying Man House Museum, 2017. Commissioned by the 15th Istanbul Biennial
Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

Embser: What was the political atmosphere like leading up to the incident? Was there a sense in the late 1990s or early 2000s that a crackdown was imminent?

Khaled: One theory is related to the government and their relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, because the Muslim Brothers used to brand themselves as the power that could protect Islamic and society values, et cetera, while the government was not marketing themselves as such. So every now and then the government has to arrest a bunch of gay men to show that they are protecting the values of society more than the Muslim Brothers, and that you can do that without aligning yourself with radical Islam. So gay people are always a card they play with in their political games.

When the Human Rights Watch released their report, it was like a horror show for everyone because you could get the sense of all the details of what happened—and think to yourself that this might happen to you the day after. Everyone was so conscious of what they were doing, where they were going, what kind of parties. It also started to become an identity, and the existence of these feelings became so politicized. Even if you didn’t think of homosexuality as an identity, you had to start thinking about it as an identity, because this might lead to you being in prison.

Embser: Let’s take the image of the crying man, which has, as you said, become kind of an icon or stock image. Can you describe your project to make a museum for this unknown man?

Khaled: I developed a certain relationship with this image and tried to make it more poetic. By him hiding his identity in the image, he is also saying a lot—he’s giving us a lot of information. So because this image has been totally abstracted and stigmatized, I tried to make a monument for it. House museums commemorate the legacy of certain individuals, writers, politicians, collectors, et cetera, who are no longer with us, but whose houses become remarkable—they need to be transformed into exhibitions, in order to keep alive the legacy of the person who used to live there. So that’s how I started to think of the house museum: as a memorial that could commemorate the existence of that man who is stigmatized and unknown. The main artistic desire was to make this image more human.

Embser: And the idea is to give him back his life.

Khaled: Somehow, yes.

Mahmoud Khaled, Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man, 2017. Commissioned by the 15th Istanbul Biennial
Courtesy the artist and Sharjah Art Foundation

Embser: And where exactly is this museum?

Khaled: It is a proposed/imagined museum that can happen in any city in the world except Cairo, because almost all the fifty-two men, when they were released, they left the country. It was impossible for them to continue living in Cairo because their names, addresses, and professions were published in the newspapers and they basically lost their lives. They mostly all asked for asylum in many different places, so now these fifty-two men are all over the world. And any of their houses can be transformed into a house museum that can commemorate the event and the victims, which is why this house museum can happen anywhere in the world—except Cairo.

The whole idea of the museum is to think of exile in a productive way. The first proposition of this museum happened in Istanbul in 2017 as part of the Istanbul Biennial. It’s a proposal for a monument that is coming out of exile, but not necessarily a bad exile. I didn’t want to imagine a person who left Cairo and lost his way in the world; I really didn’t want to imagine a bad exile. The protagonist I constructed in the project was obviously a well-off man who could afford to buy a modernist villa in a middle-class neighborhood in Istanbul, where he could stage the whole world in his own exile. So what the installation is trying to do is to give you an experience of a staged world of someone else. His art, his desires, his basement, which he actually transformed into a darkroom, his taste in music, the kind of plates he uses to eat at dinner parties and stuff like this. I wanted to imagine someone who managed to construct his proposed idea of the world in his own exile/house.

Mahmoud Khaled, The Crying Man (memorial), 2001–15. Wood, mirror, vinyl, archived online found image, and text
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: The image itself is also represented in an artwork, is that right?

Khaled: The point of departure of the project started in 2015, when I showed an object made out of wood and a hand-painted mirror in a group show in Cairo accompanied with the following caption: “Proposal for an object that can operate as a memorial displayed in the entrances of middle-class houses in Cairo, commemorating a group of fifty-two happy young men dancing on a floating structure in Zamalek.”

I wanted an object that can act as a subtle gesture of remembrance to be placed in an entrance of a house in Cairo, because that’s where people normally place a mirror so they can see themselves when they enter the house and leave the house. Then two or three years later I had the chance to make this three-floor house “museum” for the Istanbul Biennial, where this gesture/object could be placed at the entrance—and that’s the only place where you can see that image of the crying man painted in the entire installation.

Mahmoud Khaled, Do You Have Work Tomorrow? (detail), 2013
Courtesy the artist and Ibraaz

Embser: That idea of imagined lives is also played out in the conversation you staged on Grindr in a 2013 piece called Do You Have Work Tomorrow?. When I saw this work in your exhibition in New York, I didn’t know, at first, that the conversation was fictional. I read it like you would a text and found it extremely powerful and poignant. I later learned that the piece was initially commissioned by the web platform Ibraaz. How did the production of this work come about and how did it change when you showed it in a gallery?

Khaled: This work is inspired by a real experience, but it is based on a script I wrote and it is all fictional. I staged the conversation with myself. I was talking to myself on two phones, and then I took the screenshots and that’s what I proposed to Ibraaz. Probably they were expecting an image! Like an actual photographic project. Later on I was thinking about the physicality of the image of this work. I like to be in the process of creating a physical image, because now we deal with immaterial images all the time. We have images on our phones but we can’t touch them, we can’t smell them, we can’t exchange them physically. I wanted to transform online, immaterial work into a real physical work with traditional photography format.

So these black-and-white images were developed in a darkroom, which removes the time and place from the work, which is something I wanted when I was working on the piece. It’s too immediate when you look at the piece online as a screenshot: you can tell when it was produced through the layout of Grindr—this was 2012 and 2013—it looks different than what we’re using now; even the phone screen size is different. Once you see the image, you immediately can tell when this thing was happening. I wanted to remove this from the work and complicate this relationship between the image and the time and place it was produced in. That’s why the idea of the black-and-white print came out, which also gives a strong physical existence to the image. Framing every single moment of this conversation was also important for me, conceptually, because normally our relationship with texts, on WhatsApp or iMessages, are just memory—you don’t capture it or frame it.

Mahmoud Khaled, Do You Have Work Tomorrow?, 2013. Series of 32 screenshots of a staged conversation on an iPhone, transformed into black-and-white photographs. Installation view at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2018. Photograph by Kristien Dae
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: The framing seems to give value, in the art gallery sense and in the reception of the work, because the frames somehow demand that you take the panels very seriously as individual objects but also together as a thread.

Khaled: Exactly, I agree! Also, if you think about the screenshot itself as text, there’s no form. It’s formless, completely. When I went to the darkroom to print, the performativity of printing the images created a form, an effect, created some depth to the background of the text, which needed to be highlighted by the “frame.”

Mahmoud Khaled, Do You Have Work Tomorrow? (detail), 2013
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: The conversation starts out in the typical way these conversations tend to do, but then it takes a few turns toward the immediate urban context, with the car on the street. Soon, when the flirtation veers into politics, there’s a feeling that the platform is being misused. Grindr is supposed to be for sex, not politics. Could you talk a little bit about the texture of the dialogue?

Khaled: This piece started by imagining myself as a film director. I wanted to film a scene and have two men talking together, for example in a bar. It’s exactly the same in this piece, but I didn’t want them to talk in a bar—I wanted them to talk on their phones together. You can tell from the details of the conversations that it’s Cairo, but the work doesn’t deliberately say that. It’s a city, and we don’t know exactly when. But it’s happening apparently in a city that is under curfew, going through a strong political change. There’s a lot of violence going on from how they describe the situation in the conversation. In the meantime, both of them are trying to normalize this abnormal moment and still look for love and flirt and talk about sex, but still the political atmosphere is dominating the conversation.

So the dialogue fluctuates, jumping between politics, love, desire, and class. But it’s still also talking about location, about locating who you are talking with and how important it is to know how far away that person is standing. The idea of moving and talking about the car as a mobile vehicle (although it was parked in the context of this conversation), instead of talking about a house in a specific fixed location, is because they’re both supposed to be out in the street, protecting their properties and neighborhood. This is a very stressful kind of duty, but it comes out of that intense, precious, and liminal political moment their city is experiencing. Also you never know what’s going to happen if you’re holding a stick or a knife for the first time in your life to protect your house—you don’t know who’s going to come and attack you. But in the meantime, while you’re supposed to be doing that, you’re still trying to find normalcy in this moment and looking for love and intimacy in this situation. The conversation is trying to imagine this scene between the two men and also trying to speak about the overdominant political discourse.

Mahmoud Khaled, Do You Have Work Tomorrow? (detail), 2013
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: What the piece manages to achieve through text is the kind of intimacy you get by listening to audio. Like when you listen to a podcast, the voices come so quickly into your ear and your mind. With this piece, you get us to switch modes so that when you read the text it’s almost like listening to a private conversation made public.

Khaled: Yeah—and also retaining the text, taken out of the phone, is a very violent act. Because all the texts we have are very private. Taking someone else’s phone and looking at the conversations they’ve had on Grindr or WhatsApp is a very violent act. So taking this and putting it into a gallery was a way of trying to stress this tension between public and private in the materiality of the text.

Mahmoud Khaled, Splashed Memory of a night Out (detail), 2010–18
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: In a way, the opposite of this work, in the ludic sense, is a series of black-and-white pictures taken several years ago at Splash, the former gay nightclub in Manhattan. Did you revisit these images specifically for your exhibition?

Khaled: Yes; for me this is the highlight of the exhibition since it is the only work I made for the occasion of the show. I had this material in my archive for more than ten years, and I love them—they are very attractive and exciting images. But I didn’t know what to do with them. They’re very seductive, and I was quite obsessed with the content of the images because they’re all like sexy bodies and party and fun. But I wanted to get over my obsession with the images to process them conceptually in a proper way and understand why I want to work on them.

I didn’t remember at all where or when or why I went to that club, but then I realized that this happened in 2008 and it was my first time in New York, and I went to Splash because I got an ad online or a pamphlet in the street saying that they were doing a fundraiser. The go-go dancers were collecting money and all this money would go to AIDS research. They announced it in a really nice way and it seemed like so much fun, so I went there with no expectations. I didn’t even know Splash was such a big-deal place for the gay scene in New York back then. So I had a PowerShot camera, because in 2008 the cameras on our phones weren’t that advanced. Eventually I had around four hundred pictures.

Mahmoud Khaled, Splashed Memory of a night Out (detail), 2010–18
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: All from one night?

Khaled: Yes! I spent a long night there [laughs]. But then I didn’t know what to do with this, because it was just a fun party and they didn’t really mean anything to me conceptually, and I really didn’t know how to process it. But when I was working on that show, I made a mock-up for the space, to imagine how to lay out the exhibition in the gallery. But I felt like something was missing in the experience of the curatorial narrative, and it was something to do with my relationship to New York and my relationship to sexuality and understanding the body, and then I felt the urgency of working on these images to complete the cycle of the show and the experience of it.

There’s an intentional strong contrast between this work and the Grindr text. The Grindr work is basically an anti-image. At the end, it’s all text and it’s formatted in a way that makes it look like a classical old photograph in a white cube gallery, but you actually don’t see a pictorial work in the frame. While in Splashed Memory of a night Out, you see clearly composed images, composition, body as a subject and an object, the cut, the framing, and the lighting and all this.

When I Googled Splash and realized that it had closed in 2013 and there was a heated discussion about the gentrification of Chelsea, the images became more important to me. I started to think that the images are not just beautiful images of a bunch of men dancing. They definitely had gained a different meaning. I worked with a great technician in a photo lab and we found a way to transform these very low-res images taken by an old digital Canon PowerShot into large-format negatives, and then take the negatives into the darkroom and work on printing them. So at the end, the presentation of this work is one piece composed of twenty images. They have to be presented all together. I always have to have a reference for a presentation, so I imagined a big theater showing these images at the entrance of it in order to celebrate that history—it’s like the archive of that theater. I wanted to present it in a way that I think shows the history of that club in New York, like an archive celebrated in a way that also celebrates an era in the history of the city.

Mahmoud Khaled, Splashed Memory of a night Out (detail), 2010–18
Courtesy the artist and Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

Embser: Do you see a connection between the image of the crying man and those images from Splash in some form?

Khaled: Yes and no. I think in Splashed Memory of a night Out, the images are celebrating bodies and sexuality and freedom, but also you could tell from certain images that there are buckets full of money with stickers that say “AIDS” on them, so you know that all the celebration and fun is also a form of activism and resistance. It has different layers. The crying man is starting from a very oppressed point of departure and going into a very emotional, poetic, productive and protective place, which is the house of the crying man.

Embser: The Queen Boat incident happened at a moment when queer men were seeking a space for revelry, a space like Splash, and perhaps a space that only exists in the imagination of the two men whose dialogue you constructed in the Grindr piece. What has the pursuit of revelry meant to you?

Khaled: It’s obviously a human need that we all share, but specifically for groups like LGBTQI there is a political urgency for it. It’s basically a celebration of existence and togetherness, and a transformation of the banal and the quotidian into an organic form of resistance.

Brendan Embser is the managing editor of Aperture magazine.

The post The Pain and Pleasure of Queer Life in Egypt appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Let Us Now Praise David Lebe

A long-overdue exhibition expands the canon of gay photography.

By Matthew Leifheit

David Lebe, Angelo on the Roof, 1979
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In 2017, Peter Barberie, Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, extended a somewhat cryptic invitation to me. “I’m working on an exhibition with a little-known photographer named David Lebe, whose work I love,” he wrote. “I would like to show you.”

A few weeks later I hunched tentatively off the train from New York and found my way to the museum, where, leaning seductively on mahogany shelves in a viewing room for works on paper, I discovered David Lebe’s hand-colored gelatin-silver print Seth (1985). It alone was worth the trip. The delicately wrought tones of Seth, its large format, and the intricacy of its analog compositing all make for an example of photographic ingenuity that would be considered momentous by any standard.

David Lebe, Seth, 1985
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Seth turned out to be just the beginning. Relatively few people knew about Lebe until this year, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened the career survey Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue attempt to complicate the narrow canon of gay photography of the 1970s and ’80s on an institutional level by forging new space for a septuagenarian artist and his rich and varied body of work.

 

“A lot of queer artists in the 1970s and ’80s turned to photography as their medium of choice,” Barberie said. “That is a story that is still being told, it’s still unfolding, and there are many voices who are part of that story. This exhibition is just one iteration.” Barberie was speaking to a standing-room-only crowd gathered one afternoon in February to hear a public conversation with Lebe soon after the exhibition’s opening. “One of my goals for this exhibition, and I think the most important one, is to give support and space to this tremendously moving body of work. But I also want to make a contribution to our understanding of queer art during these crucial decades.”

David Lebe was a fixture of the Philadelphia art scene in the 1970s, and his center-city home on South Fifteenth Street was a gathering place for friends, students, and others involved in the arts. He studied with Ray K. Metzker and Barbara Blondeau and was a close friend and roommate of the artist Barbara Crane; the Bauhaus-y ethos of experimentation handed down from Moholy-Nagy at Chicago’s Institute of Design—of pushing mundane circumstances past their furthest logical conclusion—can be felt in every part of Lebe’s work.

David Lebe, Scribble #6, 1987
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Lebe was known for developing a certain kind of “light drawing” that melded details of the real world and male bodies with gestural marks drawn in with a pen light during long exposures. Some of these images are in the Philadelphia Museum’s collection, and they were Barberie’s introduction to Lebe’s work. They were also the primary focus of perhaps the only other comprehensive exhibition of Lebe’s work, a show called Truth Fantasy, which was staged in 1986 by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and accompanied by a small, staple-bound catalogue. In his essay for that publication, curator Tom Beck writes, “Autobiography is the key to [Lebe’s] work, which has shifted from time to time among photograms, light drawings, and male nudes.” Beck adds, in a seemingly personal note amid otherwise dry curatorial text, “Until the age of 25, David Lebe lived a closeted life; his life was about keeping a secret. Finally, he vowed to be open and honest about his homoerotic personal and aesthetic life.”

When Lebe discovered he had AIDS in the late 1980s, the diagnosis would almost have amounted to a death sentence. Soon after finding out, he met Jack Potter, who also has AIDS, and they fell in love. Though their lives were in Philadelphia, they withdrew to upstate New York, a decision they made in an attempt to improve their fragile immune systems. They moved to an area that has been cultivated since the mid-twentieth century by Anthroposophists, members of a philosophical organization whose adherents follow, to varying degrees, the teachings of the Austrian-born philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy promotes holistic living and Steiner made advancements in biodynamic farming, so the community uniquely provides a wide range of the organic crops Lebe and Potter need for their macrobiotic diet. “Jack came very close to dying, and David also declined, but amazingly they rallied with new drug combinations that became available after 1995,” Barberie writes in the catalogue. Today they are remarkably healthy and full of zeal and appreciation for life, though they face a range of physical challenges that mean, among other things, that they spend most of their time at home.

David Lebe, Jack Watering, from the portfolio Jack’s Garden, 1996
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In November 2017, I took a train and then a cab to Lebe and Potter’s home near Ghent, New York, to see more of Lebe’s work in person. Everything in their house and their life together was organized just so, as if the house were an artwork. Rooms had been painted and repainted many times over to match or contrast the landscape perfectly, as well as the particular character of light and the objects and artworks inside.

We toured Potter’s garden, which was past its prime after a cold spell the week before, but purple flowers still blossomed on a few bushes near the ground. (He commented that they were bracts rather than flowers. Bracts, I later learned, are ornamental or colorful leaves that protect a smaller, more fragile bloom within, which I guess was the reason they survived the freeze.) We went inside, and I looked at prints with Lebe in an immaculate attic studio as Potter prepared dinner: mixed whole grains topped with natto, a traditional Japanese dish that he’d made himself by fermenting soy beans, a food they’d come to early in their macrobiotic diet.

Up in the attic, I experienced a second, slower revelation than I had in the museum’s viewing room. I began by looking at Lebe’s hand-colored botanical photographs, which are a technical marvel. The exact combination of spliced, projected negatives, contacted photogram objects, and hand coloring that was required to make these pieces in the darkroom is mystifying. The works are surreal in their spare landscapes and gradient skies, lost children of the psychologically inflected figurative paintings Jared French made in the mid-twentieth century and the botanical photograms of Anna Atkins a hundred years before.

David Lebe, s/m–Leather Contingent, from the portfolio The Second March on Washington for Lesbian & Gay Rights, October 11, 1987
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

I also leafed through an album of pictures from the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, in 1987. Lebe made the pictures using high-speed recording film, a black-and-white process known for its usefulness in low light and its unpredictability in terms of grain. Four-by-six prints were arranged in a modestly sized album, with the names of the people in the pictures written underneath in ballpoint pen. Lebe told me this was the first LGBT march on Washington where AIDS was a part of the agenda, but when I looked at the faces of the people in the photographs what I saw was joy instead of fear or anguish.

Barberie, too, feels these early works are essential to Lebe’s message. “Lebe discovered he had AIDS soon after the march,” he writes. “Over the decade that followed, he produced diverse photographs that grapple with the disease and its impact, and which together form the crucial part of his artistic achievement.”

 

David Lebe, Morning Ritual No. 28, 1994
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

It wasn’t until the current exhibition, however, that I saw one of the central pieces in Lebe’s work, a series called Morning Ritual (1994), made after he and Potter moved to the mountains. These smallish, black-and-white pictures exude tenderness through gestures of caring and intimacy, but also make the daily routines of the couple, whose health was still extremely perilous, into little photographic gifts of fine tonality and formal invention. If photography is often an honorific form, these pictures honor the quietest moments in Lebe’s life. They appear to genuflect for these times, and as part of a daily practice also mark time as it passes. They insist delicately, day by day, We are still here.

Robert Mapplethorpe, the go-to gay photographer of all time, naturally comes up in comparison to Lebe’s work and the culture of the 1980s. Lebe photographs flowers in black and white, and also deals with the erotic male body, sometimes explicitly. This is the case in a series of photographs of the porn star, activist, and writer Scott O’Hara, a friend and muse who Lebe photographed, often masturbating, in a series of four sittings between 1989 and 1996. During these years, pornography took on a new importance for gay men as a means of safe sex, free from the existential anxieties a hookup might incur. Of his photos of O’Hara, Lebe wrote, in 2013, “They are about, in part, the refusal to give up on life or on life’s pleasures. A triumph of spirit over AIDS.”

David Lebe, Bernard, Grady & Me, 1986
© the artist and courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art originated Mapplethorpe’s infamous 1988–89 retrospective that later went on to upset conservatives throughout the United States. Lebe saw the exhibition—and even appears in the 2016 HBO documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures examining Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, which was installed at the ICA in a glass case built purposefully too high so as to prevent children from seeing the images. In February, during their conversation, Barberie asked Lebe what his reaction to the show had been. “I was doing male nude work at the same time he was, and so it wasn’t as if I saw his work and thought, Oh, it’s OK to do that. I was already doing that. It’s just that nobody saw it like they saw his work,” Lebe said. “I wasn’t searching out people who I thought would make startling or interesting photographs. My inspiration for photography always came from my life and myself.” Lebe recalled seeing the work of Minor White and Duane Michals, but not being certain if they were gay. “And that was frustrating and annoying,” he said. “So from an early time I just decided to be open in my work, and just let people know that I was gay and that the work came from that experience.”

All too often, museums and galleries show overexposed work by already famous artists, the ones who have been affirmed in the history of photography, like the recent museum and gallery exhibitions of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in New York, or the Guggenheim’s two-part yearlong Mapplethorpe show. This is precisely why Lebe’s career-spanning retrospective being staged at a major museum is essential. Lebe is now incontrovertibly part of the history of twentieth-century queer artists. Given the number of voices silenced by HIV and AIDS, it is crucial to look back and celebrate the important work that queer artists made despite personal and political adversity. As a gay artist born in the late 1980s, at the height of fear about the American AIDS crisis, the trauma of the previous generation looms like a kind of silence of arrested potential. We can still hear that silence, and we could use more saints.

Matthew Leifheit is a photographer and the editor of MATTE magazine. He is a cocurator of the 2019 Aperture Summer Open.

Long Light: Photographs by David Lebe is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 5, 2019.

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Alice Proujansky: Teaching Visual Literacy Through Photography

 

This one-day workshop is intended for photo educators and photographers looking to build their skills in the classroom.

Led by Aperture Teaching Artist and author Alice Proujansky, and grounded in Aperture’s On Sight curriculum, this workshop will teach participants how to decode and encode images, and how to interpret photographs using flexible, engaging inquiry techniques that make material accessible to middle- and high-school students. Through this workshop, participants will understand the ways that images communicate, how students can infuse their own photographs with meaning, and ways to move beyond art history lectures toward truly thoughtful interpretative conversations that encourage students to make personal connections with visual imagery.

The Aperture On Sight curriculum is designed to teach visual literacy through working with photography and creating photobooks. The curriculum builds students’ abilities to communicate as visual storytellers, develops them as creative and critical thinkers, and builds their capacity for academic and professional success.

The curriculum relies on the equation form + content + context = meaning as a framework for twenty lesson plans that guide teachers working with students in grades six through twelve.

Alice Proujansky is a documentary photographer and teaching artist, and the lead curriculum writer for Aperture On Sight, Aperture’s photography and visual literacy curriculum. Her photographs of women, labor, birth, and leftists have been published widely, and she has received support from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Magnum Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Women Photograph, and others. Her book Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids was published by Aperture in 2016.

 

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Objectives:

Learn engaging strategies for teaching visual literacy

Receive lesson plans, inspiration, and project ideas

Plan a photobook project for your students

Tuition:

Tuition for this one-day workshop is $250 and includes lunch and light refreshments.

Currently enrolled students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above receive a 10% discount on workshop tuition. Please contact education@aperture.org for a discount code. Students will need to provide proper documentation of enrollment.

 

 

REGISTER HERE

 

 

Registration ends on Friday, July 5, 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.

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

If the workshop includes lunch, attendees are asked to notify Aperture at the time of registration regarding any special dietary requirements. Please contact us at education@aperture.org.

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.

 

REFUND AND CANCELLATION

Aperture workshops must be paid for in advance by credit card, cash, or debit card. All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date, unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of ten students is required to run this workshop.

 

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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2019 Portfolio Prize Winner: Mark McKnight

Mark McKnight’s black-and-white images of bodies and landscapes challenge Eurocentric ideas about male beauty—and aim to make “straight” photography a little less straight.

by Brendan Embser

Mark McKnight, if water forgets how to play mirror, 2018, from the series Decreation

Mark McKnight is a modern-day modernist. His black-and-white photographs of skin and sand, brick and tar, with their rich tones and sparkling light, are redolent of twentieth-century masterworks, those pictures by men like Edward Weston who cast the world in silver-gelatin. Weston once said the camera should be used for recording the “quintessence of the thing itself, whether polished steel or palpitating flesh.” But for McKnight, who was born in Los Angeles to a New Mexican, Hispana-identified mother, something was missing from Weston’s vision. Something that would ignite a flame of recognition in a young queer man with ideas about male beauty more expansive than the Eurocentric standard. Something that would make “straight” photography a little less straight.

McKnight began to photograph hirsute, softer-bodied men, often people of color, deliberately obscuring their identities so as to render them as “armatures for concepts of loss, desire, vulnerability, and entropy.” His subjects are people he knows intimately, partners or close friends. In his photographs, the body, the physical world, and the built environment begin to merge. “I like when the body starts to look like another thing, when it transcends itself. When it becomes undone,” McKnight says. By overprinting his images, he buries certain details while accentuating others. It’s a strategy “for making the body look less like a body, whether it’s concrete or metal.”

“The flame started first by amazement over subject matter, that flame which only a great artist can have,” Edward Weston wrote back in 1930. For McKnight, the choice of queer bodies as an ongoing subject—the flame itself—is simply about photographing men he found beautiful, and who looked more like himself. “I wanted to represent these subjects with the grace that Weston would have afforded,” he says. McKnight didn’t set out intending to “right some art historical wrong,” but he admits he couldn’t find the subjects of his desire represented in the history of photography. Until now.

Mark McKnight, Burned Map (or: Body), 2018; from the series Decreation

Mark McKnight, Decreation, 2018; from the series Decreation

Mark McKnight, Untitled, 2018; from the series Decreation

Mark McKnight, Earthskin, 2018; from the series Decreation

Mark McKnight (born in Los Angeles, 1984) was born to a New Mexican mother who struggled with their Southwestern, diasporic roots. In turn, McKnight grappled with reconciling his own identity, both as a mixed-race person of color and as a gay man—particularly one who neither exemplified nor desired the idealized, Eurocentric cultural standard of male beauty that is perpetuated even within gay culture. Since McKnight was raised in an environment that privileges white, heterosexual masculinity, his work operates as a site of resistance to those values. McKnight completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Finland in 2009, and he has also completed artist residencies at Storm King Art Center (2017) and Light Work (2019). In 2018 McKnight gave the first in a series of public lectures titled “Queer Eye,” in which he confronted the shortsighted legacy of “straight,” modernist photographic practice while proposing a queered historical revision; that same year he held two solo exhibitions that received favorable national reviews. His work was the subject of both a two-person gallery exhibition at Roger’s Office in Los Angeles and a multi-museum survey and catalogue. His most recent group exhibition, Close to Home (Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, 2019), dealt with the themes of identity and abstract narrative. His work is currently represented by James Harris, Seattle.

Brendan Embser is the managing editor of Aperture magazine. All images courtesy the artist.

As winner of the 2019 Portfolio Prize, a portfolio of McKnight’s work will be published in an upcoming issue of Aperture magazine as be exhibited at Aperture Gallery.

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2019 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Teresa Eng

In her lyrical, dreamlike images, Teresa Eng asks—what does modern China look like to a child of the Chinese diaspora?

by Cassidy Paul

Teresa Eng, Junction, 2016, from the series China Dream

What does modern China look like to a child of the Chinese diaspora? That question at the heart of the lyrical, dreamlike images Teresa Eng has created throughout the country. Eng’s parents were part of the mass exodus of Mainland Chinese who fled to Hong Kong during the Communist revolution in the 1950s, and eventually immigrated to Canada. Growing up in Vancouver, Eng was only able to construct her vision of China from the cultural norms and traditions she experienced. It wasn’t until traveling there in 2013 that Eng was confronted with the stark contrast to her imagined state, finding instead a landscape in a constant state of fluctuation.

Drawing from the cultural preconceptions she formed in her youth, Eng began photographically exploring the country of her ancestors, looking to better understand her heritage. The resulting series, China Dream—named after a popular slogan Xi Jinping used, alluding to the American Dream—evokes cycles of reconstruction and reinterpretation of the past happening in China due to the immense development occurring throughout the nation. “The rate of development in China is so quick that the buildings I photographed have long been demolished and replaced,” Eng writes. “Historical monuments and buildings destroyed during the Cultural Revolution are being rebuilt haphazardly—often as facsimiles of the originals.”

Each of Eng’s vertical compositions feels like one part of a larger narrative, and viewing them gives a similar sensation to remembering flashes from a dream. In one, an ornate bonsai tree sits abandoned in a trash-filled alley. A head of infinite ink-black hair swirls off frame, mimicking the curved modern architecture of a similar image. Chinese graffiti gets scratched into the leaves of plants. And a never-ending series of overpasses and roads link over one another like a knot floating above the city. Eng’s photographs live at the in-between of moments, covered in a hazy, ambiguous veil that balances between reality and dream—reflecting her own personal experiences in ever-changing China. As Eng writes, “These observations allow me to make sense of the world around me.”

Teresa Eng, Wave (Hair), 2016; from the series China Dream

Teresa Eng, Chinese Graffiti, 2013; from the series China Dream

Teresa Eng, Wave (Blossom), 2016; from the series China Dream

Teresa Eng, Station, 2017; from the series China Dream

Teresa Eng (born in Vancouver, Canada, 1977) lives and works in London. Her photography deals with transition and change: she tends to revisit a place over time, allowing the temporal and physical distance to process her thoughts while new and existing strands of ideas merge. Eng’s first self-published book, Speaking of Scars, was shortlisted for the 2013 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, and her work has been featured in publications such as Vogue Italia, British Journal of Photography, Dazed & Confused, Raw View, Invisible Photographer Asia, Photoworks, and L’Oeil de la Photography. In 2018, Eng was a finalist for the Photographie Grand Prix at Hyères 33e festival of fashion and photography.

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

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2019 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Jack Latham

In the age of fake news, Jack Latham investigates the secret society that has inspired conspiracy theories, protests, and attacks since its founding days in 1872.

by Emily Stewart

Jack Latham, The Phantom Patriot, Nevada, 2018; from the series Parliament of Owls

In the redwood forests of Monte Rio, California, sits an expansive 2,700-acre retreat where, every summer, an elite invitation-only social club founded by a group of male artists, writers, actors, lawyers, and journalists meets. The Bohemian Club, founded in 1872, has inspired conspiracy theories, protests, and attacks since its founding days. In Jack Latham’s new project, Parliament of Owls, he investigates the secrecy of the club and the wider political effects this has caused.

What happens when the country’s top lawmakers, politicians, artists, lawyers, and businessmen meet behind closed doors? What secrets are being swapped, plans being made? For years these questions have been at the root of protest groups and journalists hoping to expose the truth. Latham takes the viewer on a journey of discovery, showcasing the town surrounding Bohemian Grove (the club’s rural outpost) and its people. His photographs also depict the rise of Alex Jones—conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars—and how his break-in at the Grove led him to become a household name with the antiestablishment crowd. In 2000, Jones released alarmist footage of the club’s “Cremation of Care” ceremony, which inspired the attempted attack led by “Phantom Patriot” Richard McCaslin two years later.

Latham describes his work as “an attempt to explore the dangers within society when voids of context are challenged.” His images are beautiful and thought-provoking, often leaving the viewer feeling mystified and intrigued. Because nonmembers aren’t allowed inside, Latham instead photographs spaces that are in some way tied to the club and its members—for instance, his image of an empty, glittery stage was taken in a strip club owned by two members. In one of Latham’s photographs, three Bohemian Club members can be seen standing on a viewing platform inside the Grove. The image is taken at such a distance that the members almost disappear into the surrounding forest, solidifying the fact that for the majority of us, the club will always be a remote mystery.

 

Jack Latham, Viewing Platform, 2018; from the series Parliament of Owls

Jack Latham, Main Stage at the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, San Francisco, 2018; from the series Parliament of Owls

Jack Latham, Great Grey Owl, 2018; from the series Parliament of Owls

Jack Latham, Mary as Nixon, Camp Meeker, 2018, from the series Parliament of Owls

Jack Latham (born in Cardiff, 1989) is a Welsh photographer based in the United Kingdom. His work primarily focuses on aspects of storytelling throughout society, which he presents using large-format photography or realizes within photobooks. Latham is the author of Sugar Paper Theories (2016), which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation and Kraszna Krausz photobook awards. He is currently working on his latest project, Parliament of Owls, which focuses on Bohemian Grove, a private men’s club in Northern California.

Emily Stewart is the manager of education and engagement programs of Aperture Foundation. All images courtesy the artist.

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2019 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Zora J Murff

Zora J Murff evaluates the fallout of prejudicial housing policies within the larger narrative of violence perpetrated against African Americans.

by Michael Famighetti

Zora J Murff, Chris (talking about fear), 2017, from the series At No Point In Between

Zora J Murff has emerged as a distinguished voice in photography dealing with the complex intersections of race and American society. Earlier works have focused on a facility for incarcerated youth, where he was employed, by exploring notions of visibility and interrogating a system that rendered his young subjects invisible. For his recent series At No Point in Between, Murff turned his attention to the historically black neighborhood of North Omaha, Nebraska, a cityscape shaped by “redlining” and other prejudicial housing policies. Through his mix of emotionally resonant portraits, vacant landscapes, and fraught archival materials, Murff locates his investigation of this particular place within a larger American narrative of violence perpetrated against African American citizens. His project has been informed by viral videos of police shootings of these horrific documents he reflects, “They are injurious, yet informative, shifting how I navigate my own black body through this world.” But Murff never entirely reproduces images of trauma. Instead, he offers fragments, suggestions, hints. By “creating a collection of images scrutinized in both their historical and contemporary contexts,” he notes, “I metaphorically connect the body and the landscape, fast and slow violence.”

Zora J Murff, Under dark daylight (cross), 2018; from the series At No Point In Between

Zora J Murff,, Dark pages written white (cleared), 2018; from the series At No Point In Between

Zora J Murff, Terri (talking about the freeway), 2018; from the series At No Point In Between

Zora J Murff,, Surveyors, 2018; from the series At No Point In Between

Zora J Murff (born in Des Moines, Iowa, 1987) combines his education in human services and art to explore how photography is intertwined with social and cultural constructs. Murff, who is visiting assistant professor of photography at the University of Arkansas, received his MFA in studio art from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a BS in psychology from Iowa State University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and featured in Aperture, the New Yorker, Vice, British Journal of Photography, and the New York Times. In 2019, he was named an honoree for PDN’s 30: New & Emerging Photographers to Watch, selected for the Light Work Artist-in-Residence Program, named the Daylight Photo Award Winner, and selected as a LensCulture Top 50 Emerging Talent with his collaborative partner Rana Young. Murff has published two monographs, Corrections (2015) and LOST, Omaha (2018).

Michael Famighetti is the editor of Aperture magazine. All images courtesy the artist.

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2019 Portfolio Prize Runner-Up: Guanyu Xu

Reclaiming domestic space through installations in his parents’ home, Guanyu Xu explores queer identity and censorship across China and the US.

by Taia Kwinter

Guanyu Xu, Space of Mutation, 2018, from the series Temporarily Censored Home

In Temporarily Censored Home, Guanyu Xu quietly intervenes in his parents’ house, creating queer installations in secret across the heteronormative domestic space. Xu inserts countless made and collected photographs—including images from family albums, torn ads and editorials collected as a teen, and portraits of himself and other gay men—in complex tableaux to create a collective visual portrait. In some rooms, small and large photographs meticulously fill an area, covering every visible inch of the scene. In others, huge prints drape over furniture or hang from the ceiling, layered and multidimensional across the walls and floor.

The act of return and intervention is not uncommon in photography; marginalized and misrepresented groups have a long history of visual reclamation and redefinition to form a portrait of the self that was once controlled. This is particularly powerful for Xu, who grew up in China—a country with severe censorship laws and regulations surrounding LGBTQ+ visibility and content—and in a conservative household: his parents do not know he is gay. Xu now lives in the United States, and uses these installations as a comparative examination of the two countries, where his intersectional experience of the US meets his conservative familial and social experience of China.

It is hard to fathom how Xu’s parents remained unaware of the installations, which are without doubt incredibly time-consuming to create and then dismantle. Any practical uses of the home become impossible—bedroom drawers overflow with photographs; open doorways are blocked by hanging posters; all surfaces of an office, including the computer desktop, are consumed by images. Xu’s interventions reveal a painstaking process to create a domestic space that finally acknowledges him. They grab the viewer gently but urgently: see me here.

Guanyu Xu, Parents’ Bedroom, 2018, from the series Temporarily Censored Home

Guanyu Xu, My Desktop, 2018, from the series Temporarily Censored Home

Guanyu Xu, Behind My Door, 2018, from the series Temporarily Censored Home

Guanyu Xu, Worlds within Worlds, 2019, from the series Temporarily Censored Home

徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (born in Beijing, 1993) is an artist currently based in Chicago. He was the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship and James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship, and a finalist for the Lucie Foundation Emerging Artist Scholarship and Luminarts Cultural Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. Xu’s work has been exhibited internationally, at venues including Aperture Foundation, New York; the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado; New York Photo Festival; Union League Club of Chicago; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; and Embassy Tea Gallery, London. His photography has also been featured in numerous publications, such as Aint-Bad Magazine, Musée Magazine, Der Greif, and China Photographic Publishing House.

Taia Kwinter is the managing editor of Aperture Foundation. All images courtesy the artist.

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California on Fire

Carolyn Drake’s photographs of the 2018 wildfires point to the human role in creating a new, terrifying normal.

By William Finnegan

Carolyn Drake, Forest view at sunset, two months after the Ferguson Fire, Yosemite West, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Every fire has a narrative. For major wildfires, there are numbers to help frame the narrative, and usually a name. But all fires start long before they start, in the sense that the ground must be prepared, literally, for the conflagration to come. Fuel, weather (and behind weather, climate), the natural landscape, the built landscape, suppression efforts past and present, prevention schemes, politics—these factors and many others, interacting and colliding, create a context and prehistory for each major fire. The fire itself burns and then takes its place both in recorded history and in the natural history of its epoch. That epoch, now, is the Anthropocene—the epoch of a world made by humans.

Carolyn Drake, Wawona campground in Yosemite National Park, two months after the Ferguson fire, Yosemite West, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

To make these images in California’s disaster-struck areas, Carolyn Drake chose the long moments after a series of major wildfires. The flames and smoke, the panic and news crews, are gone. The land is charred, ashes are sifted, burned-out residents return, campgrounds reopen. The fury and violence of the vast event recede, and the world that’s left behind becomes specific again, inviting contemplation. Three big wildfires broke out in Northern and central California in July 2018 and burned through the following weeks. Drake tracked and photographed the aftermaths of all three.

Carolyn Drake, Archaeologists search for a jar containing the ashes of a widow’s husband after her house burned down, Redding, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

The Ferguson Fire was started by a vehicle’s overheated catalytic converter in dry vegetation beside a highway in Mariposa County. This was in the Sierra foothills southwest of Yosemite National Park. The fire burned into the park, and its smoke filled Yosemite Valley, the most popular (and most photographed) destination in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The valley was closed and evacuated. It became a staging area for firefighting operations. Roughly three thousand firefighters were thrown at the fire. Two died. One was a bulldozer operator, killed when his vehicle rolled down a mountainside. The other, a captain of an elite crew whose members work in the most dangerous areas of wildfires, was killed by a falling tree. Nineteen other firefighters were injured. The Ferguson Fire took more than a month to contain. It burned almost ninety-seven thousand acres.

Carolyn Drake, Fire roads cross privately owned mountains, three weeks after the Mendocino Complex Fire finished burning, Spring Valley, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

The Carr Fire was started by a flat tire, which sent a wheel rim onto asphalt, where it generated sparks, igniting dry vegetation. This occurred in the mountains west of the city of Redding. Three days later, the fire jumped the Sacramento River and entered Redding, forcing the evacuation of thirty-eight thousand people. That same evening, a fire whirl developed—a tornado-like column of superheated air that can be generated by intense wildfires. The Redding fire whirl contained winds exceeding 143 miles per hour. The wind tore roofs from houses, bark from trees, and toppled high-tension power-line towers. The fire whirl was reported to be forty thousand feet tall. The Carr Fire killed eight people, including three firefighters. It burned more than a thousand homes. Insured losses were estimated at $1.5 billion. The cost of fire insurance is said to be soaring in California, moving beyond the reach, effectively, of many residents in fire-prone areas.

Carolyn Drake, Lounge in the Usona Forest Fire Station, Mariposa County, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Finally, the Mendocino Complex Fire started as two vegetation fires in the chaparral-covered mountains near Clear Lake, about one hundred miles north of San Francisco and fifty miles from the coast. The ignition point is still under investigation. In hot, dry, windy conditions, the fire burned for nearly two months, ultimately consuming more than 450,000 acres, which makes it the largest wildfire in California history. It destroyed 280 structures, most of them rural residences, many in unincorporated communities like Spring Valley. One firefighter died. He was a battalion chief from Utah, killed by a falling tree. The firefighters struggling to contain the Mendocino Complex Fire were hampered by a manpower shortage—many of their brethren were off working other fires. Nevada state prison inmates, among others, were deployed to fight the enormous blaze, and suppression costs ran to more than $200 million.

Carolyn Drake, Rod on the foundation of his burned home after the Mendocino Complex Fire, Spring Valley, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Wildfires are getting bigger, hotter, more frequent, more destructive. Of the ten most destructive fires (measured by destroyed structures) in the history of California, six have occurred in 2017 or 2018. The single deadliest and most destructive, the Camp Fire, in Butte County, is still smoldering as I write, in November 2018. This fire, which essentially destroyed the small city of Paradise, California, on November 8, killed eighty-eight people, with 249 more still listed as missing. It burned more than thirteen thousand homes, and archaeologists are working among the ruins now to find any traces, such as teeth, of the perished. The second most destructive California wildfire, the Tubbs Fire, in Napa and Sonoma Counties, did its gruesome thing in October 2017. It killed twenty-two people and burned more than five thousand structures, including some 2,900 homes in the city of Santa Rosa.

Carolyn Drake, A creek overpass, one month after the Carr Fire, Redding, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Why this biblical plague of fire? It is the Anthropocene, and we must look to our own agency. The climate is hotter and, in California, much drier than in the recent past because of the greenhouse effect, which is caused, primarily, by the burning of fossil fuels. In the American West, as in other places, logging practices have produced vast amounts of slash—woody debris that burns more readily than the mature forests it replaced. Overzealous fire suppression policies have contributed, paradoxically, to the proliferation of bad fires. They have left a tree-choked landscape, where natural fires caused by lightning have been unable to do their ecological job of thinning.

Then there is the mass migration of people into what land-use jargon calls the wildland-urban interface (WUI)—the zone where residences abut forests or other combustible vegetation. This is by far the fastest-growing land-use type in the United States. More than one hundred million souls now live in the American WUI. These people accidentally start a great many fires, and their presence makes firefighting harder and more dangerous. Natural fires cannot be allowed to burn themselves out anywhere in or near the WUI.

Carolyn Drake, Charred landscape, one month after the Carr Fire, Redding, California, for Aperture, 2018
© the artist/Magnum Photos

These calamitous trends and policies form some of the context, the prehistory, of the wildfires that rage in our day. These problems are national, if not international; climate change is, of course, global. But here is Stephen Pyne, the preeminent American scholar of fire, on California, its particular problems, and the larger picture:

California is a special case. It’s a place that nature built to burn, often explosively. If people vanished, fires would still thrive. … But people have worsened the scene. They have introduced flammable grasses, overgrazed in the mountains and felled forests in ways that overturned the prior system of ecological checks and balances. … And then Earth’s keystone species for fire decided to burn fossil biomass, which has cascaded effects throughout the planet and unhinged the climate. We used to think fire history was a subset of climate history; now climate history is becoming a subset of fire history.

I see this dilemma, this mess, in Drake’s pictures. They are not about simply the harsh aftermath of natural disasters. They are about the role of humans, and of Drake’s own observing eye, in this burning world we’ve made.

William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

Read more from Aperture issue 234, “Earth,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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