Aperture's Blog, page 91

The Woman Who Made the World’s First Photobook

Why Anna Atkins deserves her place in the pantheon of great photographers.

By Maika Pollack

Anna Atkins, Alaria esculenta, 1848–49, from the book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Courtesy The New York Public Library

Anna Atkins’s book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–53) has long been, to photographers, a highlight of the New York Public Library collection, and perhaps even a subtle highlight of the city itself. As part of the library’s exhibition Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins, this exquisite book of nineteenth-century photograms, rarely on display, can be seen in person in all its delicate glory. Photographs of British Algae is now widely seen as the first photographically illustrated book, thanks to the scholarship of Larry Schaaf; an expanded reprint of his original Aperture catalog accompanies the exhibition.

Like other better-known British women photographers of the nineteenth century—Julia Margaret Cameron, for example—Atkins came from means, and started photography later in her life, in her early 40s. To create the approximately fourteen copies of British Algae, Atkins printed some six thousand cyanotype photogram exposures on hand-treated paper. The book was produced without the backing of a major enterprise or society, though a few works, some containing peacock feathers and ferns, are collaborations with Anne Dixon, a childhood friend, and Atkins apparently had the help of household staff.

Spread from Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1848–49
Courtesy The New York Public Library

The New York Public Library’s copy of British Algae originally belonged to John Hershel, the scientist-inventor of the cyanotype. Never bound, it consists of delicately hand-stitched folios each a dozen or so pages, like little zines meant to be assembled and bound by the owner. This vulnerable form—not hidden by the officious leather cover and spine—gives the viewer a more intimate glimpse of Atkins’ process: streaks of Prussian blue, hand-sewn bindings, and the watermarks by J. Whatman Turkey Mill, the venerable nineteenth-century art-paper maker, all add to its allure, and all might have been hidden by binding. A title page has little pieces of seaweed spelling out the words on the cover: “British Algae Vol. 1”—the strands slightly fuzzy, like electricity hit them.

Cyanotype blue, or Prussian blue, is durable and unfading as a medium, and appears very close now to how it must have looked to the wealthy friends and amateur scientist readers (including Talbot) who received gifts of the volumes. The algae photograms appear not just in silhouette but also with some gradations of blue showing the thickness of the strands of seaweed, giving a diaphanous floating quality to the prints. You can almost smell the seawater. The page layouts are beautiful—the relatively modest size of the paper sometimes seems too vast for a tiny centered sprig, while other tentacled strands have to be wrapped artfully to fit on the page. Latin text (always present) is sometimes tucked to one side, a reminder that these photograms are products of scientific inquiry, and even an unconscious colonial impulse, an endeavor to categorize and name seaweed and capture its unfathomable detail with photographic precision.

Anna Atkins, Grateloupia filicina, 1848–49, from the book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Courtesy The New York Public Library

The lapidary exhibition in the NYPL’s tiny rare book gallery is dense with both illuminating objects and carefully chosen contextual details: for example that Atkins’s father, John George Children, was “Keeper of the Department of Natural History and Modern Curiosities” at the British Museum, and that Atkins had an herbarium with 1,500 examples of plants. The exhibition includes works such as Atkins’s early drawings of shells; the botanical illustrations of Elizabeth Blackwell (women, generally barred from academic art training, could instead illustrate plants); a mediocre watercolor by Atkins of Halstead Place (her home); and Mary Wyatt’s 1832 books on algae with actual specimens of marine plants somewhat comically flattened inside.

The larger question the show raises is this: We know that William Henry Fox Talbot aspired to create the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature (1844–46)—but because of the laborious progress of that book’s production, the diligent Atkins beat him to it with her modest edition about seaweed. But why do we constantly cite Talbot as the first individual to create a photographically illustrated book (now adding the words “commercially available” for accuracy), and why has Atkins received so little credit on that front? What does it mean to succeed as the “first” in any medium or form?

Anna Atkins, Ulva latissima, 1848–49, from the book Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions
Courtesy The New York Public Library

A number of distinguished women have told me that it hardly matters who is “first”—as if “first” were merely a male ambition—and as if women have better things to do than worry about their place in these histories. Yet major histories of photography almost completely omitted Atkins until the 1990s. At various points her “A. A.” initials on the book were even said to stand for “Anonymous Amateur.”

Woman, only child, mother, and scientist, Anna Atkins has progressed in the public imagination from an “Anonymous Amateur” to a proper pioneer of photography. A photographer recently told me she took her children to see the show, telling them, “This is part of why Mom is a photographer.” The exhibition is spectacular, and you can’t help but wonder what else we don’t know and who else we aren’t crediting in our histories of the medium.

Maika Pollack teaches the history of photography in the MFA program at the Pratt Institute.

Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins is on view at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building through February 17, 2019.

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Richard Renaldi: Building a Body of Work

Photo by Bill Kotsatos

Join Richard Renaldi for a two-day workshop where participants will discuss the ideas and practices behind fostering a long-term photographic project. Students are expected to bring to class one or two photographic series that they have been working on for some time, and should be looking for guidance on how to “grow” their project. Students will be required to participate in a dialogue that is self-critical and encourages reflection. The instructor will make suggestions and provide tools to help build a strong and lasting photographic body of work. There will be an examination of both renowned and lesser-known photographic projects, as well as a deliberation regarding the “why” and inspiration behind the themes in each of the students’ work. Participants in this workshop will also be asked to remark upon and develop an opinion about their colleagues’ work.

Richard Renaldi was born in Chicago in 1968. He received a BFA in photography from New York University in 1990. He is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York and Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin. Five monographs of his work have been published, including Richard Renaldi: Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006); Fall River Boys (Charles Lane Press, 2009); Touching Strangers (Aperture, 2014); Manhattan Sunday (Aperture, 2016); and I Want Your Love (Super Labo, 2018). He was the recipient of a 2015 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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Objectives:

Build a set of goals that will help further advance your project(s)

Learn how to build a strong and lasting body of work

Be comfortable in explaining your project(s) to a group of people

Materials to bring:

Please bring one or two long-term projects. You may bring prints or send your image files to education@aperture.org.

Tuition:

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

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

 

 

REGISTER HERE

 

 

Registration ends on Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

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

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

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

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

 

RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY

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

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

 

REFUND AND CANCELLATION

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

 

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

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

The post Richard Renaldi: Building a Body of Work appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

What Does It Mean to Navigate Queer Life in Hong Kong?

Meet the winner of the 2018 Aperture Portfolio Prize.

By Stephanie H. Tung

Ka-Man Tse, Untitled, 2017, from the series narrow distances
Courtesy the artist

It began with a landscape in the viewfinder. Ka-Man Tse was making a long exposure of a Hong Kong public square with her large-format camera when a teenage couple waltzed onto the scene. The image of the girls laughing and openly flirting imprinted on Tse as she indulged in imagining the infinite possibilities of their budding romance. “What does it mean to navigate queer life in Hong Kong?” she recalls thinking. “What does it mean to look, who has the right to look, what does it mean to be seen?”

In 2004, Tse began working on narrow distances, an ongoing body of images that attempts to visualize the circumstances that led up to that moment. Tse’s photographs propose what she calls “B sides”: queer narratives and obsessions set against the backdrop of Hong Kong, the place of her birth, and New York, where she grew up and now lives and works. Shifting back and forth between the two cities, her images are made at the intersection of the Asian and Pacific Islander and LGBTQ communities. In a society in which queer folks are often either hidden—as she states, “invisibilized”—or oversexualized and objectified, Tse tells the stories of her subjects by looking for the most subtle of gestures: a halfheartedly held cigarette, an affectionate caress, a longing gaze.

Ka-Man Tse, Untitled, 2017, from the series narrow distances
Courtesy the artist

Each portrait starts with an interview. “I often ask for a mental image, memory, or location,” Tse tells me. She likes to inquire: “Is there a space that you have that you go to?” As photographer and protagonist trade images and ideas over the course of months, or even years, they collaborate to imagine a world recast according to their own experiences and desires. References from pop culture and literature weave in and out of the work. Lines from Ken Chen’s debut poetry collection, Juvenilia (2010), become touchstones for musings on family and intimacy. The toxic relationship of Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together appears restaged as a desperate embrace. A parody of the postpageant group photograph channels the “bad Asians” of Hellen Jo’s LA-based comic book, Frontier #2 (2013). “The work is about responding and seeing, rather than directing or executing,” says Tse.

The physicality of Hong Kong frames many of the pictures. There are few images of vast, open spaces; the only unpeopled photographs are of the abandoned Kai Tak International Airport and close-ups of water and cramped rooms. Most of the portraits are made on rooftops and in alleyways, the nooks and crannies where people go to escape. In one photograph, a friend, who is an outspoken queer activist by day, changes his clothing in the stairwell of his building, a ritual he completes each night before returning to the apartment shared with his family. Light pours from his chest as he gazes outward in the unabashed act of either putting on or taking off. In a place like Hong Kong, where it is common for young people to live with their parents until marriage, spatial precarity shapes the everyday lives of its queer inhabitants.

Ka-Man Tse, Untitled, 2017, from the series narrow distances
Courtesy the artist

When Tse writes about how “occupying a space and a conversation is an act,” she invokes the urgent, political need to “establish a sense of personal space and agency where it is often contested and eroded.” Tse centers the gaze in narrow distances on queer subjectivity as she and her collaborators carve out space, both physical and psychological, to be vulnerable. Maneuvering through the city with her 4-by-5 camera, she compels others to make way, as she writes, to “be deliberate, breathe together, slow time together.” Each resulting composition is carefully layered, activating the space between the viewer and the protagonist.

Curator Helen Molesworth, citing Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, connects the notion of “holding space” with a more gentle, generative, and provisional act of displacement that Molesworth sees as manifested most powerfully in Rosa Parks’s 1955 refusal “to make room for whiteness” on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. It seems that narrowing the distances with “small gestures, clear or coded,” as Tse says, is a means of challenging spatial dominance.

Hong Kong itself is a contested space, caught between a British colonial past and an increasingly Chinese colonial future. Navigating through the territory’s streets, Tse continues to investigate the condition of being in between, making visible the everyday acts of care—for one’s home, each other, and our built communities—that sometimes get lost in the gaps and dashes.

Ka-Man Tse, Untitled, 2017, from the series narrow distances
Courtesy the artist

Stephanie H. Tung is assistant curator of exhibitions and research in the department of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Ka-Man Tse is the winner of the 2018 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her exhibition narrow distances is on view at the Aperture Gallery through February 2, 2019. Click here for more information about the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize.

The post What Does It Mean to Navigate Queer Life in Hong Kong? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

From August Sander, Stirring Portraits of Nazis and Jews

An extraordinary photobook reveals the lives of persecuted Germans during World War II.

By Brendan Embser

August Sander, VI/44/8 Persecuted Portfolio VI/44—The City, Persecuted, ca. 1938

In December 1941, Adele Katz sent a postcard that was never received. “My two dears, first of all let me send you my very best wishes,” she wrote from the Litzmannstadt ghetto, in the Polish city of Łódź. “I’m sorry to say that so far we have waited in vain for news from you.” Adele’s father, Benjamin (Benno) Katz, had been a prosperous butcher and meat wholesaler in Cologne, having opened his business in 1892 not far from the home and studio of the photographer August Sander. But on April 1, 1933, the day of Germany’s first nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses, Benno and his son, Arnold, were forced to march the streets of Cologne carrying defamatory, anti-Semitic signs. It was a scene of humiliation.

Soon, the family business would become untenable; several years later, unable to go abroad, Benno and Adele were sent to the Łódź ghetto. By May 1942, just months after Adele wrote her postcard from Łódź, she and Benno were deported to the Chemno extermination camp and killed.

August Sander, VI/44/5 Persecuted Portfolio VI/44—The City, Persecuted, ca. 1938

This is not how a story about August Sander—the Rembrandt of photography, whose name summons classical archetypes of German identity between the wars—is supposed to start. How do the Jews fit in? But the German Jews who Sander photographed in the late 1930s, among them Benno Katz and his family, are at the center of August Sander: Persecuted/Persecutors, People of the 20th Century (Steidl, 2018), an extraordinary book that accompanies an exhibition of Sander’s portraits at the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Holocaust museum in Paris. Numerous photographic collections have put faces to 180,000 German Jews killed during World War II, as Sophie Nagiscarde, head of the cultural department at the Mémorial, notes in the introduction. But “none compare with August Sander’s skillfully produced portraits of the Jews who sat for him in his studio.” And none, perhaps, have been collected and printed with the austere clarity of this book, with its fragrantly inky, unvarnished pages, which was overseen by Gerhard Sander, the photographer’s grandson.

Persecuted/Persecutors unfolds with the graceful structure of a sonata: exposition, development, recapitulation. In the beginning comes Face of Our Time, the 1929 photobook that would precede Sander’s masterwork, People of the Twentieth Century. Taken in the German Westerwald region and in Cologne, Sander’s portraits, as he gathered them into highly organized portfolios, were meant to portray the breadth of humanity through individual faces and bodies marked by a person’s station in life. Here, Young Farmers (1914), Country Girls (1925), Pastry Cook (1928), Working Students (1926), and Tycoon (1927)—some of the most memorable photographic portraits in the history of the medium—are set at quarter-page size, as aides-mémoire. We know them, but they’re not the stars this time. They remind yet again of Sander’s brilliance, and a time when making a photograph was an event, not a habit.

August Sander, IV/23a/4 National Socialist [Member of SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler] Portfolio IV/23a—Classes and Professions, The National Socialist, ca. 1940

There follows an entirely black spread, the silence before the next movement: “Portfolio IV/23a—Classes and Professions, The National Socialist.” Across ten pages are masculine exponents of the Nazi regime, each at full-page and uninterrupted by any text. They are members of the SS or Hitler Youth, according to the captions in the back matter. Some, in their looks, edge close to Aryan deities; others, with their glasses and well-kept hair and pudgy middles, look like someone’s father or brother. NS insignia is apparent in subtle or glaring ways, as in Sander’s portrait of the Nazi head of the department of culture, seated in profile, a pose that foregrounds the swastika on his armband. “Since millions of Germans from all social backgrounds abhorred it, the Nazi armband was meaningless,” Alain Sayag, of the Centre Pompidou, writes in one of the book’s many wide-ranging essays. “Similarly, the Nazi uniform, authentic or costume, became a hollow symbol: the mask behind which an entire society was hiding.” But it’s not the Nazi accessorizing that makes the portraits in this portfolio unnerving. It’s the hands, calm and carefully folded, a wedding ring shining—or, in one fearsome young National Socialist, wide-spanned and clenched, veins popping. Those hands are capable of anything.

August Sander, Persecuted [Mrs. Franken], ca. 1938

With comparative precision, the persecuted share this book with their persecutors. “Portfolio VI/44—The City, Persecuted” is a collection of studio portraits of German Jews, most taken in 1938. They appear pensive, guarded, their minds are elsewhere. They were having their ID portraits made; they were thinking of escape. Persecuted/Persecutors tethers these plates to biographical research conducted by Cologne’s NS-Documentation Center. Brief and empathic in tone, and printed on light blue pages in the appendix, the stories of the persecuted are often accompanied by transcriptions of letters. Many end with a chilling cadence about deportation. Philipp Fleck, for instance, an editor of a bis z, the magazine of the influential Cologne Progressives with which August Sander was associated, died in the Lódz ghetto in 1942. He never received the letter his brother, Richard Fleck, sent in May of that year. “You can imagine how I long for some news of you,” Richard wrote. “I hope you are, at least, in good health.”

Of the Nazis, we learn nothing.

August Sander, VI/44a/7 Political Prisoner Portfolio VI/44a—The City, Political Prisoners, 1943

Apart from the exceptional reproduction of the plates, the revelation of Persecuted/Persecutors comes in the form of the contact prints from which Sander selected the twelve images for the portfolio “The Persecuted” in People of the Twentieth Century, as well as various other ephemera (letters, book covers, archival photographs) that are threaded throughout. The contact prints are set to scale, with full negative frames, on a pale gray-green background, and pull back slightly to reveal the apparatus of the studio. They lose none of the intensity of the final cropped versions. Adele Katz appears in profile with her white blouse and watch, alongside her brother, Arnold, with his wide-lapelled jacket and the still-youthful openness of his features.

This sequence concludes with smaller 6-by-9- centimeter contact prints of Erich Sander, August’s older son, who was imprisoned in 1934 for his political activities with the Socialist Workers’ Party. Erich, who died in prison in 1944, became a prison photographer, and several of his own portraits of political prisoners would be integrated into his father’s work in “The Persecuted.” A leitmotif in Persecuted/Persecutors, the unexpectedly moving relationship between father and son, between master and protégé, finds its most eloquent expression in a photograph of August at his desk, two years after Erich’s death. On the wall are five portraits of Erich, including one from his student days, recognizable from Face of Our Time, and one of his death mask, included in Sander’s final portfolio, The Last People.

August Sander, Persecuted [Adele Katz], ca. 1938

“Last week I was again busy with Menschen des 20. Jahrunderts,” Sander wrote, in 1947, of his intention to include the persecuted in his portfolios. “We got the Jew folder down on paper. These are people who emigrated or breathed their last in the gas chambers. All magnificent heads of unpolitical people.” Sander aspired to make a portrait of society as it was, not as it could or should be. The pictures might well have been enough. But, the cumulative effect of the research and short biographies of the Jewish subjects and political prisoners in Persecuted/Persecutors, arriving at the end of this book like a coda, is devastating. No longer “types,” Sander’s subjects are envisioned here as windows onto individual lives brutally cut short. Adele Katz’s letter was never received because it was intercepted by the Nazis. She is alive now only in a photograph, but her words, at last, can be read by an audience she might never have imagined: “Heartfelt greetings and kisses from me, and say hello to everyone who knows me.”

Brendan Embser is the managing editor of Aperture magazine.

All photographs © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; ADAGP; and Courtesy Galerie Julian Sander, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

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

The post From August Sander, Stirring Portraits of Nazis and Jews appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture Remembers the Life of Hector Xtravaganza (1965–2018)

The grandfather of the legendary House of Xtravaganza was known as an artist, activist, and family man.

By Chris Boot

Stefan Ruiz, Grandfather Hector Xtravaganza, July 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

We were shocked and saddened by the news that Hector Xtravaganza, grandfather of the legendary House of Xtravaganza, passed away on December 30, 2018, after a battle with cancer. A few short weeks beforehand, he led a crew of Xtravaganzas to perform with Kathy Sledge to “We Are Family” at Aperture’s Family gala, while simultaneously working long shifts preparing holiday window displays for Bloomingdale’s, following a season of vogue workshops across Europe and America. He was a whirlwind of energy and purpose, and he got a whole lot done, even in the last few weeks of his life.

Grandfather Hector Xtravaganza performing at the Aperture Gala, New York, October 2018
Photograph by Sean Zanni/PMC

Aperture approached Grandfather Hector as we built the “Family” theme for our gala and the fall issue of Aperture magazine. Thinking about photography’s role in the evolving depiction of the family, we proposed an Xtravaganza portrait photo shoot at Aperture’s gallery, with photographer Stefan Ruiz. What Hector wanted out of it was a great family portrait, with as many members of the family present as possible. He pulled out all the stops, cajoling and threatening all the Xtravaganzas to participate. On July 29, 2018, more members of the House gathered at Aperture’s gallery than ever before to help realize Hector’s vision—and for a joyous and exhausting ten-hour shoot. After the family picture was done, Hector gathered the family in Aperture’s boardroom. For forty-five minutes there was silence, and the rest of us wondered what was going on. Hector told us later that they were able to solve a decade-long dispute that afternoon, and thanked Aperture profusely for creating the atmosphere that made it possible. His work with us moved our story forward, too—and led to a picture that justifies inclusion in future surveys of the family and photography from here on.

Left to right: Jaclyn Perez, Marisol Xtravaganza, Chelsea Maria Xtravaganza, Angelia Xtravaganza, Alexia Xtravaganza, and Nomi Xtravaganza, July 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Grandfather Hector combined the roles of artist, activist, and family man. As Stefan photographed the House’s newest recruits—six awe-inspiring young transgender women who looked like the future leaders of America—Hector mused about how far we’ve come, what world might be open to them today that just a few years ago was entirely closed. When Hector cofounded the House of Xtravaganza in 1982, rescuing kids from the streets, young brown transgender runaways had little hope of a livelihood outside the sex industry. There may be a long way to go before we see true equality, but few have advanced that dream more than Hector. Thank you, sir. “I’m a hugger,” as we learned, were among the first words he introduced himself with. A huge collective hug from all of us here whose lives you touched.

The House of Xtravaganza, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Chris Boot is executive director of Aperture Foundation.

The post Aperture Remembers the Life of Hector Xtravaganza (1965–2018) appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Aperture Remembers the Life of Hector Xtravaganza (1958–2018)

The grandfather of the legendary House of Xtravaganza was known as an artist, activist, and family man.

By Chris Boot

Stefan Ruiz, Grandfather Hector Xtravaganza, July 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

We were shocked and saddened by the news that Hector Xtravaganza, grandfather of the legendary House of Xtravaganza, passed away on December 30, 2018, after a battle with cancer. A few short weeks beforehand, he led a crew of Xtravaganzas to perform with Kathy Sledge to “We Are Family” at Aperture’s Family gala, while simultaneously working long shifts preparing holiday window displays for Bloomingdale’s, following a season of vogue workshops across Europe and America. He was a whirlwind of energy and purpose, and he got a whole lot done, even in the last few weeks of his life.

Grandfather Hector Xtravaganza performing at the Aperture Gala, New York, October 2018
Photograph by Sean Zanni/PMC

Aperture approached Grandfather Hector as we built the “Family” theme for our gala and the fall issue of Aperture magazine. Thinking about photography’s role in the evolving depiction of the family, we proposed an Xtravaganza portrait photo shoot at Aperture’s gallery, with photographer Stefan Ruiz. What Hector wanted out of it was a great family portrait, with as many members of the family present as possible. He pulled out all the stops, cajoling and threatening all the Xtravaganzas to participate. On July 29, 2018, more members of the House gathered at Aperture’s gallery than ever before to help realize Hector’s vision—and for a joyous and exhausting ten-hour shoot. After the family picture was done, Hector gathered the family in Aperture’s boardroom. For forty-five minutes there was silence, and the rest of us wondered what was going on. Hector told us later that they were able to solve a decade-long dispute that afternoon, and thanked Aperture profusely for creating the atmosphere that made it possible. His work with us moved our story forward, too—and led to a picture that justifies inclusion in future surveys of the family and photography from here on.

Left to right: Jaclyn Perez, Marisol Xtravaganza, Chelsea Maria Xtravaganza, Angelia Xtravaganza, Alexia Xtravaganza, and Nomi Xtravaganza, July 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Grandfather Hector combined the roles of artist, activist, and family man. As Stefan photographed the House’s newest recruits—six awe-inspiring young transgender women who looked like the future leaders of America—Hector mused about how far we’ve come, what world might be open to them today that just a few years ago was entirely closed. When Hector cofounded the House of Xtravaganza in 1982, rescuing kids from the streets, young brown transgender runaways had little hope of a livelihood outside the sex industry. There may be a long way to go before we see true equality, but few have advanced that dream more than Hector. Thank you, sir. “I’m a hugger,” as we learned, were among the first words he introduced himself with. A huge collective hug from all of us here whose lives you touched.

The House of Xtravaganza, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Chris Boot is executive director of Aperture Foundation.

The post Aperture Remembers the Life of Hector Xtravaganza (1958–2018) appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Time is Always Now

A recent exhibition considers the legacy of James Baldwin and the civil rights era in photographs.

By Ben Sloat

Bruce Davidson, Untitled (Tennessee), 1962
Courtesy Harvard Art Museums

Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America, co-organized by Harvard Art Museums and Harvard’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, is an urgent and disarmingly intimate exhibition of photographs, all black-and-white, spanning the lifetime of James Baldwin. Curated by Makeda Best in a manner that suggests the visual pace of a musical score, images from the exhibition demonstrate the photograph’s uncanny ability to immerse the viewer within the distinct psychology of past moments. Part historical reflection and part call to action, Time Is Now acknowledges Baldwin’s enormous cultural legacy by including diverse components such as an essay and books by Baldwin, a sculptural installation on Harvard’s campus by Teresita Fernández, and a series of companion events for the larger community. Last fall, I spoke with Best about the project.

Steve Schapiro, James Baldwin, Colored Entrance Only, New Orleans, 1963
Courtesy Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Ben Sloat: T. S. Eliot once said that “the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” I thought of this idea in relation to your exhibition, in which there’s an unsentimental recognition of the past, but also a demonstration of how these historical works bridge to our contemporary life, maybe providing a kind of guidance.

Makeda Best: That quote’s interesting, because it relates to Baldwin. The title Time Is Now is a quote by Baldwin. Someone once asked him, “When is the time?” And he said, “The time is always now.” It’s a similar sentiment; there is no past, time is always present, there’s always a present for action. Baldwin was very enmeshed in the impact of everyday life, and how incidents in everyday life transform you forever. The Danny Lyon and Marion Post Wolcott photographs in the exhibition both engage a theme in Baldwin’s work—how humiliation or other forms of psychological terror are used as a tool of oppression.

Sloat: Just as in the sole image of Baldwin in this show—Steve Shapiro’s 1963 image—Baldwin is dressed as a celebrity during the height of his fame in the 1960s, but he is still denied entry to a restaurant in the South.

Best: Yes, while being followed around by a Life magazine photographer.

John Simmons, Unite or Perish, Chicago, 1968
Courtesy the artist

Sloat: One thing that strikes me about this show is the tether to forms outside of the photograph: there’s a nod to literature, to the magazine, to Nothing Personal (1964), Baldwin’s book collaboration with Avedon, to music, to a companion sculptural installation by Teresita Fernández. Can you talk about the expanded purview of the show?

Best: That was directly inspired by Baldwin. I was looking at someone who, as an activist, modeled so many different types of interactions. I think that’s useful for us to think about today when we think about how to be an activist. There isn’t just one form. It doesn’t mean that you don’t stick to your discipline. Baldwin wasn’t necessarily doing all those different things, but he did think very deeply about how that impacted his own work. He was an active participant in observing all of those other forms. I wanted to show that as a model for the young people who visit this exhibition. That you can participate in different communities, and how important that is to sustain.

Joanne Leonard, Untitled, ca. 1965
Courtesy the artist

Sloat: Can you talk about your approach to putting this exhibition together? 

Best: I had this limitation I put on myself of Baldwin’s life dates, so I really had to compress my thinking. His lifespan is important for us to consider because there are so many moments in those decades that directly influenced not only his life, but all of what happened in history. I tried to visualize what were the kinds of incidents that mattered in those decades. I began looking at what those moments were that foreshadow the traumas and the uprisings that would come later. 

Steve Schapiro, Stop Police Killings, Selma, 1965
Courtesy Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Sloat: You have both an MFA in photography as well as a PhD in art history. How does that studio art background inform your curatorial decision-making in this show?

Best: I’m interested in images that create movement, on a page, or on a wall. I wanted there to be moments where you had to physically move your gaze and other moments where you had to stop. These moments of stopping, of movement, of direction, that definitely comes from my practice of photography and thinking of how images communicate.

I think I’m taking a risk here, since I’m relying on the viewer a lot to sit with this. There isn’t a lot of wall text, so I’m hoping there’s an intuitive way that people might approach this, which also comes from a studio practice. It’s an intimate exhibition; I wanted you to be close to people, and sometimes far away. That kind of dialogue I think also comes from a studio practice.

Danny Lyon, Segregated drinking fountains in the county courthouse in Albany, Georgia, 1962
Courtesy the Cleveland Museum of Art

Sloat: What has emerged as unexpected for you from the experience of this show?

Best: The Danny Lyon image [Segregated drinking fountains, 1962] has become more and more important to me—the fact that you had to stoop, no matter how tall you were, the various levels of dehumanization to get to that water fountain. It was small, it was unrefrigerated—that you had to turn the knob. Versus this big thing that was elegant, that was refrigerated, that you would just push this button and a nice big arc of water would come out. People look at the signs that say “White” and “Colored,” but it’s not even about the signs. Look at these facilities which were just poor. And then you look at what’s next to you.

John Simmons, Window Writing, Chicago, 1969
Courtesy the artist

Sloat: I find myself often caught in a one-to-one gaze with the portraits in this show. It’s a kind of a reacquaintance with the presence of the moment of the photograph being made, even with images that are historically iconic, like those of Robert Frank, Roy DeCarava, and Diane Arbus.

Best: This was a decision that was really inspired by Baldwin’s writing. He constantly writes about looking in someone’s eyes. I wanted you to focus in on a few images where you would be confronted with someone, that it would inspire that kind of looking. One of the reasons that this show resonates so much now, is that’s what we’re seeing today. We’re learning how much our everyday lives matter. How much that can totally transform who we are, the path that we take. These simple incidents that are important.

Sloat: I wanted to conclude with this quote by Baldwin: “To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free.”

Best: Yes, it’s a compelling idea of freedom, through our past.

Ben Sloat is an artist and writer based in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at Lesley Art + Design in Cambridge.

Time Is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America was on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from September 13 to December 30, 2018.

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We Are Family

For the members of the legendary House of Xtravaganza, family is about love, identity, and protection.

By Mikelle Street

Father Jose Xtravaganza and Mother Gisele Xtravaganza, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

It took a picnic in New York’s Central Park for Coko Xtravaganza to understand what the House of Xtravaganza meant when they called each other family. Having been inducted into the crew in 1983—after discovering house members on the piers on Manhattan’s West Side and at the downtown nightclub Paradise Garage—Coko thought they were simply a group of friends with a name.

“But Carlos and Tito used to throw an annual picnic for the house, and that was really the tipping point for me,” Coko, now the grandmother of the house, said during a recent photoshoot with photographer Stefan Ruiz. “That’s when the family thing really clicked, and I finally felt a part of something real. It came to the point where I would kill for one of them.”

Left to right: Dominique Silver Xtravaganza, Yusef Junquera, Rorí Xtravaganza, G Xtravaganza, and Manuel Xtravaganza
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Founded in 1982, the House of Xtravaganza (formerly Extravaganza) is one of the original houses of Manhattan’s ballroom community, in which queer people of color compete in balls centered around voguing, fashion, and identity performance, and group themselves into houses to share knowledge, resources, and also, at times, protection. This community was chronicled in Paris Is Burning (1990) and is at the center of the documentaries How Do I Look (2006) and Kiki (2016). The Xtravaganzas distinguished themselves early on, having been founded as the first all-Latinx house in a majority black scene, with a penchant for appearing in the mainstream. At its core, Xtravaganza has always been a true family, thanks to the cultivation of the first mother of the house, Angie Xtravaganza, who died in 1993.

Exclusive Xtravaganza, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Danni Xtravaganza became mother of the house in the mid-1990s. “I remember I would walk into Danni’s apartment and see nine or ten sleeping bags on the floor, someone cooking, and someone else running off to work,” Jose Xtravaganza, onetime Madonna choreographer and current father of the house, says of those early years. According to Jose, that legacy lives on to this day, with parents and elders helping to house their children in need: “If there were no more balls, there would always be Xtravaganza, because this is about family to me.”

Grandfather Hector Xtravaganza and Grandmother Coko Xtravaganza, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

As the ballroom community has steadily grown and mainstreamed over the past three decades—FX’s television series Pose counts several Xtravaganzas working in front of and behind the camera—other houses have developed organizational structures more akin to corporations or franchises. This family, though, has remained true to a hierarchical structure that includes grandparents, elders, one mother and one father, and children. The chapter structure popular elsewhere in the ballroom community, with its multiple leaders, has been avoided.

Alexia Xtravaganza, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

Like any other family, tradition and legacy are mainstays of the house. Birthdays, holidays, vacations, and events like the annual AIDS Walk bring them together, along with the yearly picnic, revived by Coko in 2013. There is an Xtravaganza legacy that lives on today of “impossible beauties”—a descriptor from the 1980s for the family’s extraordinarily beautiful trans women who pass as cis. For grandfather Hector Xtravaganza, the family came to mean so much that he changed his legal last name. In Ruiz’s images of House of Xtravaganza, the photographer attempts to capture that sense of created family, respecting the individuality of each member while putting their shared bonds at the forefront.

Hector Erazo, 2018
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for Aperture

“It was really getting this overwhelming response of positivity and love that drew me to Xtravaganza,” says Angie Xtravaganza, who took on the name of the original mother of the house when she joined in 2009. “It’s one thing to have that from your biological family, but they have to love you. These are random people who have no claim to you; they don’t have to love you and don’t have to care about you, but they take the time to love you and take care of you and appreciate you.” It’s this purposeful choice that makes their love all the more meaningful.

Mikelle Street is a writer based in New York.

Read more from Aperture, issue 233, “Family,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Aperture’s Best Photography Features of 2018

From the images that inspired Sofia Coppola’s films to Zanele Muholi’s visual activism, here are this year’s highlights in photography and ideas.

Zanele Muholi on Resistence

In an interview, the visual activist speaks about courage, rethinking history, and the politics of exclusion.

Back in the Days

Guadalupe Rosales and her archive of Chicano life in Los Angeles.

Sofia Coppola on Pictures

The acclaimed director reveals the photographs that inspired her films.

The Spirits of Fire Island

Matthew Leifheit conjures history and fantasy in the fabled gay enclave.

Alec Soth Revisits His Legendary First Book

How the American photographer fell in love with photography.

The Woman Behind the First Photography Gallery

Helen Gee risked everything to open Limelight in 1954, selling prints by Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, and Robert Frank.

Black Balloon Archive

Liz Johnson Artur’s intimate workbooks honor communities across the African diaspora.

Along the Shores of the Caspian

From Russia to Turkmenistan, Chloe Dewe Mathews photographed the rituals and resources of a much-coveted territory.

Bruce Jackson: On the Inside

When a folklorist set out to document life in American prisons, he found the enduring segregation of the Old South.

What Does Photo Editing Look Like?

In the digital age, locking down a sequence of images in print can seem like an act of resistance.

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What Does Photo Editing Look Like?

In the digital age, locking down a sequence of images in print can seem like an act of resistance.

By David Campany

Henrik Malmström, Editing OK Cloth Shop (Kominek Books, 2018), 2014
Courtesy the artist

For some photographers, editing is the heart of the matter, the place where the real work is done, and a source of great pleasure. For others it is secondary, or a problem, and may even lead to anguish. But unless the photographs are absolutely singular, with no intended relation to any others, sooner or later there will be editing. If the photographer does not do it, someone else will have to. And there is certainly no such thing as a photobook without editing.

It was in the 1920s, with the flourishing of the illustrated press and the growth of popular cinema, that the role of editing became crucial to visual culture. All those images had to be sifted and arranged. The tasks of editing were soon professionalized in various fields, each according to their media-specific needs, including magazine and book publishing, filmmaking, and art history. Conventions for selecting and sequencing were established by the mainstream press and cinema, and rejected or subverted by the various avant-gardes wanting alternatives from society, from images, or both. And in that rich setting, new kinds of photographic books emerged that were more emphatic in their choice and arrangement of images than mere collections of individual pictures.

George Peet, Minor White editing photographs for the Celebrations exhibition
and Aperture vol. 18, no. 2, M.I.T. Warehouse, 1972
© the artist

The now-canonized photobooks from the interwar years were of course quite anti-canonical at the time, and many were experiments in what can be done with photographs on the page. Visual primers for the new media age such as Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold’s Photo-Eye (Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1929); László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (Bauhaus Bücher 8, Al-bert Langen Verlag, 1925) and 60 Photos (Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1930); freeform books like Moi Ver’s Paris (Editions Jeanne Walter, 1931) and Germaine Krull’s unbound album Métal (Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1928); and Walker Evans’s groundbreaking American Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1938; discussed on page 10) were all shaped by the possibilities of montage as reflexive provocation, something that would make audiences think rather than passively consume a smooth flow. These books were also responses to the modern citizen’s daily experience of images, which was speeding up, fragmenting, even becoming overloaded. (Although these feel like our problems here in 2018, we’ve had nearly a century of speed, fragmentation, and overload.)

Where filmmakers and film critics worked up sophisticated theories of editing, still photographers did not. There is no photographic equivalent, for example, of the 1920s Soviet theories of montage developed by Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov (all men, although the unsung heroine from that period is Elizaveta Svilova, who edited and appears in Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, a work every editor of movies or photographs should see).

Lesley A. Martin, Editing Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness (Aperture, 2018), July 2016
Courtesy the artist

It is surprising how rarely any of the great photo editors of the last century—Stefan Lorant of Picture Post and Lilliput magazines, John G. Morris of Life magazine, or Robert Delpire, to name just a few—spoke or wrote with any real insight about how they worked. Two unusual exceptions were actually art historians, Aby Warburg and André Malraux, although neither paid much attention to photography beyond how it reproduces and arranges all the other arts on the page. Warburg’s highly idiosyncratic methods, arranging diverse images on panels to explore multidirectional affinities and themes, are discussed widely today. Sara Knelman considers Malraux’s highly influential and highly manipulative books of art reproductions for this issue of The PhotoBook Review. Illustrated art history books are rarely considered “photobooks,” but there’s every reason they should be. Another key voice has been Keith Smith, whose 1984 study Structure of the Visual Book remains one of the few sustained attempts to think through the relations between images. You’ll find Aperture editor Lesley Martin’s exchange with Smith here, too.

Is it possible to express what happens in the mind when one photograph is placed next to another, and another, across pages? Are there theories that editors of photographs work with? Working assumptions? Unwritten rules? Or are there just private preferences? Does the role and task of an editor shift significantly if editing for the front page of a newspaper, or a magazine essay, versus an artist’s own book? Can the craft of an editor be recognized, like a signature style, or does it disappear in the result? Does an editor know why they think one arrangement “works” and another does not? Can they articulate it? Can editing procedures be classified, and named?

Lesley A. Martin, Editing Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981 (Aperture, 2017), May 2016
Courtesy the artist

There was a moment in the 1960s and ’70s when it seemed image editing would be approached theoretically. Structuralism, semiotics, and the revival of interest in rhetoric in French and British academies transformed the way culture was thought about. Methods first developed for studying language were applied to images, with highly suggestive results (notably Roland Barthes’s early writings on photography, and Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements in 1978). Complex theories of narrative structure emerged as ways to understand everything from folktales to Hollywood cinema. But something about the arrangement of still images seemed to resist scrutiny. Beyond photography’s attempts at linear storytelling or radical juxtaposition (both of which are usually pretty creaky), analysis seemed to hit a brick wall. This didn’t prevent extraordinary things being done with the editing of images. On the contrary, the 1960s and ’70s saw the second great expansion of experimental approaches, which are still influential. Think of the diverse publications of Hans-Peter Feldmann, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Edward Ruscha, or John Baldessari. But at the same time, photography was entering the museum largely on the basis of exemplary single images, not even bodies of work, and this also stalled critical discussion at the borders of the image.

There were deeper difficulties, too. Most combinations of photographs are more like poetry than prose. For all that they show and express, they also announce their gaps, indirections, and enigmas. They do not explain effectively and are not very good at argument. Instead, image combinations suggest. In their punctuated way, they do not have the flow that can be attained by cinema and some types of literature. The individual images never entirely overcome their essential isolation from each other. There is always a tension—aesthetic, cognitive, intellectual—between what is irreducibly singular about a photograph and the part it plays in the larger whole. This is the challenge and the pleasure that photo editing presents. It is also the reason why analyzing it proves difficult. Only vague things can be said about it in general, so the more specific one can get, the better. There can be no overarching theory.

Lesley A. Martin, Editing Josef Koudelka: Gypsies (Aperture, 2011), November 2010
Courtesy the artist

The range of ways that images are put together today is wide, especially in book form, which for many photographers has now come to be the space in which comprehensive expression of an artistic vision is most possible. Everything, it seems, is being dared and tried. Why? Well, these are strange and desperate times, and who knows what works best, and what forms best express an age of uncertainty? Moreover, there is barely a mainstream of photo editing conventions anymore—certainly not of the kind that was established by the mass-market magazine photo-story that dominated for decades. Today there is no fixed order to kick against. If there is a mainstream, it is that mutating flow in which the order of images experienced daily is more likely to be determined by the algorithms of ideology, preference, taste, and commerce than by a conscious mind, let alone a creative or critical one. When any image might relate vaguely to any other, the very gesture of locking down a sequence in print, once and for all, which almost any photobook demands, can seem like a small act of resistance.

David Campany is a curator and writer based in London.

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

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