Aperture's Blog, page 93

Announcing the Winners of the 2018 PhotoBook Awards

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 edition of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography. “The choices we made reflect the chaotic and changing world in which we are living,” said final juror Hervé Digne. “I think both the shortlist selection and the final award winners offer a window on the world at large and on the world of photography and photographic books today.”

Winner of Photography Catalogue of the Year

The Land in Between

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

Publisher: MACK, London

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s The Land in Between was selected for providing a strong platform for interviews, portfolios, and essays about an artist less well-known outside of her native country. The minimalist, elegant design and form are well matched to the content, emphasizing what Batia Suter describes as “the artist’s sharp vision.”

Winner of PhotoBook of the Year

Laia Abril

On Abortion

Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, UK

“In choosing Laia Abril’s On Abortion, the jury felt it was important to recognize a well-crafted statement on a topical and timely issue. The book offers a strong commentary on women’s reproductive choices, and uniquely visualizes the topic using archival imagery, contemporary photographs, and text.” —Azu Nwagbogu

Winner of First PhotoBook ($10,000 prize)

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

One Wall a Web

Publisher: Roma Publications, Amsterdam

“It’s a serious moment in history, and it felt urgent amongst the jury that we choose books that have gravity to them but also maybe a glimmer of hope, as in the selection of Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s One Wall a Web. This is a book that has complexity and embeds race in a larger narrative and a larger system—it demonstrates, if not a solution, at least a direction for further dialogue.” —Kevin Moore

Juror’s Special Mention

Pixy Liao

Experimental Relationship Vol. 1

Publisher: Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China

“In this current situation of post-#MeToo, and the ongoing debate around the binary opposition between the male and female gaze, Pixy Liao’s Experimental Relationship Vol. 1 is a very refreshing and blissful vision of intimacy, complicity, and collaboration between the sexes.” —Federica Chiocchetti

A final jury at Paris Photo selected this year’s winners. The jury included: Federica Chiocchetti, curator and founder of the Photocaptionist; Hervé Digne, president of Manifesto and the Odeon Circle; Kevin Moore, curator; Azu Nwagbogu, director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) and LagosPhoto Festival; and Batia Suter, artist.

This year’s shortlist selection was made by Lucy Gallun, associate curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art; Kristen Lubben, executive director of the Magnum Foundation; Yasufumi Nakamori, PhD, incoming senior curator of international art (photography) at Tate Modern, London; Lesley A. Martin, creative director of Aperture Foundation and publisher of The PhotoBook Review; and Christoph Wiesner, artistic director of Paris Photo.

The shortlist was first announced at the New York Art Book Fair. The thirty-five selected photobooks are profiled in issue 015 of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture Foundation’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook. Copies will be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore. Subscribers to Aperture magazine receive free copies of The PhotoBook Review with their summer and winter issues.

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Speak Loud and Embrace the Protest

In Los Angeles, an exhibition revisits the images and struggles of the Chicano Movement.

By Yxta Maya Murray

Luis C. Garza, La Marcha por la Justicia, Celia Luna Rodriguez (with mic) and Rosalío Muñoz (Chair of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee) at Belvedere Park, East LA, January 31, 1971
© Luis C. Garza and courtesy the photographer and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

An image of a Latina yelling into a microphone while raising her fist marks the entrance to LA RAZA, an exhibition of Brown Power photographs currently occupying the ground floor of the Autry Museum of the American West, with the boldness of a late-1960s Chicano Blowout. LA RAZA (“The Race”) celebrates the boundary-smashing photography of the activist newspaper and magazine of the same name, which was published in East Los Angeles from 1967 to 1977. In each of the exhibition’s thematic suites are stunning images of protesters waving signs that say Aztlán es mi Tierra, police officers aiming weapons into the infamous Silver Dollar Bar and Café, and the resplendent Latina demanding that her voice be heard.

Why is it shocking to see Brown history here?

La Raza staff, Deputy with shotgun at the ready, National Chicano Moratorium, East LA, August 29, 1970
© La Raza staff photographers and courtesy the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

The Autry Museum has not always been first on the list of Latinx-friendly art venues. Founded in the height of the Reagan Era, the Autry is named after Gene Autry, the famous “singing cowboy” star of such history-erasing insults as 1939’s South of the Border and the 1940 classic Gaucho Serenade. The Autry’s nerve-rattling exhibits of Manifest Destiny romanticists like W. H. D. Koerner once earned the museum a boycott by the American Indian Movement in 2001: “Indians are not for sale,” AIM said.

Hope arrived in the form of the Autry’s current director, Rick West, who helped found the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation of Oklahoma. West has initiated a host of inclusive programs, including shows of Pomo basket maker Mabel McKay, Wiyot artist Rick Bartow, Chicano photographer Harry Gamboa Jr., and the Aztlán-tastic photo-feast that is LA RAZA.

Luis C. Garza, Youth from South Central LA arrive at Belvedere Park for La Marcha por la Justicia, January 31, 1971
© Luis C. Garza and courtesy the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

A bit of digging reveals that the Latina yelling into the microphone is Celia Luna Rodriguez, the 1970s leader of the Barrio Defense Committee. The photograph, taken by Luis C. Garza, then a staff photographer for La Raza and now an independent curator who co-organized the show, is a heady mix of star-making charisma and community solidarity. Garza’s black-and-white image situates Rodriguez dead center, in the midst of an outdoor crowd; a film camera at the bottom left corner shoots out a ley line of pure energy that leaps toward Rodriguez and up to a few observers perched high on rooftops to see her better. This icon of Latina political leadership was culled for La Raza out of more than twenty-six thousand images that Garza, as well as Maria Varela, Pedro Arias, Manuel G. Barrera, Raul Ruiz, and others, took during the publication’s all-too-short run.

LA RAZA brings back all of those exciting and harsh memories from the late 1960s and ’70s, when Latinx students exited their LA high schools en masse in order to protest unequal education. On the Autry’s floor spreads a relic of what became known as “blowouts.” Visitors to the exhibition step over an enlarged copy of a photo of a sidewalk sprinkled with pine needles and the spray-painted phrase WALK OUT. Up on the walls, in both enlarged, back-lit images and black-and-white prints made from the original negatives, a bouffanted lady gets hauled off by a tall white man, next to a fallen sign reading Viva La Raza. A squad of brown-bereted women takes back the streets in matching trench coats and black pants. A tiny, hollering Chicanita in pigtails grasps copies of the newspaper, whose banner headline reads La Raza Raided.

Maria Varela, A young Chicanita hawks La Raza newspapers at the Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., May–July 1968
© Maria Varela

But it’s the photographs of the Chicano Moratorium March, which took place in LA on August 29, 1970, that really tear into old wounds. The march was led by Chicano rebels who protested the Vietnam War, but the peaceful walkers who set out from Laguna Park were met by hundreds of helmeted police from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office. Soon, physical clashes between the activists and law enforcement sent shocks through the crowd, and the melee deteriorated into a frenzy of tear gassings.

Watching the fracas was Ruben Salazar, the Chicano columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a director of the Spanish-language TV station KMEX. Soon after, he retired to the nearby Silver Dollar Bar and Café. But a police officer shot tear gas canisters into the restaurant, and one hit Salazar in the head and killed him. In LA RAZA, images on display show the police attacking the poky-looking Silver Dollar. In one photograph, an officer aims his gun at two unarmed men, while two women hold up their hands in terror. Directly above it presides the last known picture taken of Salazar while he lived. He walks down a street crowded with marchers, wearing a white shirt and longish hair. You can barely see his face.

Pedro Arias, César Chávez (center) with United Farm Workers of America members, ca. 1970
© Pedro Arias and courtesy the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

This image and the one of Celia Luna Rodriguez form two lodestars within LA RAZA’s constellation. The exhibition has been on view during a period in contemporary history that unfortunately recalls the era of the Autry’s origins, as the current president of the United States characterizes Latinos as drug dealers and rapists, police killings of Black people continue to traumatize people of color and result in scandalously low conviction rates, and Trump now threatens to end birthright citizenship through the illegal means of an Executive Order. In such a climate, it’s hard not to feel dragged down by your losses. It’s better, though, to follow the lead of Rodriguez, as pictured so beautifully by Garza, and the exemplars of the other La Raza photographers and their subjects: we have to embrace our struggle and speak out loud our protest.

Yxta Maya Murray is Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and a contributor to Aperture, issue 232, “Los Angeles.” 

LA RAZA is on view at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles, through February 10, 2019.

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She Captured the Face of Modern Iran

Remembering the life Shirin Aliabadi, whose photography provided a sharp commentary on the lives of Iranian women.

By Haleh Anvari

Shirin Aliabadi, Miss Hybrid, 2008
Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai

Shirin Aliabadi, an Iranian multidisciplinary artist known for her colorful portraits of young women breaking the stereotypes associated with the country’s strict moral and dress codes, passed away in her native Tehran in October. She was forty-five. Trained as an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Paris, Aliabadi had a returnee expat’s quizzical eye, which gave her a fresh point of view to survey the changes in her native country during the reform years of Mohammad Khatami’s presidency. At a time when Iran was experiencing a respite from the zeal of its early revolutionary days and the austerity of an elongated war with its neighboring Iraq, a growing younger population had helped elect Khatami for a second term in 2001, and began the process of changing the landscape of the country, especially in the capital, Tehran.

Shirin Aliabadi, Girls in Cars, 2005
Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai

In Aliabadi’s Girls in Cars (2005), the artist recorded the urban phenomenon of nocturnal cruising in cars as a pastime of young Tehranis. Restricted in their interactions with the opposite sex in the public space, the middle-class youth used their cars to engage in a vehicular mating dance fueled by unspent hormones and cheap petrol, causing massive traffic jams in the streets in the north of Tehran. In an interview with Deutsche Bank’s ArtMag, Aliabadi recalled her time capturing the images of young women all dressed up to be seen through the windows of their cars “as the best time I ever had stuck in traffic.” Commenting in 2005 on this series of snatched photographs, she elaborated: “Every time my flash would go off in the street I would attract a lot of attention. The girls in cars were very curious and we would start a long friendly conversation about why I was taking the pictures, what was I going to do with them, where were they going to be published, etc.” The photographs show a range of reactions from the women: some are playful, others tentative.

Shirin Aliabadi, Miss Hybrid, 2008
Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai

While Girls in Cars is essentially journalistic in style, Aliabadi’s best-known work, Miss Hybrid (2007), is a selection of staged portraits of young Iranian women with bleached-blonde wigs wearing lurid blue contact lenses over their naturally brown eyes, proudly sporting nose-job plasters. Nose jobs, hugely popular in Iran, where women prize upturned European noses, had become a staple topic in the media coverage of Iran at that time. Aliabadi’s blonde babes were staged to look defiant, blowing bubblegum or coquettishly nibbling at giant lollipops. By the time she created this series, foreign media had already discovered the lure of images of Iranian women licking ice cream or handling a dripping petrol nuzzle to accompany news about the country.

Shirin Aliabadi in an undated photograph
Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai

Miss Hybrid is regarded by Western critics as a celebration of resistance in the face of oppression in a country where, for over a century, the wrangling over modernity and tradition has been played out on the bodies of its women and their style of dress. Aliabadi herself was aware that this interpretation of fashion as resistance may be simplistic.” I don’t believe that you automatically become a rebel with a Hermès scarf around your neck, but in the context of the society in which we grew up, within an educational system that has different values to those in the West, the phenomenon of fashion turns into an interesting paradox,” she said in 2013. “But ultimately, these young women’s concern is not to overthrow the government but to have fun.”

Shirin Aliabadi, City Girl, 2010
Courtesy The Third Line, Dubai

With Miss Hybrid, Aliabadi did more than point to a playful form of rebellion; she highlighted the painful truth that forced values may engender unexpected reactions. Her “Miss Hybrids” are the forerunners to the new subculture of palang (“leopard”) women in Iran, who alter their faces through extensive surgery to mimic an exaggerated idea of beauty reminiscent, at best, of Barbie. In Miss Hybrid, Aliabadi successfully captured the dilemma of young Iranian women who, in an attempt to free themselves of their social restraints, manage to take refuge in another trap, that of consumerism and objectification.

Haleh Anvari is a writer based in Iran.

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Aperture Celebrates Family at the 2018 Gala

Michael Hoeh, Chelsea Clinton, and Elizabeth Kahane
Sean Zanni/PMC

Marilyn Minter and Nan Goldin
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Catherine Opie, and Carrie Mae Weem
Sean Zanni/PMC

Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Stuart Cooper, R. L. Besson, Chris Boot, Deborah Willis, Hank Thomas, and Cheryl Finley
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Tanya Selvaratnam, Hank Willis Thomas, Alice Walton, Chris Boot, and Alvin Hall
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Alvin Hall, Jessica Nagle, Deborah Willis, Hank Thomas, and Cheryl Finley
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Vinoodh Matadin, Ethan James Green, and Inez Van Lamsweerde
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Mickalene Thomas, Racquel Chevremont, Rujeko Hockley, Julie Mehretu, and Catherine Gund
Sean Zanni/PMC

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
Sean Zanni/PMC

Dr. Deborah Willis
Sean Zanni/PMC

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Agnes Gund, and Catherine Gund
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Naina Lavakre, Hemant Kanakia, Sonal DesaiPatrick McMullan/PMC

Vinoodh Matadin, Inez van Lamsweerde, Chris Boot, Marilyn Minter, Jane McCarthy, and Kathy Ryan
Patrick McMullan/PMC

David Gilbert, Alice Razmesson, Sara Cwynar, and Sam Contis
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Rujeko Hockley and Hank Willis Thomas
Sean Zanni/PMC

Hank Willis Thomas, Catherine Opie, Alvin Hall, Agnes Gund, Catherine Gund, Rujeko Hockley, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Dr. Deborah Willis, Hank Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Agnes Gund and Sarah Arison
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Alexa Dilworth, Tim Doody, Kati Doody, Peter Barbur, and Leah Ettensohn
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Helen Nitkin and Joel Rosenkrantz
Sean Zanni/PMC

Anne Stark Locher and Zoe Bergeron
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Bob Gruen and Elizabeth Gregory Gruen
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Gavin Shiminski, Elaine Goldman, and Ruben Natal-San Miguel

Mary Ellen Goeke and Thomas R. Schiff
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Mehretu, Agnes Gund, Catherine Gund, and Catherine Opie
Patrick McMullan/PMC

William Kahane and Elizabeth Kahane
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Robyn Stein, Agnes Gund, Catherine Gund, and Catherine Opie
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Daphne Takahashi, Chris Berntsen, Karen Benik, Hank Willis Thomas, and Rujeko Hockley
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Roland Hartley, Jessica Nagle, Pepper Nagle, and Dwight Greenhouse
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Carl Xtravaganza and Sarah Anne McNear
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Vinoodh Matadin and Inez van Lamsweerde
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Gail Albert Halaban, Steven Rifkin, and LaVon Kellner
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Matthew Pillsbury and Ferratti Valerio
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Agnes Gund and Catherine Gund
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Alvin Hall
Sean Zanni/PMC

Chris Boot
Sean Zanni/PMC

Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Deborah Willis
Sean Zanni/PMC

Terry Nathan, Marilyn Kanter, Elizabeth Kahane, and William Kahane
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Gala cochair Sir Elton John
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Rori Grenert and Dominique Silver
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Missy O'Shaughnessy and Daniel Foster
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Balarama Heller, Lynne Tillman, and Richard Renaldi
Patrick McMullan/PMC

William Kahane, Gavin Shiminski, and Elizabeth Kahane
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Eddie Cooper and Remy Holwick
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Dr. Deborah Willis, Hank Thomas and Cathy Kaplan

Alvin Hall and guests
Anja Schwarzer © Aperture Foundation

Ethan James Green
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Nicole Fleetwood, Cheryl Finley, Deborah Willis, Lisa Coleman, and Kalia Brooks Nelson
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Marisa Cardinale, Peter Kunhardt Jr., Susan Gutfreund, and Chris Boot
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Marilyn Minter, Howard Greenberg, and Kathy Ryan
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Stuart Cooper, Becky Besson, and Matthew Pillsbury
Patrick McMullan/PMC

LaVon Kellner and Darius Himes
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Hannah Whitaker and Matthew Porter
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Hank Willis Thomas and Dr. Deborah Willis
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Jared Olivo, Lisa Rosenblum, Nina Rosenblum, and Brian Ellner
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Eve Lyons, Daniel Arnold, and Joanna Nikas
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Cathy Kaplan, Catherine Opie, Jane McCarthy, and Lynne Tillman
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Sara Cwynar, Elise Rasmussen, Lisa Seischab, and LaVon Kellner
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Steve Zuckerman, Cathy Kaplan, Darlene Kaplan, Ren Martin, Esther Zuckerman, Bob Marshall, and Vivian Yee
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Jane McCarthy, Catherine Opie, Eric Johnson, and Michael Stout
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Anne Huntington, Sarah Arison, and Noreen Ahmad
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Patrick McMullan/PMC

Daniel Gerard, Severn Taylor, Olivia Birkelund Gerard, and Scott Switzer
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Chelsea Clinton, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and Catherine Gund
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Sacha Yanow and Catherine Gund
Patrick McMullan/PMC

David Dechman and Clarissa Bronfman
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Cathy Kaplan, Alice Walton, Julian She, Liz Swig, and Michael Hoeh
Sean Zanni/PMC

Dwight Greenhouse and Pepper Nagle
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Stefano Tonchi, Catherine Opie, and Eric Johnson
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Catherine Gund, Rujeko Hockley, Lacy Austin, and Hank Willis Thomas
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Rujeko Hockley and Hank Willis Thomas
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Michi Jigarjian, Zoe Buckman, Michael Hoeh, and Sarah Haimes
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Marilyn Minter and Catherine Opie
Sean Zanni/PMC

Lyle Ashton Harris and Lesley A. Martin
Sean Zanni/PMC

Russell Craig and Nicole Fleetwood
Patrick McMullan/PMC

Racquel Chevremont and Mickalene Thomas
Sean Zanni/PMC

Susan Gutfreund and Rushka Bergman
Sean Zanni/PMC

Cathy Kaplan and guests
Sean Zanni/PMC

Kathy Sledge performs at the Aperture Gala
Sean Zanni/PMC

Coco and Breezy
Sean Zanni/PMC

The House of Xtravaganza
Sean Zanni/PMC

The House of Xravaganza
Sean Zanni/PMC

Kathy Sledge performs with The House of Xtravaganza at the Aperture Gala
Sean Zanni/PMC

Kathy Sledge performs with The House of Xtravaganza at the Aperture Gala
Sean Zanni/PMC

The House of Xtravaganza
Sean Zanni/PMC

On October 30, Aperture celebrated the family—the human family and the Aperture family—by honoring five outstanding artists and philanthropists at the foundation’s annual gala: Agnes Gund, Catherine Gund, Catherine Opie, Hank Willis Thomas, and Dr. Deborah Willis. Centered around the launch of Aperture magazine’s winter 2018 issue, “Family,” the Aperture Gala brought together leading artists, curators, writers, and public figures including Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Mehretu, Rujeko Hockley, David Dechman, Alvin Hall, Sarah Lewis, Marilyn Minter, Chelsea Clinton, Nan Goldin, Mickalene Thomas, Lisa Rosenblum, Kathy Ryan, Elliot Erwitt, Inez & Vinoodh, Ethan James Green, Quentin Bajac, Liz Swig, and Alice Walton. “We could not have a group that better exemplifies what Aperture cares about and stands for,” Cathy Kaplan, Aperture’s board of trustees chair, said. “Community, great art, great writing, and great philanthropy.”

Throughout the evening, special guests gave moving tributes to each of the honorees. Marilyn Minter spoke of Catherine Opie’s pathbreaking photographs about queer life in the U.S. Opie documented her community with dignity, Minter said. “Her portraits stare right back at you. Her portraits become the royal family.” Sarah Elizabeth Lewis honored philanthropist Agnes Gund and her daughter, the filmmaker and activist Catherine Gund. “When others relax, you press onwards,” Lewis said. “When others think of personal gain, you consider what good can come for all of us.”

Lewis joined the artist Carrie Mae Weems in praising the scholar and photographer Deborah Willis and her son, the artist Hank Willis Thomas. “You have been the world of insight, information, leading us out of darkness into light. Always asking questions that few others dare to ask,” Weems said.

Accepting her tribute, Catherine Gund spoke on behalf of her mother. “For us, Aperture Foundation fills a unique place in our little, and very big world,” she said. “And it’s such a crazy time. One of my thoughts to live by comes from Toni Morrison, who said that at some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even to remember it. It is enough. And I feel like until that time comes, we have Aperture.”

The evening ended to the classic “We Are Family” performed by Kathy Sledge, of Sister Sledge, joined by members of New York’s legendary House of Xtravaganza.

Leading up to the gala, patrons enjoyed a weekend full of studio visits, gallery talks, and collection tours with Chloe Dewe Mathews, Sara Cwynar, Lehmann Mapuin, and Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi. On the evening of the gala, Robbie Gordy of Christie’s auctioned works by Todd Hido, Dawoud Bey, Gordon Parks, Hank Willis Thomas, and Richard Mosse. For the second year in a row, Aperture partnered with Magnum on the Square Print Sale, presenting 6-by-6-inch prints by artists such as Nan Goldin, Bruce Davidson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Kwame Brathwaite, and Mary Ellen Mark. The prints are available for sale online through Friday, November 2, 2018, at 6:00 p.m. EST.

Aperture’s endeavors are made possible with contributions from gala patrons and Aperture trustees and Members. Click here to donate to Aperture’s Annual Fund or join our community as an Aperture Member.

The 2018 Aperture Gala and Auction was made

possible with the generous support of:

Sponsors

Adobe, Christie’s, and Ingram Content Group

 

Cochairs

Sir Elton John

Judy and Leonard Lauder

Nion McEvoy

Jessica Nagle

Leader Committee

David Dechman and Michel Mercure

Agnes Gund

Elizabeth* and William Kahane

Hemant Kanakia* and Sonalde Desai

Cathy M. Kaplan* and Renwick D. Martin

Judy and Leonard Lauder

Anne Stark Locher* and Kurt Locher

Nion McEvoy*

Jessica Nagle* and Roland Hartley-Urquhart

Lisa Rosenblum

Thomas R. Schiff*

Gala Committee

Adobe

Malú Alvarez

Anonymous (2)

Peter Barbur* and Tim Doody

Elyse and Lawrence B. Benenson

Dawoud Bey*

Allan Chapin* and Anna Rachminov

Sb Cooper* and R. L. Besson

Fine Art Frameworks

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Elaine Goldman* and John Benis

Mrs. John Gutfreund

Hermès of Paris

Darius Himes, Christie’s

Jeff Hirsch, Foto Care

Michael Hoeh*

Inez and Vinoodh

Jack Shainman Gallery

Darlene Kaplan and Steve Zuckerman

Deana Lawson

Lehmann Maupin and Regen Projects

Susana Torruella Leval and Hon. Pierre Leval

Marina and Andrew* Lewin

Patrick McMullan

Sarah Anne McNear*

Helen Nitkin* and Joel Rosenkranz

Philip C. Ollila, Ingram Content Group

Missy* and Jim O’Shaughnessy

Lisa S. Pritzker

The Rosenstiel Foundation

Sheri Sandler and Mark Schneider

Melissa Schiff Soros

Severn Taylor* and Scott Switzer

Willard Taylor* and Virginia Davies

Alice L. Walton

Whit Williams

*Aperture trustee

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Fifteen Photographers at a Crossroads

How can a photograph transform us?

A crossing implies movement across a physical border, but a photograph can also depict personal crossroads that lead to growth and change. Pictures can be transformative in their ability to deepen one’s sense of selfhood, or expand their understanding of identity. From Joel Meyerowitz to Susan Meiselas, Aperture and Magnum photographers have long demonstrated how photographs can spark change, both literal and metaphoric.

This week, for five days only, get signed and estate-stamped, museum-quality, 6-by-6-inch prints by acclaimed Aperture and Magnum photographers for $100 each. Use this link to make your purchase and a percentage of each sale will support Aperture Foundation. Visit Aperture Gallery through November 2 to view Crossings, a special exhibition hosted by Airbnb Magazine, featuring photographs from the sale.

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Belinda de Gaucho, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1998
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Alessandra Sanguinetti

“Back in 1998 when I started taking pictures of Belinda and Guillermina, I asked Belinda what she thought she would have been like had she been a boy. She didn’t hesitate. She painted a mustache with a burnt cork, took off her shirt and looked straight at the camera.” —Alessandra Sanguinetti

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs), 1968
© the artist and courtesy Philip Martin Gallery

Kwame Brathwaite

“This is a picture of Sikolo Brathwaite, my wife and muse. The headpiece, inspired by South African beadwork, was designed by Carolee Prince, whose exquisite beadwork was also worn by Nina Simone and can be seen in many of my photos. This picture is part of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ narrative—an embrace of African ancestry and unifying the black experience around the globe.” —Kwame Brathwaite

Nan Goldin, Drugs on the Rug. New York, 2016
© the artist

Nan Goldin

“I was addicted to OxyContin for four years. I overdosed but I came back. I decided to make the personal political. I’ve started a group called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to address the opioid crisis. We are a group of artists, activists and addicts that believe in direct action. We target the Sackler family, who manufactured and pushed OxyContin, through the museums and universities that carry their name. We speak for the 250,000 bodies that no longer can.” —Nan Goldin

The photographer’s proceeds from the sale of this print will help fund the work of P.A.I.N.

Joel Meyerowitz, New York, 1965
© the artist

Joel Meyerowitz

“A girl on a Vespa on her way to ‘who knows where,’ when the light stopped her at the 72nd street crossing near the Dakota, where John Lennon would one day cross paths with his fate. She takes this moment to finesse a fingernail before she resumes her downtown journey, while I, stopping at the same crossing, but on foot, leap into the street to capture this vision of a dream girl before time takes her on her way.” —Joel Meyerowitz

Mary Ellen Mark, Hippopotamus and Performer, Great Rayman Circus. Madras, India, 1989
© the artist

Mary Ellen Mark

“Photographing the Indian circus was one of the most beautiful, joyous, and special times of my career. I was allowed to document a magic fantasy that was, at the same time, all so real. It was full of ironies, often humorous and sometimes sad, beautiful and ugly, loving and at times cruel, but always human. The Indian circus is a metaphor for everything that has always fascinated me visually.” —Mary Ellen Mark, excerpt from Indian Circus (1993)

Pete Souza, Million Man March. Washington, D.C., 1995
© the artist

Pete Souza

“I had covered numerous protests and rallies on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. But the Million Man March surpassed all of those as an unforgettable experience. Hundreds of thousands of African American men gathered en masse for a peaceful rally, stretching from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument. . . . I saw these two adult men with their sons, the golden light illuminating the Capitol. It was a symbolic moment of reflection, for them but also for me, on what this day meant.” —Pete Souza

Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, Backseat of a car, New York City, USA, 1959
©the artist/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson

“You’re looking at Lefty and his girlfriend, members of a Brooklyn gang who referred to themselves as ‘The Jokers,’ on a trip to Bear Mountain State Park. This photograph is not meant to be risqué. These were young, teenage kids who had a great deal of spirit, energy and love in lives that were reckless, unstable and oftentimes dangerous. . . .

The gang was completely out of their element. No mean streets, not a worry on their minds, just time to explore themselves and their surroundings. They were free, and it was captivating.”

—Bruce Davidson

Bieke Depoorter, Agata, Paris, France, 2017
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Bieke Depoorter

“October 2017: I wandered around at night in Paris, looking for . . . someone that could help me translate the atmosphere in my mind with a story that would partially be theirs as well. The result, ‘Agata,’ is an ongoing project about a young woman I met at a striptease bar one of those nights, in which I explore my interest in collaborative portraiture. . . .

As Agata once wrote to me: ‘I am going to give you myself, and you will wrap it with Bieke, and I believe something beautiful can be created.’” —Bieke Depoorter

Chien-Chi Chang, A newly arrived immigrant eats noodles on a fire escape, New York, USA, 1998
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Chien-Chi Chang

“Humans need to hold hope in their hands. This man was willing to live in poverty in hope of prosperity. . . . A few years later, this man was able to bring his family to New York, and today they are living the American dream. He is now a grandfather! But is economic prosperity worth the social cost? Perhaps the answers to such questions can be found in the lives of the people left behind in China and in those of the second and third generations who are growing up in the United States. Look at them and listen to their voices. You may not understand their language, but you can feel their longing.” —Chien-Chi Chang

Olivia Arthur, Bombay, India, 2016
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Olivia Arthur

“I photographed Nikhil for my project ‘In Private, Bombay,’ an exploration of privacy, sexuality and the changing atmosphere in the city of Mumbai. . . . At the time there was a contradictory atmosphere in the city. At once an opening up of voices, boldness and desire to talk about sexuality. Yet, at the same time, there was growing Hindu conservatism and seeming regression across the country. The combination of audacity and intolerance made for a feeling of friction as well as excitement.” —Olivia Arthur

Susan Meiselas, Fifth Avenue, New York, 1977. From the series, “Volunteers of America”
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas

“In 1977, I followed the men who performed as Santa Claus to raise funds for the Volunteers of America. They were recovering alcoholics, ringing bells on the street all day long. On Fifth Avenue, they crossed the lives of those who would never look at them otherwise.” —Susan Meiselas

Justine Kurland, Tonguing BQE, 1997
© the artist

Justine Kurland

“The first condition of freedom is the ability to move at will, and sometimes that means getting into a car rather than getting out of one. It’s difficult to describe the joy of a carload of girls, going somewhere with the radio turned up and the windows rolled down. . . . At last we arrive at a view, a place where the landscape opens up—a place to plant a garden, build a home, picture a world. They spill out of the car along with candy wrappers and crushed soda cans, bounding into the frame, already becoming a photograph.” —Justine Kurland

Ethan James Green, Three Boys in Maheshwar, India, 2018
© the artist

Ethan James Green

“I was drawn to these three guys together. There was something alternative about them. They reminded me of myself when I was younger, all serious about doing the hair and the clothes. . . . I found it interesting the way they threw their arms around each other, in a place where male friendships seem to be expressed much more intimately than they are in the United States. I like this picture too because, when you look for a moment, you see that they all have smartphones in their hands. This detail seems right. Boys the same age all over the world who see this picture will understand exactly what’s going on and relate to it.” —Ethan James Green

The photographer’s proceeds from the sale of this print will be donated to Operation Smile.

Graciela Iturbide, Pájaros en el poste, carretera a Guanajuato (Birds on the post, highway to Guanajuato), Mexico, 1990
© the artist

Graciela Iturbide

“I was in my car on the highway to Guanajuato, and suddenly I saw this flock of birds. I love birds, for me they represent freedom.” —Graciela Iturbide

Alex Webb, Maquilla worker housing being built, Outskirts of Tijuana, B.C., 1995
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Alex Webb

“I’ve long been fascinated by the transience and paradoxes of the U.S.-Mexico border. Even though these two countries were culturally worlds apart, it sometimes seemed that the border region was a kind of third country between them—2,000 miles long and 10 miles wide, a place where two countries meet, sometimes easily, sometimes roughly, and often with a confounding note of surrealism. . . .

In 1995, while walking through the outskirts of Tijuana, I was surprised to find this box of brightly colored shoes, which seemed so out of place on this dusty, isolated embankment. . . . Was there a market here earlier—and these shoes left behind? . . . In my bad Spanish, I asked a passer-by if he knew. The old man just shrugged his shoulders.

To this day, this surreal scene remains a mystery.” —Alex Webb

This week, for five days only, get signed and estate-stamped, museum-quality, 6-by-6-inch prints by acclaimed Aperture and Magnum photographers for $100 each. Use this link to make your purchase and a percentage of each sale will support Aperture Foundation. Visit Aperture Gallery through November 2 to view Crossings, a special exhibition hosted by Airbnb Magazine, featuring photographs from the sale.

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Everything is Light

In her recent photography, Mona Kuhn evokes LA’s iconic architecture and landscapes.

By Sara Knelman

Mona Kuhn, AD 7809, 2014, from the series She Disappeared into Complete Silence, 2014
© the artist

Los Angeles seems literally made of light. Most days, an unbroken blaze shines down from cloudless skies where palm trees casually sway, casting every detail of the city’s surfaces in forensic focus until they eventually disintegrate into the pink-hued explosion of sunset. Even as the light fades, neon signs illuminate shop fronts and sidewalks, parades of hazy red-and-white orbs make freeways glisten, and, viewed from the surrounding hills, the whole sprawling mass shimmers quietly. The bright lights of movie theater marquees beckon toward projected illusions inside and remind us that cinema chose Hollywood, in part, for its year-round promise of gleam. As the film industry flourished in the 1910s and ’20s, architects flocked here too, entranced equally by the city’s special quality of light and by the avant-garde spirit of freedom and inventiveness that inspired new ideas about “modern” living.

Mona Kuhn, AD 6046, 2014, from the series She Disappeared into Complete Silence, 2014
© the artist

Mona Kuhn, a German-Brazilian transplant to the city, often works at the intersection of light and architecture. In her series, She Disappeared into Complete Silence (2014) (which draws its name from Louise Bourgeois’s first monograph), the lines and shapes of an anonymous house frame images of a desert setting. A sharply angled overhang looks out toward a graph of mountain ranges and cuts a black triangle across a swath of sky. Watery reflections undulate beneath a room’s blurry scaffolding, and refracted doorways lead to the arid earth outside. Mirrorlike, silvery folds and a spectral figure recur, beacons in an ominous landscape. Shot in a modernist structure built by architect Robert Stone outside Joshua Tree National Park on the fringes of LA, Kuhn’s images are mirage-like, visions borne of a thirst for otherworldliness.

Mona Kuhn, AD 6705, 2014, from the series She Disappeared into Complete Silence, 2014
© the artist

For Schindler House (2015–ongoing), Kuhn turned to a more specific architectural and social history. Designed and built by Rudolph Schindler, the West Hollywood house was a masterful experiment in communal living (intended for two couples), with private rooms and shared spaces dispersed around a pinwheel axis. Completed in 1922, it quickly became a place for working out other modernist ideas, as well as a hub for intellectuals and bohemians. Kuhn’s pictures of the house evoke the moment it was imagined, in soft, veiled vignettes. Like walking through a dream, the house appears as a memory of some lost, ideal past, both haunted and romantic. Yet at the same time, the images are unfinished and tentative, sketches for a potential future not quite realized.

Mona Kuhn, Schindler House #2, 2018, from the series Schindler House, 2015–ongoing
© the artist

Sara Knelman is a writer, curator, and educator based in Toronto.

Read more from Aperture issue 232, “Los Angeles,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Peter d’Agostino Wields the Film Still Like a Scalpel

An artist considers the psychological ramifications of media images.

By Brian Wallis

Peter d’Agostino, CHUNG: “Still” Another Meaning (detail), 1977
Courtesy the artist

In his 1970 essay “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” French theorist Roland Barthes argued that the essence of film lay not in the motion or flux, but in the potential arrest of movement characterized by the film still. This move allowed Barthes to propose a structuralist theory of film in which the disruptive still is the key to filmic language, the punctum that pierces the narrative reading and reveals its obtuse meaning. In a stirring last line, Barthes proclaimed that such a “mutation of reading and its object”—text or film—was “a crucial problem of our time.” Taking up this challenge in the mid-1970s, Californian media artist Peter d’Agostino embarked on a series of photographic projects that deliberately interrogated the semiotics of film through a structural analysis of film stills, or what he prefers to call “stilled images.”

Peter d’Agostino, ALPHA (detail), 1976
Courtesy the artist

The heady mystique of the art-house underground of subtitled foreign films pervades d’Agostino’s slim artist book ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG (1978), subtitled A Photographic Model: Semiotics, Film, and Interpretation. In this largely photographic book, d’Agostino documents several of his own disruptive interventions, time-based media installations that took as their raw material stills from three New Wave films, classics even then: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1966), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina (1972). For the first project in d’Agostino’s book, ALPHA (1976), the artist reduced Godard’s dystopian sci-fi film to thirty-six stilled frames on a single contact sheet. From this, d’Agostino distilled eight photographs to summarize the film’s attention to, on the one hand, the formal events of light and time, and on the other hand, the dissolution of language. For the second chapter, TRANS (1977), d’Agostino analyzed Robbe-Grillet’s dazzling film-within-a-film by slowing the action, lingering on certain details, and incorporating the responses of the audience, filmed in real time. The third section, CHUNG: “Still” Another Meaning (1977), employs stills from the opening of Antonioni’s lengthy documentary, commissioned by the Chinese government, to consider why China censored the film and harshly rejected the filmmaker’s depiction of “their” reality.

Peter d’Agostino, TRANS (detail), 1976
Courtesy the artist

But ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG also contains a dazzling appendix of pertinent metacritical texts by Robbe-Grillet, Umberto Eco, Lew Thomas, Kristine Stiles, Hal Fischer, and others, showing that d’Agostino is above all a media experimenter and theorist. In addition to his many innovative and interactive installations, d’Agostino has written extensively and compiled several significant anthologies, including Still Photography: The Problematic Model (1981), with Lew Thomas; The Un/Necessary Image (1982), with Antonio Muntadas; and Transmission: Theory and Practice for a New Television Aesthetics (1985). Some writers have related d’Agostino to a loosely affiliated Bay Area group around the publication Photography and Language (1976), for which his contact sheet from ALPHA served as the cover image, or described d’Agostino as a “conceptual photographer,” a phrase he rejects. But as he said to me recently, “I am an artist working with/utilizing photography, not a photo/language or conceptual photographer.”

Peter d’Agostino, ALPHA (detail), 1976
Courtesy the artist

By no coincidence, ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG—which doubled as a catalogue of d’Agostino’s 1978 exhibition at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he then taught—functions in a similar way to his other anthologies: it combines specific examples of media practice with clear theoretical texts to advance a radical critical thesis. As the press release for the 1978 showing of the project at Artists Space in New York stated, “[ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG] is a model of the interrelationships of various means of symbolic communication, visual as well as verbal. In terms of the media, it utilizes the similarities shared by film, photography, video and the written word.” In ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG, d’Agostino wields the film still like a scalpel, to dissect the social, cultural, technological, and even psychological ramifications of media images. The goal for d’Agostino, as for Barthes, was the delineation of a semiology of film and photography, as a social language, a system of signification in everyday life.

Brian Wallis is a curator and writer based in New York.

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Along the Shores of the Caspian

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

By Arnold Van Bruggen

Chloe Dewe Mathews, In the oil boomtown of Aktau, a woman looks out to sea. Aktau, Kazakhstan, 2010
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

What was this?

At the start of my traveling life and journalistic career, in 2001, I dipped my toes into the waters of the Caspian Sea, in an attempt to recover from a weekend spent on the Iranian coast in a rambling house in a gated community. Opium and hash smoke filled the air, and alcohol flowed freely in large gatherings that tried to circumvent the regime’s strict rules. At the edge of the sea, I felt a kind of oily substance, a thick, briny, lukewarm liquid, so unlike the clean and bracing water surrounding the North Sea island where I grew up. A woman, completely covered, was bathing a little farther down the beach in the ripples that constitute the surf there. I looked out across the sea and contemplated the treasures on the other shore: the legendary city of Baku, surrounded by oil fields; strict, isolated Turkmenistan; the gateway to the Caucasus at Derbent; and the endless steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan, with the countless mouths of the Volga Delta in between.

Seas ignite wanderlust. A toe in the water is a connection to the opposite shore, even if it is miles away. As a child I used to stand on the North Sea beach and imagine Iceland on the horizon, taste the molecules from the Sargasso Sea, and feel the chill from the Arctic Ocean. In my imagination I saw the opal-blue waters of Fiji flecking the gray seas of the north. Here, on a beach in Iran, I wanted to go to Russia, to the fairy tales of Central Asia, and see how this sea influences the peoples on its shores. Chloe Dewe Mathews did just that and discovered that although the sea is relatively small, and its coasts might seem worlds apart, the countries are bound together.

Chloe Dewe Mathews, Employees of a fish-curing factory that vacuum packs strips of dried vobla, or Caspian roach, and distributes them across Russia to be eaten as a snack with beer. Kamyzyak, Russia, 2012
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

A short distance to the north, the Caspian Sea becomes lighter, sweeter, fresher. Standing on the beach on the Russian side you can see the ferries attempting the crossing, the freighters ploughing through the water. I imagine myself as a small dot on a zoomed-out map of the world, standing next to an apparently insignificant sea without an exit, without perspective. The Caspian Sea is an anomaly, a self-contained system. All the water from Russia’s mighty Volga, which is Europe’s largest river, flows endlessly into the sea, heavy with historical and cultural significance, eventually breaking on the shores of Iran and Turkmenistan and evaporating. The sea acts as an enormous engine, transforming all it touches into steam and salt.

Hard, almost ruler-straight borders divide the land around the sea into fifths, although what these borders have to do with any kind of reality remains a mystery. The borders in this region should be as fluid as its peoples. The dozens of tribes from the Caucasus, the nomads from the Russian steppes, Kazakhstan, and beyond are the result of thousands of years of migration, conflict, and the rise and fall of empires. If you fast-forwarded through the tribal history of the countries surrounding the Caspian Sea, you would see the different peoples washing over the land in waves. From the east came the Tartars, the Mongols, and the Turks, from the south came the Persians, from the north the Cossacks and the Russians. National borders have existed for less than a century. Access to water and, in the last hundred years, to oil and gas are the only real, literally fluid borders that count here.

Chloe Dewe Mathews, A young woman poses before entering the icy water. Astrakhan, Russia, 2012
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

The Caspian Sea has never belonged to anyone, unlike the Mediterranean Sea, which the Romans called Mare Nostrum (Our Sea), or the Black Sea, which the Ottoman Empire ruled in various constellations. Russia has never completely owned the Caspian, although it has come close. Neither the Persians nor the Turks have ever ruled it. Genghis Khan’s nomads got the farthest, but even they never conquered the Caucasus, which the Russians have managed to do to a greater or lesser extent over the last 250 years. The sea belongs to no one—or at least, which part belongs to whom is still under dispute. Despite years of negotiations, the five countries around the sea have failed to reach an agreement. Envy and geopolitics surrounding oil and gas dominate the water. Is the Caspian a lake or a sea? The countries disagree. If it is officially a sea, Turkmenistan, according to international law, may lay an underwater pipeline to Azerbaijan. If it is a lake, then Russia remains the most important transit country for oil and gas. In a complicated game of chess between the five countries, with Russia and Iran at the fore, this body of water’s fate hangs in the balance.

The Caspian Sea is a place of real-life fairy tales. One of these can be found about halfway down the west coast, on the southern border of the Russian Federation, in the autonomous Republic of Dagestan. Here lies Derbent, one of the oldest cities in the world. Embroiled in a fight between trade (as Russia’s gateway to the East) and separatism and Islamic terrorism, it is a city of faded glory, of tensions and uncertainty. But what a city! To the west rise the hills and then the mountains of the Caucasus, the highest mountain range in Europe. Look carefully and you can see traces of the city even in the mountains, like long arms trying to pull passing travelers into its embrace. At one time there were miles of city walls. Looking down from the castle, you can see more of these arms reaching into the labyrinth of the city below.

Chloe Dewe Mathews, At a beach café, Azerbaijani soldiers question a local man. Lankaran, Azerbaijan, 2010
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

Like a spider, Derbent has woven a web between the sea and the mountains, in order to prevent travelers and, hopefully, any invading army from escaping. The walls that cut through the city do not end at the coast, but march straight into the sea, creating a safe artificial harbor and ensuring no black-market vendor or malicious outsider can pass unnoticed. It’s a city straight off the pages of a children’s storybook, a city just as you would have liked to have drawn it. A city with an oriental history, with a Russian and then a socialist layer laid over it, and where now the messy, random, modern buildings seem to defy any form of logic. A city where the Caspian coast is used as a beach and a bar but also where empty factories, old harbors, and shipwrecks dominate, making their own mountain range of concrete posts, steel hulls, and graffiti, just as in so many other places on the Caspian Sea.

Perhaps the most appealing fairy tale of the region is that of Kara-Bogaz Gol (which literally translates as “black gullet”), the Turkmen sea waterfall through which the Caspian pours and then spreads over a wide bay, where a merciless sun evaporates the water faster than the Volga can replenish it. This has created a fascinating area of extremely salty water, salt pillars, and crystals that the residents eagerly harvest. In his book Engineers of the Soul (2012), Frank Westerman describes the writers who, under Stalin, were meant to prepare the minds of the Soviet citizens for communism. Konstantin Paustovsky, one of the great twentieth-century Russian writers, chose Kara-Bogaz Gol as his topic. In fantastical terms, he cites the many stories about the sea waterfall—how sailors described the coast of Asia as a towering wall and the cascade as a maelstrom. A “sea waterfall” sounds like a fantasy from the time when the Earth was still considered flat, something that would have been drawn on old maps next to dragons and deep-sea monsters. But in the Caspian Sea, it is reality.

Chloe Dewe Mathews, A larger-than-life-size photograph of Turkmenistan’s president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, towers over a hotel guest. Awaza, Turkmenistan, 2012
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

In any other country, you would expect Kara-Bogaz Gol to be a world-famous attraction. Not here. In authoritarian Turkmenistan, you need a special permit to visit. But farther to the south rises a new mythical land: Awaza, Turkmenistan’s answer to Dubai—or “Turkmen Las Vegas,” as Dewe Mathews discovered. Every country around the Caspian Sea would like to copy Dubai’s success, the fairy-tale city rising out of the Arabian desert. Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Russia all regard Dubai’s incredible transformation into an ultramodern cosmopolitan metropolis as a rags-to-riches tale worth imitating. In this, everyone believes they have found a unique route to new national success. But construction alone is not enough. In Turkmenistan, the resorts are empty, and the country’s dictatorship stifles the type of freedom found in Dubai, as one of Dewe Mathews’s images attests, featuring a larger-than-life-size portrait of the leader looming in a baroque interior. In the meantime, the world’s greatest inland sea, fed by Europe’s largest river, empties itself desolately over a sea waterfall and into a salt desert.

This Volga is much more than a river. This is Mother Volga, on which nearly all old Russian cities are situated, the lifeblood of the Motherland. Many Russians, rich and poor, travel to the river to eat, drink, and fish. Here, and in the sea, swim the sturgeon from which Russia’s black gold, the coveted roe that makes caviar, can be mined. The Volga Delta, with its thousands of arms and lakes and abundance of birds and animals, is therefore also a perfect place for wealthy Russians to pit their strength against nature. Putin and Medvedev come here for male-bonding weekends and roar up the rivers in motorboats; they fish bare-chested on the bank, organize hunting parties, or dive below the surface to photograph the wildlife, so that the whole of Russia will know their president and prime minister can measure themselves against Mother Volga.

Chloe Dewe Mathews, In Turkmenistan, the foreign ministry has expressed plans to transform the luxury beach resort of Awaza into a “Turkmen Las Vegas.” Awaza, Turkmenistan, 2012
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

Those in power in the Kremlin form a striking contrast to the inhabitants of the delta and the Caspian coasts, from the extravaganza of Baku, “Turkmen Dubai,” and elite Russian resorts to those of small villages, cities, former Soviet farms, and abandoned factories. Most Caspian residents still live at subsistence level and are self-sufficient; they fish and work their land, and survive the changing regimes. The wide, beckoning sea offers few alternatives on the other sides.

When looking through Dewe Mathews’s work on the Caspian, from its often-impoverished denizens to its decadent visitors, from the worshipping of holy water to its reserves of holy oil, you can’t deny the fact that the Caspian is a magical place. Think about it: when dipping your toes in the water of any sea or lake, there she is, the lady in pink on the other side, dipping hers in the ice-cold water. There are the sunbathers, draping their towels between the rotting concrete remnants of some factory; there are the empty, shiny palaces, misplaced but waiting for those toe-dipping tourists. Seas are magical places. A sea connects cultures, even those that are miles apart. People move close to it, bathe, swim, build ships, start trading, go fishing, and look and sail across and start dreaming away. In the meantime the water flows past in an endless swirl from the Volga to Kara-Bogaz Gol.

Chloe Dewe Mathews, Two women pause by an upturned boat.
Kamyzyak, Russia, 2014
Courtesy the artist, Aperture, and Peabody Museum Press

Just before the Volga pours into the sea, Russian Orthodox state priests declare the Mother River’s water holy. The sins of the past year are washed clean in the ceremony and illnesses disappear while the water, in the harsh Russian climate, undergoes the endless transformation from liquid to ice, from river to sea, from fresh to oily and salty, from seawater to salt desert, and then returns as cloud, rain, and water vapor. The never-ending cycle begins again.

Arnold van Bruggen, a writer and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, is cofounder of Prospektor, a documentary production company.

This essay is from Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements (Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, 2018) and was translated from the Dutch by Alison Eradus.

Chloe Dewe Mathews’s exhibition Caspian: The Elements will be on view at Aperture Gallery from October 25 to November 30, 2018, and at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, from April 27, 2019 to January 5, 2020.

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Outside, Looking In

Barak Zemer pictures intimate moments of isolation in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles.

By Kate Palmer Albers

Barak Zemer, Aquarium, 2015
© and courtesy the artist

How do human beings—and human bodies—experience a culture that is structured around separation? How many ways can we be outside, looking in? And what are the consequences, conversely, of occupying inner spaces? Bodies in states of transition, and subjected to degrees of impermeability, are at the heart of Barak Zemer’s photographic interests. The title of his recent body of work, Aquarium (2012–16), sets the tone for a range of disorienting states of looking, states of containment, and, often, states of incongruity. Those dark and luminous spaces of immersion and separation act as metaphors both for his experience of Los Angeles and, more broadly, for a heavily structured and mediated experience of daily life in the twenty-first century. As he puts it, “The aquarium is how we live, encapsulated.”

Barak Zemer, Lotus, 2014
© and courtesy the artist

Zemer was born in Israel, in 1979, and relocated to LA for graduate school, in 2011, where he found the flux of his encounter as a foreigner echoed and mirrored in the basic structure of this most decentralized city. The rich sensory porousness that had characterized Zemer’s daily life in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was abruptly replaced by an isolation fostered by LA’s urban infrastructure and pervasive car culture. The contrast was initially—and to some degree remains—a shock. Of his experience in LA, Zemer says, “I’m trying to deal with it. We’re closed in a car, we’re all bubbled from each other. It’s as though someone planned it for us to be unable to look at or experience somebody else. And the camera fights that. It recognizes the closed thing.”

Barak Zemer, Ramp, 2014
© and courtesy the artist

As a result, Zemer photographs prolifically, finding his subjects in the course of daily life, on his travels around the United States and internationally, and at tourist sites like zoos and aquariums that he habitually seeks out wherever he goes. For Transit, his 2018 exhibition at LA’s Night Gallery, Zemer culled a tightly conceived edit from some fifteen thousand images he’s made in the past few years alone. In those photographs, one feels again and again the sense of something just out of reach, a consciousness in which disorientation has become routine. In Passenger (2015), an older man’s face is partially lit by the blue glow of flight—an inverse of the aquarium. In Ramp (2014), the white industrial haze of a Los Angeles morning fails to fully mask the slight oddities of street life. Aquarium (2015) depicts a seated woman with her cellphone, appearing comfortably, if incongruously, submerged. Is she taking a photograph, looking out? Or is it a selfie? In Lotus (2014), lacquered and bejeweled fingernails offer a closed bloom from the darkness, and in Head (2016), a statue seems to have shed a lifetime of tears. The organic and the artificial repeat and replay, in ever-shifting configurations.

Barak Zemer, Passenger, 2015
© and courtesy the artist

In both the vast archive of his images and the radically reduced selection that has become Aquarium, the current U.S. political environment is never pictured directly. However, as Zemer comments about the series as a whole, “If it succeeds in being about the human experience, then it’s always about politics.” In Zemer’s work, that feeling finds its way into moments of disconnect, of uncertainty, and of absurdity.

Kate Palmer Albers is a professor of art history at Whittier College, Los Angeles.

Read more from Aperture issue 232, “Los Angeles,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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