Aperture's Blog, page 89

On the Cover: Aperture’s “Earth” Issue

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

“I first happened upon this remote area of southeast Utah in 2007, not realizing where I was until I found myself staring up at Comb Ridge,” says the photographer David Benjamin Sherry, whose photograph of Bears Ears National Monument is on the cover of Aperture’s spring 2019 issue, “Earth.” “This was my first photographic trip to the southwest, and I was in awe.”

In 2016, President Obama declared the 1,351,849 acres of Bears Ears, what Sherry calls “holy land,” a protected monument—an achievement for the five Native American tribes who have ancestral ties to the region, as well as for environmentalists who were seeking protected status of the area for decades. But only one year later, in December 2017, President Trump rolled back Bears Ears by eighty-five percent, making way for the possibility for oil extraction and mining.

“This was the point when I packed my car and headed directly back to Bears Ears to create this work,” Sherry says. “I remember thinking, on my drive, that everyone should be able to experience this place and have access to it.”

With his arresting, analog images, saturated in spectacular colors, Sherry is reclaiming the idea of the historic American landscape and making, as the environmentalist Bill McKibben writes in Aperture, a “‘queer revision’ of the rugged and macho legacy” of photographing the West. The warmth of the pink shade for his photograph from Bears Ears, in particular, “is emblematic of my intensified connection to the natural world and simultaneously connotes a sense of my ‘otherness’ as a queer person,” Sherry says. “Dramatic color is a way to entice viewers and also aid them in thinking about landscape differently.”

Throughout the “Earth” issue, photographers, artists, and writers from Carolyn Drake and Gideon Mendel to William Finnegan and Eva Díaz grapple with the reality of climate change and the age of the “Anthropocene,” in which human actions determine the factors shaping Earth’s geology and ecosystems. “We are losing our deep connection to the natural world and hastening our own demise in the destruction of places like Bears Ears,” Sherry says. “My aim with these pictures is to raise awareness about the fight for the reclamation of this National Monument and others being threatened.”

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

The post On the Cover: Aperture’s “Earth” Issue appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Looking Back at the New Romantics

A British photographer’s fashion-forward family pictures.

By Adam Murray

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Yvonne Taylor and her daughter Amelia Lonsdale are from Doncaster, a town in Yorkshire, northern England. I first encountered Taylor’s archive of photographs as a visiting lecturer at Leeds Arts University, where Amelia was studying photography. This personal archive consists of photographs predominantly featuring Yvonne and her partner at the time, Dennis Shedrick, produced while they were both living in the north east of England. The following are excerpts from a conversation I had with Amelia and Yvonne; I am currently working with them both to include the work in a group exhibition that I am curating with Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, scheduled to open in spring 2020.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Adam Murray: Can you explain the story behind this collection of photographs?

Yvonne Taylor: The photographs are from the period around 1977–84. At the time I was living in Doncaster, living at home with my mum in a mining village, and worked at Doncaster Council.

At the end of 1977 I started going out to Outlook Club in Doncaster, which on Monday nights featured different kinds of bands. This became a really important club in my life, as it changed the way I looked at fashion and music. The love of music and dance and fashion was what inspired me to start sourcing clothes that were different. At the time, there was no fashion shops like there is now—there was only things like C&A and Chelsea Girl. The main source of my clothes came from jumble sales, or from raiding my mum’s and my grandma’s wardrobe.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Murray: When did you first start becoming aware of the importance of photography to you?

Taylor: I don’t have a lot of photographs from the early days, because basically I didn’t own a camera. Not everybody had cameras of their own and we certainly didn’t take them with us when we went out. But something that did make me start thinking more about image and how you looked was the emergence of fanzines. I’d made friends with a lad called Stephen Singleton, from Sheffield, who was in a band at the time and later became part of ABC. He wrote a fanzine and used to put photographs in of his friends. They were all in black and white, just printed on a local printer. But it made us start to think about how we looked. We would be inspired by other people and how they looked in magazines, which were starting to documenting real people, not celebrities or film stars and pop stars that we’d seen in magazines before then.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Murray: What was your relationship with Dennis?

Taylor: I met Dennis in 1978, when punk was slowly dying and we needed something to take its place, and along came what is now called New Romantics. That was very fashion-focused; it was important to look different, to be as unique as possible, so I started making clothes. Sometimes I only adapted things, or changed the buttons or added a bit of fur to make it look different. We wanted to keep a record of that, so I bought Dennis a camera. Dennis was really into fashion and it was important to him how he looked, and he loved taking photographs of me. He liked to have photographs in his room of me. We didn’t live near each other—he lived in Scunthorpe, he worked on the steelworks, got grotty and dirty, came home, changed into somebody different, and it was documented in the photographs. There was photographs all over his room; he was an artist, he liked drawing, and he’d get inspired by taking photographs and then making them into drawings.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Murray: Did you take a lot of photographs?

Taylor: Later on, when I got my own camera, I’d set up little sets, scenes, and I took photographs of my friend Carol modeling some of the outfits that I’d made. I wanted to be able to look back and think, this was me then. The photographs represent a really happy time in my life, a time that was filled with love, when I first met Dennis, and the excitement of going to new places and meeting new people.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Murray: Amelia, when did you first become aware of Yvonne’s and Dennis’s archive?

Amelia Lonsdale: Mum and Dennis both took a lot of photographs, and until Dennis passed away in the late 1990s, they were kept separately. When a friend was clearing Dennis’s house, he came across a box labeled “In result of my death please return to Yvonne Taylor.” So, he took them back to my mum, and there were old pictures of her, love letters that they’d sent to each other. Until that point there were a lot of pictures that she hadn’t seen for fifteen to twenty years, so that was really special for her.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Murray: Has the archive changed since you became more involved with it?

Lonsdale: I don’t think my mum has understood herself how special the archive is until now, since I’ve started talking to her about the photographs and other people have shown an interest. So for me to be able to provide a platform for her to realize that is the most important thing for me. I would like to make a publication, but I really want to do it justice. I don’t want to rush into anything. It’s important to me that I do it right because it’s such a big responsibility. Even more so than my own photographs that I’ve actually taken.

I’ve taken pictures for as long as I can remember, and I ended up studying photography and becoming a photographer, so the archive has had an influence on me that way. In the last five years, as I’ve started really looking into the pictures, they’ve helped me understand why people take pictures, and that’s become more interesting to me than actually taking photographs.

Untitled photograph, ca. 1977–84
Courtesy Amelia Lonsdale and Yvonne Taylor

Murray: How do you feel about the archive being displayed in public?

Lonsdale: It makes me really proud of my mum. It’s crazy because, while obviously there’s elements of the woman I know now in the photos, and although she’s always been the life of the party and she’s always been into fashion, it still feels when I look at them like I’m looking at someone I don’t know.

Adam Murray is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and Manchester Metropolitan University.

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A Surrogate for Love

What can the doll community tell us about relationships today?

By Melissa Harris

Elena Dorfman, CJ 3, 2002
© and courtesy the artist

Artists Jamie Diamond and Elena Dorfman picture the intimate familial, and at times romantic and sexual relationships between people and synthetic human dolls. On the occasion of their joint exhibition in Milan, Surrogati. Un amore ideale, they spoke with curator Melissa Harris about stigma, the doll community, and redefining love.

Melissa Harris: Based on my conversations with some of your respective subjects, they seem to accumulate, to embrace many dolls in their lives. Where does the collecting impulse play into this, do you think?

Elena Dorfman: I think it’s about making a community, a family. And, in the case of the people I photograph, also about attaining a sexual partner or partners.

Jamie Diamond: When I say, “collecting,” I think that word is being appropriated from histo­ry—from the idea of doll collecting. It’s changed considerably within this com­munity: It’s the creation and gathering together of surrogates. Take for example the terminology of “portrait babies”— dolls made based on old photographs of a childhood past. Essentially when a child has died—that’s a big part of the idea of surrogacy. Or there are women who can’t have any more children because of illness or age, or women who for various reasons can never have children.

Jamie Diamond, 4.12.12, 2012
© and courtesy the artist

Dorfman: In the doll community I focus on, they were generally surrogates for flesh and blood women that for whatever reason eluded the men. They were also fantasy women and muses. In the case of the image of the doll in the church, Rob was writing a novel, and Lily was his muse. His novel had to do with the church and spirituality, so I asked if he was will­ing to take her to church. That was always my process—I asked the men what they did with the dolls on a day-to-day basis, or what they would like to do with them. Taking her to church, however, was nearly a disaster. These dolls are very heavy, and complicated and cumbersome to move, so physically navigating her into a house of worship was challenging.

Harris: Were there other people in the church at the time?

Dorfman: Yes, there were.

Harris: Did anybody know this was a part of his life?

Dorfman: Absolutely not. But he was willing to take her out of the house in order to try to overcome the stigma that doll owners face, to move beyond the walls of his house.

Elena Dorfman, Ginger Brook 4, 2001
© and courtesy the artist

Harris: Jamie, do those with reborn dolls feel similarly stigmatized?

Diamond: Outsiders make assumptions and may think that these women are crazy. But I’ve never met a woman in this community who thinks their doll is real, regardless of her behavior. The women might treat it as if it’s real, but they know the difference. In fact, most of the women I’ve met are kind, generous, nurturing, and very much in touch with reality. There is genuine feeling here, far beyond fantasy or role-play.

Harris: There seems to be a certain amount of common ground shared by your two projects, synergy between their emotional and psycho­logical underpinnings. Many of your subjects I spoke with made an analogy to having a pet. We use that word “anthropomorphize”—the way people converse with or refer to animals and their emotional lives as if they are human, but even in these instances, they’re still interacting with a living creature. How does all this happen with synthetic creatures? How do we bestow human qualities, a type of life itself, on the inorganic?

Dorfman: In the case of the sex dolls, they are so lifelike that they fall into the uncanny valley. My experience was that in order to live with a silicone surrogate over an extended period of time, to devote so much of your life, energy, and finances to her (these dolls are expensive), she has to be given a life story, which nearly every man conjured.

Diamond: It’s the same for my subjects on so many levels. What’s interesting to me is while making the dolls, I knew I was done when I had that visceral response … when I felt the urge to hold it. Something gets triggered. It’s hard to articulate because it’s just something that you feel so deeply within yourself, that it feels real.

Jamie Diamond,5.28.12, 2012
© and courtesy the artist

Dorfman: But this fantasy is also a reflection of technology and artistry. The dolls look so realistic it makes it easier for them to “pass” as real women. This wasn’t so true when I began nearly twenty years ago. The world we live in today, where the norms of beauty are shifting and the demand that women stay eternally youth­ful becomes increasingly urgent—this, combined with medical and technolog­ical advances, and more sophisticated techniques applied to the creation of plastic women, blur the line between flesh and silicone even more.

Harris: What’s interesting to me about both of your projects is that they challenge so many preconceptions about sex and love and relationships, family and motherhood. They are remarkably open-ended emotionally and psychologically.

Dorfman: For the most part, the doll owners I worked with had a certain level of emotional depth, self-awareness, and self-knowledge. I was often surprised and constantly rubbing up against my own ideas of what constitutes love—and what kind of person lives with a love doll as his or her domestic partner. My preconceptions were regularly shattered.

Elena Dorfman,Sidore 4, 2001
© and courtesy the artist

Harris: Do you consider these projects documen­tary in nature?

Dorfman: Yes. For this series, I documented the domestic lives of men and women who live with life-sized, anatomically correct, sex dolls.

Diamond: My work has always been rooted in fiction while examining the disparity between image and reality. I use photog­raphy and staged intimacy as a vehicle to question existing values regarding inherited social and gender expectations. “Forever Mothers” is interesting for me in that there is a level of reality that never existed before in my work. Everything prior to this was very much a construction that I was producing for the camera.

Jamie Diamond, Mother Marilyn, 2012
© and courtesy the artist

Harris: Let’s talk about the history of the arts and literature—dolls are omnipresent. Why is that? There’s something about not being quite sure what you’re looking at, that is fascinating. Both of you, I know, have various references, visual references—not even necessarily for your own work, but in terms of how you contextualize your subject.

Diamond: Think of Morton Bartlett. Part of what I find interesting is his fetishization of the doll. He’s basing them on children, but there’s something maybe a little perverse about how he’s representing them. But his obsession—the fact that he’s sculpt­ing these anatomically complete dolls, dressing them and then photographing them (although sometimes they are naked in the photographs)—is fascinat­ing. You don’t know exactly what you are looking at.

Dorfman: While making “Still Lovers,” I became aware of the role that automatons and dolls have played throughout mythology and art history. Of particular intrigue was Thomas Edison’s Phonograph Doll, from 1877—a twenty-two-inch doll that played a single nursery rhyme; Oskar Kokoshka’s 1918 stuffed replica of Alma, his estranged lover; the contorted, life-sized pubescent figures and photographs by Hans Bellmer; and, the myths of Pygmalion, and Pandora—the perfect woman created by the Gods, with the purpose of destroying mankind. Women’s roles have always been complicated, as they embody both the expression of and end to Paradise.

Elena Dorfman, Rebecca 1, 2001
© and courtesy the artist

Diamond: Regarding our projects, there are parallel narratives here that are intriguing, each involving genuine human emotion, but within a shifting set of parameters, as the dolls become more and more lifelike, and what they represent shifts.

Dorfman: At first glance, it may be easy for viewers to characterize our subjects as peculiar, or in some way deviant. But, while their chosen lifestyles or hobbies might be out of the ordinary, they pose myriad and fascinating questions about the intersection of fantasy and reality, and shed light on the human condition now—and in the future.

Melissa Harris is editor at large of Aperture Foundation and the author of A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols (Aperture, 2017).

This interview is excerpted from Surrogati: Un Amore Ideale (Surrogate: A Love Ideal), in Quaderno #23, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2019, in conjunction with an exhibition on view at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio, in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan, from February 21–July 22, 2019.

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Bisi Silva Changed the Way We See African Photography

Through her ambitious curating, writing, and teaching in Africa and beyond, Silva was a force for change in contemporary art.

By Oluremi C. Onabanjo

Bisi Silva, New York, 2016
Photograph by Gabriela Herman/The New York Times/Redux

When the time comes to reflect on the titans who shaped the course of photographic practice in Africa during the early twenty-first century, the name Bisi Silva, who died last week in Lagos, will be writ large, emphasized in bold. Over more than twenty-five years in the field of contemporary art and photography, her remarkable vision and indefatigable spirit instigated tectonic shifts in editorial, curatorial, and institutional frameworks in Nigeria and across the African continent. A curator trained at the Royal College of Art in London, and a contributor to publications including Artforum, Third Text, and Art Africa, Silva responded to the flows of the global, but was ultimately grounded in a granular treatment of the local, which she defined as “an expanded field of practice and engagement.” Situating her curatorial practice within Nigeria, Silva founded the nimble, impactful organization that is the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Lagos in 2007, which provides a platform for the development, presentation, and discussion of visual art and culture. Her CCA Lagos exhibitions included Democrazy (2007–8), Lucy Azubuike and Zanele Muholi: Like a Virgin (2009), and Kelani Abass: If I Could Save Time (2016–17), among many others.

In 2011 Silva organized Moments of Beauty, the first comprehensive survey exhibition of Nigerian photographer J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (1930–2014), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, Helsinki, initiating a period of long-term engagement with Ojeikere’s dynamic body of work. During 2012–13, she initiated The Progress of Love, a transcontinental collaboration between Houston’s Menil Collection, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Missouri, and CCA Lagos, which explored evolving modes and significations of love through work by artists from across Africa, Europe, and the United States. The year 2014 found Silva curating Playing with Chance, an in-depth solo exhibition on El Anatsui at CCA Lagos, which drew deeply on archival and photographic material from Anatsui’s studio. She also served as a member of the international jury for the 2013 Venice Biennale, the Pinchuk Art Centre’s 2014 Future Generation Art Prize, and the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize.

A tireless tour de force, Silva organized the Second Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece (2009), cocurated the seventh Dak’Art Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, Senegal (2006), and served as the artistic director of the tenth Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2015). Entitled Telling Time, Silva positioned the biennale—in collaboration with associate curators Yves Chatap and Antawan I. Byrd—as a space to explore the multiple valences of temporality within a Malian context, featuring a dizzying number of experimental and exciting approaches from artists based across the African continent and throughout the African diaspora. Including a focus on Lusophone African photography, a core engagement with Malian studio photography archives, and ambitious visual literacy initiatives, she amplified the scope of what kinds of curatorial, programmatic, pedagogical, and artistic modes could be engaged through a photography biennale’s mandate.

Yet beyond these direct interventions and contributions, what Silva has done for the fields of contemporary art and photographic practice might be felt in the most embodied manner through the six cohorts of curators, photographers, and artists that she cultivated from 2010 to 2016 through the Àsìkò International Art Programme, a pioneering pedagogical model that employs a nomadic framework to stage intensive workshops for artists and curators across the African continent. Nurturing dialogues between emerging practitioners as well as invited international guest artists, scholars, curators, and cultural administrators, Àsìkò stimulates critical and conceptual thought, while also spurring meaningful dialogue, exchange, and collaboration. It also provides a vital space within the field of contemporary artistic practice where the perspectives of those working within the African continent are foregrounded first and foremost.

Moussa Kalapo, Métaphore du temps, 2015
© the artist

Silva was also a record keeper—a librarian, an archivist, an editor. As an extension and constitutive element of her curating, she concentrated on the importance of accumulating and caring for visual histories through publications. At CCA Lagos she accrued what is now the largest photographic and visual arts library in Nigeria, a collection of photobooks, artist monographs, theoretical texts, exhibition catalogues, historical accounts, and journals numbering in the hundreds. Silva’s 2015 monographic publication on Ojeikere stands as a rich tome of photographic research, featuring more than two hundred images taken over more than sixty years, ranging from his typological survey of Nigerian hairstyles to his architectural studies of Lagos. The accompanying catalogue for Silva’s iteration of the Bamako Biennale featured not only original texts and beautifully executed spreads for each of the artists in the festival, but also a detailed timeline and complete reprint of the catalogue for the biennale’s inaugural 1994 edition. With an editorial team of twenty contributors, Silva offered a cogent point of entry for considering the historical framework of the biennale and contemporary photographic practice within Africa.

In 2017 Silva published Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa, a volume that documented the six iterations of the program and indexed the reflections of the seventy cultural producers that participated in the program. Edited and designed in collaboration with Stephanie Baptist, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and Julia Novitch, the book emulated the multivalent nature of the program by incorporating archival materials and documentation from each edition alongside a number of critical and theoretical essays, interviews, and artistic works. The same year, Silva was also a guest editor for Aperture’s “Platform Africa” issue, where, alongside coeditors John Fleetwood and Aïcha Diallo, she tracked the various sites and spaces across the continent that inform contemporary photography in Africa. A true luminary, she enriched and sustained the field of contemporary art and photography tenfold.

In the process of writing this piece, I returned to old notebooks, catalogues and exhibition leaflets, saved bookmarks, program ephemera, and extended email threads—all in an attempt to pinpoint precisely when Bisi Silva entered my life. As often is the Nigerian way, we were connected through family. She was generous from the start, and through her guidance, I learned the importance of retaining an astute eye, an ambitious scope, a sensitivity to tracking artistic growth, and a set of standards predicated on asking the hard questions—of myself, my collaborators, and the photographic medium itself. It is a point of pride to note that this experience of being mentored by Silva is not particularly unique to me. She has equipped countless individuals with the tools to make room in this field for thoughtful, critical consideration of photographic practice on the African continent. Across varied contexts, time zones, and geographic spaces, Silva pursued her work with rigor and care, with an exuberance for the present and a deep respect for history. Writing in Telling Time in 2015, Silva quoted the griot Kouyaté: “I teach kings the history of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example, for the world is old, but the future springs from the past.”

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is a curator and scholar of photography and the arts of Africa. The former director of exhibitions and collections at the Walther Collection, she is a doctoral candidate in art history at Columbia University.

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Bamako Revisited

The legacy of Mali’s influential photography biennial.

By Bisi Silva

Oumou Diarra, Les Chasseuses de Bazin, 2016
Courtesy the artist

In 1998, I traveled to Bamako for the first time to attend the third edition of Bamako Encounters: African Biennale of Photography. At the time, I was an independent curator based in London, and was thus humbled and refreshed to learn that a space existed on the continent for presenting the work of photographers of African descent—many of whom had yet to gain recognition in the West. Since that eye-opening experience, I’ve followed the evolution of the Bamako Biennale, the longest running platform for photography in Africa, by attending nearly every subsequent edition in various capacities—as a spectator, presenter, curator, and, most recently, in 2015, as the artistic director for the tenth edition.

Titled Telling Time, this edition marked a milestone in the Biennale’s history on a number of levels. Not only was it celebrating the tenth anniversary of the event, but Telling Time also heralded the Biennale’s return after a four-year period of absence due to the political instability and threats to Mali’s sovereignty brought about by the jihadist insurgency of 2012. This confluence of political upheaval and cultural expression dates back to the very conception of the event. Mali’s first democratically elected president, Alpha Oumar Konare, staunchly supported the Biennale’s founding in 1994, envisioning it as an opportunity to test the capacity of culture to rehabilitate the nation’s image and restore international confidence following decades of violent authoritarian rule under Moussa Traore. For the tenth edition, local stakeholders renewed their investments in the power of culture by once again positioning the Biennale as a tool for strengthening Mali’s fragile democracy and increasing its international visibility.

Youcef Krache, Untitled, March 13, 2015
Courtesy the artist and Collective 220

I view my role in the tenth edition as part of the efforts to reinvigorate the local, insofar as the responsibilities granted to me marked the first time in the Biennale’s history that a curator based in the region (in 2007 I founded the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos) was chosen as the artistic director. Intimately familiar with the Biennale’s history and evolution, I accepted the challenge of devising an expansive program that would honor the event’s influence, question its place and relevance to current lens-based practices and discourses in Africa, and proffer possibilities for the Biennale’s future. This multiplicity of perspectives animated the conception and execution of the tenth edition’s focus on questions of time and of the local.

The coexistence of different temporalities is a defining characteristic of Bamakois urbanism. Bamako is a place where the past unavoidably engenders a symbiotic meeting with the present, a place where tradition and heritage are at one with modernity. From these perspectives, I consider Bamako a “city village” where tall modern buildings rise in close proximity to modest residential dwellings of neotraditional design, and modern cars mingle, at times, with animal-driven carts. While these characteristics make Bamako an ideal site for discursive exhibition platforms, it should be noted that Mali is one of the least economically prosperous countries in the region. On first sight it lacks the infrastructure to host international art happenings: there exist no degree-granting educational establishments providing photography courses at any level; there is virtually no collector base; and there are no major art-publishing initiatives, to name a few enabling prerequisites.

Moussa Kalapo, Métaphore du temps, 2015
© the artist

But Mali has a deep cultural past with a long and strategic history. By the fourteenth century, the University of Sankore in Timbuktu had established Mali as an internationally renowned site for Islamic study, with ancient manuscript traditions dating back to the eleventh century. It is the land of the griots and the country of the Dogon people, and of the fourteenth-century magnificent mud mosque in Djenne. Its empires and its emperors, such as Sundiata Keita and Mansa Kankan Musa, are legendary. Malians today remain fiercely proud as well as protective of this cultural heritage. Even in the absence of purpose-built contemporary art venues in Bamako, the Biennale benefits from adequate venues like the Palais de la Culture, the main site of the Biennale before its transition to the National Museum of Mali; the Musée du District de Bamako; the Modibo Keita Memorial Centre; and smaller informal spaces around the city. With this structure, it is no surprise that Bamako would stake a claim as the “capital of photography” on the continent, a status that endures but that may be undermined by increasingly inadequate official support.

The Bamako Biennale started in 1994—founded by French photographers Françoise Huguier and Bernard Descamps—two years after the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal positioned itself as a forum dedicated to contemporary art. Both can be considered the result of the proliferation of mega-exhibitions and biennials that were springing up in so-called margin locations around the world in the 1980s and 1990s. But most importantly, these two events were responding to the absence of platforms for African artists within and outside of the continent, and to the visibility of the growing number of artists working in Africa and the diaspora. They provided important meeting points for artists, curators, writers, editors, and other art professionals to meet, interact, and exchange.

Alpha Oumar Konare, opening ceremony at the first Bamako Biennale of African Photography, 1994
© Archives de l’Agence Malienne de Presse et de Publicité, Bamako (AMAP)

Consequently, the Bamako Biennale, through its focus on photography, has directly and indirectly spurred a plethora of lens-based platforms and smaller initiatives across the continent. One of the earliest, though short-lived, was the Rencontres du Sud (Southern Encounters), started by Ivorian photographer Ananias Léki Dago in 2000. Other events included Rencontres Picha, in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, started by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji in 2008; Addis Foto Fest, founded by Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh in 2010; and LagosPhoto, developed by Nigerian cultural entrepreneur Azu Nwagbogu, also in 2010. These events have been supplemented by new artist collectives such as Invisible Borders, a pan-African collective of photographers and writers who travel by road across Africa, as well as new educational programs and workshops that have manifested

Unlike the major biennials, which often become instruments of governmental politics, the foregoing artist-led initiatives are grassroots organizations that have been cultivated from the ground up, providing training and professional development—in the absence of appropriate education initiatives—with exhibition-making. In addition, they impose no geographical limitations to participation, arguing that international or transnational integration takes cognizance of global parameters.

Despite the profusion of platforms in Africa, which are poised to continue, it becomes necessary to question whose interests are ultimately served through the development of these initiatives, and how, if at all, they harness local infrastructural growth with international visibility. When the Bamako Biennale began, it had a local premise. It symbolized the nation’s embrace of democracy and was supported by President Konare, who understood the role culture could play after the end of a prolonged dictatorship. However, there were tensions from the beginning as to what a French-Malian partnership might look like. From the outset, France played an integral role in the production of the Biennale. Although Mali is now more involved in management decisions, the French have been criticized for their neocolonial relationship regarding the event. Nevertheless, the original aims, which sought to foster collaborations and develop the embryonic field of African photography, as well as the local scene, have seen tremendous success.

Aboubacar Traore, Inchallah, 2015
Courtesy the artist

There have been many local beneficiaries of the Biennale, some more successful than others. In the early editions, Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, already with burgeoning international careers, were catapulted into foreign museums, galleries, and collections. In 1994, the Malian government announced its intention to found the Maison Africaine de la Photographie—finally created in 2004—to strengthen the presentation and dissemination of photography across Mali and neighboring countries. Education centers, especially the Cadre de Promotion pour la Formation en Photographie (CFP), established in 1998 and generously funded by Helvetas Mali, produced a new generation of photographers. Promo-femme: Center for Audio Visual Education for Young Women was created in 1996 to develop and nurture the first generation of women photographers, including Fatoumata Diabate, Amsatou Diallo, Alimata Traore, and Penda Diakite (who opened her own studio in 2002, considered the first by a woman in Mali). Over the course of its existence, numerous women were trained and some participated in the Biennale, such as Diabate, who won the Afrique en Création prize during the 2005 edition and has since gone on to develop her career internationally.

Seydou Keïta at the opening of his first solo exhibition in Mali, Bamako Biennale, December 1994
© Érika Nimis

While Keïta and Sidibé were accepted and acknowledged as national treasures at home who catalyzed the developing Malian art photography scene, their celebrity status—due to important group exhibitions such as Africa Explores, curated by Susan Vogel in New York in 1991, and Keïta’s 1994 solo exhibition at Fondation Cartier in Paris, for example—has contributed inadvertently to the eclipse of equally important and impressive Malian studio photographers including Adama Kouyate, Mountaga Dembele, Abdourahmane Sakaly, and Tijani Sitou, among others. Unfortunately, it also has had repercussions for the next generation of photographers, such as Racine Keita, Mamadou Konate, Emmanuel Bakary Daou, Alioune Bâ, and Youssouf Sogodogo, who all have been creating important bodies of work since the 1980s. Although some of this photo-based work was shown during the first or second editions of the Biennale, these photographers have not been able to sustain interest in their work once it fell outside the genre of studio photography, which continues to govern associations and expectations for photography in Mali.

By the third edition in 1998, when the event began to take on a more international outlook, the possibilities for inclusiveness became limited, with the participation of Malian artists becoming overshadowed by the scale of the Biennale and the broader inclusion of international artists. Some of the early attempts at consolidating the local sector were short-lived, despite a period of increased funding. With the appointment of Paris-based, Cameroonian curator Simon Njami to head the next four editions, from 2001 to 2007, the international status of the Biennale was confirmed, and so too was the consolidated influence of the French government on the event.

Not dissimilar to the climate in which the Biennale was founded two decades ago, Telling Time developed during a period of optimism after the fall of a dictatorship and a four-year hiatus due to insurgency. The tenth edition provided an opportunity to look back in order to move forward. It was obvious that neither the country as a whole, nor the Biennale as a single, though crucial, entity, could continue without tangible integration with, and benefits to, the local population. The key question for the tenth edition was how to deviate from abstract pronouncements of local engagement and develop concrete programs within the Biennale that were locally conceived—in essence, how to make the Biennale a local event with international visibility.

Alioune Bâ, Studio of Malick Sidibé, 2015
© the artist and courtesy 10th Rencontres de Bamako

This approach was reflected in Telling Time, which I conceived in collaboration with two associate curators, Antawan I. Byrd and Yves Chatap. The edition’s substantial Focus Mali program was instituted through a rigorous consultative process. It was an attempt to kick-start the long journey back “home.” As director general Samuel Sidibé signals in the Biennale publication’s introduction: “The local engagement is one of the major pillars on which this edition was constructed.” Focus Mali included an exhibition of work by a new generation of Malian photographers organized by Malian curator Amadou Chab Touré; an invitation to twenty photography studios across all the boroughs of the capital to collaborate on presenting their archives in mini-exhibitions that were co-organized by Malian journalist and cultural producer Amadou Sow; and an ambitious educational workshop that involved sixty-four schools, reaching approximately five thousand students. The local and the international, pedagogical and scholarly, historical and contemporary coalesced in the tenth Biennale and also in its expansive publication, which was itself conceived to be a dynamic platform under the art and editorial direction of Byrd.

Questions of sustainability naturally circumscribed the development of the Biennale, as they do in most places. Like the Dak’Art Biennale, the Bamako Biennale suffers from the grip of government departments at home and abroad. But one aspect that brings a sparkle of hope is the growing visibility and dynamism of the event’s large and growing OFF program, initiated by local artists. Malian photographers are increasingly overcoming the limitations of local professional development and education initiatives by traveling in Africa and abroad for residencies. The path to cultural self-determination and articulation is visible with locally driven projects, including Emmanuel Bakary Daou and Patrick Ertel’s Espace Photo Partagé and its monthly Bamako Samedi Photo; the dynamic Medina Gallery, founded by social and cultural entrepreneur Lassana Igo Diarra; and Photo Kalo, the Month of Photography, started modestly in 2016—all of which might provide needed, year-round activities to position Bamako as a hub of cultural activity beyond the Biennale. Only time will tell.

Bisi Silva is the founder and artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos.

Read more from Aperture issue 227, “Platform Africa,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Bamako Revisited appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

How Can Photojournalists Navigate the Crisis of Press Freedom in Mexico?

Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. In this conversation, moderated by Alexandra Ellerbeck, photographer Emmanuel Guillén Lozano and journalists Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul and Ginger Thompson discuss the current state of press freedom in an era of monopolized truth.

Emmanuel Guillén Lozano, A group of armed men standing in the field in Michoacán, southern Mexico, where the war against the cartels was declared by Felipe Calderón in 2011. Since then, the state has gone through an uninterrupted period of violence by the presence of drug cartels, the army and other groups of armed civilians, 2014
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Alexandra Ellerbeck: I’d like to start with Emmanuel. You’ve given your project a very bleak title, Blackness, and you document some pretty chilling things. What led you to look at the impact of the war on drugs in Mexico?

Emmanuel Guillén Lozano: We are presenting the work of three photographers, Mauricio Palos, Félix Márquez, and myself. Mauricio Palos focuses on following some journalists across Mexico to show how they work, under which kinds of circumstances. Félix Márquez documents the belongings of some of the journalists that have been killed in his home state of Veracruz. My work is a series of black-and-white pictures that tries to explore different parts of the country, following groups of sicarios [hit men associated with drug cartels] to landscapes interrupted by violence. I think it’s a pretty good combination because my work tries to show the environment itself and how violent it can be, Mauricio’s follows the journalists as they try to document what’s going on, and Félix’s focuses on the aftermath of covering those areas and of what happens to those who try to tell the truth in these places.

Ellerbeck: Alejandra, you’ve delved into press freedom in Mexico from a couple of different angles: looking at the factors that can lead to journalists being murdered, issues around impunity, crimes going unsolved, and now working on this database on journalists’ work. Can you give us a sense of the scope of the press freedom threat in Mexico and some of the findings of your research?

Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul: Mexico is a very peculiar case regarding press freedom because it became very violent as it transitioned into a democracy in 2000. I’ve done some work to explore what shapes the factors that result in violence against journalists, because it’s not only due to a general context of violence and the drug war—it also has a lot to do with corruption and lack of accountability from different levels of government. Mexico is the most dangerous country for reporters in the Western Hemisphere, and worldwide it can only be compared to countries like Iraq and Syria. As opposed to other countries, where reporters die in conflict zones and crossfire, in Mexico, journalists are targeted and they’re silenced for their work. They come for them while they’re driving their kids to school, when they are eating dinner out at a restaurant.

Félix Marquez, Property of Yolanda Ordaz, who was murdered July 26th, 2011, 2018
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: Ginger, you worked in Mexico for more than a decade as a bureau chief. Can you talk about some of the challenges you’ve faced running a bureau in Mexico City and also, amidst this general panorama of violence against journalists—as well as against citizens throughout Mexico—what kinds of stories you looked to find for an American and international audience?

Ginger Thompson: When I was in Mexico, for the New York Times, the country had just elected its first nonruling party president [Vicente Fox]. We focused heavily on writing about him and his fight to establish independent institutions, particularly institutions that have to do with justice; it was a losing battle. The corruption in Mexico runs so deep and has been going on so long. Nine-eleven really derailed US interest in Mexico, so Fox suddenly didn’t have international support to push the politics of Mexico in a certain direction. The violence, though, didn’t really explode this way until after I had left Mexico and Felipe Calderón was elected president.

I didn’t start covering the drug war until I left Mexico in 2006 and I was in the Washington bureau. My focus on the drug war has been about the U.S.’s role, because I think a lot of the time, we in the United States think that this is Mexico’s problem. A lot of the problems have to do with Mexico’s lack of institutions and the corruption that runs deep there, but the U.S. plays a really big role in Mexico and in its drug war. In fact, when Felipe Calderón started the drug war, he started it with great support from the United States, which wanted to go after Mexican kingpins. The kingpin strategy has been ruinous for Mexico. Calderón basically started this war with the U.S.’s support, encouragement, and money, and forced this fight on institutions that weren’t quite prepared to protect civil society from the consequences. You’re running around arresting kingpins and disrupting criminal organizations, but there aren’t courts and police forces that protect civil society from the fights between drug traffickers that happen as a result of these big arrests. So a lot of my work has been about what role we play there, a role which is often kept secret because Mexico doesn’t want its people to know that our police, FBI, and DEA are operating in Mexican territory, and the US government wants to keep it secret for those same reasons.

Mauricio Palos, La Ley del Monte, 2017
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: Emmanuel, this is something that you actually touch on in your exhibit. You draw the legacy from the beginning of the drug war under Calderón in 2006 to the current administration of [Enrique] Peña Nieto. Could you give us a rough timeline of what’s happened over the past decade?

Lozano: Mexico used to be a really different country twelve years ago. Back in the day, the only narco-states were in places like Sinaloa and Chihuahua, but there were other places that were sanctuaries of peace. I can certainly tell you right now that there is not a place where there is peace, not even Mexico City. Felipe Calderón’s war continued till Peña Nieto took power in 2012. Peña Nieto’s administration decided to not change their strategy, and it was either a major mistake or a conscious decision, because everyone knew what was happening in Mexico. At the height of the violence during Calderón’s administration, the average number of people killed per day was fifty. In the middle of Peña Nieto’s administration, the average reached seventy people per day. In these past couple of months, the rate has increased to ninety people per day. Nobody’s talking about what’s going on there even though it’s worse than it used to be when it was being highlighted in the news. I think the figures are around 234,000 people killed and that’s the official number, so the real number might be way higher. Thirty-eight thousand people have disappeared in Mexico. Mexico finds itself in a very particular moment after the most recent election because for the first time, its federal government is shifting towards the left.

Ellerbeck: There’s a lot to dive into with the election and what that means for Mexico, but before we get there, you mentioned something that was very interesting, which is the idea that it’s actually in some ways worse now than it was in 2006. You said you thought that there was less coverage of that internationally. Ginger, do you find that to be the case?

Thompson: Yeah, I think the whole election went very uncovered in this country. There were something like 102 or 103 candidates for government—politicians—who were killed during this election season. The Times didn’t really write that story until two or three days until the election. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. This country is going through its own political upheaval and there are lots of places in the world to cover, but I think attention on Mexico has fallen particularly as we’re talking about journalists and the fact that it’s become the most dangerous place for journalists to work in this hemisphere. I think there’s been some good work on Mexico, but not nearly enough.

Emmanuel Guillén Lozano, A human skull lies on the ground next to a road in Coahuila, Mexico, 2015
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: Alejandra, in this general environment where 234,000 people have been killed in Mexico, where does the issue of press freedom fit in? Why is the press freedom crisis something we should be focusing on amidst this general crisis of violence?

Chaoul: The patterns of violence against journalists vary according to what kind of threat you’re focusing on. If we’re talking about murdered journalists, the places where journalists are murdered are not always in states that are most violent. Of these crimes, 99.7% haven’t been solved, so we don’t really know who is murdering these journalists. None of these cases have come to a conclusion, nor is there a guilty party in jail. That makes calculating the risk for reporters really scary because if you don’t know where the threat is coming from, it becomes very complicated to assess when the threat is real and when it’s going to result in physical violence.

Thompson: Killing a journalist and killing anyone is a horrible thing, but in Mexico, when a journalist is killed, it’s an attack on democracy and it’s a message to civil society. That’s why these messages are important, because they have a political intent that is meant to quiet this effort by Mexican civil society to free itself from a seventy- or eighty-year-long rule by one political party.

Chaoul: I completely agree with you, Ginger. Journalists provide the information for us Mexicans to make better decisions, to choose our governors and representatives, and without that link, not only do journalists suffer, but the whole society suffers from the lack of information and agency to assert change and to hold people accountable.

Lozano: In Mexican society, but also in the rest of the world, there is a particular way of killing journalists. Sometimes they are shot in the street and that kind of thing, but there are also many cases of journalists being tortured before actually being killed. There is a particular signature of violence in each case that attempts to send a message to the rest of the journalistic community, especially the journalists covering stories in their hometowns. Local journalists are the most vulnerable of the whole community.

 

Félix Marquez, Property of Moises Sanchez, who was murdered January 2nd, 2015, 2018
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: What kinds of stories are not being covered? What kinds of stories do some journalists maybe shy away from because of the threat?

Thompson: I think a lot of news organizations in Mexico have completely decided not to write about violent crime. They simply don’t cover every murder because a lot of those murders are committed by drug organizations that have control over the local government. These local journalists work in these news organizations where they have almost no pay. These news organizations run on advertising that comes from the government, so they are independent in many ways, but in the most fundamental of ways they are not. Editors are afraid to lose that financing, so they don’t want their reporters to report on stories that are uncomfortable for the government, which is in league with these drug organizations in many cases, especially at local levels.

I spent the last couple of years writing a story about a massacre in a town called Allende in Coahuila, where this massacre happened and dozens, possibly hundreds, of people just vanished and no one talked about it, for months. People were afraid to say anything to the police, because the police were involved, to the military because the military was involved, and to the mayor because the mayor was involved. I met a lot of reporters in Coahuila who said, “You know, I was there when Allende happened. We couldn’t report it. We weren’t allowed to report it.” Reporters who do, get killed, and they don’t just get killed, they get killed in front of their kids. They’re sending the message to civil society that “if we can kill her, this very public news person, if she has no protection, you don’t either.” And that’s why this is so insidious and why it’s so important.

Mauricio Palos, La Ley del Monte, 2017
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: Emmanuel, Alejandra mentioned how difficult it was to calculate risk and how difficult it is to know where a threat is coming from. You’ve had some of your own experiences navigating risk in your reporting. Could you tell us a bit about how you navigate that?

Lozano: It’s really hard to calculate the risk in Mexico. In some places in the world, there are really clear areas, red zones or green zones. Mexico is an entirely red or black zone, so you can’t know who is trustworthy. The military, the army, the navy, and the federal police—every single layer in Mexican society is involved at some level, so it’s really difficult to navigate. In my experience, I used to spend my vacations in college at these places just because I was curious about them. That was probably pretty stupid, but somehow I learned to navigate some of the places that I was going to. At some point, I started to get threats from the cartels. Even if you start receiving threats from the cartels, there might be a safe zone as long as you don’t go into their territories. As long as you don’t mess with them again, it’s probably going to be fine—not in all cases, but in my case it was.

What scared me the most was what happened after I covered the case of the forty-three students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa. It was published in a few places here, in the New York Times Lens blog, and in Europe. At some point, the nature of the threats I was getting started to change. I used to Skype with my girl, who’s my wife now. We used to Skype every day. We started to hear typing that was coming from somewhere—not from us, but from somewhere. We heard someone putting a glass of water on the table and other environmental noise that wasn’t from either of us. At some point you realize that these are not the cartels anymore, this is probably something else. I went to Mexico City once and they started to send me pictures of myself from earlier in the day. The nature of things is changing for me and for a lot of my colleagues. The government is more dangerous for some journalists than the cartels themselves sometimes. For most of my colleagues, there is no way to navigate those situations, especially when you’re living there.

Emmanuel Guillén Lozano, Smoke coming out from a “ghost town” in the mountain area of Guerrero, Mexico, 2010
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: The Mexican government often talks about the press freedom crisis and about the general difficulty of dealing with organized crime. I’m interested in your thoughts on this excuse. How many of these threats are coming from organized crime? How many of them are coming from state actors? How should we even think about the dichotomy between those two?

Chaoul: Article 19 [a human rights non-profit that focuses on freedom of expression] investigates the source of some of the attacks, like hacking attacks or phone threats or cloning websites. According to them, most of these attacks come from public servants. Having said that, I think the line that divides the government from organized crime is way more unclear on a local level. At a municipal level it’s going to be way harder to determine which is which because they are the same. I think it gets more complicated with more elevated levels of government. When you’re talking about the federal government, it’s known that they’ve spied on reporters with malicious software. That’s where making the excuse gets harder, because it’s not really believable that they’re organized crime. Instead, they say it’s for security purposes.

Thompson: I think it’s actually not all that hard. What’s hard is to get people punished for those things. There’s plenty of evidence of collusion by high-level government officials at the federal, state, and local levels, but getting punishments for those people has been almost impossible. It is true, at the local level they’re the same people. At the federal level there’s maybe some degrees of separation. But the fact that the federal government has been hacking into reporters’ computer and phones, all of that has been proven. What’s really hard to get in Mexico is prosecution, and until that changes, the rest of it is going to be really hard to change. I’m not saying what Mexico needs to do is easy, because it’s not. A start might be prosecuting people at high levels who are responsible for these very prominent attacks on the press or on political actors, but I think there’s tons of evidence that the collusion is real.

Félix Marquez, Property of Guillermo Luna, who was murdered May 3rd, 2012, 2018
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: I actually want to talk a little bit about this election. It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this election is in Mexico. It’s a major shift, a major game changer. A left-leaning candidate, [Andrés Manuel] López Obrador, won the presidency and his party, Morena, won Congress and swept a lot of the local elections as well. So what does this mean? Are you optimistic that he could tackle issues like impunity, the lack of prosecutions of crime?

Chaoul: I’m going to choose to be optimistic. I think there’s a lot on the table that can work for passing certain laws that are key to protecting journalists. There’s enough strength in Congress and enough state congresses to pass and change laws. There are a couple of laws that come to mind. One is on internal security, which basically allows for surveillance against anything that seems like a threat, which could easily mean reporters. The other one, which Ginger mentioned, is one on advertising from the government. It’s an institutionalized way of exerting power and dictating editorial lines. That’s another one that could be changed. The numbers are there, it’s just a matter of if they’re going to do it.

Emmanuel Guillén Lozano, Bodies hanging from a bridge above the highway in Tamaulipas, Mexico, 2014
© the artist and courtesy the Bronx Documentary Center

Ellerbeck: I wanted to ask each of you what the international community should be doing to help resolve the press freedom crisis in Mexico.

Lozano: In the U.S.’s case, since we’re neighbors, I think we need more coverage on the context of the U.S.’s role in Mexico’s predicament, and more reporting on the major stories here. That’s all we need. That’s the least we can aspire to.

Chaoul: I agree with you but I would be a little more pragmatic. My wish would be for funding. Expand your Mexico bureaus, fund an independent, investigative newsroom. There’s really good reporting in Mexico, really good photojournalists in Mexico. Consume our stories, but also put some money there.

Thompson: I agree with both. I think having a way to hold bad actors accountable, as the press and as citizens who have senators and congressmen who send money to Mexico, is important. Obviously the one thing we don’t need is a wall. So in addition to what they’ve said: accountability and looking for ways to understand how interconnected we are, how Mexico’s problems are not just their problems, and how those problems are driven a lot by funding from or drug consumption in the United States. We’re in this together. I think if there was more consciousness about that, it would go a long way.

Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul is an investigative reporter, magazine writer, and researcher based in New York. Alexandra Ellerbeck is the North America Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. Ginger Thompson served as the Mexico City bureau chief for the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. Emmanuel Guillén Lozano is a documentary photographer based in New York.  

This conversation is adapted from a public talk at Photoville in New York on September 15, 2018, produced by United Photo Industries and presented in partnership with PhotoWings, with additional support by The Philip and Edith Leonian Foundation and Two Trees Management. This talk coincided with the traveling exhibition Attacks on the Press: Mexico, which was on view July 12­–August 3, 2018 at the Bronx Documentary Center.

The post How Can Photojournalists Navigate the Crisis of Press Freedom in Mexico? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Remembering Xavier Barral (1955–2019)

Aperture remembers the life of an influential figure in photobook publishing.

By Lesley A. Martin and Darius Himes

Xavier Barral at Paris Photo, 2017. Photograph by Ramón Reverté

When The PhotoBook Review was first launched in 2011, Xavier Barral was an obvious choice as the publisher best suited to launch the ongoing Publisher Profile column. The stated intent for the column was to “profile publishing houses that are contributing to the international photography book scene and who see the book as a primary means of expression within the broad field of photography.” Barral was a major figure in the French photobook community, but his impact was truly felt internationally. He had a keen and inimitable sense of the book as an object, and for the way photographic intention could be elevated by the judicious selection of materials, the right mode of reproduction, the proper balance of elements on the page. Barral brought an innate sense of elegance to every book, without ever reverting to the staid or expected, and his books ranged from the beautiful to the exquisite. Éditions Xavier Barral was a co-publishing partner of Aperture and it was a point of pride for a book that we originated to be selected as suitable for the XB list. It was with profound sadness and a sense of loss that we heard of his passing this past weekend. The publishing community is less lovely and less complete without him. In tribute to him, we repost Darius Himes’s column from November 2011. —Lesley A. Martin

Ramón Reverté, Lesley A. Martin, Xavier Barral, and Klaus Kehrer at Paris Photo, 2017
Photograph courtesy Ramón Reverté

Editions XB, based in Paris, France, was founded in 2002 by Xavier Barral, a photographer and former art director. The first book Barral published was Word for Word, a co-edition with the Centre Georges Pompidou on the work of French minimalist artist Daniel Buren. In many ways, this book set the tone of the publishing house. As an artist, Buren was regarded as visually and spatially audacious, and is known as an abstract minimalist who is concerned primarily with what he calls the “scene of production.” For his book with Barral, this “scene” became the printed book. Word for Word is a glossary of sorts, thumb-tabbed like a large dictionary, covering one hundred key words, from A for “affichage sauvage” (fly posting) to Z for “Zigzag.” It is a pleasure to hold and behold.

Sergio Larrain (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2013)

A creative marriage of content and form is precisely the point of a book, in Barral’s eyes. As a publisher, he actively strives to “recapture the pleasure of a book” and set the physicality of the object on center stage. Great art books are akin to “sculpture, or like portraits,” he stated in a conversation with me by email. “Books will become more and more expensive to produce, the cost of paper will never cease to rise, and they will become a luxury good,” says Barral. “The role of the digital book will be essential. I have nothing against the digital book. On the contrary, I see it as a solution to the dynamism of information and a field of fantastic exploration!” The paradox, he offers, “is in how it serves the art photography book. The digital book pushes the printed book to distance itself from accepted standards, to distinguish itself. The imprinted form becomes a choice.” This distancing from accepted standards is evident in the titles published since the inception of Editions XB. In the last few years, Barral has worked on projects with Jean Gaumy, Sophie Calle, David Lynch, Philippe Chancel, Takashi Murakami, and a second project with Daniel Buren.

Speaking about the nature of collaborating with artists, Barral shares that “Every collaboration has been gratifying. I publish authors not only because I want to defend an idea, a work, but also because they teach me, because they help me. And likewise, I push the artists. Through the books, I think I can go farther precisely because they surprise me. . . . I become a kind of conductor, advancing towards an objective. I see all my books as parts of a whole.”

Josef Koudelka, Wall (Éditions Xavier Barral, 2013)

Two books which exemplify this collaborative spirit were published this past year: Antipersonnel (2011), by Raphaël Dallaporta, and A Criminal Investigation (2011), by Yukichi Watabe. Dallaporta was born in France in 1980 and was the winner of the 2010 Young Photographer ICP Infinity Award. In many ways he represents a new generation of photographers who are consciously engaged with photographs and their relation to the printed word—whether following the dictums of scholarship or the mores of literature—and who see the book as a lasting, important form of expression. Dallaporta’s long-term projects can loosely be termed “documentary,” as they are concerned with real-world situations, but he consciously borrows a visual language from varied sources beyond the recognizable tropes of journalistic photography. His photographs and subsequent books are the result of collaborations with professionals from a wide range of fields, including social work, forensic pathology, and, for Antipersonnel, a landmine-clearing project.

Martin Parr, Life’s a Beach (Aperture/Éditions Xavier Barral, 2013)

Also based on a real-world situation, albeit one from some decades ago, A Criminal Investigation, by Yukichi Watabe, looks and reads like a crime thriller, with the following text appearing on the back cover:

On January 14th, 1958 the disfigured and mutilated body of a man was discovered near Lake Sembako, Japan. Two Tokyo detectives were sent to help local authorities quickly wrap up what seemed to be a routine case. It turned out to be anything but.

From the outset, the question presented by this book is whether the story is fictional or historical. Watabe (1924–1993) was a freelance photographer who was granted special permission to accompany the two detectives on a murder case involving a dismembered body. The vocabulary Watabe wields is an elegant blend that draws on both film noir and the handheld, Magnum-inspired journalism of the era. Many of the photographs read like film stills, with the elder detective cast as the main protagonist of the story. The murder case was indeed real. Through the active storytelling devices of brief journalistic notes deeply enhanced by powerful editing, sequencing, and the design of the book, A Criminal Investigation borders on a true graphic novel in photographs.

Barral’s conscious attention to the printed book as a platform for creative expression in collaboration with artists and designers is what will distinguish Editions XB from other art and photography book publishers in the twenty-first century. —Darius Himes

At the time of the publication of this piece, Darius Himes was assistant director of Fraenkel Gallery and a cofounder of Radius Books, and had recently coauthored Publish Your Photography Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). He is currently the International Head of the Photographs department at Christie’s.

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Collapsing Time and Space in Black and White

Ray K. Metzker spent his career exploring the boundaries of photography in order to break them.

By Max Campbell

Ray K. Metzker, 63 CM-12, Early Philadelphia, 1963
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Twenty-three empty frames divide the left and right side of Ray K. Metzker’s likeness in 67 DH, Early Philadelphia (1967). Each is numbered and, under every other one, “Kodak Safety Film” or “Kodak Plus X Pan Film” can be read, written upside down. On first glance, the image might appear to be a contact sheet of blown exposures or an empty template. But at either end, silhouetted features—hair, ears, shirt collar—punctuate the emptiness, turning a roll of film into a single image.

Ray K. Metzker, 67 DH, Early Philadelphia, 1967
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

This contact-sheet-as-self-portrait is on view to the public for the first time among more than fifty photographs surveyed in Ray K. Metzker: Black & Light at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Like 67 DH, which makes a subject out of what is in between by stretching the study across twenty-five shots, the works in Black & Light draw attention to the evolution between various experiments in Metzker’s half-century career. It is in transitions from one formal exploration to the next where the restlessness, frustration, and persistence that set Metzker apart are most clearly on display.

Ray K. Metzker, 82 QO 21-22, City Whispers, 1982
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Here street photography hangs near intricate darkroom compositing. Scenes from Chicago, where Metzker studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design, mix with others from Philadelphia, where he went on to teach at the College of Art. Faces get close to brushing the camera’s lens; cars, building facades, and interior scenes recede into geometric impressions. A range of action and observation is mounted on the wall here like a score. We can sense Metzker’s interests in theater and music clearly in stark shots of people posted under industrial structures and exchanging passing glances on street corners. In certain images, subjects are found in such dramatic relief that they seem to have been photographed across footlights.

Ray K. Metzker, 68 FD/68 FD, Couplets, 1968
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Black & Light, which is presented on the occasion of Howard Greenberg’s new representation of the photographer’s estate, of course does not provide the context that might be available in a museum retrospective. But the show does present works spanning Metzker’s career, and a look at the rolling innovation that defined it. In two early photographs, a man and a woman stand behind what appear to be thin curtains, some obstruction on the street Metzker has chosen not to avoid. A few years later, he would seek a similar effect in early experiments, holding up film negatives to photograph through and abandoning a dedication to the power of the decisive moment.

Ray K. Metzker, 58 EA-20, Chicago – Loop, 1958
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Throughout his career, Metzker identified the boundaries of photographic images so that he could restructure them. It was an inclination that grew out of what Keith F. Davis describes in The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker as an “impatience with the static perspective of the single image,” a frustration with “the essentially realist notion of the photograph as a passive ‘window on the world.’” Metzker might take a photograph and advance the film only partially, muddying the temporal divisions inherent in his camera and film. At Howard Greenberg, a grid of Metzker’s “Pictus Interruptus” images shows him grappling with the too-perfectness of landscapes, lifting things into his frames in order to disturb familiar forms. The objects blot out and mix into architecture in the distance, collapsing space between his vantage and the landscape. Clear indications of people and landscape leave his frames entirely in some later works, where solarized prints, torn and collaged, make rough white paper edges look like photographic highlights.

Ray K. Metzker, 65 A-2, Early Philadelphia, 1965
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

As Davis writes, Metzker’s work encourages us to “think about the adventure of perception in new ways.” His techniques for compositing underscore a tension between the static stipulations of photography and the current of action one might find on the street. Describing the “Pictus Interruptus” work, Metzker explained that he sought disturbances, things that were “foreign in subject but hauntingly right for the picture, the workings of which seem inexplicable, at the very least, a surprise.” Physical aspects of perception were also of interest, and Metzker took to translating them into images. It is an eyeball in rapid motion that charts the world before us, he observed, and holding that energy within the pictures required reaching for and often developing new frameworks.

Ray K. Metzker, 82 KS-4, City Whispers, 1982
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

During different phases of his work, Metzker described photography both as a vacuum cleaner used to suck up every detail and as a process like collecting butterflies. The two analogies account for time in very different ways, and we can find a shifting relationship with the delicacy and voraciousness of photography in Black & Light. Formal approaches are adjusted like a watch because, as Metzker explained, photography was for him a way of examining the world by reaching out, touching, and then transforming meaning. “What catches my attention and leads me to trip the shutter,” he once said, “is the first step in a process that may or may not lead to anything that quickens the heart.” The individual works often do. And an opportunity to chart the many directions in which Metzker reached provides a delight of its own.

Max Campbell is a writer and photographer based in New York.

Ray K. Metzker: Black & Light is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, through March 2, 2019.

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Three Women Photographers Reclaim the American Landscape

Susan Lipper, Kristine Potter, and Justine Kurland deconstruct the mythology of the Wild West.

By Rebecca Bengal

Justine Kurland, One Red, One Blue, 1999
© the artist and courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

In her influential 1985 essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men,” Deborah Bright called for women artists to “recoup landscape photography for themselves in response to its long-time character as an exclusive white male preserve.” The cherished ideal of the Wild West, metaphoric repository of the American dream, seemed particularly hunted and besieged: Ronald Reagan was in office, and images of the cowboy president riding horses and chopping wood on his Santa Barbara ranch were prevalent, propping up stereotypical colonial ideas of dominance and expansion. “Landscape images are the last preserve of a nation’s myths about nature, civilization and beauty,” Bright wrote.

Certainly plenty of American women photographers working in landscape-at-large have been cracking apart those myths since, as seen in Sally Mann’s photographs of Civil War battlefields, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s depictions of steel industry wastelands in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, to name a few. In that vein come two auspiciously titled new books of black-and-white photographs centered on American landscape by women photographers: Domesticated Land (MACK, 2018) by Susan Lipper and Manifest (TBW Books, 2018) by Kristine Potter.

Susan Lipper, Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and MACK

Lipper’s Domesticated Land is the third in a series of monographs the New York–based photographer has made on road trips in America since the 1990s. In this installment, she travels to the California desert, rendered postapocalyptyic in sun-bleached tones. In the image that wraps the front and back cover of Domesticated Land, a desert junkyard of tin cans rusts in the sunlight, the detritus of past westward migrations leaving an ominous trail for those who follow. While born in Dallas, Potter was based in New York for years, prior to moving to Nashville in 2017. For Manifest, she traveled to Colorado, photographing wilderness and the men who wander it. On the cover of the book, a male subject is mostly camouflaged by leaves and corresponding shadows; they shield and protect him in a harsh and unknown landscape.

Kristine Potter, Topher by the River, 2012
Courtesy the artist and TBW Books

Lipper and Potter focus specifically on the American West. Their books join other recent monographs by women that take as their subject this complicated history and landscape. In her first monograph, Deep Springs (MACK, 2017), begun when she was completing an MFA at Yale, Sam Contis traveled to the then all-male liberal arts college of the same name, located in the California desert east of the Sierra Nevadas. Her sensual, gestural pictures of young men in a rugged landscape reveal atypical depictions of masculinity in the West. In her photographs the region remains romantic, but the view is personal and intimate, focusing not just on bodies in relation to landscape, but specifically the textures of clothing, skin, dirt, blood.

Wilderness, the road, and the individualist promise embodied by the West have occupied much of Justine Kurland’s career, too, starting with her Girl Pictures series of staged photographs, which were recently shown in an anniversary exhibition and republished as a limited-edition photobook in an edition of two hundred copies, which sold out rapidly (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2018). Seen afresh in 2018 and by a new generation, her girls took on new resonance as they forged through woods and roadside wastelands and made those places their own, reclaiming male-dominated adventure narratives in the process. What began as revisions of fictionalized myth for Kurland launched a career trajectory into a years-long, documentary minded exploration of the American road as place and ideal, an interrogation of manifest destiny.

On her annual cross-country migrations, often accompanied by her young son, Kurland photographed the tropes of the Westward road: trains dissolving into the vast landscape, horses and cars and their mechanics and drivers and hitchhikers—America’s grizzled and troubled dreamers and drifters, most of them and the Contemporary American Landscape men. “What is power in this wounded world?” Kurland asks, quoting her own son’s question; “I could ask the same of the road.”

Justine Kurland, Boy Torture: Love, 1999
© the artist and courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

The drifters who wander through Kristine Potter’s pages could practically be some of the same men. Potter has made masculinity the subject of previous series: her photographs of soldiers training at West Point are connected to a long line of male relatives who served in the military. Her latest work, photographed in Colorado, is also rooted in personal history—her great-great-grandparents were sharpshooters who started their own traveling show, in the style of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show—and Manifest grapples with both the history of landscape photography Bright cites, and the legacy of westward expansion, justified by national ideology. “The mythic image of the West abetted the profound and sustained violence required to render this region to the nation, in a process that in turn stripped from the West the lifeworld of its indigenous peoples,” writes Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa in the afterword.

Potter’s landscapes are luminous but anxious, alluring but frightening. There’s a sense of paranoia in the pacing of Manifest. Darkness offers comfort: shadows shelter those for whom to be exposed means to be vulnerable. Midway through the book, a photograph of an empty road under a full moon, in multiple shades of silver, is the most serene image in the book—here, the night delivers calm. In daylight, appearing like portents on the ground and repeating within Potter’s sequence are images of water, a river, and the mini narrative of a man surfacing in it, attempting to make his way across. Will he make it? There are flashes of the pastoral—a man sunning on a rock in a stream, sunlit weeds, those river rapids—but idyllic nature is often a goal, not the present tense. It is the distant view, in the book’s final image, of the snow-capped Rockies, seen from a still-green part of the country, obscured by other woods, another wilderness to cross first. Here is manifest destiny realized, Potter seems to suggest—or, to answer Bright, the cancer of the Marlboro Man.

Kristine Potter, Drying Out, 2015
Courtesy the artist and TBW Books

When Susan Lipper began her road trip trilogy of photobooks in the 1990s, she had returned from a three-year residency in the UK. Grapevine, first published in 1994 by Cornerhouse, takes its name from a hollow in rural West Virginia, where Lipper made pictures that were both diaristic and documentary. Her next photobook in the series, trip (Dewi Lewis, 2000), worked photographs made in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas into an imagined journey that subverted the classic male road trip, and made her own presence a character. Between trip and Domesticated Land, Lipper says, she invented a new photographic persona, not terribly unlike herself: a liberal New Yorker who “has not lost faith in America fulfilling its utopian promise,” and who also seeks to shuck off its consumerist culture. Her protagonist heads to the California desert, culminating at Zabriskie Point, unnamed but resonant nonetheless. Here presented as a kind of final frontier—blighted, scorched, blinding, largely uninhabited—the landscape takes on an alien aspect, and the objects pictured within it offer telling clues.

As in trip, in which Lipper made her own presence palpable on diner plates and motel mirrors, she places herself in the narrative of Domesticated Land. A car’s side mirror is visible at the right edge of one frame, for instance, and these moments where the photographer is seen offer tangible proof that this world is being watched, that someone is bearing witness to what is happening to this dry, cracking earth. Interspersed at intervals throughout the book are pages containing brief quotations, which clue the reader in to the mindset of this traveler, which is aligned with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a legacy of American women pioneers who, as feminist theorist Annette Kolodny writes in one epigraph within Domesticated Land, tend to approach the harsh land with the goal of “locating a home and a familial human community within a cultivated garden”: a domesticated land. It’s a gentler approach, but still centered around bending landscape to human will—and isn’t that a version of colonial sensibility, too? Instead of the utopia her traveler seeks, Lipper finds the dried pages of a book, littered fragments of construction material, discarded refrigerators and washing machines, baked asphalt, an abandoned house that could be a suburban tract home out of Robert Adams’s The New West—all grim portents. Soldiers and military tanks appear on the horizon; here, seemingly, is the foregone conclusion of the land, the government takeover of the desert.

Susan Lipper, Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and MACK

And yet the book makes room for a kind of hope. Lipper’s lone protagonist is also seemingly rescued by the company of a band of wanderers. Perhaps they are a literal band (she also quotes song lyrics by a desert musical group, the Sibleys), but regardless, their faceless presence in the images adds a welcome mutinous thread as they inspect the traces of civilization. They are the human community of which Kolodny writes, and seeing them delivers a little surge of possibility. Could they collectively rebel against the feds encroaching and imposing an armed rule over the natural world? Some of the solace in the book comes from the bleakness of the images, the depictions of the continuous desert itself, suggestive of something Adams also said in his New West period: that “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.” In any case, if this land is to survive humanity’s most destructive impulses, perhaps a first step is to undo the Marlboro Country mythology of the West: to question, to see again, to see anew.

Rebecca Bengal is a writer based in New York.

Read more from The PhotoBook Review Issue 015 or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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For Alex Majoli, Photojournalism and Performance are Inseparable

The photographer’s psychological portraits cast a unifying light around the world.

By David Campany

Alex Majoli, Scene #2774, Guangzhou, China, 2016
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Europe, Asia, Brazil, Congo. For eight years, across continents and countries, Alex Majoli has photographed events and nonevents. Political demonstrations, humanitarian emergencies, and quiet moments of daily life. What holds these disparate images together, at first glance at least, is the quality of light and the sense of human theater. A sense that we are all actors attempting, failing, and resisting the playing of parts that history and circumstance demand; and a sense that we are all interconnected. Somehow.

Alex Majoli, Scene #8667, London, 2017
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Majoli’s photographs result from his own performance. Entering a situation, he and his assistants slowly go about setting up a camera and flash lights. This activity is a kind of spectacle in itself, observed by those who may eventually be photographed. Majoli begins to shoot, offering no direction to people who happen to be before his camera. This might last twenty minutes, or even an hour. Sometimes the people adjust their actions in anticipation of an image to come. Sometimes they are too preoccupied with the intensity of their own lives to even notice.

Majoli uses very strong flash lighting. It is instantaneous and much brighter than daylight. It illuminates what is near but plunges the surroundings into darkness, or something resembling moonlight. Spaces appear as dimly lit stages and, regardless of the ambient light that existed, everything seems to be happening at the sunless end of the day. Just when the world should be preparing to sleep, it offers a heightened performance of itself.

Alex Majoli, Scene #9928, Republic of Congo, 2013
© the artist/Magnum Photos

The term “theater” implies a stage; a stage implies an audience; an audience implies performance; and performance implies artifice. Photography has always had fraught relations with all these concepts. This is because it is a medium that can be used with minimal preparation or intervention. It can set itself apart from the world it depicts, or at least fool itself it can, and this was for a long time enshrined as the protocol for realist reportage photography. In order to be true and authentic, a reportage photographer had to be present in the world but without interference. It was an aspiration at once noble and impossible, of course.

Alex Majoli, Scene #1350, Shenzhen, China, 2017
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Alex Majoli’s approach to image making constitutes a profound reflection upon the conditions of theatricality that are implicit in both photography and a world we have come to understand as something that is always potentially photographable. If the world is expecting to be photographed, it exists in a constant state of potential theater. Whether it is a surveillance camera, a smartphone camera, or a photojournalist’s lens, the omnipresence of photography has created a heightened state of camera-consciousness. Even when this consciousness does not affect those in front of the camera, it affects those looking at the resulting images. In photographs we do not see people, we see people who have fulfilled their potential to be photographed, to become light, with all the inevitable theatrical transformations this can entail. This does not negate the documentary potential of the image, although it does imply that documentary itself ought to accept the theatricality of its own premise.

Alex Majoli, Scene #9546, Republic of Congo, 2013
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Majoli accepts this newly complex condition, responds to it and reflects upon it. And from this perspective it is perfectly understandable that the points of departure for his project come from experimental theater, and in particular Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, first performed in 1921. Its “plot” concerns a theater director, and actors who, while rehearsing their play, are interrupted by strangers. The presence of these strangers, with their complicated relationships and difficult histories, forces the director to rewrite the play in order to accommodate them. The layers of theatricality build up, and the audience has to adjust constantly. But the play would be little more than an empty game about theater, were it not for the fact that Pirandello has deep moral questions to pose to the audience. What is our relation to the demands of strangers? What adjustments are we obliged to make? How do we reset the “plot” of our life, our society?

Alex Majoli, Scene #2233, India, 2015
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Is there a correct position from which to grasp Alex Majoli’s proposition? Are we to suspend any documentary claim and engage with these pictures as fictions, like film stills or theater publicity photographs? Are we to understand these images as psychological portraits of people and circumstances, made by a photographer concerned with some higher truth relating to the contradictory promise of a new global consciousness? Would this global consciousness be the ghostly return of the humanist promise of universal rights and values, asserted in the face of shameful and catastrophic inequality? Perhaps these are not so much ways to read Majoli’s photographs than questions to think about while looking at them.

David Campany is a curator and writer based in London.

This piece is adapted from Alex Majoli: Scene (MACK/Le Bal, 2019). Alex Majoli: Scene is on view at Le Bal, Paris, from February 22 to April 28, 2019.

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