Aperture's Blog, page 88

In Iran, Images of a Dystopian Water Crisis

Hashem Shakeri’s pastel-hued, otherworldly photographs depict a landscape on the verge of destruction.

By Haleh Anvari

Hashem Shakeri, Hossein, 13, is from Beris, Chaabahar, which is on the sea but lacks secure access to freshwater. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Hashem Shakeri is making a name for himself as one of Iran’s foremost emerging photographers. Trained as an actor and an aspiring filmmaker, Shakeri doesn’t like to be called a photographer; he prefers to be seen as an experimental artist. Whatever label he is given or aspires to, he has captured the attention of the international photographic community with his latest series of photographs about Sistan and Baluchestan, a province in southeastern Iran bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The largest of Iran’s provinces and the birthplace of Rostam, the Persian mythical superhero, Sistan and Baluchestan has a rich cultural history, but the area is also woefully underdeveloped. Thanks to its being on the border of Afghanistan, the province has hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees who escaped the troubles in Afghanistan and have come searching for work in Iran. There is widespread poverty, and major and petty smuggling of people and goods across the porous border is a way of life. This has turned the province into Iran’s “wild east,” where the rule of law is fragile. Shakeri’s recent series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun (2018) focuses on the acute water crisis in the region, which also resonates on a national level.

The water crisis in Sistan and Baluchestan is caused by factors that threaten acute water shortages in all of Iran: a steady decrease in annual rainfall, the rise in population, and shortsighted planning by various governments in water distribution. In Sistan and Baluchestan, the problem points also to a failure in understanding that foreign policy must include environmental issues like water rights. Many in Sistan and Baluchestan believe that Afghanistan’s control of the river Helmand, through the construction of dams and, more recently, irrigation canals, has led to the drying of Hamun Lake, the life source of the Iranian province; the Afghans point to water mismanagement on the Iranian side. Earlier this year I spoke to Shakeri in Tehran about his recording of the drying of Sistan and Baluchestan.

 

Hashem Shakeri, A family removes soil from the riverbed to use for their home garden. Last year the river that flowed under Nohrab Bridge—a branch of the Helmand—was full of water, but now it is completely dried. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Haleh Anvari: How did you become interested in Sistan and Baluchestan and its environmental problems?

Hashem Shakeri: I have to take you back to when I first became aware of Sistan and Baluchestan Province. About ten years ago I got a call from one of my friends, who told me to hurry to a mutual friend’s house. Her name was Negar. Negar was a childhood friend from my neighborhood; she was a beautiful and gentle girl. I was told that her father had killed her, because she wanted to marry a man and her father didn’t approve. When I got to her house I saw women dressed in a kind of traditional clothing I had not seen before. They were wailing and scratching their faces, mourning in their own traditional way. Their clothes and the women’s behavior made me curious, so I asked where they were from, and I was told that they were Baluchis, from Baluchestan. That’s the first time I heard the name of this province. And something stuck in my head about wanting to know why they were so different.

Six years ago, visual storytelling became important for me, and my priority changed to working on documentary photography to tell the story of different peoples of Iran. I remembered Negar and decided to go see the place for myself. But because of security reasons, Sistan and Baluchestan being on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, I couldn’t go there easily. The place can be unsafe. Border patrol soldiers are regularly kidnapped. The project was too difficult and also too costly.

Then in 2018 I received a scholarship to the Danish School of Media and Journalism. I chose Sistan and Baluchestan as my final project topic. This was the best opportunity for me to cover this topic. I could borrow a medium-format camera from the school, which I couldn’t afford to buy myself. I had a sense that medium format, because of the atmosphere it creates, would be the right camera for this story. I also got the chance to research the subject. This project is my best-planned and best-researched project.

I arrived in the region with an understanding of the place and its situation, because I had the means to research the topic before setting off. I spoke to a number of fixers and used different drivers who facilitated access to a story that is happening very quietly out of sight. As soon as I got there I knew what the title of my project should be: “The Tired and Forgotten Land”—because that is what I was facing. I was looking at a vast emptiness that has a five-thousand-year history and was once known as Iran’s grain store because it was so lush and productive. But in the past eighteen years this place has changed so much, you’d think that all the Persian mythology that tells stories of this green and fertile land must have been lies.

Climate change is happening all around the world, but I believe in Sistan and Baluchestan it is directly affecting the sense of dignity of the people. Here the basic status of humanity is being challenged.

Hashem Shakeri, Four girls from a family in Choutani village take water from a Houtag, or pit dug to gather rainwater. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: When you say humanity’s status is being challenged in Sistan and Baluchestan, is climate change the only factor that is making life difficult for the inhabitants of this region? 

Shakeri: In the past eighteen years, climate change has had a direct effect on people’s lives. In 1973, Iran and Afghanistan signed a treaty about the right to the waters of the Helmand River for the people living downstream. The Helmand poured over the border into Iran, filling the Hamun Lake, then turned around again and returned to Afghanistan in a loop.

In 1998 the Afghan government built four irrigation canals to distribute the water of the Helmand River on their side, obstructing it from flowing into Iran, reneging on their 1973 treaty. As a result, Sistan and Baluchestan Province has experienced nearly two decades of drought, which has become acute in the past ten years. Four years ago, the yearly Helmand flood filled the Hamun once again, but it had been dry for so long, the water disappeared into the ground. No doubt mismanagement has added to the crisis. The province is full of half-finished projects.

The majority of the people who live in this province were farmers once, so when the water ran out, it took their livelihood with it. They have turned to smuggling petrol or people across the border. Twenty-five percent of the population has migrated. They move to the nearest place with water. Most of the people from Zabol have migrated to Golestan Province to the north so they can continue as farmers. Some go to Chabahar to the south on the Oman Sea for water, but there is no sweet water there. So they end up being taxi drivers. It’s a case of absolute poverty here. Unemployment leads to addiction and that leads to all sorts of other problems. If I want to record the different ways that lack of water is affecting the lives of people there, I will have to travel to the region several times over three or four years to be able to tell all the stories.

Hashem Shakeri, Until last year, water ran under the Zahak Dam, but now urban sewage runs through it. Teenagers have caught fish from the dirty water, which they sell for bread. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: I’ve heard from a friend who grew up in Zabol that there were so many fish in the river that she used to catch fish with her hands as a child. That’s how much water they used to have. A section of society lived on fishing alone.

Shakeri: I photographed three young men who were fishing under the Zahak dam, right opposite the governor’s office. The dam is now where the city’s waste is collected. I asked them if they were going to eat the fish from this dirty water; they said no, they will sell it to the poorer families who can’t afford anything better. The boys will buy bread for themselves with the money.

A little further under a bridge near the dam, five addicts were hanging out. I spoke to one of them and photographed him—Hoveyda, a thirty-year-old man who was collecting rubbish. He was living in a hole by the pipes running the drinking water supply of the city very close to the governor’s office. But no one does anything. He said he wanted to go into rehab, but feared that he would be arrested because he doesn’t have a birth certificate. These problems are all visible to the authorities, so quite clearly there is a case of mismanagement here as well.

There was a time that the people of this province lived like kings, through their farming. There is a famous wind called the 120-day wind, which can actually last for 170 days. It blows across the province. Sometimes the speed reaches 120 kilometers per hour. It blows across Lake Hamun. Imagine when there was water in the Hamun—this wind would hit the water and return at speed, working like a natural cooling system. Now, the lake is a dustbowl. When the wind blows, it brings only dust. You sleep at night and in the morning your doorway is covered in a heap of dust. This dust is destroying people’s lives. In 2016 this region was one of the most polluted areas. So it’s not just drought, but pollution too. I went to the region once just for the winds but I kept having to stop working, because my mouth would fill up with dust.

Hashem Shakeri, Before the draught struck, part of the Hirmand River moved through the Zahak Dam and entered the Hamun Lake. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: What’s the difference in the problems facing this region and other areas of Iran facing loss of water in a dramatic way, like Lake Urmia, or Isfahan’s Zayandeh Rud?

Shakeri: I have visited these other areas too. I think because these two cases are closer to the capital, they have received a lot of publicity. I decided to go to S&B because as a minority people in a marginal geography, their voice is not heard. It’s like they are screaming but no one is hearing them. The place reminded me so much of Waiting for Godot. It’s years that they are just waiting for something to happen, for a miracle to happen. A people who had a magnificent past are sitting waiting for that past to reappear again. But they seem to be completely dispossessed now. Some of the people here don’t even have birth certificates, because they may have moved over from Pakistan. So they live in homes made of date branches.

Anvari: It sounds like you had so many different social issues that you could have zoomed your lens on throughout this project.

Shakeri: I decided to stick to the water shortage as the main theme of my project so as not to get lost and distracted by the various issues. All the other problems are so grave they need to be looked at separately.

Hashem Shakeri, Poverty, unemployment, and addiction have spread through the region. Hoveyda, 30, lived next to the Zahak Dam, which until recently was full of water but is now contains sewage and garbage. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: Let’s have a look at the form of your photographs. You said it was your first time using medium format. One thing that sticks out to me as someone who sees a lot of photos of Iran is the colors that run across the whole series—a dreamy set of pastels that have a dusty look about them. Are these the colors of drought? Because there is a sublime beauty to them. You have managed to inject some romance into this rather dire situation.

Shakeri: I see myself as an experimental artist more than a photographer. Anyone can take photographs, these days. People are taking amazing photos with their phones, but that’s not art. I thought very hard about how I would treat this story. I do this with every project. I’m a documentary photographer, and visual storytelling is what I do. For me visual storytelling is no different from any other filmmaking or any other medium in art. I have to use whatever I need to be able to tell a dramatic story, which I like to imbue with a poetic atmosphere. My world is without time or geography. A no-man’s-place that can occur anywhere. I’m looking for the human soul, so if I work on climate change in the US, I might create a similar atmosphere.

When I got to the location, I encountered a sharp light and most of my photography happened at midday. So I went up by three or four stops as I took the pictures, so I could escape the sharp light. This overexposure made the impression of desolation that I had about this place possible. I was hugely inspired by Roy Andersson, who creates dead and dramatic atmospheres, and Michael Haneke, who changed my life completely, not only in art but in my personal life. I learned from him about the relationships between people and their states of mind, but also how I can photograph between my own imagination and the reality. I love my own subjectivity.

If there is an incident, even if there are no photojournalists around, many people can capture that image—but how many people can turn it into a story? I think about how I take a photograph subjectively, so as to make the story my own. The more personal it is, the more the viewer can connect to the story and the more awareness it creates.

Hashem Shakeri, Behzad, 5, swings in Takht Edalat Village located along Hirmand River, which is now completely dried. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: Can we say that you have taken the voice of the locals, which you say you hear as a scream, and changed it to a song?

Shakeri: I like that analogy. I like the photos I take to be poetic even if they are about the most bitter and horrific human experiences. Not necessarily beautiful, but what seems aesthetically right to me. Maybe this is my decisive moment, the intuition that I am experiencing at the time. It’s a challenge looking at a disaster and making it beautiful and effective.

Anvari: These photos are certainly not hard on the eyes, considering all the hardship you found surrounding the story. Maybe that’s why they are attracting so much attention, which in turn brings attention to the water and environmental issues that people might turn away from otherwise.

Shakeri: I think sometimes, viewers feel they are having an issue shoved down their throat. With this series, I was surprised that mainly art magazines and even a fashion magazine have asked to publish the images.

Hashem Shakeri, Mohammad, 42, at an abandoned mosque located at the heights of the former Takht Shah Village. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: This makes a lot of sense, specifically about one of your photographs, where a Baluchi man is standing by a rock in the wind. It’s a beautifully evocative photo where the eye is held by the folds of the man’s local outfit. We don’t see any of the horrific issues that you witnessed in this photograph, not the poverty, not the environmental disaster—it looks exactly like a fashion photograph.

Shakeri: Exactly. Medium format’s perspective creates that atmosphere. I tried to work in a minimal way, and the format requires a certain stillness. Plus the fact that I had to be frugal about the use of the medium-format film, because you can’t find it in Iran. So I had to learn to wait for my shot. The photo of the family taking the soil of the dry riverbed for their garden took me twenty hours to get.

Anvari: Apart from the foreign artists you have mentioned, do you see any Iranian photographers’ influences in your work?

Shakeri: Not directly. But no doubt our war photography has had an effect on me, how could it not? People like Abbas Attar, Alfred Yaghoubzadeh, Mohammad Farnood, Kaveh Kazemi, and their war photography have definitely made an impression on my subconscious, because I saw their photos during the war years as a youngster. But I have tried to take it up a level. If you look at the Magnum archive, which I have scoured studiously, up until ten years ago, all the photographers were feeding from the same visual subconscious; you can’t tell their photographs apart. Classic black-and-white. But then it changes by bringing in new photographers who are experimenting with art.

I reach out to other arts. I am a professional actor and have tried to find a common ground between photography and theater, because photography wasn’t going to be enough.

Hashem Shakeri, The Rige Mouri village was near the river, but it is now a wilderness covered with sand and dust. The Saravani family, who have lived in the region for more than 100 years, remember swimming in the river and working in the area. From the series An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Anvari: You’ve received a lot of attention outside Iran with this series. What’s been the reaction to this work inside?

Shakeri: I offered the photos free of charge to some Iranian publications but none of them would take them. Even though I am highlighting how Afghanistan is infringing on Iranian rights to Helmand water. This made me very sad. After all, these photos should be seen in Iran by Iranians first and foremost, on huge billboards, so they know what’s going on in Sistan and Baluchestan.

Haleh Anvari is a writer based in Iran.

The post In Iran, Images of a Dystopian Water Crisis appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Pixy Liao Straddles the Male and Female Gaze

In her playful, collaborative photographs, the Chinese photographer upends the meaning of “muse.”

By Jon Feinstein

Pixy Liao, Open Kimono, 2018
Courtesy the artist

For more than twelve years, Pixy Liao and her partner Moro have been making collaborative self-portraits, playfully contorting gendered displays of power in photography and art history. Liao’s series Experimental Relationship depicts the couple in reversed, often intentionally stiff roles. The scenes recall, lampoon, and flip Liao’s expectations of relationship dynamics inherited from growing up in Shanghai, China: marrying an older man (Moro is five years younger) who would also be her mentor, and enjoying less authority.

The photographs, with Moro and Liao usually looking directly into the lens, place Liao in control. This ranges from subtle interactions—Moro sitting on Liao’s lap—to the hilariously direct, as when Liao pinches Moro’s nipple in homage to the 1594 painting Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses sœurs.

Liao’s latest exhibition, Open Kimono, builds on Liao and Moro’s collaboration with photos made in 2018 while the couple traveled through their home countries of China and Japan. Often clothed in traditional Japanese dress, Liao nods to Japanese Pinky Violence films (a genre in Yakuza films in which the leading roles are female) and Chinese mythology. I recently spoke with Liao about her process and evolution of ideas.

Pixy Liao, Mountain Mirror, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Jon Feinstein: Where does the title Open Kimono come from?

Pixy Liao: Open Kimono is also the title of one of the photos in the show. The show has two parts; one part is from a photo trip I took in Japan in which we both wore kimonos. I’m always fascinated by the sexual attraction of a partially opened kimono. It’s revealing secrets depending on how open it is. The project Experimental Relationship is like opening my thoughts to the public.

Feinstein: “Opening up to the public . . .”—how so?

Liao: I grew up in China. It’s a very different society than the U.S. In the U.S., people like to express themselves and are never afraid to be different. You won’t even be noticed much even if you are weird. In China, people don’t want to stand out. Any difference will immediately be talked about and discouraged. I’m used to hiding my thoughts and just blending in with the group. I felt that revealing my weird thoughts were too risky when I was younger. Experimental Relationship helped me to recognize my real self and get used to revealing my real thoughts.

Pixy Liao, Sento Thinker, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Feinstein: You’ve been making this work for more than twelve years. What’s changed about how you’ve made, or thought about, this work with this new chapter over the past year?

Liao: For the new show, I think it’s the first time I show so many photos from the same photo shoot (eight images). It’s a rare occasion that I actually planned a big photo shoot for this. I found a very old hotel in a town with the smallest population in Japan. For the role in the photos, I was imagining the female Yakuza women in the cult films.

Feinstein: What made you decide to include mostly images shot in 2018 and from the same shoot in this show?

Liao: Last year, I published a photobook including my photos from 2007 to 2017. Many of those photos have been circulating since then. So I thought it would be interesting to see only some new work in the exhibition.

Pixy Liao, The Women in the Red Robe, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Feinstein: Much of this new work was made while traveling, whereas, in the past, my understanding was that it was made in a much less transitory context. Did this impact how the photos were made?

Liao: During our earlier years, Moro and I were students, and then we graduated and we moved every year trying to find a more stable place to live. And after living in the same Brooklyn apartment for eight years, I got bored taking photos in my own apartment. Location is a very important element to inspire me to work. So now I always look for good locations for photos during our trips.

Feinstein: The cable release is present in almost all of your photos. I see it as an acknowledgment of the photographic process, an awareness that the photographer is present, that there’s a sense of fabrication and construction. Most literally I see this as relating to the staging of your relationship, but I think there might be more here.

Liao: I had to use the cable release in my photographs because it’s always just the two of us. Moro is usually the person who holds the cable release. In the beginning, I handed him the cable release because my hand does not have enough power to squeeze the air bulb. It would make my facial expression very painful.

One of the earliest photos in the project, called Relationships work best when each partner knows their proper place (2007), shows me pinching Moro’s nipple while he clicks the shutter, and the cable release extends outside of the frame. Me, him, the audience are all connected by the cable release. I also think it’s like a metaphor for our relationship. Sometimes the one who seems to be in control is actually the one who is being controlled. And I like the fact that he also has control in the image making. After this image, I always leave the cable release in the photo.

Pixy Liao, Relationships work best when each partner knows their proper place, 2008
Courtesy the artist

Feinstein: Like the nipple grab you mentioned, humor seems to be an important part of your work.

Liao: I have to enjoy the process to make it work. The work needs to amuse me in some way. People might think humor means “not serious.” But only when I’m humored can I find my true self.

Feinstein: A big piece of this series is about flipping and rethinking the history of the male gaze and the tradition in art, photography, and cinema of women-as-muse. Has making these images changed how you think about that history?

Liao: This history is a result of our world revolving around men for thousands of years. Men have always been in power for the majority of time and places. So there’s no doubt that the male gaze and women-as-muse has always been in favor. I’m glad to see that now a “female gaze” is getting more recognized these days; that means our world is changing.

Pixy Liao, Untitled (Moro in Dawn), 2018
Courtesy the artist

Feinstein: When I was in school in the early 2000s, I read a passage in Terry Barrett’s Criticizing Photographs about how photographer and critic Diane Neumaier tried to photograph her husband the way historic male photographers like Harry Callahan had photographed their wives—with a sense of muse-ish romance—but found the photos to be “emasculating,” and, in her words, photographic “failures.” The process and experience created new revelations for her about a problematic history of men photographing women. We’re more than two decades past these revelations, yet I think it’s interesting to consider them in the context of your work.

Liao: That is interesting! I never thought that taking photos of Moro could result in photographic “failures.” And if Moro seems less masculine, that is my goal. But my starting point is different than Diane Neumaier’s. I didn’t start by wanting to reverse male photographers photographing their female muses. Before I became a photographer, I had already developed a taste for less masculine males. What inspires and interests me the most are actually photos by gay photographers photographing men.

Also, I think the word emasculating is problematic. It means “deprive (a man) of his male role or identity,” so that means something is being taken away. I wonder why masculinity is man’s most essential quality—I never see it that way.

Feinstein: Has the renewed attention to women’s empowerment impacted how you view this work or your process?

Liao: Even though I personally support the #MeToo movement, I don’t think my exhibition is in response to it. The #MeToo movement might have put more spotlights on females in general, but my process hasn’t been affected by it. I was going to make the work anyways.

Feinstein: With Moro having a great deal of control in making these photos, would you consider this work to be in the “female gaze” or something in between? And how important is that distinction to you?

Liao: I think it’s something in between. Although I’m the mastermind behind the project, Moro is a collaborator. There are so many things that cannot be controlled by me—it all depends on him, like his facial expressions, his body gestures. And he also improvises during the photo shoot. The moment when he clicks the shutter—he was sure of the moment while I was just waiting.

Pixy Liao, Study of A House Husband, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Feinstein: You’re branching out into sculpture and other processes, like risographs, as well. How do these relate to the series and ideas at large?

Liao: The sculpture and risograph piece in the show is part of a larger project I’m working on about female ambitions and leadership, called Evil Women Cult. The two pieces were inspired by the one and only empress in Chinese history, Wu Zetian. What relates to my work is probably my female position. I make work based on my feelings growing up as a girl in China, and how I feel as a woman in today’s world.

Feinstein: The original project title Experimental Relationship refers to a kind of staging of romance, of the roles, gender dynamics, and power often associated with it. Have these stagings changed how you and Moro think about your real-life relationship?

Liao: One thing I have learned is that relationships, even between the same two people, are always changing. The other thing we learned is that role-playing can bring so much fun to a long-term relationship. Making the photos sometimes is taking the role-play to the extreme, doing things that you wouldn’t normally do. And because it is for photographs, that makes it acceptable.

Jon Feinstein is a curator, writer, photographer, and cofounder of Humble Arts Foundation.

Pixy Liao: Open Kimono is on view at Chambers Fine Art through April 27, 2019.

The post Pixy Liao Straddles the Male and Female Gaze appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

For This Young Photographer, A “Simple Song” of Images

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s photographs capture the private moments hiding in our everyday, public lives.

By Luther Konadu

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., On Ice, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Looking at artist Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s photographs over the last few years, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out on something, like catching the middle of a conversation between friends on public transit, or overhearing one side of a phone call. In the presence of Brown’s photographs, you remain in wonder, speculating within the gaps he leaves for us onlookers. Instead of giving in to photography’s susceptibility to spectacularize or idealize, Brown opts for the uneventful, seemingly inconsequential bits and pieces laden with history and elliptical meaning.

It’s no surprise that Brown’s recent solo show at the Baxter Street Camera Club was titled a simple song—a reference to a Billy Preston track, initially created as a hushed intimate recording, that later became propped up by label heads for commercial success. When I spoke with Brown recently, he described that act of communicating something private in public as being core to his overall practice. “I’m inherently dealing with visibility but privileging the interiority of the individuals and spaces I have access to,” he explained.

Throughout the works in a simple song, Brown manages to be plainspoken, but only enough to keep you at a distance. Every decision, from the images themselves to their idiosyncratic titles and their physical displays, feels highly deliberate and considered. There’s no identifiable beginning or end the viewer might try to piece together into a neat narrative. Over our conversation, we got further into the ways he continues to complicate his photographic practice through sculpture, and what it means to reach beyond the mere flatness of a photograph.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Keep that one metaphorical, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Luther Konadu: You briefly mentioned before we started talking that you might be working on a public installation. Have you ever done anything like that before? 

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.: No, I never have but always wanted to. Most everything that we interact with can be repurposed to structure a photograph. Everything is made out of a rectangle. Everything has a square in it. Everything that is a shape, a photograph can somehow occupy. I would like the opportunity to do something public and that can breathe in a different way in terms of who would interact with it and what the work is. A lot of the time, working with photographs, you end up working with them as these precious objects, and I’d like the opportunity to make something physical that can take some use or be impacted by the environment somehow.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Just Beyond, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Konadu: Do you see that as something that is coming out of your recent work, in terms of incorporating relief elements into the photograph, which is otherwise flat on the wall?

Brown: That is an aspect of the recent work. The largest structure in my show at Baxter Street was a piece inspired by an awning, but didn’t end up referencing an awning. It’s made of willow so there’s a natural element involved in its actual structure. It was an object that no matter how I handled it, I could make missteps or not be as gracious with it. I appreciated that one wrong move would not render this piece unseeable; it could still be shown in public space. Similarly, in another piece constructed after a traditional photo panel, a lot of the damages were a result of working through how to make this thing. The wire was coming out of the groove and breaking as I worked with it. I decided to intentionally wound some areas of the work so that it made sense. I think ultimately, because of the reference for that structure and thinking about how that structure may have lived in someone’s house, or may have received some kind of wear over time, it works. The damages don’t stop it from being displayed.

That process reminded me of my mother’s collection of Lenox Angels. Lenox is a brand that makes plates and other dining ware, but they also make angels. They were specifically making these African-inspired angels where each of the angels was given a significant name. One of them represented music, another strength, and agility, et cetera. My mom has collected over fifteen angels and, over time, a lot of them have been broken. In the various houses—three or four homes—my mother has lived in since my parents divorced, those angels have always had a place to be seen in the house regardless of their damage. Sure, these items were intended to be protected, but the sentiment and the act of cherishing them are consistent; therefore, they’ll continue to be displayed. I like objects from that perspective. They don’t have to be perfect. They can exist publicly even as they’ve been transformed by time.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Sssummmmmwhhhhhhhhhhere, 2018. Lightbox print, painted aluminum, and willow
Courtesy the artist

Konadu: The lightbox in the show feeds into this outdoor way of viewing images as it relates to advertising billboards. The scale of it is also something we haven’t seen from you before. It sounds like you are very much in that place of physicality: thinking about how objects in space enact with our bodies, trying to make a linkage between the two-dimensional way of working—collapsing our three-dimensional space into these flat surfaces—now that you are going back into a very physical mode of working. Was it inevitable that you’d take this new turn?

Brown: The very first piece I ever exhibited was in my junior year of college in 2015. And I was thinking about how I wanted to frame it, but something about the work didn’t make sense in a traditional frame. I had this idea to instead frame it in ribbed undershirts that were stained and bloodied by a costume designer. The work was about internal dialogue and conflict, so I wanted to communicate a sense of abuse that was tangible. I knotted and stapled them around the piece and that was the frame. That was my first gesture as an exhibiting artist but also an artist that cared about each element involved in showing my work to people. And so, these dimensional qualities have always existed when I’m making a photograph. The flatness of the picture is something that I love but it’s also a limitation. I love objects and the things they possess; how they can communicate various experiences and time. The objects in my images are oftentimes equally as important as the individuals in them. When I’m making a picture, I’m already thinking about how I can incorporate the space that the photograph is made into the image and beyond the image. The camera limits the frame to a certain view, so how can I embellish what is not pictured here?

Konadu: That’s something I’m always thinking through with my own work. I’m always trying to figure out how I can continue a single image or multiply it in a way that the reference points to different directions. I think a great example of this in your work is a piece you have in the show right now: He gave and he gave … (2018). That piece is almost disorienting. I have to slow down and look at it several times. I like what you are doing there. You are not making it easy for the viewer to passively consume the image. I think that ties into what you were saying about the frame and the image coexisting together.

Brown: I’m invested in how people live with photographs in public and private spaces. When I’m in public, I’m constantly observing spaces where images can or do inhabit and how I can use that in my own work. The same thing happens when I’m in an interior and thinking about how images inhabit people’s private spaces. That piece was inspired by the way my grandmother collects photographs and the frames she uses to organize them. But more specifically, I had already been thinking about family photo panels and how I can use the frame to cause a tension with the photograph. I wanted to use my own photographs that would work in this fractured, compartmentalized, disjointed way, kind of against how the family photo panel was designed to function.

Family photo panels are traditionally used to organize photographic experiences that are somewhat scripted celebratory moments, experiences of accomplishment such as graduations or awards. Experiences are organized very neatly in these frames and I wanted to reference how sometimes experiences in my life are not neat. Things are haphazard. When you recall some of these experiences as a memory, there are certain memories that are pronounced that you are hyperaware of. There are other memories that are lost and not visible in the photograph that your memory creates. That drove the way that I obscured and made visible the images in that piece. The title also helped reveal my inclination behind putting those two images together.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Is it that I desire to see Jesus bend, to witness them at odds or in question? Jesus loves me, but I believe that Jesus is in process too., 2018
Courtesy the artist

Konadu: I like how you play with a discontinuity in your work. Photography can easily fall into a narrative driven space, but you seem to jump in and out in the way you image the spaces, objects, and figures in your work. It sometimes seems like you are showing us something specific, but that leads us nowhere in particular. I’m wondering if you can speak about the usefulness in engaging with discontinuity in terms of how the individuals in your images are read.

Brown: The recent Soul of a Nation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum was talking about the history of photography as it pertains to black people’s usage of it. It talked about the Kamoinge collective headed by Roy DeCarava, and the ways in which that collective practiced photography w rooted in realityasking reality to prove their thesis. So, they go out and make photos of people on the street and of events and these photographs serve a particular purpose in terms of how you position them through history. But then it started talking about how the next movement of photography by black photographers was led by people like Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, who began to consolidate experience into these re-fabricated non-specific moments. So, when you think about Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table series, it’s a completely fabricated moment where she’s thinking about a lot of different things and symbolizing them, as opposed to documenting how these things show up in reality. These are photographers who are conjuring an image within an environment that looks familiar. And so, it teeters on the line of a document versus a studio fabrication. And I think it is within that tradition that I work. I work in ambiguity in the way that someone like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates these characters that exist within an environment that can be either real or imagined or someplace in between.

These moments of happenstance where people are at leisure or in dialogue—that’s something I’m interested in when framing my work. I don’t work in series and so working within these structures allows me to imbue these singular images with a relationship to one another, but also with a multiplicity where their biographical context—presenting it on its own—might not allow. I’m making photographs that move around, challenge other images, offset them, complement and broaden the span of the moment and what they can be of service to.

I think that my practice is maybe more akin to how I see painters work with perspective and how you can be placed in multiple places at once. When I first saw Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s paintings, it really shot my mind. The way he depicts the figure is exactly what I want to communicate in my work. He’s able to make the bodies and the space transcend their natural limits and speak to this collective way we experience and recall things. I think other mediums are often more successful in doing that than photography.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Kearra, over it, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Konadu: Some of your images carefully consider color, texture, and composition the way a painter would—I’m taken by those elements. Examples of this are in works like 96 degrees in the shade (2017) or Kearra, over it (2016) or Mommy, Jayden and I at Christmas (2016). It comes to be a deflection of direct observation of sorts from the viewer—we are not seeing a person but instead a picture of them. If I describe this as formalism, it is not simplifying the image but rather form acting almost like a blockade.

Brown: The form is definitely integral to how you navigate the work in terms of defining the viewer’s distance to the piece. There are some photographic works by other artists that are confrontational. They position the gaze in the way that while you are looking at this work, this person who made the work and the people in them are looking at you. Notions of agency and power dynamics are integrated into such works. There are photographs that work to fold you into the experience of that space or event. In my work there are a lot of things that are peppered through the space There are a lot of points that allow you to imagine further about this work because all of the work is about intimacy, maintaining a certain privacy, and discretion; naturally the viewer is not allowed mentally and physically to have a certain proximity to the work.

I think the form helps guide that. I think that process of your body relating to these works is a part of the work itself. When you think about the large awning structure I was talking about earlier, it dictates the distance you have to stand. I’m still working on the language around this but the structure dictates that there’s a certain way that you should behave when guiding these works. I don’t think of that behavioral requirement as abusive or repressive but educational. Here is a way to relate to someone’s life that does not require me to own or know everything, but requires me first and foremost to be respectful. When I’m making these works, I’m thinking about how I interact with others. It foregrounds behaviors within my own life.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., She threatened most people off the dance floor. Fingers now laced quietly along the red countertop., 2018
Courtesy the artist

Konadu: You talk about intimacy and private encounters as being central to your work. How is that sustained as you continue to move outward and become more extroverted with the scale of the work, the sculptural components, and potentially future public works?

Brown: It’s amplified. Sometimes, when I think about these dimensional elements, it comes out of feeling like the photo is not enough to communicate what’s on my mind. But the structures are often like periods or exclamation marks at the end of a sentence that would’ve already exclaimed or ended without those markers. The markers are helpful in contextualizing the work further. The intimacy is still there. Those are the moments I want to photograph. I’m really interested in the parts of ourselves that cannot be articulated or can’t be made available to other people.

Luther Konadu is a visual artist and writer based in Winnipeg, Canada.

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The Photographer Behind John Waters’s Cult Classic “Pecker”

How Chuck Shacochis made Edward Furlong into an art star.

By Lou Stoppard

Chuck Shacochis, Matt’s First Time Stripping, 1997
Courtesy the artist

More than twenty years have passed since the release of John Waters’s film Pecker (1998), which tells the story of an aspiring photographer, played by Edward Furlong, whose deliciously gritty black-and-white images of the characters and happenings in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood catch the eye of a New York gallerist. Much hullabaloo follows—critics rave over his debut show; an arts writer calls his friends and family “culturally challenged” in the newspaper; his grandmother Memama appears on the cover of Artforum; the Whitney Museum of American Art offers him a show, to be titled A Peek at Pecker; and, eventually, the great and good of the New York art world end up partying in Baltimore, where Pecker decides to stage his own show. The film remains a cult favorite and one in a long line of movies that buoy the cliché that all photographers are eccentric if lovable outsiders.

The images in the film were the work of then twenty-eight-year-old photographer Chuck Shacochis. Briefly, his life intersected with Pecker’s, going from anonymity to the cusp of success. Before filming, he had served Waters various times at the camera shop where he worked in Baltimore. When Waters sought to book Matt Mahurin to capture Pecker’s images—who, in a happy coincidence, Shacochis had on occasion traveled to New York to assist—Mahurin pointed out that, though he was unavailable, there was an ideal person right there in Baltimore.

“On set, John used to refer to me as the Lana Turner of the film—she got discovered from nowhere,” says Shacochis. Underneath all the lampooning of the snobbism and vapidity of the art world, the film is an American-dream narrative, a story about how anyone can make it with sufficient talent and panache. Pecker’s own nonchalance in the face of all the opportunities promised by New York—“God, I don’t wanna be in Vogue,” he says at one point—is ironic, given that Shacochis was unable to turn the images into a viable career, despite the strength of the work and a succession of calls after the film’s release.

Plans to move to New York, including one to enroll at Pratt Institute, never worked out, often due to family issues or financial restraints. “I had people saying, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why haven’t you turned this into insane fame and fortune?’ That happened a lot, and, for a while, I got bitter about it,” he recalls. Shacochis still lives in Baltimore and continues to make portraits in the Hampden area—his work is tender and less sensationalist than the Pecker images. His pictures, he says, are images of “really quiet, nondescript moments.”

Chuck Shacochis, Little Chrissy, 1997
Courtesy the artist

Filming was stressful. While various photographers have produced images credited to fictional photographers in films—Don McCullin for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-Up and Steve Pyke and Mick Lindberg for Mike Nichols’s 2004 Closer—the Pecker setup was unusual, as Shacochis was taking photographs on set, rather than in advance, and the prints were being used immediately in the film. After a take, he would duck in and make an image, such as that of Pecker’s kleptomaniac best friend, Matt, played by Brendan Sexton III, dancing on a Baltimore bar. (Matt has turned to stripping after being unable to shoplift unchallenged in the wake of Pecker’s fame.)

After shooting, Shacochis’s film would be rushed to a lab, so that it could be returned to him at the end of the day to be printed in his own darkroom through long nights and then presented to Waters the next morning. Sometimes he’d end up with only a couple of usable frames, such as when he was tasked with shooting two rats having sex; “Every day I’d be like, Please God, please God, let there be something here that can work.” Waters wanted the photographs to look deliberately amateur, so Shacochis printed through a piece of glass that he covered in dirt and tea-bag stains. He made about thirty prints in total and was forced to turn all of the negatives over to the producers when filming ended.

Shacochis also found himself tasked with teaching the somewhat chaotic Furlong how to pass as a half-decent photographer: “I spent a while showing him how to use a camera, and how to move around a darkroom like you know what you’re doing so it didn’t look completely ridiculous—because photographers always complain about that kind of stuff in films about photography, and John was really concerned about it.”

Like nearly all of Waters’s movies, Pecker is a love letter to Baltimore. “It’s an amazing place,” says Shacochis, “but it’s also a giant pain in the ass because there is so much possibility here that just never gets realized.”

Lou Stoppard is a writer and curator based in London.

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Okwui Enwezor Pioneered a New Kind of Global Exhibition

Through ambitious shows staged around the world, the curator raised the profile of African art and photography.

By Brian Wallis

Okwui Enwezor and Artur Walther, New York, 2011
Courtesy The Walther Collection

When the visionary curator Okwui Enwezor selected a title for the 2015 Venice Biennale, he chose “All the World’s Futures.” For many, this was an optimistic message of hope and prophecy. But for Enwezor, who died last week in Munich at the age of fifty-five, the future was less an abstract ideal than the embodiment of social change, a tangible ongoing project of individuals thinking and working in communal dialogue—a process in which art and art exhibitions played a central role. Unlike many curators, Enwezor understood that each exhibition was an essay or an argument, a brief in what he called his “change agenda.” By this he meant not only rewriting existing art-critical canons, but also introducing a radical rethinking of the role that art—and artists—can inhabit in shaping social and political ideas.

Enwezor was, without doubt, the most influential curator of his generation, noted for bringing an unexpected global perspective to mega-exhibitions like Documenta and the Venice Biennale. From the late 1990s onward, during an era of proliferating biennials and blockbuster exhibitions, he was a master showman. But with his erudition and scholarly demeanor, Enwezor, who was born in Nigeria and moved to New York in the early 1980s, was able to steer clear of the glitzier commercial tendencies of art world spectacles and produce meaningful large-scale interventions. His exhibitions were typified by weighty themes and strong statements from non-Western artists, as well as by contributions from writers, critics, filmmakers, and performance artists. His Venice Biennale featured live readings from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital—all three volumes! Such lively participations always made his exhibitions engaging and entertaining; they were rich with ideas and complemented by the visions of younger artists, as well as by mini-retrospectives of artists who were previously overlooked or marginalized.

Samuel Fosso, Self-Portrait, 1976–77
© the artist and courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Enwezor’s first major curatorial effort was the landmark exhibition In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, which he organized with Octavio Zaya at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1996. In/sight coincided with the rise on the international stage of several African artists whose work is now considered canonical, including Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, and David Goldblatt, all of whom Enwezor wrote about in later books. Then, in an incredible run of large-scale group exhibitions staged from 1997 to 2017, Enwezor organized the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), Documenta 11 (2002), the 2nd Seville Biennial (2006), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), Meeting Points 6 (2011), La Triennale 2012 at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the massive Venice Biennale (2015), along with numerous smaller exhibitions. For Enwezor, the exhibition was an opportunity for interrogation and research, and an extension of the archive—an idea he explored to great effect in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008). He studied the form and meaning and history of exhibitions as what he called “thinking machines.” He noted that his projects evaluated not just the responsibility of art, but “the responsibility of an exhibition as a public forum.”

His organization of Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, in 2002 was an audacious and innovative breakthrough, widely considered the first truly global exhibition. It was breathtaking in its scope and ambition, with vastly increased spaces, a substantial infusion of non-Western voices, and scholarly research conferences (or “platforms”) organized in advance on four continents, from Lagos, Nigeria, to Saint Lucia in the West Indies. The exhibition—the fifth platform—foregrounded artists and collectives who addressed critical issues pertaining to transnational politics, raising cultural hybridity and cultural migration as key concerns in contemporary artistic practice. The implicit thesis of Documenta 11 was that the physical and psychic displacements of twenty-first-century global realignments could best be understood through cultural forms—the written, filmed, visualized, and performed expressions that shape identity and highlight social injustices in the challenged context of today’s world.

Nontsikelelo (Lolo) Veleko, Cindy and Nkuli, 2003
© the artist and courtesy the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Enwezor was a citizen of world cultures, but throughout his work he returned to the primacy and centrality of African arts, not simply to redress the slights and omissions of lingering colonialist Eurocentrism, but also to assert the complex contemporaneity of approaches based on different histories and modalities. With a comprehensive and methodical agenda, he helped to engineer a profound reconsideration of the arts and culture of the African continent and diaspora. Initially grappling with the lack of a critical dialogue around art of African and African American artists, he cofounded, with Olu Oguibe and Salah Hassan, the critical publication Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in 1994. He later outlined a bold historical arc, often driven by photography, in exhibitions that traveled internationally, including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (2001), Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (2006), and Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (2012). He also curated an important show on African photographic portraiture for The Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm, Germany, titled Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity (2010).

These historical—yet often surprisingly timely—exhibitions were a postcolonial riposte to the conventional narrative of Western cultural dominance. They were also richly modeled investigations that traced the complex artistic genealogies of various African nations to demonstrate how art and photography were vital to self-expression and political self-determination. Enwezor’s exhibitions were frequently described as political, but this sometimes pejorative descriptor made them sound ponderous or didactic. They were anything but that. He understood and validated art as an important means of social activism, a form of translation and transmutation, a talking back to social inequalities and abuses of power. Yet, for Enwezor, who published frequently and championed artists including William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Yinka Shonibare, Yto Barrada, Lorna Simpson, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Lyle Ashton Harris, the real power of the political was the construction of meaning in all things, artistic and otherwise—not merely as a propagandistic affirmation of ideologies, but as a subtler, allegorical way of representing and affirming the political in everyday life.

James Muriuki, Matatus II, from the series Town, 2005
© the artist and courtesy the The Walther Collection

Although Enwezor served as director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich from 2011 to 2018, he was never comfortable in institutions, as an administrator or bureaucrat. He preferred to be, as he said, “unaffiliated.” At Haus der Kunst, a museum constructed by Adolf Hitler to highlight Germany’s nationalist artworks, Enwezor addressed the persistent cloud of World War II in the staging of his last major exhibition, the magisterial Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, curated with Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes. Enwezor brought together more than 350 works by 218 artists from 65 countries, as well as various scholarly symposia, to radically reconsider the responses of post–World War II artists to the substantive political circumstances of technological change, anticolonial liberation movements, and the international struggle for civil rights and human rights. Overturning any lingering belief in the triumph of American painting and other hackneyed formalist narratives of art history, this exhibition sought to redress the cultural, racial, and national biases of the past and to instate a more nuanced and egalitarian critical approach to modern art.

Enwezor understood that art and art exhibitions always have a role in responding to the messy and precarious world they inhabit. He opposed a view of art exhibitions and art practices that would preclude such political realities, or that would fail to address the future. “An exhibition, as a space of public discourse, a stage of anticipatory practices, and as a statement of intent,” Enwezor said, “can no more assert a distance from its cultural context than it can repress the very social conditions that bring it into dialogue with its diverse publics.” Art was, for him, an “analytical lens” through which to engage the world and to apprehend the future, and the exhibition was art’s platform, a thinking machine to navigate a legacy of catastrophes instigated by Western capitalism and its colonialist enterprises. “To think about the future,” Enwezor reflected, “is to think about one’s own possibilities in the world.”

Brian Wallis is a writer and curator based in New York. From 2000 to 2015, he was the chief curator at the International Center of Photography.

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A Japanese Photographer’s Encounters with Natural Disasters

Eight years after a devastating tsunami, Lieko Shiga investigates Japan’s haunted landscapes.

By Amanda Maddox

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

Death, like the tsunami about to usher it ashore, moves toward her. She is standing unaware outside a grocery store in the city of Natori. She can’t see the ten-foot waves cresting in the Pacific Ocean. She doesn’t feel the seismic plates shifting, scraping, subducting, or lifting the sea floor approximately eighty miles away. All she knows is what they told her: tsunamis do not happen in Kitakama village, where the sandy coastline near her studio runs straight and narrow. Then the Great East Japan Earthquake hits on March 11, 2011, the first blow of the “triple disaster” that will claim more than 15,500 lives. But photographer Lieko Shiga, alone in a parking lot, twenty miles from the village, doesn’t realize this yet.

When the aftershocks subside, Shiga runs inside the store. Everyone is safe. She returns to her car and drives toward her studio—a prefab trailer nestled among the magical grove of pine trees adjacent to Kitakama beach. Her boyfriend calls, unscathed but upset. “Please don’t go to your village,” he says, having heard a tsunami warning issued over the radio. “It’s coming.” But she keeps driving until, suddenly, she sees it. The sea stretches out like a long, dark coffin. A massive, brown wave filled with debris barrels toward her white Mazda. She reverses quickly and races in the opposite direction, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror as the waves close in behind her. Along the road that leads inland, she passes a mother with her son walking calmly and obliviously. Shiga doesn’t know them, but she urges them into the car, where they wait out the snowy night together parked in front of Natori City Hall.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

I first heard Shiga recount parts of this story in summer 2014. We were in Tokyo, and she was pregnant with her son, Shiita. As she recalled the nearness of the waves, her protruding belly came to signify her survival. She embodied the notion that proximity to death conversely breeds proximity to life. Similarly, hearing the tsunami described as more devastating than war, she told me, made her identify that event as the first “super real” experience of her life. Born in 1980 and raised in a suburb of Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture, where the neighboring Toyota plant and assorted manufacturing facilities employ the majority of the local workforce, she always perceived her immediate environment as an empty stage, with props and puppets acting out scenes before her eyes. But in the aftermath of the disaster, she “can finally feel what’s happening in the world.” This sensation comes to bear in her work. “I can imagine quite clearly now. I can trust my imagination. And it’s not only about dreaming; I’m connecting.” In 2008, Shiga moved to Kitakama in Miyagi Prefecture, motivated in large part by the promise of connection. A residency in nearby Sendai two years earlier introduced her to this place—its peculiarities, its agrarian roots, its strong and intoxicating natural landscape. She was immediately entranced. “I wanted to jump inside the photographs I was making here,” she said. After seven years in London, where she studied photography at Chelsea College of Art and Design until 2004, followed by two years in Berlin and residencies in Singapore and Brisbane, Shiga boomeranged back to Japan for good. Kitakama had emerged as “the place I’d been looking for all along.”

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

How could this village, situated in the “backwater” region often regarded as “old Japan” because of its slow pace and rural lifestyle, be part of the same country she called home? Like many people, her knowledge of northeastern Japan—six prefectures collectively known today as Tohoku (meaning “northeast”) but formerly called Michinoku, meaning “end of the road” or “back roads”—derived almost exclusively from Kunio Yanagita’s The Legends of Tono (1910). But that folkloric account represents one academic’s journey across Tohoku, she is quick to point out. He purportedly spent little time in Miyagi Prefecture before returning home to Tokyo. Shiga’s initial impression of the area as silent, minimal, and imbued with a punk spirit also diverged from Yanagita’s account. Intrigued and determined to discover this unusual place for herself, she understood that as an outsider she needed to establish her studio there.

To simultaneously announce her arrival, in January 2008, and ingratiate herself among villagers, Shiga passed out flyers that read: “Pleased to meet you. My name is Lieko Shiga. I have rented a space in the pines next to the Kitakama Pool … I am a photographer, and I usually travel around to various places and take photos. This will be my center of activities for the new year…. I will do my best to serve you.” She became the local community photographer. In this role, she documented everything from baseball games to town hall meetings, as well as festivals and ceremonies on the verge of dying with members of the aging population. She made portraits that villagers could give to family members or use for their own funeral services. As word spread, people began to visit her studio out of curiosity. Soon she began recording their oral histories, collecting information about them, the local environment, the economy, and the history of the village. A complex portrait of Kitakama consequently emerged, leading her to believe: “Japan is in Tohoku.”

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

Four days after the tsunami hit, Shiga returned to her studio for the first time postdisaster. It was gone. She couldn’t even locate the plot of land it once occupied because sand stretched across the forest like a massive tatami. The home she rented nearby had also washed away. “What does it mean to no longer be able to live on your own land?” she asked herself. By that point, fifty-three of Kitakama’s 370 residents had been confirmed dead; another seven were declared missing. Shiga had photographed all of them. How do you pick up the pieces of projects interrupted by disaster and death? Can you continue? Do you start over?

She arrived at an answer quickly, which she articulated in an email to worried friends and family on April 5, 2011: “What I feel compelled to confirm with my entire being is that what I started … is not over at this moment. If anything I have done in Kitakama up to now was rendered meaningless by the disaster, it was just the things that could be washed away.” But she didn’t miss her camera. In fact, she struggled with feelings of disappointment with the medium of photography—years earlier, it had allowed her to discover her existence, but now it seemed empty. And yet, charged with a sense of responsibility as the community photographer, she borrowed a camera to record her neighborhood. The choice to remain busy and connected, to serve this place as a documentarian, defined this period in her life. It informed her decision to voluntarily live in temporary shelters for three years rather than move in with her boyfriend and his family, whose home was not damaged. It justified her participation in the cleaning of found photographs at the community center. It gave her a reason to live. It alleviated pain. It allowed her to forget what happened. It allowed her to remember.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

Shiga has since realized two major projects; both embrace the past and explore notions of memory. In 2012, she released Rasen Kaigan, a body of work rooted in Kitakama that concerns the landscape—its physicality, its mythos, its history, and human intervention into it—and constitutes a collaboration with local residents. Last year, she revisited and updated a project, from 2008, called Blind Date, which features photographs of couples on motorbikes in Bangkok. The tsunami claimed most photographs made prior to March 2011 that Shiga envisioned utilizing in these series, but some files stored elsewhere remained accessible. Trusting that the pictures had been left behind for a reason, she incorporated them into new work. In the case of Rasen Kaigan, she also felt it necessary to reconceptualize the project on account of the tsunami. But the disaster itself would not become her subject; it was one moment that violently punctuated her extended engagement with the community and the land of Kitakama. What she needed to express was how the tsunami had entered her body.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

Shiga has alternately referred to herself as a camera, a vessel, and a medium. In all of these descriptions, photography takes a physical form. This perspective stems from her training in dance, which ended abruptly at the age of eighteen. Aware and deeply self-conscious of how her body was rapidly changing, Shiga abandoned dance for photography in high school, a decision she later questioned upon encountering the experimental, expressive work of Pina Bausch. However, she ultimately found she could tap her interest in performance and physicality as a photographer. This often involves pushing her body into the frame, whether literally or figuratively. In Rasen Kaigan, one self-portrait exemplifies this idea: map showing the relationship between photography and myself (2012) depicts her carving concentric circles into the sandy beach with the root of a pine tree. But arguably the most personal incursion in the series occurs in the photographs of white stones, something Shiga likens to mirrors that reflect memories of faces, animals, or trees found in Kitakama. Upon viewing the exhibition of Rasen Kaigan at Sendai Mediatheque, Miyagi Prefecture, in late 2012—where prints were displayed as a dizzying gyre in a darkened room—visitors responded to the sight of these enigmatic stones as she had. Many brought their own associations. Everyone saw Kitakama. Critic Minoru Shimizu, who took the minority position when he dismissed her photography as the stuff of “B-grade horror,” declared the installation “cleverly constructed as a stage device in which the acts of recalling and mourning alternate.” Former Sendai Mediatheque curator Chinatsu Shimizu said the exhibition resembled a funeral, with prints angled upright like tombstones in a cemetery, and the visitor experience akin to bon odori, a traditional style of dancing during the Obon festival in which people dance in circles to mourn the dead.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

In Spring Snow (1969), Yukio Mishima writes, “There is an abundance of death in our lives. We never lack reminders—funerals … memories of the dead, deaths of friends, and then the anticipation of our own death.” The proliferation of death, alluded to in Rasen Kaigan, spurred Shiga’s new body of work, Human Spring (2018–19), the third part of a trilogy that includes Rasen Kaigan and Blind Date. In 2012, while living at an evacuation center near Kitakama, Shiga found herself surrounded by mortality. Two neighbors, residing in the apartments that flanked hers, died by suicide during her stay. They were the only individuals there to fall victim to what the Reconstruction Agency of the Government of Japan officially termed “disaster-related deaths.” Classified as indirect damage caused by either physical or psychological stress, such casualties triggered by the earthquake and tsunami emerged collectively as a crisis. Many of those affected, including one of Shiga’s neighbors, were farmers who resorted to suicide because their oversalinized crops could not be sold.

But the farmer whose story anchors Human Spring is S-chan (whose name has been changed to protect his family’s privacy). A native of Kitakama, S-chan grew Chinese cabbage and melons on land owned by his family for many generations. In the late 1980s, a government-supported initiative to stimulate further agricultural production in Tohoku—an area historically cursed by famines and harvest failures—allowed him to install a greenhouse. Eager to see how his crops would perform in this new environment, S-chan visited his farm obsessively until one morning, when he discovered that everything had died overnight. He eventually recovered and revived his business, but the seed of depression had been planted inside him. It germinated for decades.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

Shiga met S-chan years later, in winter 2008. He often stopped by her studio during his morning walks to the beach. They exchanged pleasantries and became friends. But within a few months, Shiga recognized something odd about his character, something that everyone noticed but no one acknowledged out loud. In spring, about forty-eight hours before the cherry blossoms bloomed, S-chan transformed. His cheeks turned red. He never slept. He drove his tractor around town in the dark. He talked incessantly. According to Shiga, S-chan’s particular strain of mania always coincided with the change in seasons; his “super high” marked the onset of spring, which arrives so suddenly in Tohoku that “the body must respond before the heart,” Shiga said. “He was the spring itself.”

Immediately after the tsunami, Shiga and S-chan spent three months in the same temporary shelter staged inside a local middleschool gymnasium—a location referenced in Human Spring. His strange behavior continued there. He walked around clutching a Jizo statue, like a child with a stuffed animal. He visited the beach often to confer with the ghosts because, he claimed, they were lonely. Every morning, he flung open all the curtains at sunrise to announce the arrival of a new day. Though this annoyed practically everyone at the shelter, they were so charmed by S-chan’s idiosyncrasies and positive energy that “springtime mania infected them, too,” said Shiga.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

In 2013, soon after the suicides in the evacuation center, S-chan succumbed to cancer. Shiga couldn’t help but draw a parallel: one death prompted by disease, two deaths instigated by societal and financial pressures, all of the men victims of the Heisei depression—a reference to the Imperial era during which they died—and all connected through her. As time passed, she kept thinking about their final moments and thoughts, the state of their corpses, and their potential reincarnation. After these tandem deaths, Shiga confronted the fragility of her own existence when diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. She lost control of certain faculties, she sensed S-chan’s manic spirit pulsate through her every time her metabolism accelerated, and she started to channel this energy into Human Spring.

For Shiga, the process of generating her latest series began by positing simple but expansive questions: What is the history of human expression? What is inside the human body, and how is it connected to the earth and to society writ large? Such queries demanded extensive research and fieldwork, which, along with the active participation of her subjects, are mainstays of Shiga’s practice. She draws inspiration from everywhere: friends, dreams, films, dance, news events, nature, literature, mythology, personal experience. The concept of spring—as the season when cherry blossoms both bloom and die, as a period that has defined such historic uprisings as the Prague Spring and the Arab Spring, as a physical movement—serves as an organizing principle. Sometimes these varied influences and ideas yield highly controlled surrealistic work, from sculptures made in her studio that evoke Mike Kelley’s Kandors series (1999–2011) to a choreographed scene in the landscape of a suspended forest, yet her process never involves digital manipulation.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

But in alignment with Shiga’s own delicate physical state, Human Spring reflects and arises from discomfort and intentional disorder. An image of the off-kilter horizon, made from an airplane window, encapsulates the imbalanced, dualistic spirit of the project. She also wrestled with personal and national trauma by photographing in Fukushima Prefecture, where she focused on the ghost town of Futaba (population zero), located five miles from the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which released radioactive material into the ocean, soil, and air in 2011. And unlike in previous series, Shiga worked with many anonymous people and sought unfamiliar locations while making these images. These circumstances destabilized certain preconceived ideas of the project and even disrupted the previsualized images she sketched out on paper, forcing a loss of control, much like the megathrust earthquake shifted Earth’s axis and threw off its orbit. Only under such uncomfortable conditions, she claims, could she make Human Spring.

Conceived as a series of personal pictures, Human Spring originally bore the title S-chan’s Spring until Shiga realized that his story represented a set of more universal, interconnected social, environmental, and economic fault lines running just below the surface of things in Japan. S-chan’s depression felt deeply intertwined with the development of the Heisei era, which commenced in 1989 not long before the economic bubble collapsed in the early 1990s, around the time his greenhouse was installed. Broadly defined by its excess and emptiness, the Heisei period will come to a close on April 30, 2019, when the emperor abdicates his throne. In his 2017 book Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone, journalist Richard Lloyd Parry observed that the country has been “adrift, becalmed between a lost prosperity and a future that was too dim and uncertain to grasp” during much of the Heisei era; though the disaster, in 2011, had the potential to jolt “Japan out of the political and economic funk into which it had slithered,” this has not occurred. Perhaps the presentation of Human Spring at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, in spring 2019, scheduled to overlap with the end of the Heisei era, will usher in a new wave of reflection, with images that defy any sense of calmness and complacency associated with the past three decades.

Lieko Shiga, from the series Human Spring, 2018–19
Courtesy the artist

As Tohoku continues to recover and rebuild, the land still registers wounds of contamination, devastation, and depopulation. “Everywhere is the shadow of death,” as Rachel Carson wrote of a fictional town sprayed with DDT in Silent Spring, her classic 1962 book about the effects of toxins in the environment; this valuation could apply to many villages in northeastern Japan today. Citing Carson’s influence on Human Spring, Shiga acknowledges, “If I want to capture what’s happening when we’re alive, I have to think about death.” It is omnipresent, it is internal. Ideas about life and death swirl inside her constantly and quickly, such that “her mind is a kind of ocean,” as her publisher Tomoki Matsumoto put it. The tsunami that seeped into her body now spills out in her work. And one side effect, Shiga says, is that “I am living with a lot of dead and I may be a ghost.”

Amanda Maddox is associate curator, Department of Photographs, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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

The post A Japanese Photographer’s Encounters with Natural Disasters appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

A Filmmaker’s Journeys Across the African Diaspora

Throughout his career, photographs and family narratives have been at the center of Thomas Allen Harris’s films.

By Serubiri Moses

Production still from Through A Lens Darkly, 2014
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

I first came across the work of artist, writer, and filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris in an article for California Newsreel by curator Rhea L. Combs, in which she calls Harris’s documentary É Minha Cara (That’s My Face) (2001) “a queer mythopoetic journey through the African Diaspora.” Currently, Harris is known for his recent appointment as a senior lecturer at Yale School of Art, but early in his career, in the 1980s, he was known as television producer. He also gained recognition for his participation in the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and as a member of the experimental video-film and postconceptual art scene in SoHo and Lower East Side of Manhattan during the same period. Yet I have come to understand his work as being located in the cultural triangulation about the Atlantic: Africa, South America, and North America. In this interview, Harris speaks about four works: VINTAGE – Families of Value (1995), É Minha Cara/That’s My Face (2001), Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2006), and Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014).

Through a discussion of his creative process, Harris engages with the notion of the “circle” when thinking about photographic archives. He not only advances the circular as a thematic through which to view the archive, but he equally reveals the importance of archives in building stories, narratives, or history. This might not appear unique—that is, until one considers Harris as being proximate to the 1990s efforts by New York–based artists and writers who intervened in histories within which they had yet to be adequately represented. Such an effort is illustrated in the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive, which focuses on the correspondence and personal papers of several Black and queer figures, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library.

Production still fromTwelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, 2005
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Because of the precarity of historical records, personal letters and photographs are liable to go missing. Often, these are the missing parts of the “circle” or of a story. Completing this story can be challenging, if not exhausting. And as such, for Harris, the search for historical and personal archival documents is one of self-determination and conviction. Harris’s filmic process has consisted of making journeys across both time and space in Bahia, Brazil; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Bloemfontein, South Africa; and Harlem, New York.

While the photo album can be the concrete container of personal family portraits—listing dates and events in one family—it can also be a metaphor for a larger cultural and political history. In Through a Lens Darkly, Harris demonstrates how connections can be made between his own family and a larger American story through the juxtaposition of Frederick Douglass’s portrait with his childhood portraits taken by his grandfather, thus revealing the power of archives as mediums of storytelling.

Production still from É a Minha Cara (That’s My Face), 2001
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Serubiri Moses: In all your films, there is a recurring moment at which the first person “I” becomes emancipated through photography. In É Minha Cara, this happens through a filming process during which the narrator “sees himself” in the cultural process of the Yoruba festivals in Bahia, Brazil. What does a photographic liberation mean to you?

Thomas Allen Harris: I think it’s the relationship of photography to the mirror. In the sense that it can give another kind of a reflection, and not a posed reflection. It’s more about how one is seen within one’s community. It is this reflection-refraction. This sense of being present and seeing oneself across time, through photography.

I was raised in front of the camera. In the course of making my films, I realized the extent to which my grandfather documented the family. I had lived there growing up, and I was the first grandchild, the first of four that lived with them. My grandmother principally took care of me and my grandfather photographed me. And so I was the model. Just finding those images shows that the camera can be, in the context of family, this gift of love.

Moses: That’s incredible. Can you describe this more?

Harris: It means that you can actually be present with someone, engage, take pride in, and encourage. Subconsciously I have that awareness. It’s something that my brother has as well: Lyle Ashton Harris, who turns it into his own work and trajectory.

The camera has been a very reassuring presence in our lives. As opposed to some situations where people want to avoid the camera: “Don’t take a picture of me.” The way in which they are seen, they must have encountered a vision of themselves, photographically, that was about a kind of denial of beauty and power. It might be a projection. But the camera has been an affirmative tool, an emancipatory tool, growing up in a country in which the stereotype looms so large.

Production still from Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, 2005
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Moses: The family album becomes this method to examine photographic history but also national history. It is America’s photographic history, but it’s also a family history. I was interested in that, and you just affirmed it. But what other containers or structures exist beyond the family album?

Harris: For me, the archive has been clues left on a path to help me realize certain aspects of identity—whether diasporic identity or personal identity—and tools to be able to create. So much of my work is inspired by the archive, or kind of rubbing up against the archive and creating something alongside it, another narrative that’s both personal but also in the service of a collective or community building. In terms of my work, it is about socially engaged practice. As I am engaging these journeys around filmmaking, the films are really rubbing up against these individuals and changing certain things, and inviting people in. Each of them has been a participatory practice, and community building.

Moses: You have the family album as this strong container, that you can refer to; you have your own pictures, you know the people who have taken the pictures, you have seen yourself in the album change over time, you can reference it.

Harris: If I had not embarked on the films that I’ve embarked upon, it would not have set me on a journey to find these archives—they were not readily available. They were not readily available in the way that I could use them. They weren’t in my consciousness.

Production still from VINTAGE – Families of Value, 1995
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Moses: When you worked as a film producer in the late ’80s into the early ’90s, how did you transition into that kind of performative photographic work that you were making? It looks very much connected to the artists who were working around you at that time—no doubt your brother Lyle Ashton Harris is among them, as well. And what structures were available to you to do that work before you actually found the archives?

Harris: The first film is called VINTAGE – Families of Value. And that film I started in the late ’80s. It looks at three African American families through the lives of LGBT siblings. So with three different sibling sets, I gave them cameras and asked them to interview each other. In part it started when my brother tested HIV positive, and I introduced the camera into our dialogue, and we start speaking across the camera. And so that became this kind of family conversation that was happening. I was also directing these non-actors to perform, including myself, to perform their identities in a certain kind of way. I started to look for archival material to support that film. At the time, I wasn’t looking at the archival materials in this intense kind of way that I would later on in the next three films. They came to me: they were like gifts. In my bed, underneath the bed that my stepfather made for us, I found these three reels of Super 8 film. They were the films I used in that film VINTAGE – Families of Value. That’s when I started.

Production still from VINTAGE – Families of Value, 1995
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Moses: Can you tell me the story of É Minha Cara?

Harris: After we finished VINTAGE – Families of Value, I started traveling. First place I traveled with that film was Brazil. I decided to go and make a film in Brazil, I had always wanted to. I left with two Super 8 cameras to just document this journey, but also was aware—as I had done the stuff with Vintage Families—that I wanted to pass on the camera, and empower others, towards an inter-collaborative filmmaking process with me, and to film me if they wanted to. I was there for three months in Salvador da Bahia, documenting the Brazilian festivals that climax in carnival. The religious festivals, based on West African, but more specifically Yoruba deities—Oshun, the pantheon of deities that migrated from Western Africa to the New World. When I came back, I got a call that my film VINTAGE – Families of Value, even though it was rejected by almost all African American festivals in America, was selected to screen at the Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. This was 1997. They flew me from Salvador da Bahia all the way to Ouagadougou. I screened there and continued to shoot. I took my camera there as well.

So I came back from Ouagadougou directly to Salvador da Bahia. I got to see this place in Brazil, essentially Africa in America, the largest concentration of black folks in the Americas. I got to see in that one trip both through an American perspective, coming from North America to South America, but also from West Africa to Salvador, before I came home. I had this experience. It changed the way I thought about things, but also the way I was filming. And I came back, I was filming with Super 8, because when I went to Brazil—in VINTAGE – Families of Value I had used Super 8 with a lot of the fantasy material. I didn’t use footage of people talking, because there had been a lot of talking between the siblings. I decided to move forward with this nonverbal kind of performative narrative. I grew up in Tanzania, we didn’t know Swahili very well, I traveled all around. The Chinese were coming in and building. British were leaving. There was all this dialogue happening even though it wasn’t always linguistic.

Moses: What do you mean by that?

Harris: Without it having to be human dialogue, I wanted to explore this kind of communication, cross-culturally. A visual kind of investigation. And I came back with the Super 8 film, all silent. And then started writing my script. I didn’t know what the script was going to be. And then I struggled and struggled and struggled. And then at last, I had a waking dream.

Production still from É a Minha Cara (That’s My Face), 2001
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Moses: When did you have the waking dream?

Harris: This is two years later. In 1997 my grandfather died. In 1999 I had a waking dream, I went to his basement, I found more Super 8 material. Because I had just had two reels, after I’d been trying to edit this film, trying to figure out what this film is about, and I knew that it was É Minha Cara. It’s a colloquial expression that means: “That’s my face.” If we look alike and could be part of a family—É Minha Cara—we look similar. It could be familiarity, similarity, or attraction. You could see someone on the street—É Minha Cara—cruising someone. I had this kind of thing that’s all about that filming without the sound. It was about what am I attracted to and why. My face. What am I looking for and why?

I came back and tried to put this into a coherent argument in the film and a script. And I realized that my mom made a similar journey when she took us to Tanzania in the 1970s. And that my grandfather also had wanted to go to Africa, but he was never able to go. And so I was trying to write about these three generations, but I didn’t have any visuals. Then I had a waking dream. I was living in San Diego, I was teaching at the University of California in San Diego as an assistant professor, and I came back to the Bronx and I went to my grandfather’s basement and I found hours and hours of Super 8 that documented our family as we went from being “colored” to embracing a Pan-African aesthetic with my stepdad, who followed us to Tanzania. And so if I had not gone to Brazil, I would not have looked for the material. And I looked for it for two years. And boom! It happened.

Moses: What happened after you found the hours of footage?

Harris: I was basically able to tell my story through my grandfather’s archive. And then I found my stepdad’s archive. I thought he had thrown it away, because something had happened. They transferred the material to this awful video, and then threw out the Super 8. But he hadn’t! And so I was able to transfer all of the Super 8 and tell the story. I didn’t know that when I was doing my Super 8 that I would be even remotely thinking about going back to my family’s material.

Production still from Through A Lens Darkly, 2014
Courtesy Chimpanzee Productions, Inc.

Moses: How did your work with archives emerge?

Harris: Over three generations. Multiple stories. Me and my grandfather and my mother on one hand, with the auditory story, and then me, my stepfather, and my grandfather in terms of the visual story, because we were shooting. So that’s how that emerged. I also found some other material there as well. I still need to go look for some others. That’s typically how my work with the archive emerges. With the exception of Through a Lens Darkly—it’s a little bit different. In Through a Lens Darkly, I was starting with the national archive—or not so much the national but rather the Black photographic archive. I was aware of my family archive, started with that, but went back to look at things in a completely different way. For instance, with Through a Lens Darkly I juxtapose the abundance of images that my grandfather had taken with the paucity of images that my father had taken.

Moses: Returning to an earlier point in the interview, the family album as a literal object can be stored in a place: a house; a suitcase. It is dated by names, marginalia, or timestamps printed with the photographs. It can defined by the cameras and what printing paper was used. How well or how badly it was stored. However, through our conversation, you present another understanding of the family album. Can you say more about it?

Harris: One way of framing it is the album is a metaphor as opposed to being literal. It is an archive. It is what one chooses to produce. What one chooses to keep. How one creates one’s archive. And all those things both physical and invisible. [In Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela] the story is told through an expanded concept of family. It’s a literal family: Lee’s [Harris’s stepfather B. Pule Leinaeng] family, including us in Harlem, and in Johannesburg. The family of twelve Bloemfontein comrades that he left South Africa with to meet Nelson Mandela in Tanzania. Then the larger South African family. The land, diaspora, and family between South Africa and America. In order to strengthen that circle, I had to fill my part of the circle.

Serubiri Moses has written and published internationally. His research, curation, and programming have taken place in Accra, Berlin, Cali, Kampala, and Nairobi.

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Kummer & Herrman: Designing Your Story

 

Kummer & Herrman is a Dutch design agency that has built an acclaimed international portfolio of designs for photobooks. Join cofounder and designer Jeroen Kummer for a two-day workshop intended for photographers who are ready to transition their work to book form. This workshop will challenge participants to think about how to tell their photographic story in the most convincing and effective way. Participants will work with Jeroen on ways to develop their work and strategize on what materials, typography, and design elements are necessary for their project. The goal of the workshop is to determine what the work is about and how to strongly convey that idea to the public. The work brought in by participants can be either a finalized project or in development.

 

Kummer & Herrman (K&H) was founded in 1998 by Jeroen Kummer and Arthur Herrman. While their roots stem from the renowned Dutch tradition of graphic design for print, K&H has since grown into a multidisciplinary creative office that develops publications, exhibitions, visual identities, and campaigns over a wide range of media. Over the years K&H has built long-standing collaborations with individuals and organizations operating within the field of photography, leading to an internationally acclaimed portfolio of designs for photobooks, including Raphaël Dallaporta, Antipersonnel (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2011); Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong, Poppy: Trails of Afghan Heroin (Hatje Cantz, 2012); Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen, The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (Aperture, 2014); Martin Parr, We Love Britain! (Schirmer/Mosel, 2014); and Vasantha Yogananthan, A Myth of Two Souls (Chose Commune, 2016–19). In 2014, Kummer & Herrman won the prestigious Dutch Design Award.

Jeroen Kummer was born in Amsterdam in 1969. He is cofounder, designer, and creative director of K&H. In addition to his work at K&H, he currently teaches graphic design and storytelling at the Photography Department of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

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Objectives:

Determine the best design and format for your project

Develop a strategy on how to transition your project into book form

Gain insight, advice, and best practices for book design

Materials to bring:

One photographic project that you’d like to bring to book form

Tuition:

Tuition for this two-day workshop is $500 and includes lunch and light refreshments for both days.

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 Wednesday, May 15, 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 eight students is required to run a 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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Who Can Tell the Story of an Indigenous Community?

Twenty years after his first visit to New Zealand, photographer Martin Toft makes a photobook about—and for—the Māori.

By Will Matsuda

Martin Toft, Celebrating Christmas at the home of Te Tawhero Haitana and whanau in Raetih, 2016
© the artist

Te Ahi Kā: The Fires of Occupation is a record of the Danish photographer Martin Toft’s time living with a Māori community in New Zealand in 1996, as well as his return twenty years later. Toft’s deep connection to the land and the community is largely a result of his participation in an illegal occupation of Mangapapapa, an ancestral land inside Whanganui National Park, in 1996. During this time, Toft was adopted into a Māori family. They even gave him a Māori name—Pouma Pokai-Whenua. But, as photographers and critics reckon with the medium’s colonial, often racist history when it comes to representing non-Western people, who can tell the story of a community? Do we really need another white man representing Indigenous life? I recently spoke with Toft to understand Te Ahi Kā against the backdrop of decolonization, climate change, and Māori spiritualism.

Martin Toft, Descendants of female members of the family of Te Utamate Tauri, also known as Mrs. Waetford, 2016
© the artist

Will Matsuda: I’m interested to know the origins of this project. How did it begin?

Martin Toft: I lived in Auckland in 1995 while backpacking around the world. In 1996, when I was twenty-five, I returned to New Zealand on the recommendation by my mentor, a Danish photographer and photobook collector. He suggested I should begin a project about the Māori. I was very young and naive and I had no connection to Māori. I also had very little knowledge of white men using photography to explore Indigenous cultures and I knew very little about New Zealand’s colonial history.

I ended up living in a Māori community for six months in the King Country, the central plateau of the north island of New Zealand. This is where the Whanganui River runs. The river is the border between three major tribes. I spent my first two months in this area speaking with people in the community and not taking any photographs. I realized that I needed to learn to speak the language to really present who I was, as well as explain my intentions.

I met a Māori elder who taught me how to deliver a formal speech to the tribe. And when I gave a speech the first time, the elders who were listening told me that they could see my ancestors behind me when I was speaking. I had never experienced anyone talking like this. I think they saw me as someone who had come from another place, but someone whose ancestors had been there before. That’s why they welcomed me into the community.

Martin Toft, Catholic missionaries in the mid-19th century converted many Māori settlements along the Whanganui River and Jerusalem (in Māori, Hiruhārama) is still home to the religious order, The Sisters of Compassion and their historical convent and church, 2016
© the artist

Matsuda: And once you were part of the community, you became involved in their political actions as well?

Toft: After the initial ceremonies, I got integrated pretty seriously into the community. I took part in their occupation of a piece of ancestral land, Mangapapapa, deep inside Whanganui National Park, which surrounds the Whanganui River. It’s a very politically charged landscape. Many Māori tribes since the 1870s have been fighting the New Zealand government for ownership of this land and the river itself.

When the Europeans began colonizing New Zealand, they followed Western codes of land ownership; they began to portion off sections of the river and sold off pieces of land to new landowners. For the Māori, the river is a single living being, a whole thing. The tribes of Whanganui often refer to their river as an ancestor and talk about their river from the mountain to the sea. You cannot take one portion of the river, and seperate it from the rest.

In 2017, the government finally gave the customary rights and ownership of the river back to the Māori. Even more, the river has the same legal rights as a human. Before, if the Māori wanted to go fishing, travel by boat, establish a community, there were always legal disputes about how they could do this. With this new development in a settlement between the government and Whanganui tribes, it seemed a good time to return and finish the book. The book is about the time I spent with them in ’96, as well as my time there twenty years later, reestablishing the kinship that we had on a physical and spiritual level.

Martin Toft, The Whanganui River is surrounded by steep gorges covered in native bush and trees, 2016
© the artist

Matsuda: The Whanganui River appears throughout the book. In a white, Western framework, we think of a portrait of a person and a landscape photograph as two very different things. But if you’re thinking about this river as a spiritual being, as an ancestor, how does that change the way you photograph it?

Toft: I traveled up and down the river on numerous occasions. It’s a major tourist destination, and I didn’t want to take the clichéd photos that everyone else was taking. I wanted the book to mimic what it’s like when you’re traveling the river. All you can see is water and the bush on the riverbanks. In the book you never see any images of the river from above. Instead, it’s dense and dark.

The river has 239 rapids and each one has a Māori name and story attached to it. For people who never have been there, it just looks like water. But for the Māori, they see the water and the rapid and it may inspire them to recite a poem or incantation. So I wanted to photograph these rapids for that reason.

But how do you photograph something that is not physical? I’m not sure if photography can do that and I’m certainly not claiming that I’ve done that. But I am interested in exploring how a photograph can have a third dimension, a spiritual dimension.

Martin Toft, Once an animal is killed the heart is cut out and given back to the forest with a blessing, 2016
© the artist

Matsuda: This interview is published online in conjunction with the “Earth” issue of Aperture magazine. In the issue, Wanda Nanibush, a curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, argues that Indigenous people need what she calls “visual sovereignty”—the idea that native people should be the ones in control of their image. A lot of people question if we need another white man photographing an Indigenous community. I’m curious as to how you worked through this idea yourself.

Toft: It’s a very important question. As I said at the beginning, I was naive when I first arrived, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have any respect for the culture. I arrived with an open mind and open heart wanting to learn from Māori and their unique way of life. In retrospect I think this naivete helped me make connections and form relationships, because I didn’t carry any historical burden that may have influenced my approach then. But of course now, twenty-some years later, having studied and gone to university, and teaching photography, I have a much better understanding of photography’s role in colonial history.

When I decided to finish the book, I did a lot of research about how Indigenous people in New Zealand had been photographed, especially in this particular region. In that research, I came across an expedition made by a white photographer in 1885, named Alfred Burton. His works now are held in national collections and some of his images are well-known within photographic history of that time, especially in the South Pacific regions. But he decided to go upriver, similar to me, to make photographs of the Māori at home. In 1921 there was another big ethnographic expedition to the river by a photographer named James Ingram McDonald, another white man. I wanted to make sure that the work that I produced recognized that history and context. I then began to think about how I could involve and collaborate with my Māori friends and family. I wanted them to have some creative ownership, and I wanted them to have input in the ways their images would be used.

Research in New Zealand archives was also an important element of the development of the book’s narrative and structure, and allowed images of ancestors from national collections to be seen by the descendants of those featured in nineteenth- and twentieth-century portraits. An important aspiration of the book is to reconnect people to their tribal treasures (taonga), and in the broadest sense to assist in wider reclamation of Māori knowledge, language, and customs.

Consultation to use the images was sought from living members of the Māori family, and permission was granted according to Māori taonga policies held in New Zealand museums, that acknowledge the guardianship (kaitiaki) and copyright of any Māori cultural treasures, including photographs that belong to tribes.

Martin Toft, The Haitana family photographed outside their home in Raetihi arranged in a similar photographic pose as Alfred Burton’s image Taumarunui – King Country, 2016
© the artist

Matsuda: How did you involve the Māori in the project?

Toft: When I returned to New Zealand in 2016, I took ten book dummies with me. I presented them to the tribe and explained to everyone, especially the elders, what my intentions were. I gave them the book dummies, which were more like family albums. It really showed the community and it was quite personal. It was far less abstract than the final book. So I wanted it to be a gift. Some of the people in those photographs from 1996 have since died, so I knew the photos would be valuable to the tribe.

I wanted to make sure that I had their permission to continue. This was partially what the trip was for, but it was also to make new work, now that I had much more background knowledge about my position as a photographer from outside the community. This time the images were mainly of the natural landscape. There were very few portraits.

After I transcribed all the interviews, I checked with members of the tribe to make sure that they made sense and that the information was correct. I wanted to make sure they were happy with the narrative.

Another reason I returned after twenty years was to ask why they had given me a Māori name, Pouma Pokai-Whenua. What exactly did that mean for them? This book also explores what it means for me.

But of course, I totally understand what your question is. I’m not trying to shy away from it; I still understand my position in the sense that they haven’t made the images, although in some of the images we collaborated on how we set them up, and how they posed. But essentially it is my interpretation. And, of course, I am a big advocate for Māori people themselves to be their own visual storytellers.

Martin Toft, A hāngi is a traditional Māori method of cooking food using heated rocks buried in a pit oven. It is still used for large groups on special occasions such as this tangihanga at Ngāpuwaiwaha Marare in Taumarunui, 1996
© the artist

Matsuda: I want to return to your Māori name. I think that gesture is key to this work. In one of the interviews about this in the book, you say, “I was young then and I didn’t fully understand the honour that was bestowed upon me. It is something that brought me back here 20 years later because I knew you had given me this privilege of being allowed to make these images. I do feel that there is a sense of responsibility to do something with this before I pass on.” Can you describe that responsibility? Is this book the “something”?

Toft: The group that I lived with was known in the area as being very politically active. They had been doing protests before, had been on television, and people had read about them in national media. I didn’t go there specifically to get involved politically with them, but that’s what ended up happening.

After I became accepted into the community, I was given the responsibility to talk to the media. It sounds very strange now. They knew that by doing the protests, and illegally occupying the land in the national park, that the media would be there. And of course they were. I was given the task to facilitate and mediate that side of things, while other members of the tribe had other responsibilities. It was my responsibility to make sure the story was handled in a proper way. I told them from the very beginning, even in the first formal meeting that I had with them, that I wanted to make a book.

I left in ’96, due to visa complications. My family (whānau) believe in Māori sovereignty and self-determination (tino rangatiratanga) and did not recognize the authority of the New Zealand immigration authorities. I persuaded them to not go forward with a legal challenge, and so I had to leave the country. And when I left, they told me that they trusted me entirely to use the material how I see fit. That was a very big responsibility that they gave me—to look after these photographs and stories of the community. I went back in 2016 to make sure that they still felt this way.

Martin Toft, Hunting for deer at night in the steep hills and forests surrounding the Whanganui River, 2016
© the artist

Matsuda: Now that the book is out, what are your hopes for it and the stories it contains?

Toft: I hope that this book is used within the community as a resource for future generations about what happened during the occupation in ’96. Those protests have now changed the law. The rights to the river have been given back to the people. There are still many claims on the land that surround the river, and those are now in the process of being settled too between Māori people and the New Zealand government.

I want this book to be part of that story. The book first and foremost is for them. I am, of course, not denying that it is for myself, too. But I am more interested in how it is received by them, and the wider Māori community, more than anything else. It’s great that a place like Aperture will write about it, or that the book will go to Paris Photo, but it’s for the Māori, first and foremost.

Right now we live in a world where the biggest issue is climate change and the environment. As Westerners, we have destroyed the natural world. We can learn so much from Indigenous communities, not just the Māori, about their relationship with the natural world. I hope we listen.

Te Ahi Kā was published by Dewi Lewis in 2018.

Will Matsuda is a photographer and writer based in New York.

The post Who Can Tell the Story of an Indigenous Community? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Will America’s National Monuments Survive the Trump Administration?

David Benjamin Sherry’s spectacular photographs of contested lands.

By Bill McKibben

David Benjamin Sherry, Río Grande del Norte National Monument, New Mexico, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94

Before you’ve seen the West, you’ve seen the West—landscape photographs of the region, especially those by Ansel Adams, are so deep in our nation’s collective imagination that you have to work to actually see Half Dome, in California, or Shiprock, in New Mexico, even when you’re standing there with your hiking boots on.

David Benjamin Sherry’s recent pictures help us see again. Sherry is known for his fascination with color, for his analog techniques, and for what some have called his “queer revision” of the rugged and macho legacy of western landscape photography. His images of several national monuments, photographed last year, carry the same level of detail as Adams’s iconic pictures, the sublime clarity of the haze-free western summer afternoon. But drenched in unexpected and unreal color, they get you to take a second look.

And in this case, a second look is helpful for any number of reasons.

David Benjamin Sherry, Muley Point I, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94

For one, looking backward, the great protected areas of the nation are not simply blank slates, empty wastes. They were often the homelands of this continent’s original inhabitants, and so they tell, among other things, the stories of our nation’s original shame. Their very emptiness is a reminder of what we did—all the more telling when the petroglyphs left behind at places like Bears Ears, the national monument in Utah, make clear what a bustling place it once was. These lands are as sacred to Indigenous cultures as they ever were, but there’s a tragic quality to that reverence now.

David Benjamin Sherry, Muley Point II, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94

For another, looking forward, these same lands are no longer as sacred to the colonizing tradition as they once were. One of the great boasts of its legacy was the protected landscape: in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, we felt ourselves rich enough to methodically put aside large tracts of land for the benefit of the rest of creation, or the future, or our idea that there was something lovely about wildernesses, even ones we might not see. Congress never got more poetic than with the Wilderness Act of 1964, with its commitment to protecting places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Aside from the questions already raised about who was there originally, and aside from the obnoxious use of man that belies the text’s birthdate, the statute still marks something powerful: even in the middle of America’s great postwar boom, the understanding that we needed something more than we had.

David Benjamin Sherry, Sotol cactus, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, New Mexico, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94

But we don’t think that anymore. Or at least, at the moment, those in charge don’t think that. President Donald Trump, among his endless provocations, has begun trying to roll back the protections of an earlier era, beginning with the national monuments pictured in Sherry’s images. For no reason other than to undo the work of the bigger souls who came before him, the petulant boy king has begun to take apart the network of protected areas that is one of the country’s great legacies. Actually, of course, there is another reason: the fossil fuel industry covets these lands, just as it covets the Arctic, and the offshore lease holdings along the North American coasts, and pretty much every other piece of real estate on the continent. Not content with merely destroying the planet’s climate, it must also do what it can to wreck the loveliness that has been set aside.

David Benjamin Sherry, Looking toward Valley of the Gods, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Salon 94

Somehow the saturated and unsettling colors of Sherry’s photographs of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, in Utah, and the Río Grande del Norte National Monument, in New Mexico, among other western vistas, help us see all that splendor, all that history, and all those politics more clearly, or at least glimpse that something has gone wrong and is now going wronger in these places that have long been a comforting part of the landscape of the mind. No longer retreats or redoubts from the overwhelming bleat of our wired world, they are contested places. We must fight to make sense of them, and we must fight to preserve them, and we must fight to make sure that in their preservation they connect us back to the people who wandered them originally.

Iconic images have their place—but iconoclasm has its place too.

Bill McKibben, a writer and environmentalist, is the author, most recently, of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019).

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

The post Will America’s National Monuments Survive the Trump Administration? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.