Aperture's Blog, page 87

The Photographs that Defined the Iranian Revolution

Forty years after the Iran’s turbulent political transformation, a look back at the images that captivated the world.

By Haleh Anvari

Bettmann, Ayatollah Khomeini Stepping Down from Plane, 1979
Courtesy Getty Images

February 2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. The last major revolution of the twentieth century, which toppled an ancient monarchical system and ushered in an Islamic theocracy was a widely photographed event. By the time of the revolution in 1979, Iranians had been exposed to photography for more than a hundred years; it wasn’t uncommon for ordinary middle-class people to own cameras. A professional cadre of photojournalists followed the royal court and the country’s growing pop-culture personalities, providing news photographs for the daily newspapers and numerous weekly magazines. But it was the revolution, followed by the American hostage-taking, and then the eight-year war with Iraq, that propelled Iranian photographers into new territories, transforming them into serious practitioners of new genres.

Photographs of the first year of the revolution helped fix the inevitability of a new Iran in the eyes of the world and the psyche of the Iranian nation: the crying Shah leaving the country as one of his officers threw himself at his feet, Ayatollah Khomeini descending the steps of the Air France chartered aircraft that carried him back to Tehran, executed generals’ and ministers’ corpses lying naked on mortuary slabs, published daily in newspapers. For all Iranians there must be a number of images that mark for them the progress and development of the revolution. For me, these photographs are searing reminders of the nascent days of the new regime and the blossoming of Iranian photojournalism.

Two photographers whose careers changed because of the revolution were Maryam Zandi and Bahman Jalali. They were both young amateur photography enthusiasts who had secured jobs as in-house photographers in National Iranian Radio and Television, which published its own magazine.

Monday, December 11, 1978, was the day of Ashura, the second of two consecutive holy days of mourning in Iran, when processions of black-clad men take over the street to mark the martyrdom of Imam Hussein by flagellating themselves with chains to the sounds of beating drums. The revolutionaries, well aware of the immense symbolism of these days, had arranged a large demonstration.

Iranian Radio and Television had called a strike in sympathy with the anti-Shah demonstrators. Zandi was at home when she heard about the big protest march. She felt these strange new times had to be recorded, but there was no one to look after her two-year-old daughter. So she threw her camera bag on her shoulder, and her baby girl on her hip, and headed out into the street.

Crowds already filled the streets and the square around Tehran University, punching their fists in the air, shouting slogans against the Shah and dictatorship. Zandi decided to climb upon a bus shelter to get a better view, but couldn’t do so while holding her daughter in her arms. So she asked a woman standing nearby if she would hold her child for a little while. “On one condition,” said the woman. “If you shout ‘long live Khomeini.’” Zandi passed the child into the stranger’s arms and yelled: “Of course, long live Khomeini!” as she climbed atop the shelter. She doesn’t remember how long she stayed there, but she does remember being scared when she saw the crowd from above. She had never seen so many people in one place.

Bahman Jalali, Iran Revolution, Tehran, 1979
© and courtesy Rana Javadi

Numerous photographs of the Ashura demonstrations show the multitudes marching with their banners. But one of the most memorable images of that day depicts a half-finished five-story building overrun by onlookers seeking the perfect vantage point. Filling every floor, men and women flesh out the spaces where walls should have been. Taken by Bahman Jalali, the image of a half-finished building close to the Azadi monument suggests a striking metaphor: the country’s incomplete project of modernity imagined by the Shah, interrupted by tiers of people, hopeful, excited with merely a skeletal idea of what they want. None of them knows how this half-finished structure will look when the project is complete.

Bahman Jalali wasn’t a photographer by training. Before the revolution, he had studied politics and economics at Tehran University. He traveled with the architecture students on their many road trips around Iran, taking photos of traditional houses. When the unrest began in 1978, he and his wife, Rana Javadi, who had picked up the photography bug from him, joined the throngs in the streets to photograph the events. She could move freely among the women and provided a different point of view.

Jalali, who went on to establish Iran’s first university course in social documentary photography, may have sensed the uncertain nature of the revolution; in another photograph that resonates deeply with many Iranians who, four decades after the event, are questioning the outcome of their revolutionary actions, he shows a young man waving a banner atop a traffic sign that reads “Choose your direction before you reach the bridge.”

Another couple were also busy recording the events in the streets of Tehran in those days: Kaveh Golestan, the son of one of Iran’s celebrated film directors, Ebrahim Golestan, and his wife, Hengameh. At the outbreak of the revolution, Kaveh Golestan had already established himself as a photographer with a talent for accessing challenging social documentary subjects, such as the sex workers of Tehran’s red light district. With Hengameh at his side, he photographed the scenes of bloody conflict, while she focused her camera on the women.

By January 1979, the Shah was forced to leave. The photographs of his unceremonious departure were captured solely by Iranian photographers, according to Jafar Daniali, who worked as a staff photographer for the daily newspaper Ettela’at. As he recalled in an interview with an Iranian publication, he and a handful of his colleagues managed to get past the guards and into Mehrabad airport, while two busloads of foreign journalists were held back because the Shah did not want the foreign press there.

Daniali, who had made his way under the plane’s stairs, describes how weak the Shah’s legs appeared, and how he heard him groaning as he boarded the plane to leave the country and end a 2,500-year-old monarchy. The various photographs of his departure were circulated widely around the world, paving the way for the next stage of the revolution: the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from his fifteen-year exile, first in Iraq and then briefly in France. A cleric and critic of the Shah, he arrived back in Iran aboard an Air France–chartered plane in a posse of his followers.

The numerous photographs of his descent from the airplane mark what Iran’s Islamic government refers to as the “succession of the revolution.” The image has such iconic value that in recent years, a two-dimensional reenactment of the famous descent has become a regular feature of the celebrations: soldiers carry a cardboard cutout of Khomeini down the steps of a plane, creating a somewhat flat, if not altogether bizarre, tribute.

A. Abbas, The corpse of ex-Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda lies at the morgue, Tehran, Iran, 1979
Courtesy Magnum Photos

The late Abbas Attar, a longtime member of Magnum Photos, had left Iran at an early age, but he visited the country both before and during the revolution as an established international photojournalist. Of all his images of the revolution, his photograph of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, Iran’s prime minister from 1965 to 1977, in a morgue might be the most unnerving. Hoveyda, who was famous for wearing an orchid in his buttonhole and smoking a pipe, did not leave the country when the Shah left. He gave himself up to the revolutionaries because he felt he had not committed any wrong.

Like many of the Shah’s generals and high-ranking officials, he was judged as “corrupt on earth” and executed by the revolution’s merciless hanging judge Sadegh Khalkhali, who had a penchant for five-minute trials and executions in makeshift situations. Hoveyda was apparently shot dead during the recess in his trial in the basement of Qasr prison. It has been suggested that his corpse was returned to his chair for the reading of his verdict. Abbas’s unsettling photograph of the morgue shows Hoveyda surrounded by four men, two of them posing with their assault weapons (which were not used in his execution) with triumphant smirks. The composition echoes the photograph of the dead Che Guevara, positioned so gleeful men with rifles could record themselves in a macabre memento mori.

Kaveh Kazemi, Defiant Revolutionary, 1979
Courtesy the Artist

Iranian women were an intrinsic part of the Iranian Revolution. They would become its icon. A photograph by Kaveh Kazemi—one of the only academically trained photographers of the revolution, who had trained in the UK in the seventies—shows a militiawoman holding her hand out of the impenetrable blackness of her chador, while brandishing a G3 weapon. The towering chador, apart from being an immensely powerful image in its own right, heralds what is to come in the Islamic hegemony that will be forced on the country, as well as how it will be represented visually for decades afterward. The Iranian black chador, worn by the pious and political, became a favorite of visiting photographers depicting the revolutionary spirit of Iran.

On March 8, 1979, less than a month after the succession of the revolution, Iranian feminists chose International Women’s Day to demonstrate against enforced veiling. Joined by the American feminist Kate Millett, who had come to Iran inspired by the role of the women in the revolution, they braved heavy snow in the streets of the capital,to show their dismay at Ayatollah Khomeini’s announcement that the wearing of hijab would be required of all women in Iran.

Their hopes of greater equality and freedom after the revolution were dashed by this fundamentalist slogan during the march: “Ya roosari ya toosari”—wear a scarf or be smacked on the head. The photographs of this march are an exotic reminder, for the younger generation who grew up with mandatory rules of modesty, that compulsory veiling was not accepted without a fight by secular Iranian women.

The early days of the revolution saw power struggles between the various revolutionary factions in Tehran. There were also serious incidences of ethnic unrest in other areas of the country. In August 1979, dissenting Kurds in the northwest of the country were punished with impunity. Some of the captured rebels were taken to Sanandaj Airport to meet their fate in one of Khalkhali’s notorious courts.

A series of images captures the execution of eleven men who are shot dead by a firing squad in Sanandaj airport. The photographer even records the point-blank shots that ensure the men are dead once they hit the ground. But the most powerful image, known as Firing Squad in Iran, shows the men in various stages of being hit by bullets: some are already on the ground, others bent double by the force of the bullet entering their body. This photo was distributed by United Press International without crediting the photographer, and became the recipient of the only anonymous Pulitzer Prize ever awarded in Spot News Photography in 1980. No one knew the photographer’s identity until 2006, when the Wall Street Journal revealed the photographer to be Jahangir Razmi from Ettela’at newspaper. Razmi’s editor in Tehran had decided at the time that his identity should remain secret for his own safety during the vengeful early days of the revolution.

Jahangir Razmi, Firing Squad in Iran, 1979
Courtesy United Press International

On November 4, 1979, another event affected the growth of homegrown photojournalism.  A group of hardline students supporting Ayatollah Khomeini climbed over the walls of the U.S. embassy compound in Tehran and took fifty-two American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. They paraded the hostages, blindfolded, with arms tied, to be photographed by the international press. This was an opportunity for the regime to use visual media to convey its independence from the West—specifically, its anger toward the United States (already deemed “the Great Satan”), which had propped up the Shah.

One such image, of a man—a hostage—in a white shirt, with a thick white blindfold wrapped in layer after layer around his head, as if he is readied for execution, became the emblem for the US television show Nightline, a program hosted by Ted Koppel and created specifically to follow the state of the hostage crisis. These photographs would form an image of Iran as barbaric and hostile in the minds of American viewers, which to this day has proven difficult to erase.

After the hostage-taking, many foreign journalists, including Michel Setboun, who had come to Iran early on to record the revolution, decided to leave. They handed over the job of covering the still-volatile country to local photographers, who stepped in to supply the foreign media with the images they needed. Setboun passed his SIPA mantle to Reza Deghati, whom he connected to the agency. “There were these young Iranian photographers that grew up with us. It was time to let them take over. They could speak the language; all they needed was a connection to the outside media, which they didn’t have before,” he says. With that, Iranian photojournalism took another step forward. The hostage-taking was not only good for Iranian local photographers; it was also one of the first landmark events that consolidated the hold of the Islamists on the way the country would proceed. Iran’s foreign policy took an irreversible turn into isolationism and belligerence toward the world.

By 1980, the eight-year war with neighboring Iraq had begun, providing Iranian photographers with a chance to experience war photography, and allowing the new Islamic government to tighten its grip on internal politics with the sophisticated use of photography as one of the sharpest tools in their propaganda toolbox.

Four decades on, photographers like Maryam Zandi and Kaveh Kazemi have been given rare permits to publish photobooks of their images of the days of the revolution. According to their publisher, the younger generation of Iranians are very interested in images that depict that cusp in their history. The treasury of photographs by these local photojournalists provides them with a chance to review their history independently from the official narrative and provide a fuller picture of those turbulent days.

Haleh Anvari is a writer based in Iran.

The post The Photographs that Defined the Iranian Revolution appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

How to Make Art at 30,000 Feet

For nearly a decade, Nina Katchadourian has made images on airplanes using only a cell phone and found objects.

By Ellen Pong

Nina Katchadourian, Topiary, 2012, from Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Fridman Gallery

Overlooking a seaside courtyard of ornately manicured hedges and potted shrubs, Nina Katchadourian’s Topiary (2012) pictures meandering garden-goers on a sun-drenched summer’s day. From a lily pond at the center of the scene springs the focal point of the image: a towering, Brancusi-like form of stacked green spheres. The “sculpture,” as the artist confirmed at a talk she recently gave at Fridman Gallery, is actually a row of green peas that Katchadourian was snacking on during one of many flights she’s taken over nine years of traveling between exhibitions, professorial positions, and her home bases of New York and Berlin.

Nina Katchadourian, Dancers, 2012, from Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Fridman Gallery

Using rephotography and found objects, the artist makes the most of the mundane. Drink napkins, airplane food, in-flight magazines, paper toilet-seat covers, and countless near-silent hours spent sitting stiffly upright become the fertile grounds for Katchadourian’s series Seat Assignment (2010–ongoing), a body of absurdist cell phone images made exclusively while flying on airplanes. This series was on view in the artist’s recent solo exhibition, Ification, at Fridman Gallery in New York. It was presented alongside video, audio, and sculpture works that are equally amusing—including a functional, Frankensteinian popcorn machine that speaks with the assistance of a custom-written Morse code translation program (Talking Popcorn, 2001). Ification framed a thoroughly entertaining experience of Katchadourian’s diverse art practice, reminding us that an exhibition is never really a “show”unless there’s popcorn involved.

Nina Katchadourian, Ascension, 2013, from Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Fridman Gallery

Deadpan and parodic humor deftly manipulate otherwise unimpressive objects and imagery in Seat Assignment. The result is a bootleg canon of art-historically (mis)informed images, hung à la the nineteenth-century salon. In Ascension (2013), a tissue-haloed dog climbs into bed using a ramp marketed for elderly pets, eagerly welcoming a long and peaceful rest. In an intimately sized portrait titled St. Edward (2013), a downward-gazing Edward Snowden dons a similar napkin-shred nimbus. Katchadourian now categorizes the expansive series according to recurring themes, many of which draw from art and photography genres—Landscapes, Athletics, and Proposals for Public Sculpture—and others that don’t (among them, Buckleheads and Sweater Gorillas).

Nina Katchadourian, Centaur, 2012, from Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Fridman Gallery

Appropriating images from SkyMall, travel magazines, and whatever else has been abandoned by prior passengers, Katchadourian defies reasonable doubts against the artistic possibilities of cell phone photography, advertisements, and literal garbage. The images in Seat Assignment, as low-resolution as they may be, are sharp depictions of the artist’s intuition for a playfulness that resists being tired. Operating in a conceptual mode reminiscent of John Baldessari’s dot paintings, they provoke viewers to see the ordinary anew by making evident all we take for granted in our everyday visual field. They could even stand in response to a hypothetical Yoko Ono instruction poem:

Collect a piece of sweater lint. Throw it into the sky.

1964 summer

Nina Katchadourian, Pink Volcano, 2011, from Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Fridman Gallery

For as much as the series can be viewed as a set of individual images, it also can be read as the documentation of a performance. When asked how other passengers react to her process of making images, the artist recalled that over the estimated 275 flights she’s taken in the past nine years, only three people have ever inquired about her work. Whether disinterest or politeness undergirds these numbers, Katchadourian’s insistence on the airplane-as-studio is nonetheless a quiet provocation of business as usual, raising poignant questions, as the artist herself has mentioned, on the fraughtness of post-9/11 air travel. Within a space colored by the rhetoric of paranoia, anxiety, and terror, what does it mean to make lavatory self-portraits in the Flemish style?

Nina Katchadourian, Lavatory Self-Portrait in Flemish Style #13, 2011, from Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and Fridman Gallery

Katchadourian carves out a rare space for humor in the often tedious worlds of both airplanes and galleries. The images in Seat Assignment are not particularly complicated or technically sophisticated, but they forego these traits for a self-awareness and transparency made all the more refreshing by their context. Because while we often look to art as an escape into alternate realities, Katchadourian’s images are only momentary illusions. They ground us in the presentness of paper waste, dry pretzel snacks, and unflattering airplane lighting, but they also insist on the expansive potential for joy and pleasure amid the smallness of these everyday mundanities.

Ellen Pong is the editorial work scholar at Aperture magazine.

Nina Katchadourian: Ification was on view at Fridman Gallery, New York, from February 24–March 31, 2019.

The post How to Make Art at 30,000 Feet appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Don McCullin Doesn’t Want You to Look Away

From the Troubles in Northern Ireland to the wars in Southeast Asia, McCullin’s images defined the conflicts of the twentieth century.

By Aaron Schuman

Don McCullin, The Battle for the City of Hue, South Vietnam, US Marine Inside Civilian House, 1968
© the artist

In the first of the ten galleries that make up the staggering retrospective Don McCullin, currently on view at Tate Britain in London, hangs a prescient photograph taken by McCullin in 1965, entitled Sheep Going to the Slaughter House, early morning, near Caledonian Road, London. A gloomy gray haze hangs heavily in the dawn air as a shadowy figure in a long coat and flatcap marches a tightly packed herd of sheep, more than forty strong, along a wide, straight road to their deaths.

Seen through the eyes of McCullin, who grew up among the ruins of Blitz-scarred north London in the early 1940s, and would later photograph for the Observer and The Sunday Times Magazine, what might have otherwise been depicted in previous centuries as a rather quaint and pastoral image of British shepherding life is infused with a haunting sense of postwar horror. Thick black fences, buzzing streetlamps, elongated factory-like buildings, and blocky towering structures line the street with an impeccable, cold regularity, inevitably evoking the startlingly bleak pictures of concentration camps taken only twenty years earlier, and which have resounded within our collective unconscious ever since.

Don McCullin, Sheep Going to the Slaughter House, early morning, near Caledonian Road, London, 1965
© the artist

In the making of the photograph McCullin firmly positioned himself directly in the herd’s path, situating the picture and the viewer precisely between his subjects’ immediate present and the brutal fate that soon awaits them, unflinchingly recording their last living moments: some bow their heads in resignation, others look anxiously into the distance, and, most distressingly, several of them look us straight in the eye.

McCullin’s exhibition is densely hung in a relatively linear fashion with his own handmade gelatin-silver prints, and proceeds chronologically through a remarkably diverse career that spans more than sixty years—from his documentation of the teddy boy gangs that loitered in the streets of his childhood neighborhood in the 1950s, to anti-fascist protesters in Trafalgar Square and the building of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s.

Don McCullin, Protester, Cuban Missile Crisis, Whitehall, London, 1962
© the artist

He covered wars waged in Cyprus, Biafra, the Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, and Cambodia in the late 1960s and early ’70s; the Troubles in Northern Ireland; the rise of homelessness in London’s East End; the plight of industrial cities in the north of England throughout the 1970s; the war zones of Beirut, Bangladesh, and Iraq in the 1980s and ’90s; the AIDS pandemic in Africa in the early 2000s; and the ruins of Syria in the 2010s. And more. The sheer geography he traversed, the quantity of miles and the range of experience, is astounding. Yet throughout, a particular motif—direct and unwavering eye contact—persists, punctuating the show with a relentless and penetrating power.

When I visited the exhibition earlier this year, I was astonished to find that the galleries were absolutely packed, a tightly knit queue of enrapt visitors shuffling along the walls at a slow but steady rate, and growing discernably quieter and more subdued from one gallery to the next. McCullin’s photographs are captivating for both obvious and unnerving reasons, as they depict moments of human conflict, cruelty, suffering, desperation, depravity, and destruction with a wide-eyed and unapologetic directness.

Don McCullin, Northern Ireland, The Bogside, Londonderry, 1971
© the artist

It was heartbreaking to watch visitors move from one horrific scene to the next casually and in time with the surrounding throng. But occasionally, when a subject’s gaze reached out from the frame, this collective procession would come to an abrupt halt. Each one of us was struck not only by the force of what we were looking at—an instant of connection and recognition, often caught moments before death—but also by the unsettling fact that as viewers we were just looking, while the person facing us could look no longer. McCullin’s photographs demand that you stop and take a breath.

“I want people to look at my photographs,” McCullin once stated, trying to explain the complex motivations behind his work in the simplest of terms. “I want to create a voice for the people in those pictures. I want the voice to seduce people into actually hanging on a bit longer when they look at them, so they go away not with an intimidating memory but with a conscious obligation.” Despite such intentions potentially seeming naive or idealistic, especially today, within the hyper-skeptical, oversaturated, and often cynical media landscape, Don McCullin insistently serves as a troubling yet poignant reminder that we are still capable of being conscious and connected, and must therefore recognize our obligations as both spectators and citizens of the world at large. McCullin tells us, as he told himself in the field time and time again, “You have to bear witness. You cannot just look away.”

Don McCullin, Local Boys in Bradford, 1972
© the artist

Aaron Schuman is a photographer, writer, lecturer, and curator based in the U.K. His latest book, SLANT (2019), was recently published by MACK.

Don McCullin is on view at Tate Britain, London, through May 6, 2019.

The post Don McCullin Doesn’t Want You to Look Away appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Foreigners in a Foreign Land

Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross travel to Peru in search of connections to nature.

By Emmanuel Iduma

Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross, Untitled, from the series Tamamuri, 2018–ongoing
Courtesy the artists and Wilde, Geneva

In summer 2016, Arguiñe Escandón sent Yann Gross, a Swiss photographer who often works in the Amazon, a postcard with a photograph by Charles Kroehle. It was one of many pictures the German photographer made while documenting Peru between 1888 and 1891. Escandón, a Spaniard and a photographer herself, added a friendly warning: “I hope you won’t end up like him.”

Although much is known about Georg Hübner, the German ethnographer and photographer with whom Kroehle traveled in eastern Peru, Kroehle’s fate has been open to speculation—some say he disappeared after he was shot with a poisonous arrow in the rain forest. As Escandón and Gross considered their predecessors’ earlier photographs, they saw an opportunity to make collaborative work. Almost a century and a half later, they traveled in Peru with the legend of Kroehle as a kind of anti–field guide.

Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross, Untitled, from the series Tamamuri, 2018–ongoing
Courtesy the artists and Wilde, Geneva

While Hübner and Kroehle intended to produce a visual documentation of Indigenous Peoples and to send back prints for sale, Escandón and Gross were not as unquestioning of the implications of being foreign and the ties between power and representation. “We didn’t want to bring back trophies, but tried to understand a bit more, even if the result was that we realized that we were totally ignorant,” Gross said. “It was a good lesson in humility.”

They traveled along the Pachitea, Ucayali, and Nanay Rivers, living among the Ashaninka, Shipibo-Conibo, and Cocama peoples, who must fight for the guarantee and acceleration of communal land titling, based on their rights of self-determination, and for alternative development plans that respect existing ecosystems. Escandón and Gross are rightly ambivalent about Kroehle and Hübner, who were complicit in more than one form of colonial exploitation, working with rubber barons, fur traders, and gold diggers.

Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross, Untitled, from the series Tamamuri, 2018–ongoing
Courtesy the artists and Wilde, Geneva

The question for Peru, then as now, is how it might reckon with the pressures of global capitalism while addressing the fact that its resources are taken from Indigenous Peoples, whose claim to the territory is several thousand years old. The scale of the Peruvian Amazon—comprising 60 percent of the country, while occupied by only 5 percent of its population—makes parts of it prone to be allotted to companies engaged in mining, oil exploration, and hydroelectric megaprojects. “A concept is needed,” Gross said, mindful of the impact of climate change and decreased biodiversity, and the worldviews of the peoples he and Escandón spent time with, “where you are part of an ecosystem and in balance. It’s to be face to face with other elements and not above it—a concept of equality, more relational than hierarchical.”

Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross, Untitled, from the series Tamamuri, 2018–ongoing
Courtesy the artists and Wilde, Geneva

If, as the artists have noted, Gross’s earlier photographs from the Amazon were documentary in nature and Escandón’s were invested in psychology, their collaboration, Tamamuri (2018–ongoing), has produced a mix of both enthusiasms. The photographs they have returned with so far—whether a portrait or a detail of marshland, whether varnished with light silver or delicate blue—convey the intricacy and totality of an ecological surround.

Escandón and Gross are as foreign as their predecessors. Yet work of this kind, invested in sensation instead of a romantic representation of an unfamiliar culture, is an inward rather than outward exploration—an intrepid adventure that nevertheless rejects the logic of the explorer as discoverer. Their photographs mark a process of participation. Foremost on their minds was the possibility that they could find a through line connecting self and environment, image and history.

Emmanuel Iduma, a critic and novelist, is the author, most recently, of A Stranger’s Pose (2018).

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

The post Foreigners in a Foreign Land appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture Celebrates Ethan James Green at the 2019 Spring Party: Young New York

Stefano Tonchi, Ethan James Green Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Tali Lennox Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Alek Wek and House of Yes performersMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

Party guestsMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

Dara Allen, Ethan James Green, Torraine Futurum Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Micol Sabbadini, Andrea Franchini Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

DonChristian, Martine Gutierrez Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Phyllis Posnick, Ethan James Green Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Ang Rand, Matthew DomescekMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

House of Yes performance at the Paradise Club, The Times Square EDITIONMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

House of Yes performance at the Paradise Club, The Times Square EDITIONMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

Adam Eli Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Tali Lennox, Carly Mark, Richie Shazam KhanMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

The scene at the Paradise Club, The Times Square EDITIONMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

James O'Shaughnessy, Missy O'Shaughnessy, Tony White Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Nina Rosenblum, Cathy Kaplan, Daniel Allentuck Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Isabella Isbiroglu, Alexandra Ben-Gurion Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Rebecca Roberts, Lauren Lanier, Leslie Simitch Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Erwin Olaf, Nion McEvoy, Shirley den Hartog Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Stefano Tonchi, Ethan James GreenMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

Sonalde Desai, Hemant Kanakia Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Tim Doody, Sarah Haimes Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

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Performer from the House of Yes
Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Ben Pundole, Alek Wek, House of Yes performer Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Alek Wek, Brendan Embser, Nkechi Ebubedike Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

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Sophia Narrett, Alice Hines Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Nion McEvoy, Cathy Kaplan Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

The scene at the Paradise Club, The Times Square EDITION
Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Maya Margarita, MerlotMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

Alex Arauz, MarcsMadison Voelkel/BFA.com

Antwaun Sargent Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Tali Lennox, Carly Mark Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Richie Shazam Khan, Ethan James Green Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Peter Goldberg, Stevie Triano Madison Voelkel/BFA.com

Chris Boot, Mary Ellen GoekeMike Vitelli/BFA.com

Julia Wagner, Isabelle McTwigan, Brendan Embser Mike Vitelli/BFA.com

Brendan Embser, Ethan James Green, Chris Boot Mike Vitelli/BFA.com

Ethan James GreenMike Vitelli/BFA.com

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Marcs Mike Vitelli/BFA.com

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Dara Allen Mike Vitelli/BFA.com

Antwaun Sargent, Ethan James Green Mike Vitelli/BFA.com

On Friday, April 5, Aperture celebrated Ethan James Green and the release of his first monograph, Young New York, at a festive party at the Paradise Club presented by The Times Square EDITION in New York City. The night featured specialty cocktails, a creative feast, and a performance by the House of Yes, based on William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Aperture Executive Director Chris Boot toasted Green, stating: “A book can change an artist’s life, and can contribute in a significant way to culture and consciousness.” Boot extended thanks to Green and to his community, as well as to the book’s supporters, including Alexander McQueen, Peter Barbur, Michael Hoeh, Cathy Kaplan, Noel Kirnon, Fred Ohm, Missy and Jim O’Shaughnessy, and Drs. Stephen and Marsha Silberstein.

Young New York editor Brendan Embser spoke about the impact of Green’s work. “You’ve shown queer people that we are beautiful, that we exist,” Embser said, noting that the book grew out of Green’s portfolio in Aperture magazine’s “Future Gender” issue, guest-edited by Zackary Drucker. “I wish I had a book like this when I was a teenager. But I can just imagine all the queer youth out there who are going to find Young New York and suddenly see themselves.”

“Your work makes what we believe about ourselves become real,” remarked Spring Party cohost and model Dara Allen, who is featured in multiple portraits in Young New York. Torraine Futurum added that Green is “someone who, as he rises, brings people along with him, and tries to give them the same opportunities that he has.”

The House of Yes gave an energetic show for dinner guests, followed by an after-party with music by DJ Greg Poole (Homecoming), and a performance by Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Martine Gutierrez. Guests were decked out in colorful and show-stopping ensembles. In attendance were Great Bowery’s Leslie Simitch and Jordan Hancock, W magazine’s Stefano Tonchi, Vogue’s Phyllis Posnick, artist Erwin Olaf, supermodel Alek Wek, artist and model Tali Lennox, artist Carly Mark, writer and activist Adam Eli, Richie Shazam Khan, artist Ryan McNamara, and critic Antwaun Sargent.

Green’s brother, Joel Green, said: “As an older brother, it might be strange, but this feels like a hero moment for me. Ethan is someone who embodies the essence of hard work, who has overcome so many obstacles, to get to a point where he can fully express himself, and who he is, and what he can give to the world.”

The event was photographed by Jessica Craig-Martin and BFA.

The 2019 Aperture Spring Party was made possible with generous support from:

Sponsors

The Times Square EDITION

Great Bowery

Cohosts

Dara Allen, Adam Eli, Torraine Futurum, Meghan Michelle Gallagher,* Great Bowery, Sarah F. Haimes,* Jordan Hancock, Parker Kit Hill, Michael Hoeh, Cathy M. Kaplan, Joshua Lewin and Kaavya Viswanathan,* Sam Pritzker,* Lisa Rosenblum, Thomas R. Schiff, Stefano Tonchi, Alek Wek

Spring Party Committee

Anonymous, Peter Barbur and Tim Doody, Audry X. Casusol, Allan Chapin and Anna Rachminov, Jessica Craig-Martin, Elizabeth Ann Kahane, Hemant Kanakia and Sonalde Desai, Richie Shazam Khan, Tali Lennox, Andrew E. Lewin, Carly Mark, Nion McEvoy, Ryan McNamara, Paula Naughton, Erwin Olaf, Melissa and James O’Shaughnessy, Phyllis Posnick, Michael Schulman, Jasper Soloff, Lisa Stone Pritzker, Julia Wagner, Paul Zaentz, Zsela

* Aperture Connect Council Member

Partners

BFA

Mikkeller Brewing NYC

Click here to purchase Young New York.

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The Photographer Giving New Life to Ocean Plastic

Along the coast of South Africa, Thirza Schaap collects discarded bottles and shopping bags to create fanciful sculptures.

By Sara Knelman

Thirza Schaap, Sunday stroll, from the series Plastic Ocean, 2017–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

From her home in Cape Town, where she’s lived for the last six years, Dutch artist Thirza Schaap can walk to the ocean in seven minutes. The waters are wild and cold there, too rough for leisurely swimming. Drawn to them nonetheless, Schaap began walking the beaches with her black-and-white poodle, Iso, and was struck by the perpetual mass of plastic debris washing up on the shore, often caught up in watery strands of seaweed. It always looks, she says warmly, “like there has been a party.”

Thirza Schaap, Road trip, from the series Plastic Ocean, 2017–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

In 2016, Schaap started photographing found plastic sculptures and sharing her pictures on social media. As response to the work grew, she carved out a daily habit, foraging for plastic while out on morning rambles, then going home and making fanciful, pastel-hued arrangements on a table in her garden, and finally photographing her impromptu sculptures. Her lighthearted constructions contain familiar, everyday objects: bottles and lids, balloons, shoes, forks and spoons, toothbrushes, straws, and, of course, the ubiquitous plastic bag. Through Schaap’s collaboration with a writer friend, the resulting photographs take on evocative titles: Sunday stroll, Long stocking, Beehive.

Thirza Schaap, Split ends, from the series Plastic Ocean, 2017–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Despite their sweet allure, Schaap’s images are also deeply troubling. There has, after all, been a global party, and these pictures are glimpses of its ugly aftermath, shards of the unsustainable volume of refuse from our collective voraciousness. As sites of celebration so often appear the morning after, Schaap’s compositions are full of spent enjoyment, of things now devoid of use, faded, deflated, or broken. These things have been thrown away, but they persist, unable to decompose, resisting deletion.

Globally, we produce about 340 million tons of plastic each year, and a huge proportion of it ends up in our oceans. There are multiple “great garbage patches” floating languidly around Earth’s vast waters, the largest of which, off the coast of Hawaii, holds about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and weighs close to 80,000 metric tons. Like a large planetary orb, it continually pulls new objects into its sphere, perpetually accumulating remnants of our modern consumer culture.

Thirza Schaap, Beehive , from the series Plastic Ocean, 2017–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Schaap’s project Plastic Ocean (2017–ongoing) is a whimsical attempt to rescue a few stray fragments from this fate. A habit and a discipline, it has also become a meditative ritual tied to Schaap’s deep commitment to living a plastic-free life. Schaap, though, is not keen on pointing fingers or instilling guilt. There’s a groundswell now of antiplastic backlash, and Schaap finds inspiration in the community of people working to make things better. As melancholy reminders of the detrimental consequences of our entrenched habits of convenience, her images encourage the possibility, however inconvenient, of changing the way we live for the betterment of the planet and future generations.

Sara Knelman is a curator, writer, and the director of Corkin Gallery, Toronto.

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

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Announcing the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist

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

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

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

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

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

This year, Aperture’s editors reviewed over 1,000 submissions during our annual Portfolio Prize competition. With a goal to identity contemporary trends in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition, we are thrilled to announce this year’s five finalists for the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize.

Teresa Eng

Jack Latham

Mark McKnight

Zora J. Murff

Guanyu Xu

We are delighted to welcome these five finalists to our ranks of illustrious past winners and finalists, joining such artists as Ka-Man Tse, Natalie Krick, Eli Durst, Drew Nikonowicz, Amy Elkins, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alexander Gronsky, Sarah Palmer, Louie Palu, Bryan Schutmaat, and many others. Our challenge is to now select one winner and four honorable mentions from this impressive group of finalists. The winning artist will be published in Aperture magazine, receive a $3,000 cash prize, and present an exhibition in New York.

The winner of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize will be announced on Friday, April 19, and the finalists portfolios and statements will be featured on Aperture Online.

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3 Photo Editors On Why You Should Enter the Aperture Summer Open

Essential advice on submitting to Aperture’s annual open-call exhibition.

Argus Paul Estabrook, Student Protesters March, Seoul, South Korea, 2017, from the series Losing Face
2017 Summer Open Artist

Aperture: Could you describe your point of view as an artist, editor, or educator?

Matthew Leifheit: I edit MATTE magazine and publish books and write and teach, in addition to being a photographer myself, and I think all these activities within photography have a symbiotic relationship—they both influence and are influenced by my practice as an artist. For my own photographs, I hope that I am expressing something visually that cannot be expressed in language, and would mostly like to leave it to other people to put words around my images.

But in terms of subject matter of my art or my publishing, I want to remain as open as possible. I am particularly interested in queer topics and supporting queer-identified artists, but this is not exclusively what I publish or photograph. I strive to have many points of view at once.

Chiara Bardelli Nonino: So much of our experience is filtered through words. A good photograph, at least to me, is something that resembles a wordless, silent epiphany. There’s a power to this immediacy and I think an editor must never forget the responsibility of choosing and showing one image or another.

Azu Nwagbogu: To have a point of view is always a little premature, in my opinion. I would rather consider my role as an enabler of the artistic voice and temperament. If I do have one point of view that I am adamant about, it is that an artist should be an artist and not a journalist or a priest or a moralist. It is important to encourage artists to trust the process of making and to leave it at that and not have to play the multiple roles that contemporary society bequeaths upon them.

Jon Henry, Untitled #1, Co-op City, New York, from the series Stranger Fruit
2017 Summer Open Artist

Aperture: What do you look for when viewing a body of work?

Leifheit: To quote one of my heroes, Vince Aletti, the best photographs have “something soulful.” It could be a landscape or a portrait or a cameraless darkroom abstraction, but my favorite pictures and bodies of work always have a mystical third element that could be called soul. It’s something indefinable. That said, there are certain things I do look for: that the photographer is in control of their references, that the photographs show an intensive commitment of thought if not time, that the project seems intensely and urgently personal rather than contrived to appear intelligent.

Nwagbogu: Authenticity, whatever that means and however that is defined within the ideas or scope of the work in view. Also, the spontaneous is important. I also want to see if the artist is close to achieving her aims. Without beauty, however you define that, all else is hopeless.

Bardelli Nonino: A clarity of vision, a sense of urgency, the ability to condense complexity and its intrinsic ambiguity in a self-contained space, be it a single image or a project.

Gowun Lee, I’m Here With You, 2017
2018 Summer Open Artist

Aperture: What advice could you give photographers who are considering submitting to the Summer Open?

Bardelli Nonino: Don’t be literal: the theme is as broad and as open to interpretation as it can be. Be a merciless editor: keep only the images that really are essential to tell your story. Allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Leifheit: Concentrate on making your work, not promoting it. The best place to put your energy is into the pictures—artists do not need business cards, promos, or websites if their work is good. It’s a lot easier to make something good and have people love it than it is to foist bad work onto an unwilling audience. Once the work is there, then opportunities like the Summer Open can be a way for more people to discover it.

Nwagbogu: You have much more to gain by applying than not applying. It really is that simple. To borrow an oft-used cliché, it really could be life changing, and I am confident that all the jurors will take a keen interest in each application. The diversity of roles and backgrounds of the jurors means that your work will get noticed regardless.

Matthew Shain, Post Monuments, New Orleans, (General P.G.T. Beauregard, erected 1913), 2017
2018 Summer Open Artist

Aperture: There are so many calls for entry out there. Why should people submit to the Aperture Summer Open?

Leifheit: Editors, curators, and collectors actually pay attention to who is chosen for this show because of Aperture’s reputation and long history of championing the work of new artists alongside established masters. The show is also a great way to grow your community of artists and put your work in dialogue with that of your contemporaries. I think I can speak for all the members of the show’s jury in saying that we will consider your submissions carefully and will be excited to discover new trends in photography from this very competitive pool of talented artists.

Bardelli Nonino: Aperture is one of the most respected voices in photography out there. If you have something to say, I can’t imagine a better platform to be heard.

Nwagbogu: It is a singular opportunity.

Bubblegum Club, Bee Diamondhead, 2017
2018 Summer Open Artist

The 2019 Aperture Summer Open is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor, Aperture magazine; Matthew Leifheit, artist and editor of MATTE magazine; Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor, Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue; Azu Nwagbogu, director of African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto; and Guadalupe Rosales, artist and founder of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz.

Submit your work now through April 12, 2019.

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Does a Woman Have to Be Invincible?

In her latest exhibition, Phoebe Boswell takes self-portraits—and self-healing—to a new level.

By M. Neelika Jayawardane

Phoebe Boswell, Still from Rapture (detail), 2018. Single-channel video
Courtesy the artist and Sapar Contemporary, New York

In the contemporary geopolitical West, we are taught that the body should be made invincible. Despite the fact that women’s bodies and women’s psyches remain locations on which patriarchal, political, and economic violence are projected, we rarely hear narratives that are not solely about strength and resilience, negating moments of vulnerability. Fashioning the self as anything less than “strong” is seen as weakness—a personal and moral failing. But what happens if we find such mythologizing, of being so masterfully in command of our bodies, an impossible task—a nontruth that we no longer wish to support?

Kenyan British artist Phoebe Boswell’s recent multimedia exhibition, The Space Between Things, curated by Renée Mussai and organized by Autograph ABP in London, uses a variety of photographic technologies to meditate on that question. Boswell was born in Nairobi to a Kenyan British father and a Kikuyu mother, but spent much of her formative years in the Arabian Gulf, with what she calls an “expatriate” identity. The Space Between Things included minute cutouts of old family pictures in the entryway to the lower-floor gallery, charcoal wall drawings representing an extended portrait of the self—all based on photographs—as well as drawings of nude female figures and roaring oceans on paper. There was also a series of video works that featured multiple-exposure self-portraits of medical scans, some of which give us a perspective of the artist’s body from a distant vantage point, while others probe the interiors of her organs. Each room of the exhibition was accompanied by sound and spoken word; at times, one could hear sound enveloping the space; at others, one needed to step on sound boards—rectangular pedals installed on the floor—to hear Boswell’s voice reciting lines from her own poem.

Phoebe Boswell, The Space Between Things, 2018. Installation view at Autograph ABP, London
Courtesy Autograph ABP

Accompanying these was a twenty-five-meter-long “extended self-portrait,” powerfully visible on three walls of the ground-floor gallery. These are impressions of her physical and emotional reactions—drawn using soft willow charcoal—based on photographs that the artist took of herself during the three-week process leading up to the exhibition opening. These self-portraits do the opposite of ordinary selfies, so often intended to show us at our finest moments, living our “best lives.” Boswell’s are intimate, self-baring portraits that show her body and flesh sprawled in grief and pain, imperfect and unraveling.

A dramatic series of ruptures in Boswell’s life led to this exhibition, beginning with an accidental injury to her eye. She subsequently experienced an actual heart attack—a physical response to the emotional turbulence she went through as a result of her injury. That wounding, watershed moment forced Boswell to sit meditatively with her physical, psychological, and spiritual self’s vulnerability. How was she supposed to live, now, with a “new” body and an emotional self that could never return to the person she once knew and inhabited? She had to create a dialogue with this new self, “an emotive interrogation of trauma, healing, and the poetics of endurance,” as Mussai writes in the curatorial text; Boswell needed to permit herself to express rage at the cause of the injury that created these ruptures, and give herself moments of longing for return. Between the “before” and “after,” she created a healing, liminal space.

Phoebe Boswell, Ancestors Roar There, 2018
Coutresy the artist and Sapar Contemporary, New York

As she lay in the high-dependency cardiac wing of an East London hospital, “attached to the machine . . . eye bulbous and blurry, delirious,” Boswell remembers hearing the woman in the bed next to hers “calling out to the darkness, ‘Take me to the lighthouse.’” Boswell wondered “where on earth my lighthouse was.” That repeated request—to right one’s vessel in the midst of a storm that could kill, to return to the safety of homeland, guided by a beacon—recalls Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, known for its fragmented narrative structure and stream-of-consciousness contributions from several narrators. In the book, a family returns to a summer home after a ten-year absence, each carrying with them unresolved longings they’ve borne all their lives—and the hopes of righting their respective courses.

Like Woolf’s narratives, Boswell’s works depict the storms one must brave in order to make a “crossing,” fraught as they always are, to find communion with others. Healing  and recovery may be possible if we accept that our longings for an idealized union with our own lighthouses—which call our lost vessels home—will inevitably be marred by imperfections. Boswell, too, had little choice but to acknowledge that she will never be able to “return” in order to remake a perfect, whole person as she remembers herself.

Phoebe Boswell, Still from Ythlaf, 2018. Single channel video
Courtesy the artist and Sapar Contemporary, New York

Boswell’s video installation Ythlaf (2018), composed of six floor-mounted video screens, shows footage of Zanzibar’s shoreline, taken using her father’s drone. Ythlaf, with its beautiful collection of consonants and vowels, is from Old English; it is composed of yth (wave, water), and laf (remnant, relic). “Water-relic” denotes liminal spaces between land and sea, which provide reliquaries for the energy of each wave. Each screen queries the mysteries of ythlaf; we see a shallow shelf of land welcoming each lace-edged wave, and the great expanse of the Indian Ocean beyond. Boswell’s body drifts like that of a long-limbed starfish. At times, the gentle motion of successive waves pitches her off screen. A sound work activated by visitors’ footfalls on interactive pressure sensors, hidden by black floor mats, accompanied the videos, composed of rhythmic breathwork that mimics wave motion. Pedals stood next to each screen; stepping on them released a looped soundscape of spoken word poetry, The Space Between Things (2018), written and recited by Boswell: “Take me to the lighthouse / There is peace there in the space between things / Take me to the lighthouse / I can rage there / In the space between things.”

In the exhibition spaces upstairs at Autograph, Boswell’s works shifted from these intimate portraits to an operating theater, where she underwent surgery to save her right eye: New Moon (2018) presents actual footage from the surgery, bearing witness to the miraculous, meticulous work that modern technology allows medical personnel to carry out, as well as the vulnerability of an organ as delicate as the eye. Also included in these dark, womb-like spaces was an angiogram of her heart, A Broken Heart (2018), which shows us proof of an injury to the organ. At one station, visitors could put on a pair of headphones to hear the voices of the surgeon and nurses who most recently operated on her eye over a period of about two hours, attempting to fortify it using graft cells. (This was the Boswell’s fourth surgery.) Dubstep played in the background, pacing their labor. With these pieces, she illustrates the ways in which the self—both physical and emotional—is made up of, and by, those around us. Just as other people can injure us to the point where we no longer recognize who we are, they also have the capability to help mend us when we are at our most broken.

Phoebe Boswell, The Space Between Things, 2018. Installation view at Autograph ABP, London
Courtesy Autograph ABP

In the experience of diaspora, we all feel dislocation as we grasp for stability in romantic and sexual attachments, and as we pursue the excellence that one’s community or new country demands, all the while holding together our splintered selves from public view. These tensions in the construction of a diasporic identity are at the heart of Boswell’s practice. Her works unapologetically lay bare the ways in which our psyches fracture and vacillate between a physical world and a world beyond. They portray the poetics of the body’s ability to endure fracturing, without glorifying or essentializing “black women’s strength” or stereotypes about the diasporic subject’s resilience, while also showing a way to speak about our own ruptured selves. Perhaps this can lead us back to our own lighthouses, however fragile and imperfect those journeys may be.

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

Phoebe Boswell: The Space Between Things was on view at Autograph ABP, London, from December 14, 2018 to March 30, 2019.

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Introducing: Leonard Suryajaya

In the first of our new series, “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography, Aperture speaks with a queer, Indonesian photographer who makes explosive pictures of his family.

By Cassidy Paul

Leonard Suryajaya, (With Sisters, Aunts, Uncles, and Cousin) Mom as Bodhisattva, 2015

For Leonard Suryajaya, feeling like an outsider was the norm. Growing up in Indonesia as a Chinese minority, Suryajaya was a Buddhist raised by a Muslim nanny and educated in Christian schools. It was when he came into his own sexuality as a queer man that he realized the weight of living in a country that suppressed his freedom of expression and condemned homosexuality, and at the age of eighteen he fled for America.

It wasn’t until 2015, a year after coming out to his mother during a trip back home, that Suryajaya began to explore the complexities of his identity in his work. Traveling to Indonesia once a year, he started photographing various members of his family and his partner, Peter, in elaborately staged scenes drawn from experiences in his youth.

The resulting images in his series Don’t Hold On to Your Bones are vibrant, humorous, dizzying, and deeply personal. In them the absurd meets the everyday—from his father seated among a sea of trophies to his mother posed as a Buddhist figure to a family outing at the beach—and each item and figure seem both at war and at peace with one another. “I relied on my camera to process,” Suryajaya explains. “Photographing my family allowed me to acknowledge my longing to settle the contradictions I experienced about myself.”

Suryajaya knew from the onset he wanted the series to be collaborative, hoping to form a new level of intimacy with his family through the act of photographing. Each frame was approached with a loose concept, allowing his family members and himself to organically create the image together in front of his 4-by-5 camera. Describing the experience on set, he notes, “Everything changes when my family enters. It becomes a bargain and promise between me and them in the end.”

One subject in particular stands out among the rest. Suryajaya’s partner, who is white, is interspersed among his family throughout the series. In one image, Peter and Suryajaya’s mother sit on the bed together, wrapped in a duvet that matches the wallpaper in the background. Their heads rest on one another and they stare lovingly into the camera, which Suryajaya stands behind, directing. “Peter’s role is fluid and complicated,” he explains. “Sometimes he is a muse, an object of desire, a matter of convenience. Other times, he is my partner, helper, supporter, collaborator. Most of the time, he is a stand-in for me.”

At the heart of Suryajaya’s work is a desire to understand the intricacies of his own complicated layers of identity, while working against the backdrop of his cultural and familial expectations. “I’m a queer immigrant to the United States who fled constant cultural and social clashes in Indonesia,” he says. “When I’m home, I feel like I am still a kid struggling to express my autonomy. Naturally, the camera is the only thing that leaves me with any sense of independence.”

Leonard Suryajaya, Familial, 2016

 

Leonard Suryajaya, Mom and Peter, 2015

 

Leonard Suryajaya, Candyman, 2016

 

Leonard Suryajaya, Dad and All of His Trophies, 2015

 

Leonard Suryajaya, Musing, 2015

 

Leonard Suryajaya, You, By the Lake, 2015

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

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