Aperture's Blog, page 92

Strong Women

Hannah Starkey’s cinematic, psychologically astute portraits define the contemporary flaneuse.

By Sara Knelman

Hannah Starkey, Untitled, May 1997, 1997
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

In Hannah Starkey’s recent pictures, London’s East End seems less made up of concrete and steel than conjured from reflections, graphic projections, and the intensity of compressed space and glowing color. The purposefully anonymous women in them—silhouetted by a nightclub marquee, shaded by a shock of pink hair—are integral to the visual world they inhabit. We might see them as images among images, equally resonant of the aspirations and expectations suggested by the city’s surfaces around them, on billboards and hoarding, in shopwindows, or even divined from the hinted-at lives of other city wanderers.

Hannah Starkey, Untitled, January 2013, 2013
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Starkey has been making singular, large-scale photographs of women in public for over twenty years, since moving to London from her native Belfast. She doesn’t make many pictures, and there are often very long stretches of walking and watching before a handful of new ones takes shape. Often hiring actors or collaborating with friends or strangers, Starkey casts her subjects as anonymous flâneuses, neither specific nor typological. The anticlimactic blankness of their static postures—standing, sitting, staring—and the familiar, transient spaces in which they pause mark them as both actors in the pictures and agents in the world. They might appear to us as posed icons of beauty and desire, but they are also self-aware individuals struggling into formation against the environments—architectural, visual, social—that project and reflect them.

Hannah Starkey, Untitled, November 2015, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Despite their sharp stillness, Starkey’s images are incredibly dynamic. Though they’ve often been described as cinematic, their charge comes from the possibilities and surprises only a still image can yield, from the pleasures and challenges of looking carefully at an arrested moment. (To allow your eye to wander freely and completely, her images are best seen at their intended scale, usually around 4 by 5 feet.) In one of Starkey’s earliest photographs, a young woman sits in a café, her hand held up to an oblong mirror. She appears to be admiring her own pretty reflection, but a closer look reveals a moth pinned delicately beneath her fingers. Reflected in the mirror, an older woman in red curlers watches with a faint but unmistakable frown. A more recent image refracts elements from a mosaic of mirrors: architecture, trees, graffiti, pavement, a young woman taking a selfie—and the photographer herself, there with her camera poised. Whatever sleights of hand might be at play—the trick of the angled mirrors, the camera’s perspective, or digital manipulation after the fact—the pieces, again, don’t quite add up. What are we to make of all these apparent signs and symbols? Are they haphazard, coincidental? Do they relate a story, or foretell a future? Or are they performances of seduction?

Hannah Starkey, Untitled, April 2006, 2006
© the artist and courtesy Maureen Paley, London, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

For all of Starkey’s suspicion of the negative effects of mass media imagery, particularly of and on women, there’s a joyfulness and an affection for looking and seeing in her pictures. In this spirit, we might detect autobiographical resonances, glints of a shifting mind and eye across the slow accumulation of pictures. This is especially palpable in the more recent work, which thrives on the loose, vibrant mood of the street. There’s a great freedom, after all, a special pleasure of escape in the act of being in public, of watching and being watched. In 1930 Virginia Woolf made up the excuse of buying a pencil as a way of enjoying a solitary walk across London, recounted in her vivid essay “Street Haunting”: “As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” She returns home with a pencil and the intense emotional energy of other people it might, with great effort and a bit of luck, recollect, reconfigure, and record.

Sara Knelman is a writer, curator, and lecturer living in Toronto.

Read more from Aperture Issue 225, “On Feminism,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

The post Strong Women appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

American Solitude

An exhibition in Paris reveals the extraordinary power of Dave Heath’s midcentury photographs.

By Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Dave Heath, Howard Crawford, Jr., Korea, 1953–54
© the artist/Collection Torosian, and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

In the fall of 1952, at the age of twenty-one, Dave Heath was drafted into the US Army. He trained as a machine gunner to fight overseas during the Korean War, serving in the South against the communist North. Although peace still has yet to be declared between the two Koreas, the July 1953 Armistice Agreement implemented an immediate ceasefire. Until the end of his military service, Heath dedicated his off-duty time to photography, documenting the melancholy among his fellow soldiers. He was particularly drawn to the quiet intensity of their self-absorbed expressions while resting, further crystallizing a strange stillness in their bodies. Closing themselves off, if only for an instant, GIs would allow their minds to wander away from the hostile surroundings. Lost in silent thoughts, longings, or fears, they just waited, perhaps, to finally go home, while others never would; thirty-three thousand of them had already given their lives in “The Forgotten War.” This very peculiar look, when one’s field of vision temporarily deserts the outside world to turn inward instead, became the leitmotif of Heath’s candid style.

Dave Heath, New York City, 1960
© the artist/Collection Torosian, and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Once Heath returned to the United States in the spring of 1954, he traveled from Philadelphia to Chicago and New York, where he stayed until 1970. This fall, Le Bal in Paris presented over 150 pictures from this period in Dialogues with Solitudes, the late photographer’s first European retrospective. It is titled after A Dialogue with Solitude, a photobook published in 1965 that took Heath four years to conceive. (The original maquette is on display at the exhibition’s entrance, along with some of his portraits of soldiers in Korea.) In the book, a masterpiece of visual poetry, street photographs from distinct places and times are juxtaposed to summon pure emotions, which the show also pays homage to by following no chronology. Vibrating like the many tones of a poignant scale of solitude, the pictures at Le Bal are arranged around narrow white blocks to evoke Heath wandering the streets like a true Baudelairean flaneur (and the “spleen” or gloom that comes with it).

Dave Heath, Washington Square, New York City, 1960
© the artist/Collection Torosian, and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

While close to the humanist trend that developed at the time, Heath’s practice didn’t share the latter’s air of innocence. His desire to become a photographer was originally sparked by Ralph Crane’s “Bad Boy’s Story,” a photo-essay published in Life magazine in May 1947. It followed Butch, a young orphan in Seattle, whose difficulties in relating to others strongly resonated with Heath’s own journey: Heath was abandoned by his parents when he was only four years old, which left him to yearn for intimate connections that he contrastingly sought behind a camera. While he took his lonely quest to the streets and their random encounters, the absent eyes of ordinary people caught in moments of complete introspection could only mirror his own emotional homelessness. “I believe it all goes back to the loss of my mother,” he told Michael Torosian in a 1987 interview, republished in the exhibition catalogue. “I’ve been creating this work, trying to get to the point of mourning, but it sucks me down more and more instead of releasing me.”

Dave Heath, Elevated in Brooklyn, New York City, 1963
© the artist/Collection Torosian, and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

In New York, Heath’s search led him straight to Washington Square and the 7 Arts Coffee Gallery, where members of the beat generation regularly met at the time, including the poets and writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He photographed both men reading, along with other leading figures. This community of nonconformists, who didn’t believe in the postwar American dream and who sought artistic freedom away from materialism, offered Heath, for the first time in his life, a sense of belonging. Like the beatniks, Heath was simply more attuned to the shadows. His remarkable printing technique—a combination of burning and bleaching that he borrowed from W. Eugene Smith—further isolated the everyday strangers he crossed paths with through sharpened black-and-white contrasts, beautifully highlighting the depth of their inward gaze.

Dave Heath, Washington Square, New York City, 1960
© the artist/Collection Torosian, and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

In 1970, Heath moved to Toronto, where he taught at Ryerson University. He died in 2016, leaving behind an outstanding body of work, which, after an interlude of obscurity, would have sunk into oblivion if it weren’t for the growing attention it has gained over the last few years. His “inner landscapes,” as he referred to his portraits, touch the awe of the sublime in a Romantic sense. Instead of contemplating the decline of civilization through the reign of nature, Heath contemplated the desolation of the soul, to which the eyes are the windows, and tried to overcome it through photography. “When you live a life where you feel you don’t belong, everything in chaos,” he said, “maybe you sense that the control over the chaos is the structuring of art.”

Violaine Boutet de Monvel is a writer and translator living in Paris.

Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitudes is on view at Le Bal, Paris, through December 23, 2018.

The post American Solitude appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Gordon Parks, a Brazilian Child, and an Exposé that Shocked the World

A 1961 photo-essay about the struggles of Flávio, a twelve-year-old Brazilian favela dweller, elicited unprecedented response. But should an American publication have tried to “rescue” a boy from poverty?

By Laurence Butet-Roch

“The Compassion of Americans Brings a New Life for Flavio,” Life, July 21, 1961. Cover photograph by Carl Iwaski
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

The artistic career of Gordon Parks (1912–2006), which spans nearly seven decades and a variety of mediums, is so rich and diverse that it refuses simplification. Even singular projects resist linear interpretation. Case in point: the Flávio story. On assignment for Life magazine in the early sixties, Parks traveled to Rio de Janeiro with the mandate to produce a visual exposé on poverty that would elicit empathy. Eschewing instructions from the magazine’s editorial leadership to follow an impoverished father, he chose to focus on an adolescent suffering from bronchial asthma and malnutrition, Flávio da Silva, who lived in dire conditions in Catacumba, a hillside favela near an affluent enclave of the city. Nearly sixty years later, a new book and exhibition, Gordon Parks: The Flavio Story, reconsider the legacy of this famous encounter.

“Breathing hard, balancing a tin of water on his head, a small boy climbed toward us. He was miserably thin, naked but for filthy denim shorts. His legs resembled sticks covered with skin and screwed into his feet. Death was all over him, his sunken eyes, cheeks and jaundiced coloring. He stopped for breath, coughing, his chest heaving as water slopped over his bony shoulders. Then jerking sideways like a mechanical toy, he smiled a smile that I will never forget. Turning, he went on up the mountainside,” Parks wrote in his autobiography Voices in the Mirror (1990). “This frail boy bent under his load said more to me about poverty than a dozen poor fathers.”

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

For the next eighteen days, according to the diary published alongside the feature, from March 22 to April 9, 1961, Parks would climb that very mountainside to photograph the young boy and his family. Bleak images show Flávio struggling to breathe in bed, caring for his siblings, and getting through his daily chores. He appears, in many ways, to be the man of the house, responsible for the family’s survival despite his own illness. It’s a portrait of resignation. There are no smiles being exchanged, no hints of love, joy, or even playfulness, aside from a small image of Flávio and his brother kicking sand on the Copacabana Beach, where Parks took them after learning they had never been, despite living only ten minutes away from it.

Published under the headline “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” the photos pulled at Life readers’ heartstrings. They sent letters of sympathy, offering money and help. The Children’s Asthma Research Institute in Denver wrote to promise pro bono care for the ailing teenager. Parents imagined how they would feel if this were their child. Life couldn’t have hoped for a better response. Thirty thousand dollars (the equivalent of roughly $250,000 today) were collected. The family was resettled in a nicer neighborhood. Flávio was flown to the United States to receive treatment at the aforementioned hospital. Life made sure to document these efforts in a report printed five weeks later, entitled “The Compassion of Americans Brings a New Life for Flávio.”

Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story dissects this feel-good narrative. Curators Paul Roth, from the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, and Amanda Maddox, from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, in partnership with the Gordon Parks Foundation in New York and Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro, interrogate the context in which the feature was created, look at reactions it spurred in Brazil, and explore the lasting consequences of what was at the time referred to as a “rescue.” Earlier this fall, I spoke to Roth about the alleged power of photography, the influence and responsibilities of publication owners, editors, photographers, and readers, and the necessity to reject easy, black-and-white interpretations of iconic works.

Gordon Parks, Flavio da Silva, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Laurence Butet-Roch: The Ryerson Image Centre, as a photo institution set within a university, has the responsibility to provide exhibitions that examine the medium and its practices. Last year, you featured the project Collaboration by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler, which offers an alternative history of photography grounded in a range of collaborative processes. Before that, you hosted an exhibition of historical images of Canada from the New York Times archive in a bid to discuss the representation of the country in news media. And before that, you programmed Attica USA 1971: Images and Sounds of a Rebellion, curated by Philippe Artieres for Le Point du Jour, which recontextualized the coverage of the Attica prison riots, to name a few recent memorable exhibitions at the RIC. How does Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story fit within that mandate?

Paul Roth: Before I even came to the Ryerson Image Centre, I had the idea of organizing an exhibition about this reportage, which was once Gordon Parks’s best-known photo-essay. But, the truth is, I’m not sure we could have curated it this way at any other institution. It fits so perfectly with our mandate of trying to interrogate what photography is, how it communicates, and how people understand it. To unpack The Flávio Story, to place it in historical context and reveal its social impact, we’re showing Parks’s photographs alongside images by many other makers, professional and amateur, and with documentary materials that many institutions would be reluctant to exhibit. This includes lots of publications, corporate and institutional records and correspondence, Parks’s original working materials, and images that have never been printed, that we found in the course of our research.

Gordon Parks, Family’s Day Begins, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

More importantly, we discuss The Flávio Story not just as a classic picture story with extraordinary images, but also as the product of Parks’s midcareer ambitions, as an ambitious corporate media project, for its stunning appeal to Life’s middle-class audience, and for the controversy of its publication in Brazil. Now, obviously, many museums and curators have become more flexible and open in their examination of historically important artistic projects, in making their checklists and in exhibition display, in order to better contextualize the stories they tell. But for many others, especially older institutions, it can be hard to make these shifts.

Our partners at the Getty Museum are trying, as we speak, to figure out how to handle a lot of the display choices that we’ve been able to make more easily at the RIC, because we aren’t bound by the same traditions and ideas about audience, and thus we can think quite differently. Ultimately, it seems to me that our goal in this time and place is to find new ways of telling the stories of photography, so that we not only retell the stories that the artist or photographer told, but that we also question how the stories were told, and how they have been understood. Because of this, we’re actually asking our audience to come to a Gordon Parks show where a majority of the pictures are not by him!

Gordon Parks, Flavio After Asthma Attack, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: Many uphold The Flávio Story as one of the few examples of photography’s purported power to effect positive change. Here, you challenge that conclusion.

Roth: It’s really up for debate. Looking at Parks’s story and the effort to save Flávio only as a cautionary tale would also be too easy. Some of my colleagues here in Canada have analogized it to the residential schools program, whereby indigenous children were ripped away from their parents and dropped off in abusive spaces to have their culture removed. To this day, Flávio doesn’t see his experience that way. He shared his point of view with us over several interviews. Instead, he’s angry that he was taken away from the place he was brought to!

The initial situation he was taken from was so perilous. He was twelve years old, on the verge of dying due to asthma, had a terrible relationship with his parents, was physically abused, and lived in a swirl of psychic violence that we can hardly imagine. So for him, being on the cover of a big American magazine, getting toys and clothes, being deposited with a family that he liked better than his own, felt like winning the lottery. He was so incredibly distraught when he eventually had to leave his new life in Denver. He acknowledges that something wrong happened to him, but to him it isn’t that Gordon Parks and Life interfered in his life, but that he wasn’t permanently adopted by any of the people involved, like Gordon Parks, Ruth Fowler, the executive assistant to Life’s publisher, José Gallo, the longtime business manager at the Rio de Janeiro bureau of Time Inc. assigned to assist Parks as reporter and interpreter on the Flávio story, or the family he lived with in Denver. He asked all of them to adopt him. They all said no. They all felt that they were doing the right thing by returning him to his own family in the country of his birth. But Flávio didn’t want to go home to his family. Photos taken by José Gonçalves, his surrogate father in the United States, bear witness to these emotions.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Having said that, Flávio was fourteen years old at that point, and one could argue that he had no way of understanding the complexity of his situation. All the people involved were already terribly worried that they were going to cause him harm. They obsessed over that, the magazine’s employees included. Yet at the same time, they didn’t really understand, they couldn’t. And, it’s important to remember that they weren’t doing all this for purely innocent or altruistic reasons; they had very complicated motives. All this to say that an uncomplicated absolutist read of this story, positive or negative, is not only misguided, but also not really that illuminating or interesting. Like all claims made about the power of photography, it’s much more revealing to look at the fragility of those declarations than to take them at face value. That’s why I love this story so much: there are so many moments and details you can interrogate.

Jose Gallo, Gordon Parks carrying Zacarias, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: The first part of your investigation rests in scrutinizing the context in which this photo-essay was commissioned by Life. It was part of a series entitled “Crisis in Latin America,” which was launched with an introduction that began: “The messianic eyes of Fidel Castro, hypnotic and hungry for power, summon up a new and nightmarish danger for the U.S.” This came six weeks after the failed CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion and as the Kennedy administration was pitching the “Alliance for Progress” economic interventionist policy for Latin America. Knowing the strong relationship between Life’s owner, Henry Luce, and the American leadership, should it be apprehended as propagandist?

Roth: Certainly, but it’s complicated. Henry Luce was many things, including an absolute anti-communist crusader. At the same time, he was also a self-proclaimed humanist. In other words, his corporatism and paranoid defensive foreign policy coexisted with his human-uplift politics. He embodied the idea of American exceptionalism. He built many magazines to carry this message forward—principally Time, Life, and Fortune—which became citadels for the people he employed, many of whom were political liberals, thereby empowering them. So, in a sense he created a paradoxical situation: On the one hand, he stated very clearly to his editors and reporters that he needed them to be propagandists in this war—these are words he actually used—believing that their role was as important as any army’s. However, and this is no surprise, many of Time-Life’s staff and contributors resisted Luce’s politics for a variety of different reasons.

Paulo Muniz, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: Where does Gordon Parks fit within that milieu?

Roth: Gordon Parks didn’t directly oppose these ideals per se; rather, he was opposed to the tedium of politics and what that would mean for his pictures. He had enough power by this point in his career, in 1961 when he was assigned to make pictures for this Latin America story, to fight back a little. He felt that it would be dull for Life’s readers to see a programmatic set of pictures that exemplified the editors’ political convictions. So, while he fulfilled some of their demands, which came in the form of an assignment list of desired images, Parks more or less ignored the editors. Rather than build his picture story around the father, as he had been assigned, Parks chose to focus on Flávio.

You can feel this uneasy marriage between the assignment and the images Parks actually brought back in the text that accompanies the photographs in Life magazine. The first block of text is very much what the editors wanted to get across about communism. The lead writer, Timothy Foote, presented poverty as a compelling pretext for the United States to solve, in order to prevent Latin American countries from being swallowed whole by communism. The cover headline, “Shocking Poverty Spawns Reds,” is telling. Yet, at the end of the photo-essay, an additional text is provided by Parks himself, a direct yet emotional diary of his experiences.The politics have been drained out of the pages and replaced by a language that buttresses the emotional impact of the pictures.

This is why this story is so complicated. Yes, Henry Luce was trying to support Kennedy; and many Time-Life staff members certainly voted for him and wanted him to succeed, believing that the Alliance for Progress would be a force for good in South and Central America. But they also had a more human reaction to this story of a single child suffering in poverty. When Life’s readers responded in kind, the staffers got excited because they could now help a single family, as a kind of proxy for all the people of Latin America.

José Gonçalves, Untitled, Denver, Colorado, 1963
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: The ideals you speak of, the context in which this work was created and seen, and the readers’ response evoke the white-savior complex, especially given how the humanist instincts of the magazine and its readership were then celebrated, just five weeks after the original picture story was published, in a self-congratulatory follow-up story: “The Compassion of Americans Brings a New Life for Flávio.”

Roth: I think that’s certainly true. The reaction expresses several things at once. For one thing, the magazine was just bluntly kissing up to their readers. At that time, Life’s publishers were increasingly concerned about their subscription and newsstand sales. In fact, circulation numbers were at their highest in the magazine’s history, just over seven million per week. With each copy passed between families and neighbors, it’s been estimated that anywhere from thirty-five million to one hundred million people saw every issue. But the publishers were still very worried, because it’s 1961 and television is increasing its market share and taking more advertising dollars from the magazines. There’s also a more crowded competitive space among weekly publications. So that’s why the cover featured Flávio smiling, in a clean bed, with a stuffed dog. The message was: you, the readers of Life magazine, contributed to saving this boy’s life.

Another reason Life was drawn to this intervention is that it helped them to visualize a journey from poverty and suffering to middle-class life, which was kind of an obsession with the magazine—because of who their readers were. The layout of the “rescue” issue is actually organized to reflect that ascent: Flávio and his family climb down the hillside of their favela, enter their new home, they get new furniture and clothes. Flávio flies to the United States, he’s diagnosed and treated by the best doctors, he learns how to play with other children, he learns how to speak English, then he starts making new friends.

So this story of redemption from poverty served many purposes for Life. The magazine could demonstrate its own power and reach, while also suggesting to its readers that by reading Life, they could contribute to the betterment of the world. Furthermore, the intervention suggested that John F. Kennedy’s policy—a continental foreign-aid program designed to save families like Flávio’s—could be successful.

José Gonçalves, Untitled, Denver, Colorado, ca. 1963
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: Still, this story encountered some criticism, initially and almost immediately, from the Brazilian government and media.

Roth: When North American media outlets do a story on poverty or war on the other side of the world, we, the North American readers, typically only care about our own reaction to that story. Very few people would even wonder whether there’s a response in the media of that place. In 1961, the press in Brazil immediately condemned the Flávio piece. They knew what Life and the story represented: a stalking horse intended to promote a financial aid policy that wasn’t fully supported within Brazil. There were opinion columns, news articles, even editorial cartoons.

One publication, O Cruzeiro, launched a two-pronged attempt to attack and debunk the story. First, they critiqued Parks’s photo-essay by flipping Life’s idea on its head, by sending their photographer Henri Ballot to depict poverty in the U.S., in New York, where Time-Life kept its corporate headquarters. O Cruzeiro’s counterattack was deliberate and overt. When they published Ballot’s photographs of a Puerto Rican family living in poverty on the Lower East Side, their page spreads were designed to echo corresponding page spreads in Life, so that the repetition of Parks’s visual tropes would undermine his pictures and reveal Time-Life’s motives. In response to that, Life’s sister publication Time retaliated with an article alleging that Ballot staged one of his hardest-hitting photographs. And that wasn’t the end of it! O Cruzeiro fired back and commissioned Ballot to debunk Gordon Parks’s photographs. He interviews the da Silva family in their new home and even takes them back to their shack in the favela in a bid to demonstrate how Parks’s reportage was staged.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1976
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: Was Parks aware of the Brazilian backlash against his photo-essay on Flávio?

Roth: Yes. Interestingly, Parks did in fact set up a lot of his shots, working with the family to depict their lives, though that’s not altogether atypical of this kind of press photography. Ballot, a fellow photojournalist, knew this fact; hence he knew he could attack Parks in this way. He takes a particular stab at the Life picture story’s central image of Flávio getting out of bed before his family. In order to get the picture, Parks had to manufacture a high vantage point in this tiny shack, so he set up something to stand on. He had the family stage the scene in broad daylight so he would have enough light to expose his film. And his contact sheet shows that he made twenty-plus frames of this moment, with Flávio, suffering from asthma, holding his arms up for as long as it took. Parks, like a lot of photojournalists, wouldn’t think of this as dishonest. He needed to make a picture that conveyed what it’s like for Flávio to get up first in the morning. He doesn’t see it as fake, and in many respects, it isn’t.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1976
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: Henri Ballot’s photo-essay brings to mind the work that Gordon Parks subsequently did in Harlem in 1967, on the Fontenelle family, to illustrate American poverty. How did his time with Flávio and the O Cruzeiro riposte inform that series?

Roth: Certainly the Flávio story inspired that later story. However, while both Life and Parks later compared the two photo-essays, I wasn’t able to find any direct evidence in the Life corporate archives that his editors said: “Let’s redo the Flávio story in Harlem.” There are clear parallels, but also differences. There’s something darker, much more stark and harrowing, about Parks’s coverage of the Fontenelle family, with the exception of his iconic, melancholy image of the mother talking to a social welfare bureaucrat, surrounded by her children. By comparison, the Flávio story is a story of hope, and is quite romantic in its pictorial values and composition. I don’t know that Parks set out to romanticize or exoticize either of the families. He was working within the visual idioms of the times. While he certainly related to Flávio on some level, he must have seen himself even more in a couple of the Fontenelle boys. He grew up very poor in Fort Scott, Kansas, and then in St. Paul, Minnesota. Entering adulthood, he lived briefly in poverty in Harlem himself. He knew the Fontenelle story better, so perhaps that fostered more of an edge in his style. Or maybe, having passed through the experience with Flávio, he was more jaded as the 1960s were drawing to a close.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1976
Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

Butet-Roch: Why is it relevant to reflect upon such works and their impacts half a century later?

Roth: As a great photographer, filmmaker, writer, and composer—and also as a pioneering black American—Gordon Parks is somewhat like Jackie Robinson. Just as baseball historians exhaustively look at his career, you can exhaustively look at Parks, his work, and his place in history. There’s just so much there. He worked in so many different genres and with different media. At the end of it all, what he really boils down to is a great storyteller, one well worth examining and understanding.

In many ways, Flávio was his greatest story. It just couldn’t be contained. It was so compelling that the audience took it over and carried it forward. That makes it unusual. Yet at the same time it’s paradigmatic of his photojournalism.

It’s no surprise that Parks’s photographs had such a significant effect on Life’s audience. He wanted to move people, to shake them up, to take them into the lives of this distant family. He was intent on conveying the suffering of poverty. He succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of his editors. In a way there was nothing new about his approach. Characterizing poverty by representing the life of a single individual or family had been done before; taking readers from the developed world on an armchair journey to pockets of the developing world is a mainstay of documentary photography.

This idea, that photography has the power to change people’s lives for the better, is the mythology that gives us hope and makes so many of us look at similar pictures year after year. We believe that by looking at these images, we can change things, we can relieve the relative guilt we have over our affluence by looking at the lives of others. The Flávio story endures because the pictures affected Life’s readers so much that they decided to try to change fate. The fact that things didn’t work out as expected is what makes it so resonant and revealing, even today.

Laurence Butet-Roch is a photographer, writer, and educator from Toronto.

Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in July 2019.

The post Gordon Parks, a Brazilian Child, and an Exposé that Shocked the World appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Between Pictures and Concrete Objects

Anthea Behm discusses feminism, photograms, and what it means to “hover” in the world.

By Carmen Winant

Anthea Behm, Rage for Order, 2016
Courtesy the artist

Anthea Behm is a difficult artist. I mean that in the best sense: her work is beautiful, agitated, and restless. In the five years that we have been friends, I have never known Anthea to make work that resembles anyone else’s. Her new series in particular—which we will be discussing here—refuse singular description. They exist, perhaps most succinctly, in the nexus of feminism, twentieth-century art history, concretism, and the phenomenological experience of a life lived. 

Carmen Winant: I am so moved by this new body of work, Anthea, which I know is ongoing and not yet complete. I’d like to start by asking you about how you carve out an in-between kind of definition for your practice, and then talk a bit about your unique process—which I think we could say that you have invented, to some degree—and finally discuss the work in relation to feminism.

I thought it would be useful to start with two words: “concrete” and “hovering.” I’ve heard you use both of these terms in describing your work, and yet they strike me as contradictory. Can you speak to this, and the notion of making things that, in your words, “hover between pictures and concrete objects”?

Anthea Behm: When people talk about the “concrete arts,” be that sculpture or photography or poetry, they have this idea of something that is all in itself and is not bound up in other things. There’s an idea that this makes something more “what it is”: a photograph that’s itself an object rather than about another object. But that’s actually a bizarre idea of what things are: that something could just be in itself and not be relational. What doesn’t hover in relation? What isn’t always connected to other things and people? The single plane of the world, with all its striations and variegations and hidden ducts and lost folds, that’s what the concrete is.

Hovering is onomatopoeic for me, not in terms of sound, but in terms of effect—as a word that registers the affect of process, becoming, the constant movement of the layers and relations of the world. When I use the word “hover,” it’s to get at this idea of simultaneity, of our liminal connections to multiple spaces, times, and things. Hovering is ontological in this sense—it’s what I think of objects doing, and what we are, as humans in the world.

Anthea Behm, Showing the hand, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Winant: So in this sense, photograms are perhaps more in contact with the world? Less a picture of a thing, and more an impression of the thing itself.

Behm: I do consider photograms to be in contact with the world, but not more in contact than a picture, because it’s this binary split between a picture of a thing and an impression of the thing itself that I don’t recognize. Photograms are “in contact” not because they are solely themselves and representational photography is relational, but because being in contact with the world is always some mix of enclosure and connection. To be in contact with something is to form a picture of what has impressed itself on you. The picture is a kind of, I don’t know, a kind of attempt to come to terms with the fact of your embedded-ness in life, with the fact that impressions are always being made on you and you are always making impressions on things.

The philosopher Branka Arsić writes about a nineteenth-century idea of the “camera obscura of the earth,” in which all things come to bebecausetheir exposure to the sun is refracted by the shadows of other things and beings, which they process, or “develop,” in the nighttime. I love this idea of the world itself as a kind of photograph—and thus to be in contact with the world, one must have what the world already has, which is both things and impressions.

Anthea Behm, Wilendur, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Winant: The photographs themselves are cut on slight biases, and hung without frames, pinned only on top corners so that they curl upwards at the bottom. As a result, they literally hover. Can you speak to these formal decisions, and how they answer back to such ideas?

Behm: There is an immediate relationship between the viewer and the paper, which I like—not to fetishize the paper in itself, but as another object in (and of) the world. The photographs are made on resin-coated paper, which is basically plastic-coated paper, and like the plastic bag or tablecloth represented in the Mirror Lamp Hammer series, the photographs can move easily in—and through—the world. They are not hard, stable objects, but flexible and nimble, which I hope is also reflected in the potential readings of the work.

The way the work is presented also reflects how I make it in the studio. For one thing, I am constantly moving for work or other opportunities, making movement and circulation not only at stake in the work, but also my embodied experience. And because the work is so large-scale, I’ve had to create temporary darkroom spaces. So, unlike a conventional darkroom, I only have a couple of red safelights. This makes it difficult to see what I’m doing and the way the paper is cut is a result of this. I am trying to control these actions and processes in the darkroom, but chance enters in, and it’s this messiness between—or hovering, to invoke it again—that I am interested in. Of course, I could have also recut the paper after it was fixed, but I am interested in showing these tensions and economies of production.

Winant: And what of their verticality?

Behm: They are made vertically for the most part, and I think a lot about painting and drawing when making this work. I enjoy making these like paintings—not framed yet, hung with a support that allows the surface to be worked on. And then I can move them straight from the studio to exhibition, just as you might with a painting. I also go between working with and against the paper. “Against,” in terms of pushing it to do things it is not meant to do, and “with” in terms of letting it do what it wants. It is the latter reason that I don’t pin the work in the bottom corners. Being roll paper, it has a “natural” curl, and this is something I don’t force flat . . . at least I haven’t had a reason to yet.

Anthea Behm, #4 from DUST series, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Winant: How do online, Photoshop, and darkroom processes come to meet in these pictures?

Behm: It varies from work to work. For example, with the Mirror Lamp Hammer series, I find most of the images I work with online. I search, drag, copy, and organize archives of images. I then import these images into Photoshop and make sketches for works that I then create through analog processes in the darkroom. This primarily involves painting and drawing with chemistry and light. It is important to me that these processes are highly controlled, but at times, like with the cutting of the paper or painting with chemistry, my control is exceeded by the conditions of the darkroom or material.

Winant: In those instances, it seems, you begin to “show your hand,” so to speak, and that’s not always done in photography, where the idea of a “good” photograph is sometimes that the artist’s hand disappears to allow the image to come through.

Behm: Exactly, and it was against this conception that Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray and others foregrounded their place in the making of images by featuring hands in their early experimentations with paper and light. I think it’s interesting how this gesture of “showing the hand” (either the hand itself or in glimpses of the apparatus) has come to be equated with a kind of self-reflexivity. It’s as if just revealing yourself and/or how you made the thing automatically means some form of transparency.

Winant: Though “showing the hand” doesn’t always mean a heightened level of authenticity, accountability.

Behm: Right. Showing the hand doesn’t necessarily reveal anything about the social conditions that drive the relationships between us and the things our hands do or take part in. In fact, it might work as another element of concealment. Like, look at my left hand that’s showing you how the work is made, but don’t look at my right hand, which is abusing the power I have as a subject, or further still, as an institution. I’m interested in working through this complexity somehow by simultaneously revealing and concealing the hand. Whether through an image or process, the hand is at once in a position of becoming revealed and concealed.

Anthea Behm, #6 from DUST series, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Winant: Your two new series are DUST (named after the space where they were made as part of the Plates of the Present residency in Paris) and a still-untitled work in progress featuring nude images of Charis Wilson taken by Edward Weston. The first also uses nudes, from Man Ray, combined with forms from Moholy-Nagy. Each of these so-called “masters” of the form has justified their use of female bodies as “formal investigations”; your work troubles that explanation. How did you come to work with this material, and feel the need to problematize it?

Behm: The first work in photography I ever did was about the female body. It was about how I can inhabit a body that, as much as it was mine, often felt taken away from me. It wasn’t only taken away in the obvious ways—by gazes that objectified me or men who thought they had as much right to my body as I did—but also in surprising ways: by women and their assumptions about other women, and what it meant to be a feminist or fail to be a feminist.

Winant: Perhaps we can return to the idea of hovering here: how we move between different, slippery notions of self, and self-affirmation.

Behm: I love how you put that, and there is something potentially liberating in that slipperiness. But this is where “hovering” can become pejorative, when bodies (along the spectrum, in very different ways) can be stuck between desires and codes and prescriptions. It feels at times, quite viscerally, like there is no good way to be in a body. So often our bodies can seem overdetermined and unavailable, even when we think we are “reclaiming” ourselves and founding new intimacies. I don’t yet know how to answer your earlier question about the origins of this new work, how to say what exactly brings me to a material or subject, because it’s so many different strands and motivations.

Anthea Behm, #7 from DUST series, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Winant: Do you think of your project as intending to “rescue” these women? From perennial muse-hood?

Behm: It would be good if we thought of them beyond just being muses, but I don’t want this work to be some kind of “rescuing” gesture, as if they needed rescuing, as if I were in a position to rescue them, as if history had moved to such an extent that we could now look back with clean hands. Because we don’t have the time or space to get into the different types of feminism here, I would just say that I don’t want to condemn how different women respond to patriarchy, because I think we should stay focused on patriarchy itself, on how we’re all finding different ways of living in a world that is, at some real level, shaped by heterosexual male ways of seeing, and how we can continue the ongoing liberation movements to surpass that condition.

Winant: Women can oppress one another, too.

Behm: Of course. And of course there are people in the world who refuse this either/or of man/woman. My intention here is not to use “women” as a homogenous category, or overlook the intersectionality that is required when discussing issues of gender. Indeed, those complications are central to my thinking. For example, one of the things that interests me about Charis Wilson in Weston’s photos is how blissfully unaware she seems of the fact that she’s rolling around on colonized land. As if her reclaiming of her body and her right to present herself depended on the layers of dispossession that the photo wants to keep buried in the sand. Some of what I’m curious about is the capacity of images to excavate these layers and intersections. And to complicate it further, there is something still formally significant about the work of these “masters.” I’m not trying to dismiss them entirely.

Winant: Right, your claim is not totalizing.

Behm: That would go against the subtleties, fragments, and layers that I want to expose on the single plane of the photograph. I’m not trying to make a final statement about the misogyny of history. I’m trying to break apart the past and rearrange it in some manner. I’m drawing my way toward this.

Carmen Winant is an artist, writer, and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University.

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Aperture’s 2018 Holiday Gift Guide

This year, Aperture has published books by Diane Arbus, Judy Glickman Lauder, Deana Lawson, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others. Aperture publications have explored how photographers have chronicled their relationships to family, the garden’s rich history in photography, and more. From iconic monographs by master photographers, to groundbreaking, never-before-published work, we offer titles for everyone on your holiday list.

For the Collector

 

Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

In 1971, Artforum featured the work of a photographer for the very first time. On its cover and in a six-page spread, it announced the publication of a portfolio by Diane Arbus, and in the words of the magazine’s editor Philip Leider, “the portfolio changed everything . . . one could no longer deny [photography’s] status as art.” The only instance in which Arbus curated her own work for the public, Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs is a stunning large-format reproduction of the artist’s iconic portfolio.

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal presents a survey of the artist’s prolific and extraordinary interdisciplinary career, with a particular focus on his ability to critically dissect the flow of images that comprise American culture. His work’s powerful themes include race, gender, and the commodification of identity through popular media, sports, and advertising.

 

Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Limited Edition)

One of the most compelling artists of her generation, Deana Lawson’s photographs portray the personal and the powerful. This special, signed, limited-edition version of her highly anticipated first volume, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph, features rose-gold gilded pages, a luxurious slipcase, and a custom tipped-on C-print of Lawson’s iconic portrait The Garden (2015).

Family Matters

Aperture 233, “Family”

The Winter issue of Aperture, “Family,” considers how artists and photographers have chronicled their relationships to their families and chosen communities, and takes an expanded view of what families can be.

Immediate Family by Sally Mann

First published in 1992, Immediate Family has been lauded by critics as one of the great photography books of our time. Sally Mann’s extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children reveal universal truths—such as the eternal struggle between a child’s simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy—while embodying the individuality of her own family.

Amelia and the Animals

Since the age of three, Amelia has been the muse of her mother, Robin Schwartz. Amelia and the Animals is Schwartz’s second monograph featuring collaborative photographs of Amelia among the animals. The resulting photographs serve as a meditation on the nature of interspecies communication and as evidence of a shared mother-daughter journey through their invented worlds.

Remarkable Storytelling

Judy Glickman Lauder: Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception

Over the past thirty years Glickman Lauder has photographed the intensity of the death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Beyond the Shadows responds to the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust, while telling the uplifting story of how the citizens and leadership of Denmark, under occupation and at tremendous risk, defied the Third Reich to transport the country’s Jews to safety in Sweden.

Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements

Chloe Dewe Mathews spent five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In this resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. Caspian: The Elements explores the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes.

As it may be

Magnum photographer Bieke Depoorter has traveled to Egypt regularly since the beginning of the revolution in 2011, making intimate pictures of Egyptian families. In 2017, she revisited the country with the first draft of this book, inviting others to write comments directly onto the photographs. In As it may be, contrasting views on country, religion, society, and photography arise between people who would otherwise never cross paths.

 

For the Adventurous

 

The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip

The road trip is an enduring symbol in American culture that has spurred some of the most important photographs in the history of the medium—from images by Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Berenice Abbott to Robert Frank’s 1950s odyssey The Americans. From Stephen Shore to Ryan McGinley, hundreds of other photographers have continued the tradition. The Open Road is the first book to explore the photographic road trip as a genre.

Highway Kind

For several years Justine Kurland, known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities, and her young son, Casper, traveled in their customized van, going south in the winter and north in the summer. Her life as an artist and mother is finely balanced between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and surprise. Kurland’s deep interest in the road, the western frontier, escape, and living outside mainstream values pervades this stunning and important body of work.

A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols

A Wild Life is the story of National Geographic photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols, told with passion and insight by author and photo-editor Melissa Harris. Nichols’s story combines a life of adventure with a conviction about how we can redeem the human race by protecting our wildlife.

 

For the Foodie

 

Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography

From basic sustenance to savory repasts, food awakens the senses and touches both private and public life. This is the first book to cover food photography’s rich history—not only in fine-art photography, but also in crossover genres such as commercial and scientific photography and photojournalism.

The Photographer’s Cookbook

In the late 1970s, the George Eastman Museum approached a group of photographers to ask for their favorite recipes and food-related photographs, in pursuit of publishing a cookbook. Forty years later, this extensive and distinctive archive of recipes and photographs was published in The Photographer’s Cookbook for the first time. And it does not disappoint: from Ansel Adams’s Poached Eggs in Beer to William Eggleston’s Cheese Grits Casserole, the book provides a time capsule of the era’s contemporary photographers as well as a fascinating look at how they depicted food, family, and home.

For the Outdoor Enthusiast

The Photographer in the Garden

From famous locations to the simplest home vegetable gardens, from worlds imagined by artists to vintage family snapshots, The Photographer in the Garden is the first volume to trace the garden’s rich history in photography, examining the complex relationship between photography and nature.

Picturing America’s National Parks

Picturing America’s National Parks brings together some of the finest landscape photography from America’s most magnificent and sacred environments. Photography has played an integral role in both the formation of the National Parks and in the depiction of America itself. This book traces that history and delights readers with stunning photographs of the best American landscapes.

John Chiara: California

This is California as you haven’t seen it before. John Chiara creates his own cameras and chemical processes, in order to make unique, luminous images along the Pacific Coast. This highly anticipated first book includes the surreal and thrilling landscape and architectural images for which Chiara has become known.

 

For the Child at Heart

 

Seeing Things: A Kid’s Guide to Looking at Photographs

Aimed at children between the ages of nine and twelve, Seeing Things is a wonderful introduction to photography that asks how photographers transform ordinary things into meaningful moments. In this book, acclaimed and beloved photographer Joel Meyerowitz takes readers on a journey through the power and magic of photography.

Go Photo!

Go Photo! features twenty-five hands-on and creative activities inspired by photography. Aimed at children between eight and twelve years old, this playful and fun collection of projects encourages young readers to experiment with their imaginations, get messy with materials, and engage with the world in new and exciting ways.

The Martin Parr Coloring Book!

Photography and pop-culture buffs, get out your crayons and colored pencils! Martin Parr’s colorful, tongue-in-cheek photographs—his comedy of contemporary manners—have been transformed into a coloring book, featuring affectionate homages to bad fashion choices, messy foods, trashy souvenirs, and the tourists who buy them.

 

For the Design Savvy

 

Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City

For the past thirty years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape—from studies of architectural maquettes to the extraction and use of natural materials.

Self Publish, Be Happy: A DIY Photobook Manual and Manifesto

An economic and cultural revolution has shaken the photobook world in the past decade: self-publishing. An army of photographers operating as publishers have had an instrumental role in today’s photobook renaissance. This book offers a do-it-yourself manual and a survey of key examples of self-published success stories, as well as a self-publishing manifesto and list of resources.

Rinko Kawauchi: Halo

In recent years, Rinko Kawauchi’s exploration of the cadences of the everyday has begun to swing further afield. In Halo she expands this inquiry, with photographs of the southern coastal region of Izumo, Japan; images from New Year celebrations in Hebei province, China; and pictures of the murmuration of birds along the coast of Brighton, England. Kawauchi mesmerizingly knits together cycles of time, implicit and subliminal patterns of nature, and human ritual.

 

For the Classic Cat

 

Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981

Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is a canonic body of work—a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over a period of five years, Shore scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures—such as Wes Anderson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Taryn Simon—to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is Nan Goldin’s visual diary, chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers—collectively described by Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin’s cutting-edge photography.

Walter Chandoha: The Cat Photographer

The Internet is awash with cat pictures, but Walter Chandoha’s might be seen as the forefather of them all. His photographs of cats in particular have appeared in the pages of National Geographic and Life magazine. They bear examination not only for their singular charm, but also for Chandoha’s signature look: clean, brightly colored backdrops and high-key “glamour” backlighting of his tiny, fuzzy subjects.

 

Always Learning

 

Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present

What led Stephen Shore to work with color? Why was Sophie Calle accused of stealing Vermeer’s The Concert? Aperture Conversations presents a selection of interviews pulled from Aperture’s publishing history, highlighting critical dialogue between photographers, esteemed critics, curators, editors, and artists from 1985 to the present day.

Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment

In this Photography Workshop Series book, Mary Ellen Mark—well-known for her pictures’ emotional power—offers her insight on observing the world and capturing dramatic moments that reveal more than the reality at hand. Here, she shares her own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from gaining the trust of the subject and taking pictures that are controlled but unforced, to organizing the frame so that every part contributes toward telling the story.

The Photographer’s Playbook

The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories, and anecdotes, from many of the world’s most talented photographers. Whether you’re looking for exercises to improve your craft—alone or in a group—or you’re interested in learning more about the medium, this playful collection will inspire fresh ways of engaging with the photographic process.

The post Aperture’s 2018 Holiday Gift Guide appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Black Balloon Archive

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

By Ekow Eshun

Liz Johnson Artur, Under 18th Rave, East London, 2004
Courtesy the artist

Shortly after midnight on June 14, 2017, a devastating fire tore through the Grenfell Tower public housing high-rise in West London. Seventy-two residents of the twenty-four-story building were killed in what was the most lethal blaze in postwar British history. Many Grenfell inhabitants were immigrants—first- and second-generation Africans and Arabs who had formed a disparate community in the building based on the common experience of departure from their homelands and arrival in Britain. They were the kind of people who had been vilified by tabloids and right-wing politicians over the past year of rancorous debate about Brexit. The kind of people, it was said, who were guilty of spreading crime, disease, and sharia law. As Katie Hopkins put it in a 2015 column for the Sun, “Some of our towns are festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants. . . . Make no mistake, [they] are like cockroaches.”

Liz Johnson Artur, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, 1997
Courtesy the artist

The Grenfell fire felt like a reckoning. Its ferocity had been exacerbated by the cheap and, as it turned out, highly flammable cladding materials used on the building’s exterior. In the wake of the blaze, with the tower looming over West London, blackened and sarcophagus-like, lurid talk of contagion and pestilence gave way to the reality of ordinary lives lost. The dead were not alien or other. They had been fragile and vulnerable and all too human. When the photographer Liz Johnson Artur first heard of the fire, her reaction was as personal as it was pained: “I thought, This could have been me.”

For many years, Johnson Artur lived in a public housing tower in Peckham, South London, built to the same careless standards as Grenfell. After the Grenfell fire, her building was condemned as unsafe, and the tenants evacuated. She now has an apartment, which also serves as her studio, in a sturdy brutalist-style tower built in the 1960s, located just south of the river Thames. From her thirteenth-floor balcony, you can see across the city to a thicket of new high-rise developments that crowd out the horizon, including the unlovely six-hundred-foot Vauxhall Tower, where apartments go for up to fifty-one million pounds. Johnson Artur is concerned with individuals and communities that live in the shadow of such buildings. “What I do is people,” she says of her work. “But it’s those people who are my neighbors. And it’s those people who I don’t see anywhere represented.”

Liz Johnson Artur, London, 1999
Courtesy the artist

Johnson Artur’s people are, for the most part, of African descent. You might find them, long settled or recently arrived, in London, Kingston, Brooklyn, or any other place where diasporic scattering can land a person. They are ordinary black folk of ordinary income who are liable to be overlooked or stereotyped in the popular imagination because they don’t fit someone’s idea of what it is to be truly British or American or human.

For the past three decades, Johnson Artur has been capturing their presence in portraits of extraordinary nuance and empathy. She calls the body of work she’s accumulated across that time—an ongoing series begun in 1991—the Black Balloon Archive. (The name comes from a song by the soul singer Syl Johnson, which speaks of his delight at seeing a black balloon come into view against a snow-white sky.)

The shelves in Johnson Artur’s studio are laden with photography books and novels, vinyl records and magazines: Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Richard Wright, Aimé Césaire, Milton Nascimento, vintage copies of National Geographic. The walls are decorated with photographs hand-printed by Johnson Artur—who shoots exclusively on film— on surfaces such as linen, tinted paper, and sheet music. The fullest manifestation of the Black Balloon Archiveis not on view, however. Stacked haphazardly among the shelves are volume after volume of notebooks filled with photographs and sketches; Johnson Artur has maintained them since she first started taking pictures. They function as a way to externalize her ideas, experiments, and moods, and together they best sum up how she approaches photography and what kinds of subjects and people she is drawn to in her work.

Top: Liz Johnson Artur, Galaxy FM Pirate Station, London, 2003; bottom: Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris, 2005
Courtesy the artist

Within their pages we can find African women in extravagant head wraps and sprucely dressed elderly West Indian gentlemen. Here is an all-male dance crew in Jamaica, its three members lined up in formation before the camera. And a group of young women glammed up, about to hit the club. One photograph shows a young man flashily accessorized in gold chain, spangly watch, Nike headband, and blue baseball cap. He eyes the camera with adolescent self-regard. The image has been printed on what looks like powder-blue leather and stapled into a notebook. Over it, stamped in red ink, are the words, “One day someone is going to beat him.” The message is as elusive as it is disturbing. Is it a warning? A rebuke? A quote? Or simply an acknowledgment of the brevity of youthful insouciance?

Elsewhere. Another photograph. We are at a club or a gig before a crowd of kids. They are all facing forward, perhaps in the direction of a performer or a DJ onstage. The young women have hair that’s straightened or braided or, in one case, woven through with copper-colored extensions. The boys mostly wear hoodies and baseball caps. They all look eager and excited to be there. Gazing at them, we see the variety of their skin tones—honey, chestnut, umber, rust red. And we notice how, in that moment, caught in elation, each of them is so very beautiful.

Liz Johnson Artur, Carnival, London, 1995
Courtesy the artist

Exactly how Johnson Artur establishes the trust and connection necessary to conjure moments of such intimacy is a mystery, especially given that she often shoots in hectic conditions, among crowds or out in the street. There’s also a larger question raised by her work. Gazing from face to face in her photographs, we might. ask of her subjects, Where are you from? It’s a query that bedevils all diasporic peoples, casting doubt as it does on the legitimacy of the immigrant’s place among the indigenous. But the same question can be phrased more benignly when it is asked between immigrants. All of us whose origins lie abroad can share an awareness of the battle for belonging that we, our parents, or our forebears fought in order to call the country we live in home. There’s pain in that thought. We might picture ancestors shipped across the ocean as human cargo, for instance. But we can also feel pride at how our persistence, our collective strength, has brought us to this present moment. So, rightly, we can wonder what historical forces have shaped Johnson Artur’s subjects. And we might even ask the same question of the photographer herself.

Liz Johnson Artur, Nation of Islam, Brixton, London, 1999
Courtesy the artist

Johnson Artur was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1964. It was there that her Russian mother, Nina, met her Ghanaian father, Thomas. She, in the city to study radiology. He, one of a small group of around twenty African students benefiting from a cultural relations program between Eastern Bloc nations and the developing world. They had only known each other a few short months when Thomas and his fellow students were expelled after a fight between an African student and a Bulgarian soldier. Nina and Thomas remained in contact, but with her unwilling to follow him to Ghana, their relationship dwindled. By then she was pregnant with their daughter. When the baby was born, the girl’s surname fell victim to bureaucratic mangling, becoming a bowdlerized version of her father’s name, Johnston Arthur. At that time in Bulgaria, single mothers risked having their children put into foster care. All the more so if the child was of mixed heritage, and if the mother belonged to the loathed Russian occupying power. They endured in Sofia until, when Johnson Artur was five, her mother inveigled passage to Duisburg, West Germany. They arrived without money or a place to stay and ended up in a former air-raid shelter turned homeless hostel. It was cold and damp, and Johnson Artur caught pneumonia. A doctor treating her took sympathy on them and gave her mother a job. They were able to move into a room in an accommodation block for nurses. Determined to save money for their own house, mother and daughter continued to live this way, in a succession of dorm rooms, until Johnson Artur was in her teens.

Liz Johnson Artur, Mbare, Harare, Zimbabwe, 1997
Courtesy the artist

Aged nineteen, Johnson Artur left Cold War Europe for the first time, to visit New York. The trip was a defining experience. It was 1986. The streets pulsed with the sounds and styles of hip-hop: Eric B. & Rakim, Biz Markie, Run-D.M.C., gold chains, Adidas Superstars, leather tracksuits, Boogie Down Productions. The spectacle was intoxicating. But Johnson Artur could only look on from a distance. Her mother had arranged for her to stay with a Russian family she knew. Although the family lived in a black neighborhood of Brooklyn, they maintained a fierce separateness from the community around them, and they encouraged their visitor to do the same.

On one occasion, they took her to a restaurant in the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach. Onstage, as entertainment, four black women dressed in Ukrainian outfits sang Russian folk songs, inviting patrons to laugh at the apparent absurdity of black people versed in the culture of Eastern Europe. For Johnson Artur, the Ghanaian Russian born in Bulgaria, the episode was disturbing. “I didn’t know how to feel about these women. I didn’t know how to feel about sitting at this table. I felt Russian, but at the same time I felt that I was at the wrong spot. It freaked me out.” Until that moment, she’d thought of herself essentially as an émigré Russian, like her mother. In Bulgaria and Germany, her Ghanaian heritage had felt like a distant detail. “I grew up with my relatives telling me, ‘Yes, you’re black, but you’re not that black,’” she reflects. “I didn’t explore blackness because I didn’t see it as relevant.”

Liz Johnson Artur, Under 18th Rave, East London, 2004
Courtesy the artist

In New York, she felt a powerful affinity for a people and culture she barely knew. “It was the first time where I thought, I have to somehow find out where I belong.” With a camera she’d hardly used until then, Johnson Artur began to explore the city, hoping in the process to discover a version of herself that accommodated race as well as nationality. “I think from then, from that trip, that’s where I started taking photographs.” She returned to Germany and studied photography with the aim of getting back to New York as soon as possible. But she still had a Soviet passport, and travel was difficult. Instead, she ended up in London, where she studied for an MA at the Royal College of Art. By the mid-1990s, Johnson Artur was taking pictures for style magazines such as i-D, The Face, and Arena. She traveled frequently on their behalf, to the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. On each trip, she took time to slip away and wander local neighborhoods, camera in hand. “I was hungry for experience. I was hungry to meet people,” she says. And she discovered that, irrespective of location, she was able to establish the same easy rapport with those she encountered. “If you walk around and you are all by yourself, it seems very scary. But I find it easy to approach people, and there’s an empathy that follows. It’s a give-and-take. I take all these pictures because people let me.”

Liz Johnson Artur, Mbare, Harare, Zimbabwe, 1997
Courtesy the artist

The same desire for connection continues to drive her today. At the 10th Berlin Biennale, in 2018, where her work was featured, Johnson Artur presented images from the Black Balloon Archive, alongside a new video titled Real…Times (2018) that interweaves scenes of black life, some of which Johnson Artur chanced upon in the street. Like the footage of the middle-aged man being handcuffed and hauled into a police van, maintaining innocence of whatever he’d been accused of, while friends and passersby looked on in consternation. Or the West Indian men and women gathered in a public square in South London to both celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the Windrush generation—the Caribbean settlers whose arrival in the U.K. marked the start of postwar mass migration—and protest how the government’s self-described “hostile environment” policy for immigrants now threatens to withdraw the status of British subject from those same settlers.

In the video, and throughout Johnson Artur’s archive, we glimpse a myriad of sentiments: joy, pride, defiance, loss, and a desire, above all, to be fully visible, to be seen and heard on one’s own terms. The faces before us in those photographs are strangers. But in the immediacy of each image, they seem familiar, as though we’ve known them all our lives. Maybe this is what kinship is like? Identity built on a shared past. On moments of hope and pain that stretch back further than we can remember. Back into history. Back beyond those ocean crossings. And perhaps then the Black Balloon Archive might be a meeting point for those pasts made present. A family album for the diaspora.

Ekow Eshun is a writer and curator based in London.

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

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The Spirits of Fire Island

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

By Will Matsuda

Matthew Leifheit, Adam, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Fire Island, the legendary barrier isle that hangs precariously off the southern shore of New York’s Long Island, is a place where the past mingles with the present, where desires and bodies blur with the pounding surf. For his recent exhibition Fire Island Night, Matthew Leifheit walked for miles—the island has no cars or paved roads—to make his haunting compositions of men amid dark dunes. Or he stayed in, posing his subjects in repose in a clothes-optional Cherry Grove hotel. I recently spoke with Leifheit about the fantasies of Fire Island, unexpectedly living in a cottage where Peter Hujar and Paul Thek spent time in the 1970s, and preserving gay legacies against a shifting landscape.

Matthew Leifheit, Cherry Grove, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Will Matsuda: What led you to make Fire Island Night? Did it feel urgent?

Matthew Leifheit: Fire Island is a landscape in transition. It changes with the tides, and it’s changing with climate change. The island represents a gay history and a culture that is also in transition. Often, photographs that I love encapsulate the past and the present. I want these photos to do that as well.

My past work has always included historical materials because of my background; I’ve worked as a photo editor, which includes image research. While I was on the island, I started finding these pottery shards on the beach, which I’ve included in the show. I think about the work as a collection of fragments edited into a sequence.

Matthew Leifheit, Gabe, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: Are you thinking about this as a documentary project? A fantasy? An escape?

Leifheit: I hope it’s all three. Guy Maddin, the Canadian filmmaker who did My Winnipeg, uses the word “docu-fantasia,” which I like. My friend Susan Howe calls it “factual telepathy,” which is an idea that archival facts from different points in time and place can talk to each other. I’m interested in the idea of poetic documentary. I think poetry is often a way to get closer to the truth.

Fire Island holds this cultural fantasy associated with gay culture. A friend, who recently transitioned to become a man, described a trip to the island as a “gay rite of passage.” It’s an escape because queer people can go there to express themselves when they can’t in straight society. But I’m interested in that idea now because more often people don’t have to go to geographical extremes to express their sexuality. Hopefully not in New York. So I’m asking, what is the role of this place? And how will it change?

Matthew Leifheit, Gustavo, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: And what is the role of these pictures in this cultural transition? Your photographs appear to be all of men, and I’m wondering how you frame this as our notions of gender and queerness are expanding?

Leifheit: I don’t want to speak for people, but yes, almost all the pictures in the show contain male-identified subjects. But I think I’m not necessarily making that look like a good thing, and hopefully that’s evident in the way I am looking at the place photographically. The series is also a dramatization of the world that exists there. I have exaggerated its homosocial qualities. Still, I hear it called an “only space,” which I take to mean an exclusive space where people of a particular marginalized group such as gays can be the vast majority rather than the minority, the rule instead of the exception. Historically for our community that kind of space has been essential, and in my opinion it still is. But now that people are having less use for gender boundaries, or would rather define their sexuality as queer, rather than gay or straight, what will the legacy be of this place that we are inheriting?

The artist Barbara Hammer recently established a grant for lesbian experimental filmmakers. I went to hear her give a talk and during the Q&A, I asked her about the purpose of a lesbian-only grant in a world where people are having less use for these kind of exclusive terms. She said something like, “There is a slippage now, absolutely, but in the slippage I don’t want a group of people to be lost. I want the tradition and the culture of being a woman-identified woman to continue in artwork as well as in history. It’s a different culture than a queer culture. It’s a different culture than a gay male culture . . .” She talked about specifically wanting to preserve a history of butch lesbians, and I appreciated that.

I think that a lot of the history that I’m talking about here, although not all of it, is a history of fags. It’s not necessarily queer by nature, because it has been an exclusive place. Fire Island is rumored to be this place only for muscle gays and advertising executives, but I think that was another time. Alongside the island’s history, I am trying to show the world that exists there now. There’s a wider range of people.

Matthew Leifheit, Ivy Walk, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: What drew you to Fire Island originally?

Leifheit: I first went to Fire Island in 2014 for a VICE story about underwear parties. Part of the reason I fell in love with it was that it represented this world that I didn’t really know existed. I had read about what it was like in the ’70s before the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. I was fascinated and excited to see that these parties with back rooms and wild group sex still existed. Since I first went there, PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis] has become much more widely used, which is amazing. It has also brought on a new permissiveness. People are willing to have riskier sex and more sex, as I perceive it. I think that is really exciting because the AIDS crisis silenced the voices of so many great minds, ending for many this era of extreme creativity, what seems to have been an amazing time where people finally had some sexual freedom. I think that with the rise in PrEP use, there’s been a revival of this hedonism on Fire Island. Maybe it never left.

Matthew Leifheit, Ice Palace IV, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: I recently read a piece about the resurgence of Symbolism, a movement in the late nineteenth century where artists, poets, and writers were pushing back against Realism and responding to a chaotic world heading towards war as well as rapid technological acceleration. The work is otherworldly, moody, erotic, and it’s pretty morbid. It’s not hard to compare that historical moment with ours. Do you think Fire Island Night has any relation to this?

Leifheit: Oh, I like that. I do see these photographs as symbols that I’ve arranged into sentences of sorts. I believe that beautiful form has the potential to comfort people in times when it seems like the world makes no sense at all. The fact that the chaos of the world can be organized in a way that is beautiful and makes sense in a photograph can be very powerful, and it can give people hope. There are certainly other more direct ways of being an activist in your work, but I do believe that beauty is essential, and can be an escape. Earlier you used the word urgent, and I think that this is an urgent thing to show. At this particular moment, it’s of the utmost importance.

I had received a grant to research George Platt Lynes’s love letters and his scrapbooks leading up to World War II. The scrapbooks contain a lot of imagery that I’ve nearly re-created in some of these photographs. He posed for PaJaMa [Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French] on Fire Island in these dark surrealist images. I don’t know if you would call it Symbolism, but Lynes was combining images of the male form with death on the battlefield and drownings. Photography is inherently mournful, we know. I do a lot of portraiture and I can’t help but think about the subject’s inevitable death.

I want to show how things wear away. Fire Island is almost a sandbar. It’s a barrier island that changes with the tides. I felt extremely exposed to the elements while I was there, living in a shack in the woods where Peter Hujar and Paul Thek used to go in the ’70s.

Matthew Leifheit, The Spiral Staircase, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: Wow . . . really?

Leifheit: My friend Marcell Yáñez, who wrote a thesis on Hujar’s circle, heard that there was this town in the middle of the dunes on the island where Thek and Hujar went in the ’70s. Susan Sontag, Vince Aletti, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, too. It was this really remote place with artists and writers. It’s only maybe ten houses. Marcell had heard that Paul Thek had made lifecasts of his body on the island and had left pieces of himself around the town. Some neighbors had found a hand with a bunch of extra fingers. So we went looking for body parts there, and it turned out there was a house available for the summer. I spoke with the person who owned it, and their mother had rented to Hujar and Thek in the ’70s and liked the idea of an artist being there.

Weirdly, the cottage is right across from the death site of Margaret Fuller, who wrote America’s first major feminist work. It’s this low spot on the beach where things are always washing up. There was one point when a funeral wreath washed up right in front of me. There were also prayer balloons that came in from Long Island, I think. People had written the names of their loved ones on them and they drifted to this spot. History was really on the surface there.

Matthew Leifheit, Cleophas, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: How did living in that space affect this work?

Leifheit: Hujar is one of my favorite artists. Hujar waited until his subjects showed their truest form, whether they were a cow, a person, or a rock. It’s a process of waiting for a signal, of receiving. It’s the opposite of the way people think of Magnum photography. Until the commercialization of photography, photographs were not talked about as being “shot” or “taken.” All that photographic materials are capable of doing is receiving. In that way they are, like, inherently bottoms [laughs].

In preparation for a class I’m teaching at Yale, I read Kaja Silverman’s The Miracle of Analogy (2015), which is about the invention of photography. She quotes the part of Walter Benjamin’s Little History of Photography (1931) about long exposures in old portraits causing the subject to “focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past,” thereby capturing more of the sitter’s essence or aura or something. I’ve been working with longer exposures lately.

Peter Hujar worked in this way—its anti-aggressive. It’s empathic. I would like to be that way towards humans, but also towards the landscape. This is the first time I’ve ever photographed landscapes before, or even really been outside in this way. It’s amazing how you have to wait for the landscape. I had to wait for a supermoon for it to be bright enough for a photo. You have to wait for the mist to be in the air so that the light spreads in the right way. I also spent a lot of time trying to photograph that flash of blue light that happens after the sun goes down in the summer, just before darkness.

Matthew Leifheit, Mohamed, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: Taking a step back from this work, you recently graduated from Yale; you spent the summer on Fire Island, and now you’re showing this work in Brooklyn. What’s next?

Leifheit: Since graduating in 2017, I spent the last year teaching as an adjunct at four different schools, which was wild! It was too many classes to take on but I learned a lot. I spent a whole summer and probably the next six months making color studies. I photographed a million sunsets. When I graduated school I just needed something nice to do. I thought, maybe I’ll just do sunsets in Kodak Gold and it will be about, like, the death of analog or something. Eventually I woke up and realized I made a bunch of ombré gradients. It was so bad. You have to go through those phases, though.

Matthew Leifheit, Wave (Hudson and MeHow), 2018
Courtesy the artist and Deli Gallery, New York

Matsuda: You really do.

Leifheit: I just finished production on my first documentary, but it’s really more of an erotic docu-fantasy, like we were talking about earlier. It’s about George Platt Lynes’s love letters. And I just started a second film about a female impersonator who lost his voice on stage one night in 1982. It’s about the absence of his voice. I’m going to do a residency in Oaxaca this winter to start editing that documentary.

I’ve worked as a photojournalist and that’s so fast, but this video work has been slower. Film editing is exciting to me because I can just keep doing it forever. I’m going to continue working on these photographs of Fire Island this winter, as well. Eventually I want to publish them in a book, whenever it’s ready.

I’m just going to keep my work alive. I saw this TV interview with Harry Callahan from the ’80s where he said, “I felt that what I had to do was to live strongly, and to keep my photographs alive. As a result, I would have a lifetime of experience, from beginning to end.” That’s the only way I know how to proceed. I used to think I would die young but now I think I might outlive everyone, just lingering around and taking photographs while people and things slip away. I just want to make a masterpiece before I go.

Fire Island Night is on view at Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, through December 2, 2018.

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

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On the Cover: Aperture’s “Family” Issue

Liz Johnson Artur, Johnny’s wedding guests, London, 2002
Courtesy the artist

Since the early 1990s, Liz Johnson Artur has been photographing individuals of the African diaspora throughout London, Kingston, Brooklyn, and beyond, capturing moments of joy and community in a colorful, intimate style. The cover of Aperture’s Winter 2018 issue, “Family” is a collage by Johnson Artur featuring a photograph from 2002 overlaid on a page of braille text. “Johnny Sapong invited me to his wedding,” Johnson Artur told Aperture. “It was a Ghanaian–English wedding. I took my camera with me. There was a tent in the garden for the ‘official’ photographer to take formal pictures. I took this picture while the couple were getting ready for the ‘formal’ picture.”

Johnson Artur frequently collects her images into notebooks and workbooks, and sometimes incorporates these materials in the presentation of her archives, including the picture of Johnny’s weddings guests. “Many years ago, I found an Iris Murdoch novel in a charity shop,” she said. “It was printed in six large braille volumes. I have been using them ever since to put words and pictures closer together.”

The family portrait, in all of its permutations and possibilities, is about making history. Aperture’s “Family” issue, which includes photography and writing by David Armstrong, Tammy Rae Carland, Masahisa Fukase, Justine Kurland, Diana Markosian, Lynne Tillman, Stefan Ruiz, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Deborah Willis, also features a profile of Liz Johnson Artur by the London-based curator and writer Ekow Eshun. “What I do is people,” Johnson Artur said. “But it’s those people who are my neighbors.” At first, Johnson Artur didn’t see those lives represented anywhere. So, like many of the photographers in this issue, she pictured them herself. She made a world and a family of her own.

Read more in Aperture 233, “Family,” now available for pre-order.

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Fashion, Politics, and the Black Imagination

Theaster Gates revisits the legendary archives of the Johnson Publishing Company.

By Violaine Boutet de Monvel 

Isaac Sutton, Untitled, 1965
Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company

In 1942, when John H. Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company, the national press in the United States hadn’t made much space for addressing the lives of black citizens in a proactive way. Life magazine was really more about white life. Starting with the monthly Ebony and its weekly sister Jet, created in 1945 and 1951 respectively, Johnson’s magazines were designed to fill the void left open by institutionalized racial segregation. A void creates an opportunity, and the renowned Chicago-based publishing house would cover and celebrate, over the next seventy years, the breadth and wisdom of African American culture, eventually becoming one of the most influential black-owned businesses in postwar America.

In addition to the distinct upbeat tone and entrepreneurial spirit that Ebony and Jet cultivated through news, entertainment, and fashion coverage, as well as their plethora of critical essays regarding African American history and achievements, the magazines are notable for having thoroughly chronicled the nascent civil rights movement from the early 1950s on. At the same time, the Johnson Publishing Company also launched the Ebony Fashion Fair, an annual show that ran for five decades and featured black female models across the United States, as well as the eponymous brand Fashion Fair Cosmetics, which still exists to this day.

Isaac Sutton, Untitled, n.d.
Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company

With print media finally giving in to the digital world in the early 2010s, Linda Johnson Rice—the heir and current CEO of the Johnson Publishing Company—sold Ebony and Jet in 2016 to concentrate the whole business on the cosmetics line. She has nevertheless preserved and made available to the public the photo archive of her parents’ former press empire: approximately four million images documenting African American life since the mid-1940s, the vast majority of which have never seen daylight.

This exceptional profusion of black images is the starting point of an exhibition and publication conceived by Theaster Gates for the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, The Black Image Corporation. It touches upon notions of beauty, power, and the diversity of blackness through the work of two African American press photographers in particular, Moneta Sleet Jr. (1926–1996) and Isaac Sutton (1923–1995), who were once employed by the Johnson Publishing Company.

Moneta Sleet Jr., Coretta Scott King and Bernice King practicing the piano and violin, Atlanta, 1972
Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company

Born in 1973, Gates, a Chicago-native artist and urban planner, has gained international recognition for his multifaceted, often-collaborative practice committed to social change. Deploring how the African American community is still too often reduced into a mere handful of negative stereotypes, he decided to focus on beauty through the lenses of Sleet and Sutton. “They both had the responsibility of fashion and politics,” Gates told me in September. “They could shoot a fashion show during the day, and join a political rally at night, so in some ways, I think they were both using fashion to be political.”

From over twenty thousand photographs by Sleet and Sutton, Gates selected 366 for The Black Image Corporation, whose title is a direct nod to the Johnson Publishing Company’s crucial role in giving black excellence a visible outlet. “While it’s probably the simplest presentation I’ve ever done, the hardest part was deciding the images,” he noted. Scattered on two light tables at the entrance of the Osservatorio, 120 contact prints of original transparencies and photo films represent the enormity of the task. Visitors are invited to handle them with a pair of white gloves and illuminate what they wish. Ebony and Jet’s art directors used such materials to review countless pictures from photo shoots, only to publish but a few. This participatory display thus offers a subtle mise en abyme of both the editorial work that went into the conception of the magazines, as well as the curatorial work factoring into this exhibition.

The Black Image Corporation, 2018. Installation at the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan
Courtesy Fondazione Prada

Instead of a traditional exhibition catalogue, Gates has conceived a box set in collaboration with the Fondazione Prada. It contains a booklet with an essay, and the entire collection of 366 photographs in the form of double-sided cards, which can be taken out and hung with a fastener on the box; the gesture recalls an action that visitors are also encouraged to do at the Osservatorio, where a third of Sleet and Sutton’s selected work is stored for viewers to pull from a series of four wooden cabinets. “It would be lovely just to present all the photographs on the walls, but if you want to see them, you have to work. These cabinets function like a sanctum and what I hope,” Gates said, “is that there will be an intimate encounter with the images.”

In the absence of any official cataloging from the Johnson Publishing Company, Gates assigned to all the selected photographs by Sleet and Sutton a number from 1 to 366, and created six archival codes to characterize their subjects, without further identifying or contextualizing them apart from the photographer’s name and the year of realization: MDL for model, EDP for everyday people, ENT for entertainer, PRO for professional, M&C for mother and child, and FEI for female impersonator. While fashion photography and model headshots count for more than half of the ensemble, the other categories prompt viewers to question the notions of beauty beyond glamour. “What I want to convey through these images is perhaps a sensitivity to the power of everyday women to be both beautiful and maybe world-changing,” Gates noted.

Moneta Sleet Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., surrounded by his family, holding the Nobel Peace Prize medal, 1964
Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company

Unfurling throughout the selection, Sleet and Sutton’s avalanche of beauty and power includes a model sporting a sleek bob haircut with a Mondrian cocktail dress (68 SLEET 1966 MDL); a drag queen parading with sweat pearl headgear and a little black purse (43 SUTTON N.D. FEI); Ann Lowe flaunting her legendary top hat (126 SLEET 1966 PRO); Eartha Kitt posing in a swimsuit at the pool (48 SUTTON N.D. EDP); and last but not least, Martin Luther King Jr. surrounded by his wife, Coretta, and his family, holding the Nobel Peace Prize medal that he had just been awarded (176 SLEET 1964 EDP). Sleet was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral, following King’s assassination in 1968.

The presentation of all these individuals, whether iconic or not, in complete anonymity and therefore in equality—particularly before a European audience, who may be less familiar with African American culture and history—is very humbling. The Black Image Corporation poses no hierarchy, but allows for the young models who won the “Beauty of the Week” contest of Jet magazine to count as much as King himself, no matter how well- or little-known their respective contribution to this world is. As Gates concludes in his essay for the booklet that accompanies the exhibition, “Black is Beautiful. Black is Enterprising. Black is complicated and … I hope this set of images offers us all blank pages for the formulation of a new atlas.”

Violaine Boutet de Monvel is an art critic and translator living in Paris.

The Black Image Corporation is on view at the Osservatorio of the Fondazione Prada, Milan, through January 14, 2019.

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Carleton Watkins and the Image of Manifest Destiny

In his new book, Tyler Green considers a pioneering photographer of the American West.

By Maika Pollack

Carleton Watkins, Yosemite Valley from the Best General View, 1865–66
Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum

I’ve always been curious about Carleton Watkins. Manifest Destiny personified, his collodian landscapes extended the Wheeler and King surveys, post-Civil War expeditions that photographed the American West, to the very shores of the Pacific. But there is also something transcendent to Watkins’s pictures of Yosemite. They have absolutely no visible grain; they are lush, immersive, even prescient, creating as much as capturing Northern California. His Lake Tahoe, from the Warm Springs (1878–1882)—all shining lake contained by rolling black hills—seems to contain the spores of a Northern California yet to be, the roiling sublimity of Allen Ginsberg or the Grateful Dead. Much like other entrepreneurial American photographers of the nineteenth century (Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner), Watkins opened his own gallery, the Yosemite Art Gallery, in San Francisco to sell his work to the public. Unlike them, though, his photographs were also sold by Goupil & Cie, the Parisian art prints dealer, at an age before photographs could stake much claim as high art. What was going on?

Carleton Watkins, Lake Tahoe, from the Warm Springs, 1878–1882
Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

Mainly thanks to the destruction of Watkins’s records—along with nearly everything else in San Francisco—wrought by the massive earthquake of 1906, Tyler Green’s new book Carleton Watkins: Making the West American is not a biography. Although Watkins’s life, like that of many commercially successful nineteenth-century photographers, is a rags-to-riches-back-to-rags story (it’s still surprising Rebecca Solnit’s 2003 book River of Shadows about the cinematic rapscallion Eadweard Muybridge hasn’t yet been made into a film), Watkins remains an enigmatic character in this account. What Green has done instead, with success, is to create a detailed picture of the intellectual geography of Watkins’s photographs. From the paintings of Albert Bierstadt to the Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and the geology of Louis Agassiz, Green maps out the American scientific, financial, and artistic worlds Watkins worked within, and convincingly argues for his unique place in them. This book is a thoughtfully researched meditation on a photographer’s complex contribution to the formation of our national identity.

Carleton Watkins, Cape Horn, Columbia River, Washington Territory, 1867
Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum

Green, the pull-no-punches host and producer of the Modern Art Notes podcast, is a born skeptic, and as such he is wonderfully meticulous about his archival research. Watkins’s work, unlike Timothy O’Sullivan’s, was not government-funded. His commissions connect dozens of California’s oligarch founders, and Green’s deep dive into letters and contracts convincingly demonstrates how Watkins’s photographs contain within their grainless surfaces complex considerations of property, geology, capital, the politics of natural resources, and the ownership of water.

Yet Green is also a Watkins enthusiast, and out of love for the photographs he shows how Watkins’s own ambition went far beyond the task of taking pictures: “Detractors who, in recent decades, have argued that Watkins was a mere photographer in an era of painters, or that he merely made the pictures that were in front of him and thus gets credit for being there but not for doing anything special, must reckon with [his work],” he writes. That Watkins’s pictures of the natural landscape influenced John Muir and Frederick Law Olmsted’s conception of Yosemite National Park is well-known. But that the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson hung Watkins’s Cathedral Spires (1865–66) and Mount Shasta (1867) in his living room in Concord, Massachusetts, next to a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait of Thomas Carlyle, tells volumes about Watkins’s intellectual context—and why his images are at once so precise and so otherworldly.

Carleton Watkins, Cathedral Spires, Yosemite, California, 1865–66
Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum

Green is engagingly technical, going into detail about exhibition practices (sequoia wood frames!), copyright issues (why you should never buy a Watkins print featuring clouds—it was probably printed by a competitor), sales practices, and the political and legal uses of photography during Watkins’s time. He unearths a gripping bit of his own family’s history in relation to a Watkins photograph; in the nineteenth century, a direct relative commissioned a Watkins. We learn that Watkins’s collodian plates were some of the largest negatives in the history of photography: one glass plate weighed four pounds and was 17 by 21 inches—no other analog method even comes close to the sheer information that contains. I would have loved a little more on Watkins’s darkroom technique. How did dodging and burning function with those mammoth glass-plate negatives? What might comparing different prints of the same photograph tell us?

Carleton Watkins, Mount Shasta, Siskiyou County, California, 1867
Courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum

I found the book’s first chapter, about where Watkins was born, his early life before he became a photographer, and the history of Oneonta, New York, far from illuminating Watkins’s mysterious images of California, and I was highly skeptical of Green’s attempts to narrate what people in the past were thinking—this seemed to lend a needless “historical fiction” tone to the book’s earliest pages. Harvard photo scholar Robin Kelsey’s noted history of U.S. surveys is conspicuously absent from the bibliography, which seems an omission. But the book is convincing in its central argument, relating the sublimity of Watkins’s photography to American Transcendentalism, particularly the poetry of Emerson. It is also quite beautiful on the meanings of early Californian culture. In this sense Green’s research is not just about Watkins, but about the significance of the American West, and in some ways the definition of America itself. Ultimately, the book makes a strong case for photography as the first and most American art: much like Watkins’s work, Making the West American is at once technical and transcendent.

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

Carleton Watkins: Making the West American was published by University of California Press in October 2018.

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