Aperture's Blog, page 94

Sara Cwynar’s Contemporary Nostalgia

On the occasion of her solo exhibition in Minneapolis, the Canadian artist speaks about color and consumerism in the information age.

By Gabriel Ritter

Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Cezanne), 2017
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Gabriel Ritter: Can you speak a bit about your latest body of work, the Tracy pictures? Tell us how this series came to be and how you met Tracy.

Sara Cwynar: I’ve been photographing Tracy for ten years, and she is a good friend, but I’d never really shown any pictures of people until a couple of years ago. I picked Tracy because she also comes from a design and art-direction background and she poses kind of ironically, with the knowledge of a history of representations of women in mind. I always hate when people say, “My model was a collaborator,” but in some ways that was actually really true of Tracy.

Ritter: Do you see the current series as an evolution from your earlier work?

Cwynar: I think Flat Death (2014) was more about how photography works, how it tricks us in a way. With the Tracy pictures, I was thinking more about the kind of power dynamics that go into who we see as opposed to just what. I was thinking about how anachronistic portraits are from the 1950s heyday of advertising, which only portray certain kinds of people in objectifying ways. What does it mean to see an ironic, remade version of that? Every artist has their insecurities about their work, and one of mine is that it reads as too design-y or too much about a certain outmoded aesthetic sensibility, which is only a part of what I’m doing. I always try to connect it to lived experience a bit more, and using an actual person was the most immediate way to do that.

Sara Cwynar, Red Rose, 2017
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Ritter: There is a flatness to the images you make, but also what I would call an excessive materiality in the way that you build up your sculptural arrangements. I wonder, do you see this duality between the object and the image, or the reproduction and physical reality, as core to image making now in the digital age?

Cwynar: I’m responding to an overwhelming amount of images all the time. The films deal better with that because they can keep up with this influx of information, which is very much of the digital age. That’s partly why I started making films, to try and capture this hectic, insane, macro pace a little bit more—the way that it feels like there’s so much stuff but you can’t grab on to anything.

Ritter: Could you speak a bit about your own collecting and how that figures into your photographic process? How do you go about selecting and acquiring the various objects that then find their way into your images?

Cwynar: For most of the objects that repeat in my work, I find them first in the real world and then obsessively troll eBay to find every other version of, for example, the jewelry boxes or the Avon presidential cologne bottles. I used to think I should only find objects in the real world, and there should be some surprise or chance involved, but now I think that I should use the power of the internet to explore the full range of these objects.

For the Tracy pictures, I had made a bunch of portraits of her and I had them hanging on the walls for a really long time; I would pull from objects that I had saved and see what kinds of connections could be made. For example, the Tracy photos have all these historical representations of women, snapshots of real women, and a lot of discarded, high-modernist-era designed objects. I was thinking about some shared fate of these representations of women and these objects, how they had both faded out of view or become devalued a bit by the time I found them—a connection between the way we treat objects and the way we treat humans.

For this series, I wanted to shoot through layers of glass stacked on the floor and have various objects come in and go out of focus depending on where I placed them on, between, or under those planes of glass. So I actually built these glass structures on my studio floor to photograph through. I put my camera on a giant studio stand, so the camera can be about six feet in the air, and I photographed down through the layers of stacked glass and objects. This creates an intense layering effect and changes the focus of the different objects. It helps to mesh the disparate elements into one image.

Sara Cwynar, Avon Presidential Bust (Washington, Gold, Lincoln, Gold), 2017
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Ritter: What is it about these specific objects or images that draws you to them? What about them warrants further investigation?

Cwynar: I like objects that are lightly faded in color and texture from what they were initially intended to be. Color can take you back to a specific time period, like the way mustard yellow is so 1970s. I’m always trying to find certain colors and textures that do that. I also think a lot of objects from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s even, have simpler designs, so they’re easier to work with graphically in some ways, which is interesting to me, as a former graphic designer.

I’ve also thought a lot about kitsch and how a lot of what design or advertising does is try to erase the real fact of living: the everyday materiality of us being in bodies, that we’re going to die eventually, and that there are many unpleasant things about being human. Advertising erases that passage of time. It makes everything feel like it’s possible if you just buy the right things and it kind of glosses over the reality of being human in favor of a more idealized view of the world.

Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Gold Circle), 2017
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Ritter: You’ve not once mentioned the words “nostalgic” or “sentimental,” but those for me get at what you’re describing. Is there a certain nostalgia or sentimentality that you’re going for?

Cwynar: I’m not trying to make nostalgic work, but I am trying to walk a fine line between what nostalgia means and how design works, and also how we perceive the future versus how we just repeat the same things in slightly different forms. The overwhelming choice of our time is paralyzing for a lot of people. I actually think there’s something really contemporary about this kind of nostalgia.

Ritter: A lot of the work you do looks at color and its relationship to notions of femininity and consumerism. They’re all kind of wrapped up within advertising, as you were describing. What trends do you see materializing from the research you’re doing into color and the beauty industry?

Cwynar: I’ve been researching the beauty industry a lot and especially the way that color has been used to sell things. There’s a long history of inventing new colors to sell the same things. I’m just trying to make clear the ways that color has a politics, how it gets used as a tool to convince or seduce, and how that often gets forgotten about.

Sara Cwynar, Still from Cover Girl, 2018
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Ritter: It’s instrumentalized.

Cwynar: Yes, that’s a good word. All of these things—color and the beauty industry and design—really latch on to creating something that seems like it’s missing, and then solving that problem, like finding a gap. Like the rose gold iPhone, for example. Nobody needed a new iPhone, but they created a gap and then filled it by inventing—but they didn’t invent anything, they just changed the color.

Ritter: In the found images and magazine clippings you use, you often emphasize the use of halftone dots in print reproduction. It’s a specific aesthetic that you like to exploit that connotes a datedness to past forms of reproduction that high-resolution digital printing seems to almost eclipse.

Cwynar: Yeah, that’s true, and Flat Death was sort of about this, too—the way that images congeal into looking good, but could fall apart if you looked closer. Even any billboard that you see now, if you were actually able to get close to it, it looks like shit, but you’re always far enough away from it that you can’t tell. Once something exists in the world, it seems like it was almost inevitable, or it’s right in a way because it was printed or produced or put out there and people approved it. But actually it’s just a series of often subjective human decisions and specific technologies that led to that outcome.

Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Grid 1), 2017
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Ritter: Do you see your work as questioning historical concepts of beauty and femininity by reexamining those particular decisions?

Cwynar: Yes, but those are just some elements of it. I’m trying to dismantle this often-idealized kitsch, or often very nostalgic Western context of photography, which tells us who we think we are, and often with great bias. I’m trying to think of all the different ways that that is a false history. But I also love all these materials and I even really loved the rose gold iPhone in a way—I really wanted it. I’m trying to be clear about my own ambivalence, and how you can see the way the strategies of design and advertising are working but still be seduced by them, still want to be seduced by them somehow. Even in exposing some of the problems in the history of image making, I’m still making beautiful images, and I want them to contain some of the pleasure that made those things work in the first place.

Ritter: By drawing attention to that ambivalence, and using it critically, you don’t have to deny yourself that inherent pleasure. Instead, you can rearticulate it in your own vocabulary.

Cwynar: There’s a great pleasure in making this work, and I also want there to be pleasure in looking at it. I don’t want it to be a dry conceptual project; I want it to contain some of the emotional seductive qualities that advertising has. Part of the reason why I started making videos was that in some ways, it’s easier to be seduced by moving images than still ones because they operate in a more emotional register. I want there to be some of the same pleasure that has maybe led us astray at times in the pictures.

Sara Cwynar, Still from Soft Film, 2016
Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, and Foxy Production, New York

Ritter: That is a nice segue into speaking about your videos. Could you talk about your shift to filmmaking over the past few years?

Cwynar: It’s been three years since I started making videos. I thought about it for a long time before, though. I wanted to be able to actually say what I mean a little bit more. My book Kitsch Encyclopedia (2014), which is kind of my first art project, has all this text and writing, and I was sort of missing that in the photos. You can access a more heightened emotional tone or valence in video than you can in photography, and that seemed really exciting to me.

Ritter: And, as you were describing, you can have that textual layer, you can have the voice-over. The way that you use these critical texts is somewhat novel because you’re using a mixture of other people’s words and your words. You’re also putting them in an actor’s voice, and at the same time, you’re there, almost like a coach, correcting them. The overlapping voices and constant interruptions break any sense of cohesive narrative, which re-creates much of what you’re working toward visually. It’s difficult to have that richness, that layered experience solely in a photographic image without it becoming too didactic. I feel like critical theory informs so much of your thinking and image making that naturally, when you come to filmmaking, text becomes your dialogue.

Cwynar: I would read and read and then make a photograph, and so much would get lost. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, but video definitely allowed for the source material to be more present. The same way I’d use a photograph in a different way than it was intended for, I want to think about how theory can become kitsch or theory can become this easily digestible way of understanding the world. In a way, theory is a privileged realm that seems really difficult to access, or at least it did to me for a long time and still does in some ways, but actually it’s just another way of repackaging and representing the world, the same way images do. I wanted to use it in the same way I’d use an image. For example, I’ll misquote people, or use something Lacan said in a way that wasn’t really the way he meant it. I know it drives theory people crazy, but I think there’s a power in it. It’s really satisfying to use words in a similar way to images and have a form that can accommodate both of those things, which can really only happen in video. Sound also changes the way an image looks. To have this kind of didactic, male voice of authority telling you something while you’re looking at the images really changes them. And then I come in and say who’s really in charge.

Gabriel Ritter is curator and head of contemporary art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through January 20, 2019.

The post Sara Cwynar’s Contemporary Nostalgia appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Inside Member Tour of Kendall Messick’s Home Collection

On September 15, Aperture Members visited the home of artist, filmmaker, and collector Kendall Messick.

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Yu Yan © Aperture

Members had the opportunity to explore Messick’s impeccable historic town house in Jersey City, New Jersey, filled with collected photography, art, and antiques from around the world. Artists in the collection include Irving Penn and Robert Rauschenberg. Messick also discussed his project Impermanence, photographs documenting the remains of his art collection after a fire ravaged his home and belongings.

Messick’s book, film, and touring exhibition called The Projectionist explore Gordon Brinckle’s lifelong fascination with an era in American culture almost forgotten: the age of the grand movie palace. A highlight of Messick’s personal collection was objects and remnants from the “Shalimar” theater—such as the original 1940s-style box office—which was constructed in the basement of Brinckle’s modest Delaware home.

Aperture Members meet up with other photo-enthusiasts, editors, scholars, and photographers at events in New York and beyond. Click here to join our growing community and receive invitations to experiences like this one.

The post Inside Member Tour of Kendall Messick’s Home Collection appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Unpacking Ed Ruscha

A new exhibition offers an inside look at the artist’s book-making practice.

By Abigail Cain

Ed Ruscha, Pool #7, from the portfolio Pools, 1968
© the artist and courtesy Harry Ransom Center

Ed Ruscha’s artist books confounded archivists and artists alike when they were first published. In 1963, the Library of Congress mailed back the copy of Twentysix Gasoline Stations he’d submitted (a rejection the twenty-six-year-old artist memorialized in a cheeky Artforum advertisement). That same year, Artforum’s editor Philip Leider pointed out that the book—cheaply printed and composed of twenty-six black-and-white photographs of gas stations along Route 66—was “so curious, and so doomed to oblivion, that there is an obligation, of sorts, to document its existence.” Of course, that confusion was the intended effect. “People would look at it and say, ‘Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this?’” Ruscha told the New Yorker in 2013. “That’s what I was after—the head-scratching.”

Ed Ruscha, Conoco, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1962, from the book Twentysix Gasoline Stations
© the artist and courtesy Harry Ransom Center

A new exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center, part of the University of Texas at Austin, doesn’t lessen Ruscha’s artistic ambiguity, but it does pull back the curtain on his process. Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance marks the first showing of the Ransom’s Ruscha collection, acquired in 2013. (The Los Angeles artist has divvied up his papers between a number of institutions, including the de Young Museum and the Getty Research Institute.) Although Ruscha’s oeuvre is broad—encompassing painting, printmaking, photography, even video—the Texas archive contains materials tied specifically to his pioneering artist books and two public library commissions, a panoramic landscape for Denver Public Library and a series of site-specific word paintings for the Miami-Dade Public Library.

Archaeology and Romance narrows its focus to the sixteen artist books Ruscha made between 1963 and 1978. More than one hundred and fifty objects are displayed across the Ransom Center’s first floor, including rare copies of publications such as Business Cards (1968) and Babycakes with Weights (1970) and a case, over twenty feet long, that allows the accordion-folded Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) to stretch out to its full length. But it’s the preparatory materials accompanying these publications—studio notebooks, paste-ups, even invoices for printing and binding—that offer the most intriguing glimpse into the artist’s mind.

Ed Ruscha, Preliminary notes, Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965
© the artist and courtesy Harry Ransom Center

Jessica S. McDonald, photography curator at the Ransom Center, was among the first to comb through the archive. Ruscha, she discovered, was a consummate multitasker. “Something I found surprising was just how much he was working on at any one time,” McDonald told me recently. A page of notes relating to his 1965 book Some Los Angeles Apartments also sports a few lines at the bottom, reading “Fourteen Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass.” That offhand note went on to become, three years later, a book titled Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass. (There are also some other delightful, apparently discarded, book ideas, including Several Ash Trays, a Speedometer, & a Fish.) “Finding those traces all through the works,” McDonald explained, shows that Ruscha’s process “was more of a web than any kind of linear progression.”

Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass was the first of the artist’s books to include color photography. Sorting through the materials related to the project, McDonald came across Ruscha’s handwritten specifications for the book. In underlined block letters, he had written “THREE COLOR NO BLACK.” Color photographs are typically produced using four layers of ink—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—but in this case, he eschewed the final, black layer. It was an unorthodox printing choice that could, perhaps, have been a money-saving measure—except that Ruscha also added fifty-two blank pages to the book, indicating he wasn’t particularly worried about the expense. “If that decision is what I think it is, that’s a really kind of brilliant experiment,” McDonald said. “It’s a way to get the pictures to look really bright and a little bit unsettling, in that you can’t quite ground them in the shadows. I just didn’t expect to see that, because his photos are usually so straightforward.”

Ed Ruscha, State Board of Equalization, 14601 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, 1967, from the book Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles
© the artist and courtesy Harry Ransom Center

This lack of artistry is one of the hallmarks of Ruscha’s artist books. “The photographs of gas stations are bad photographs on purpose,” McDonald noted. “He’s trying to do the opposite of what a photographer trying to make an artistic photograph would be doing.” In a 1965 Artforum interview concerning his second book, Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), Ruscha explained that it didn’t even matter to him who took the photographs. “In fact, one of them was taken by someone else,” he said. “I went to a stock photograph place and looked for pictures of fires, there were none.” For his 1967 book Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, Ruscha went so far as to hire a commercial photographer to capture the aerial shots.

Compared to his paintings, Ruscha has said that the books were “easy.” “I didn’t have to struggle, and I felt like I was operating on blind faith more than on any kind of decisions. It was as though somebody else was designing them.” That self-assurance is also visible throughout the archive. McDonald came across a sheet of paper, labeled “ROUGH” in orange crayon, outlining the order of Some Los Angeles Apartments. Despite the label, “it’s not rough at all. It’s precisely how the book is,” McDonald said. “So if he’s somebody whose rough draft is essentially pretty darn close to the final draft, then that shows a certain level of confidence.”

Ed Ruscha, “Rough” layout sequence, Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965
© the artist and courtesy Harry Ransom Center

Archaeology and Romance chronicles an artist becoming increasingly sure of his vision. For Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha took far more than twenty-six photos, narrowing his selection to images he felt were devoid of feeling; for Real Estate Opportunities, published in May 1970, he took just four rolls of film in total. “A lot of people who would intentionally call themselves a photographer, somebody trying to make ‘good photographs,’ might get one good picture in forty-eight,” McDonald said. “He just needs to get the information. He’s not trying to make a great picture. By 1970, he already knows what he needs—he just goes out and gets it.”

Abigail Cain is a writer based in Brooklyn.

Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance is on view at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, through January 6, 2019.

The post Unpacking Ed Ruscha appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Disobedient Domesticity

In suburban LA, Sophie Tianxin Chen produces scenes of the mundane and perverse.

By Jennifer Piejko

Sophie Tianxin Chen, Untitled, 2018
© and courtesy the artist

Wary cartographies comprise Los Angeles. The city’s relentless sprawl—spreading itself thin over five hundred square miles—evades any attempt to cultivate a singular identity. The area we consider LA is cut into eighty-eight little cities (Culver City, Inglewood) often patched together to approximate neighborhoods and informal districts (the Westside, East LA). Greater Hollywood is at the center, both in geography and mission, the metonymic scene hosting the storied studios, the Walk of Fame, and the iconic sign at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Just over it, though, North Hollywood, in the San Fernando Valley, has become infamous for a parallel path to notoriety: since the 1970s, the Valley has been the hub for pornography production and distribution. The area’s low-lying, nondescript seediness and latent unease have fascinated establishment Hollywood (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights), portraitists (Larry Sultan’s The Valley series, shot on location a few blocks from where he grew up), and hustlers of every stripe.

Sophie Tianxin Chen, Dog Day, 2016
© and courtesy the artist

“The 818” (area code shorthand for the Valley) is also home to another singularly postwar, American climate: suburbia. The Chinese-born photographer Sophie Tianxin Chen found herself at these crossroads of normative domesticity and acute malaise when, after finishing her MFA at UCLA, a campus-village located in LA’s Westwood neighborhood, she relocated to the Valley, landing in Burbank. Describing her new residence as an “armpit town,” she began to identify it by its “mediocrity in every way … middle-class family houses, old-fashioned diners with elderly customers, front yard decorations for every holiday.”

Sophie Tianxin Chen, Man Working, 2017
© and courtesy the artist

Having a child and becoming a caretaker while maintaining a studio practice at home only distilled these feelings of isolation. Chen longed to puncture the heaving, long stretches of dullness, much like Sultan’s pornographic film subjects who wait hours in rented tract houses for a single moment of action in front of the camera. “I kept hoping for a stranger’s phone call telling me my dogs had gotten loose to happen,” she said. “My six-week-old fell off the bed and was taken to the hospital by an ambulance. These disastrous events brought me moments of relief.”

Sophie Tianxin Chen, Good Job, 2015
© and courtesy the artist

Chen used what was in front of her, staging mise-en-scènes of the unremarkable for her large-format camera: rag dolls scattered over sandstone, bleached by the sun; bananas rendered in wholly nonsensical colors; a diaphanous cascade of plastic hangers suspended from the ceiling. Giving birth had her ceding a certain amount of control: “I am now less polite or shy in my work; it’s become more raw and careless.” The forfeiture has allowed for a self-objectification as well, stretching out her body for maximum unsentimental exposure to her own camera’s roving lens. Like the town’s X-rated permeations, Chen’s late-afternoon delights feed into our voyeuristic appetites for pleasure, drama, and perversion. If watching alone isn’t enough to satisfy you, then build a scene that will.

Jennifer Piejko is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles.

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

The post Disobedient Domesticity appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The 2018 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

Aperture and Paris Photo are pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2018 PhotoBook Awards.

The 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.

Established in 2012, the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography, with three major categories: First PhotoBook, Photography Catalogue of the Year, and PhotoBook of the Year.

Edén Bernal, Exilios (Exiles) (Inframundo) Mexico City

Edén Bernal, Exilios (Exiles) (Inframundo) Mexico City

Nacho Caravia, Mamá (Self-published) Barcelona, Spain

Nacho Caravia, Mamá (Self-published) Barcelona, Spain

M L Casteel, American Interiors (Dewi Lewis Publishing) Stockport, England

M L Casteel, American Interiors (Dewi Lewis Publishing) Stockport, England

John Edmonds, Higher, (Capricious Publishing) New York

John Edmonds, Higher, (Capricious Publishing) New York

Matthew Genitempo, Jasper, (Twin Palms Publishing) Santa Fe

Matthew Genitempo, Jasper, (Twin Palms Publishing) Santa Fe

Julie Glassberg, Due to unforeseen circumstances, this book has no title (Bike Kill) (Ceiba Editions) Siena, Italy

Julie Glassberg, Due to unforeseen circumstances, this book has no title (Bike Kill) (Ceiba Editions) Siena, Italy

Soham Gupta, Angst (AKINA Books) London

Soham Gupta, Angst (AKINA Books) London

Yann Haeberlin, Tina(?) (Self-published) Geneva, Switzerland

Yann Haeberlin, Tina(?) (Self-published) Geneva, Switzerland

Esther Hovers, False Positives (Fw:Books) Amsterdam

Esther Hovers, False Positives (Fw:Books) Amsterdam

Maria Kapajeva, You can call him another man (Kaunas Photography Gallery) Kaunas, Lithuania

Maria Kapajeva, You can call him another man (Kaunas Photography Gallery) Kaunas, Lithuania

Mariken Kramer, The Eyes That Fix You in a Formulated Phrase (Multipress) Oslo, Norway

Mariken Kramer, The Eyes That Fix You in a Formulated Phrase (Multipress) Oslo, Norway

Pixy Liao, Experimental Relationship Vol. 1 (Jiazazhi Press) Ningbo, China

Pixy Liao, Experimental Relationship Vol. 1 (Jiazazhi Press) Ningbo, China

Margo Ovcharenko, Country of Women (Empty Stretch) Moscow

Margo Ovcharenko, Country of Women (Empty Stretch) Moscow

Nicolas Polli, Ferox, The Forgotten Archives (1976–2010) (Ciao Press) Lausanne, Switzerland, and (Skinnerboox) Jesi, Italy

Nicolas Polli, Ferox, The Forgotten Archives (1976–2010) (Ciao Press) Lausanne, Switzerland, and (Skinnerboox) Jesi, Italy

Laurence Rasti, There Are No Homosexuals in Iran (Edition Patrick Frey) Zürich, Switzerland

Laurence Rasti, There Are No Homosexuals in Iran (Edition Patrick Frey) Zürich, Switzerland

Nick Sethi, Khichdi (Kitchari) (Dashwood Books) New York

Nick Sethi, Khichdi (Kitchari) (Dashwood Books) New York

Clara de Tezanos, Piedra-Padre, Universo (Self-published) Guatemala City

Clara de Tezanos, Piedra-Padre, Universo (Self-published) Guatemala City

Jo Ann Walters, Wood River Blue Pool and Blue Pool Cecilia (Image Text Ithaca) New York

Jo Ann Walters, Wood River Blue Pool and Blue Pool Cecilia (Image Text Ithaca) New York

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, One Wall a Web (Roma Publications) Amsterdam

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, One Wall a Web (Roma Publications) Amsterdam

Masaki Yamamoto, GUTS (Zen Foto Gallery) Tokyo

Masaki Yamamoto, GUTS (Zen Foto Gallery) Tokyo

Lieko Shiga, Blind Date Exhibition (T&M Projects) Toyko

Lieko Shiga, Blind Date Exhibition (T&M Projects) Toyko

Thyago Nogueira, ed., Bárbara Wagner, Garapa Collective, Jonathas de Andrade, Letícia Ramos, Mídia Ninja, and Sofia Borges, Body Against Body: The Battle of Images, from Photography to Live Streaming (Instituto Moreira Salles) São Paulo, Brazil

Thyago Nogueira, ed., Bárbara Wagner, Garapa Collective, Jonathas de Andrade, Letícia Ramos, Mídia Ninja, and Sofia Borges, Body Against Body: The Battle of Images, from Photography to Live Streaming (Instituto Moreira Salles) São Paulo, Brazil

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, The Land in Between (MACK) London

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, The Land in Between (MACK) London

Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in association with Abrams, New York)

Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in association with Abrams, New York)

Susan Meiselas, A View of a Room (Here Press) London

Susan Meiselas, A View of a Room (Here Press) London

Laia Abril, On Abortion (Dewi Lewis Publishing) Stockport, England

Laia Abril, On Abortion (Dewi Lewis Publishing) Stockport, England

Nina Berman and Kimberly Stevens, An autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer Verlag) Heidelberg, Germany

Nina Berman and Kimberly Stevens, An autobiography of Miss Wish (Kehrer Verlag) Heidelberg, Germany

Dawoud Bey, Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press) Austin

Dawoud Bey, Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press) Austin

Sophie Calle, Parce que (Éditions Xavier Barral) Paris

Sophie Calle, Parce que (Éditions Xavier Barral) Paris

Alexandra Catiere, Behind the Glass (Chose Commune) Paris

Alexandra Catiere, Behind the Glass (Chose Commune) Paris

Masahisa Fukase, Simon Baker, and Tomo Kosuga, Masahisa Fukase (Éditions Xavier Barral) Paris

Masahisa Fukase, Simon Baker, and Tomo Kosuga, Masahisa Fukase (Éditions Xavier Barral) Paris

Sohrab Hura, Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (Ugly Dog [Self-published)]) Delhi, India

Sohrab Hura, Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (Ugly Dog [Self-published)]) Delhi, India

Raymond Meeks, Halfstory Halflife (Chose Commune) Paris

Raymond Meeks, Halfstory Halflife (Chose Commune) Paris

Carmen Winant, My Birth (Self Publish, Be Happy Editions) London

Carmen Winant, My Birth (Self Publish, Be Happy Editions) London

Daisuke Yokota, Inversion (Akio Nagasawa Publishing) Tokyo

Daisuke Yokota, Inversion (Akio Nagasawa Publishing) Tokyo

Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (First Print Press) New York Originally published 1955; reissued in paperback

Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (First Print Press) New York Originally published 1955; reissued in paperback

First PhotoBook

Edén Bernal

Exilios (Exiles)

Publisher: Inframundo, Mexico City

Nacho Caravia

Mamá

Publisher: Self-published, Barcelona, Spain

M L Casteel

American Interiors

Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, England

John Edmonds

Higher

Publisher: Capricious Publishing, New York

Matthew Genitempo

Jasper

Publisher: Twin Palms Publishing, Santa Fe

Julie Glassberg

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this book has no title (Bike Kill)

Publisher: Ceiba Editions, Siena, Italy

Soham Gupta

Angst

Publisher: AKINA Books, London

Yann Haeberlin

Tina(?)

Publisher: Self-published, Geneva, Switzerland

Esther Hovers

False Positives

Publisher: Fw:Books, Amsterdam

Maria Kapajeva

You can call him another man

Publisher: Kaunas Photography Gallery, Kaunas, Lithuania

Mariken Kramer

The Eyes That Fix You in a Formulated Phrase

Publisher: Multipress, Oslo, Norway

Pixy Liao

Experimental Relationship Vol. 1

Publisher: Jiazazhi Press, Ningbo, China

Margo Ovcharenko

Country of Women

Publisher: Empty Stretch, Moscow

Nicolas Polli

Ferox, The Forgotten Archives (1976–2010)

Publisher: Ciao Press, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Skinnerboox, Jesi, Italy

Laurence Rasti

There Are No Homosexuals in Iran

Publisher: Edition Patrick Frey, Zürich, Switzerland

Nick Sethi

Khichdi (Kitchari)

Publisher: Dashwood Books, New York

Clara de Tezanos

Piedra-Padre, Universo

Publisher: Self-published, Guatemala City

Jo Ann Walters

Wood River Blue Pool and Blue Pool Cecilia

Publisher: Image Text Ithaca, New York

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

One Wall a Web

Publisher: Roma Publications, Amsterdam

Masaki Yamamoto

GUTS

Publisher: Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo

Photography Catalogue of the Year

Blind Date Exhibition

Lieko Shiga

Publisher: T&M Projects, Toyko

Body Against Body: The Battle of Images, from Photography to Live Streaming

Thyago Nogueira, ed., Bárbara Wagner, Garapa Collective, Jonathas de Andrade, Letícia Ramos, Mídia Ninja, and Sofia Borges

Publisher: Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, Brazil

The Land in Between

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

Publisher: MACK, London

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings

Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel

Publisher: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in association with Abrams, New York

A View of a Room

Susan Meiselas

Publisher: Here Press, London

PhotoBook of the Year

Laia Abril

On Abortion

Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, England

Nina Berman and Kimberly Stevens

An autobiography of Miss Wish

Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany

Dawoud Bey

Seeing Deeply

Publisher: University of Texas Press, Austin

Sophie Calle

Parce que

Publisher: Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

Alexandra Catiere

Behind the Glass

Publisher: Chose Commune, Paris

Masahisa Fukase, Simon Baker, and Tomo Kosuga

Masahisa Fukase

Publisher: Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris

Sohrab Hura

Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!!

Publisher: Ugly Dog (Self-published), Delhi, India

Raymond Meeks

Halfstory Halflife

Publisher: Chose Commune, Paris

Carmen Winant

My Birth

Publisher: Self Publish, Be Happy Editions, London

Daisuke Yokota

Inversion

Publisher: Akio Nagasawa Publishing, Tokyo

Jurors’ Special Mention

The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes

Originally published 1955; reissued in paperback

Publisher: First Print Press, New York

The post The 2018 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Fashion Photography in the #MeToo Era

Are fashion photographers responsible for producing truthful images?

By Lou Stoppard

Mert & Marcus, cover of Vogue Italia, September 2017

“I’m not the UN, I’m just a fashion photographer,” says Mert Alas, who, along with his collaborator Marcus Piggott, is known for an uncompromisingly charismatic, glossy style of image-making. He’s commenting on the demand on fashion photographers today to be aware, engaged, political, and, perhaps as a result, increasingly cautious.

In October, it will be a year since allegations against Harvey Weinstein were reported in the press. In this post–#MeToo and Time’s Up era, fashion—which has had its own abusers and brave accusers—is under more scrutiny than ever. That’s good; powerful companies, and powerful men, should be held responsible for their actions. But fashion is in a particularly complex position, partly because fashion itself has never been so fashionable. It’s now a huge part of pop culture, watched by millions and commented on by many. While other industries can express a desire to change through words—expressions of remorse, discussions of new regulations, announcements of new appointments and sanctions—fashion is judged largely on what people see. Images have never been under so much scrutiny, and that scrutiny is shaping the kinds of photographs we see and dictating trends, content, and mood.

Mert & Marcus, cover of Vogue Italia, September 2018

To Alas, despite all the many victories of this modern time we live in, when it comes to imagery, we’re getting more closed-minded. He and Piggott started out in the mid-nineties and fashion was not the industry it is today. Then, shoots lasted days, rather than well-organized hours, and were often conducted by groups of friends for niche titles with a DIY, anticommercial mentality. It would have been impossible to imagine that such images would ever be subject to enormous levels of analysis, or could be digitalized and republished and reblogged by thousands, and taken as a definitive comment on society, politics, women, men, beauty, life. Today, images are simply more seen. And photographers are no longer regarded as image-makers, but increasingly as spokespeople for a set of values. “We used to go for a smaller audience and we had less pressure,” says Alas. “As the audience is so wide now, I feel there is an urge to please everyone. If you stick to your point of view you can always get a good shot.”

Photography, like fashion, is in fashion—it’s everywhere. Some like to say we’re all photographers now, uploading our own personal photo shoots onto Instagram. An average of sixty million images are uploaded to the app each day. Our eyes have never been so accustomed to digesting and dismissing images. Fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø has seen the resultant spotlight on his industry grow: “I think it’s very important that photography, and fashion photography, are under scrutiny—I don’t think that there is any point being defensive about it. But I think what is interesting is the language and understanding that it’s being scrutinized with. When you go to school you learn how to analyze written texts, you look at books, you read poetry, you analyze written statements, you analyze geography, but the one thing you don’t really get to analyze is images—and if there’s one sense we use more than anything these days, and over the last thirty, forty, fifty years, it’s our sight; we consume images nonstop. But most of us don’t have a way of understanding images; we simply have an old notion that a photograph should tell the truth. And that notion is the underlying premise for most discussions about photography.”

Steven Meisel, cover of Vogue Italia, April 2014

In her germinal book On Photography, Susan Sontag writes, “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” A lot has changed since Sontag wrote that in 1977, but the point she makes is as true as ever. As Sundsbø says, we look to fashion photography in search of some kind of reality. Increasingly, we not only expect that something exists that looks like the picture, but also demand that fashion photography only show things that could exist—hence why we criticize images that do not present a realistic body image, or suitably diverse casting, or a sort of moral sensibility that seems in line with the politics of the moment. Such comments are, of course, important. But they also establish guidelines and tricks for companies to hide behind: make a “diverse” campaign and hopefully no one will look behind it and ask about the demographic of your management board, or the working conditions in your factories. It is a veneer of an ethical industry. “There is a degree of expectation in the current moment that every individual shoot has to be representative in so many ways, and occasionally this feels like pressure to put political or ideological considerations before creative ones,” says Alas. “I personally do cast in a diverse way, but this is because of my artistic point of view. If there is a lack of representation of different kinds, maybe we need to see more points of view rather than token casting choices.”

In an age of “fake news,” it is understandable that people want to be able to trust the imagery they see. But increasingly, imagery that is fantastical or whimsical is seen as out-of-date or off topic. Glamour cannot thrive in this mood. Maybe that’s appropriate, given the uncertainty and difficulty of the times we live in. But it’s also hard to see how imagination can thrive, either. Prioritizing photography as a medium that should be dedicated only to truth-telling also defines the tools of the trade as simply a camera, relegating it to some kind of recorder or note-taker. It ignores the opportunity areas that have come with new technologies like retouch software, apps, and Photoshop. These can be dynamic tools for innovation but are often dismissed as opportunities for trickery, despite the desires of photographers to use them artistically. As Vinoodh Matadin said, when discussing his and Inez van Lamsweerde’s early experiments with digital manipulation in an interview for my book on collaboration, Fashion Together, in 2015: “It was almost like you could finally paint in photography. We never started using digital just to retouch people.”

Inze & Vinoodh, cover of Vogue Italia, October 2018

In this climate, there has been a move away from “mise-en-scène” fashion photography, and the representation of dreams or nightmares, to a more documentary-like approach. There is a thirst for something “real” or “raw,” hence the current vogue for imagery that looks natural, clean, quiet, and almost entirely unchoreographed: girls shot by the side of the road, or in quotidian settings, as if they were just stumbled upon. But “real”-looking photography is problematic, too. “The fact that people always believed images should show the truth has always been the strength of fashion photography—it made people believe what they saw in the pictures,” says Sundsbø. In other words, it helps sell bags and dresses, because people really think that they could look just like the girl in the picture. “But now, people are starting to realize the imagery maybe isn’t as true as they first thought, and they almost seem angry about it. One way fashion has reacted is to go toward reality—well, making it look more like reality. But people have to understand that the reality in fashion photography right now is no more real than a fully fledged Helmut Newton Amazon woman in the South of France.” Indeed, you may see an image of a carefree-looking girl, shot in an unexceptional town. But still, that girl is a paid model. Hours will have been spent on getting her to look artfully undone, and art directors and location scouts will have spent days hunting for just the right spot to take the image. Oh, and she’s wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes.

Seven Klein, cover of Vogue Italia, October 2017

Lucy Moore is director of the photography bookshop Claire de Rouen in London, which specializes in fashion and design and regularly supplies to icons of the industry. She’s observed the change in mood in fashion photography. “I have definitely noticed a turn away from an interest in the constructed or abstracted image in the shop’s visitors—instead they focus on archival social documentary and portrait photography as well as self-representation,” she says. “For a very long time, fashion photography needed to generate desire in a very small coterie of wealthy people, who actually had the means to realize their dreams. But with the dramatic turn-of-the-corner into a commercial world where digital space is where the power is won, and where the majority of the users of that space are young, communicative, and not afraid of sparring with their thoughts, maybe aspiration is more about forming alliances—being part of a specific group—than about standing out or entering the rarified world of the elite in a very visible way.”

As Moore observes, most fashion is now consumed in digital spaces: fashion shows are watched on live streams, clothes are bought on e-retailers, and photo shoots and magazine covers are most widely seen on Instagram. Fashion images have thus come to reflect the off-the-cuff, intimate mood on the digital space. That said, it is perhaps ironic that the most criticism of fashion photography—as unrepresentative, or in bad taste, or overedited—occurs on social media, where increasingly users’ own uploads and selfies are as manipulated, tweaked, and tuned as high-budget fashion images. Social media also has its own rules and regulations, which are shaping the future of fashion imagery. It is often described as an area of unbridled freedom and democracy, but really it is rife with censorship. “Image-makers are definitely becoming more daring while, generally, platforms are far from being accepting or willing to facilitate this progress,” say Stefano Colombini and Alberto Albanese, the duo behind Scandebergs, who offer cinematic, narrative-driven images. “Instagram, for instance, is heavily subjected to censorship because of the wider audience it reaches daily.” The most notorious example of this is the ban on showing female nipples, which is surely undermining fashion photography’s long history of breaking down taboos around nudity. “Also,” Colombini and Albanese continue, “with ‘engagement and reach’ being the most important marketing strategy points for brands, images are increasingly being created to be easy to read, rather than complex ones that would reach a smaller audience. It is important to preserve the complexity of every artist’s visual language.”

Steven Meisel, cover of Vogue Italia, July 2005

One wonders how some of the more provocative, politically charged images from Vogue Italia’s history, such as Steven Meisel’s shoots exploring society’s obsession with plastic surgery or violence against women, would fare on Instagram in this age of outrage. Social media allows for instant commentary—a quick like or dislike, dictated by a tiny movement of the thumb and a millisecond of thought. “If you do even the smallest mistake, your career might be over,” says Sundsbø. Mert Alas tries to stay brave. “Fashion photography is a tool for escapism, a break from reality, a little dream. I feel like there is a fear of being politically incorrect, and fear creates moderation. Quite frankly I hate moderation—I’m a man of excess!—so I still search for that little dream and try to portray it in our photography.”

So, what is next? Will the taste for the “real” disappear? Will glossy glamour ever feel right? And will fashion ever be able to handle sex? That’s debatable. “I’ve heard men in the fashion industry say they are ‘scared’ of making sexual work. But I hope this doesn’t last. Humans need to be sexual,” says Moore. Sundsbø has had editors shy away from sensual imagery, even in a case where a female portrait subject chose her own dress, which happened to be semitransparent. Somewhere along the way, some people seem to have forgotten that Me Too isn’t saying that sex is bad; it is saying that exploitation is bad. The answer certainly isn’t tasking female image-makers with coming up with a totally new style of imagery. It has become fashionable to talk about a “female gaze,” which is almost becoming an aesthetic in itself, with its own set of limitations and recognizable tropes. “It’s important to not fall into that easy trap,” says photographer Julia Hetta. “What’s important is that we really feel we believe in the picture.”

Steven Meisel, cover of Vogue Italia, August 2008

In the end, the diversity we demand to see within pictures should be reflected in the photographers themselves and the style of images we see: they should be surprising, unexpected, ambitious, and—the most unattainable goal—new. Sundsbø remains optimistic: “Every person hopes that the next thing you do will be the best thing you’ve ever done—whether it’s the next meal that you have, the next purchase you make, or the next person you meet. I have to believe that the next picture I do will at least be better than the picture I did yesterday—you have to have that hope.”

Lou Stoppard is a writer and curator based in London. This article was originally published in Vogue Italia‘s September 2018 issue. 

Aperture, in collaboration with UNSEEN Amsterdam’s Living Room Series, will present a panel discussion on the “Elements of Style,” featuring Lou Stoppard, on September 21, 2018.

The post Fashion Photography in the #MeToo Era appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Last Humanist

Sabine Weiss’s photographs brought style and serendipity to the streets of Paris and beyond.

By Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Sabine Weiss, Place de la Concorde, Paris, 1953
© the artist/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GRP

On June 6, 1944, the one hundred fifty-six thousand soldiers from the Allied forces who landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, under heavy Nazi fire, each carried a three-day supply of compact, lightweight food. The U.S. troops’ rations included chewing gum from the American brand Wrigley, which had reserved its entire production for GIs fighting overseas during the Second World War. As they progressed on the western front (and more supplies were sent their way), D-Day survivors offered extra gum to the children greeting and soliciting them for leftovers, French people having endured years of severe food shortages due to German occupation. This friendly gesture might not be the kind of capital-H History recorded in books, but the story has nonetheless passed from one generation to the next: the Allies did not just liberate the country, Americans also brought candy. Courtland E. Parfet, a former GI who took part in the Normandy landings, eventually returned to France in 1952 to create Hollywood, his own brand of gum sticks, which still exists to this day.

Sabine Weiss, Enfant, Paris, 1952
© the artist/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GRP

The same year, the Swiss-born, Paris-based photographer Sabine Weiss captured a French boy relishing one of these sticky treats through a sequence of three black-and-white photographs. Each titled Enfant, Paris (1952), they portray the child with an ear-to-ear grin, mischievously chewing gum and rubbing his little hands with satisfaction. Taken while Weiss was strolling around the capital with a medium-format Rolleiflex camera, these candid pictures are currently exhibited in Les villes, la rue, l’autre (The cities, the street, the other) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which gathers about eighty vintage and, for the most part, previously unseen photographs from Weiss’s own archives. (The ninety-four-year-old recently donated some of them to the Pompidou; a catalogue coedited with Éditions Xavier Barral was also published on the occasion, with reproductions of over one hundred pictures.) The overall ensemble extends from 1946, when she moved to Paris from Switzerland to assist the renowned German fashion photographer Willy Maywald, to 1962, at which point she left her personal work aside, taking up commissions for Vogue, the New York Times, Life, Paris Match, Esquire, and others.

Sabine Weiss, Dun sur-Auron, 1950
© the artist/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GRP

Born in 1924, Weiss is the last living representative of humanist photography, a typically French trend related in style to the serendipities of the street—like that child chewing his gum. Far from documenting newsworthy events, let alone historical milestones, humanists shifted their focus onto everyday situations and people in candid, often poetic compositions, which touched upon the misery and optimism that characterized postwar France. In 1952, Weiss had already embarked on a career as an independent photographer when she met Robert Doisneau by chance in the Parisian offices of Vogue. Impressed by her work, he recommended her to the Rapho agency. She joined it the following year and her career immediately took off with landmark exhibitions: some of her photographs were included in Postwar European Photography (1953) and The Family of Man (1955), both curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, and she had her first solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954.

Sabine Weiss, New York, 1955
© the artist/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GRP

The vast majority of Weiss’s personal work from the postwar period, however, ended up in boxes in her Parisian studio, and as a result her early humanist photographs have yet to be thoroughly studied and exhibited. Les villes, la rue, l’autre chiefly highlights Weiss’s certain taste for evanescent silhouettes or reflections through the rain, mist, snow, and night. While her pictures taken in Paris constitute more than half of the show, they would capture a rather dim City of Light if it weren’t for the fleeting yet palpable joie de vivre among its inhabitants, ranging from homeless people and street children to fishermen, storekeepers, and even horse-racing gamblers. Between 1955 and 1962, Weiss also traveled numerous times to New York, where everything that she couldn’t find in Paris would catch her attention—a father devouring cotton candy next to his son after a circus spectacle, the neon lights of giant billboards piercing through the dark in Times Square—in other words, the dynamism and apparent prosperity of the restless metropolis.

Sabine Weiss, Paris, 1955
© the artist/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GRP

For all the pleasure the images afford, what this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue lack are sharper perspectives by which to approach Weiss’s humanist aesthetics. By reducing the photographs on display to vaguely formal or simply geographical considerations, with basic introductory titles such as Villes de brume et de lumière (Cities of mist and light) or just the names of said cities, the presentation somewhat neglects the fundamentals: the profoundly humane quality of these works and their sociopolitical charge. Still, the best may be yet to come. Last year, Weiss gave the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, close to her Swiss birthplace, her entire archives, which will enter the museum’s collection by 2021. Hopefully exploring them will not only uncover other long-lost gems from her past, but also offer much-needed insights into her early personal practice and allow us, as she notes in the foreword of her recent catalogue, “to see the simplest details that express everything and bring out the essential.”

Violaine Boutet de Monvel is an art critic and translator living in Paris. All translations are the author’s own.

Sabine Weiss: Les villes, la rue, l’autre is on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris, through October 15, 2018.

The post The Last Humanist appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Zanele Muholi On Resistance

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

By Renée Mussai 

Zanele Muholi, Bona, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Renée Mussai: Let’s begin by talking about how the images in Somnyama Ngonyama offer a repertoire of resistance, both for yourself and for empowering others. Collectively, they represent an invitation to see yourself in a different light. You take on the image archive in the racial imaginary, addressing a range of personal experiences, social occurrences, cultural phenomena, past histories, and contemporary politics through self-portraiture. Each portrait poses critical questions about social (in)justice, human rights, and contested representations of the black body, confronting the viewer with a stance that is at once personal and political. How does the project sit within your wider bodies of work?

Zanele Muholi: My practice as a visual activist looks at black resistance—existence as well as insistence. Most of the work I have done over the years focuses exclusively on black LGBTQIA and gender-nonconforming individuals making sure we exist in the visual archive. (In Faces and Phases, I focused exclusively on LBTQ individuals, for instance, bearing in mind that gender politics are complex, and fluid; the acronyms are always shifting and changing.) The key question that I take to bed with me is: what is my responsibility as a living being—as a South African citizen reading continually about racism, xenophobia, and hate crimes in the mainstream media? This is what keeps me awake at night. Thus Somnyama is not only about beautiful photographs, as such, but also about bringing forth political statements. The series touches on beauty and relates to historical incidents, giving affirmation to those who doubt whenever they speak to themselves, whenever they look in the mirror, to say, “You are worthy. You count. Nobody has the right to undermine you—because of your being, because of your race, because of your gender expression, because of your sexuality, because of all that you are.”

Zanele Muholi, Ziphelele, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Mussai: I see at the heart of your project the desire for remedial, permanent inscription into a wider visual narrative, and to affect future histories through visual interventions. We have spoken in the past about how your affirmative portraiture practice evokes W. E. B. Du Bois’s Paris Albums 1900. Challenging the historically racist imaging machine—though with a distinctively heteronormative focus—Du Bois’s strategic assemblage of several hundreds of photographs depicting African Americans in turn-of-the-century Europe similarly represented a site of resistance, enhancing existing visual histories that had tradition-ally rendered certain communities not only invisible, but inferior. I’m thinking of your Faces and Phases (2006–) series in particular, but I feel this equally holds true for Somnyama; the many “faces and phases” you conjure not only bear witness to your own existence, but persist, and insist on, making a claim for humanity. Inviting us into a multi layered conversation, each photograph in the series, each visual inscription, each confrontational narrative depicts a self in profound dialogue with countless others: implicitly gendered, culturally complex, and historically grounded black bodies.

Muholi: Somnyama is my response to a number of ongoing racisms and politics of exclusion. As a series, it also speaks about occupying public spaces to which we, as black communities, were previously denied access—how you have to be mindful all the time in certain spaces because of your positionality, because of what others expect you to be, or because your tradition and culture are continually misrepresented. Too often I find we are being insulted, mimicked, and distorted by the privileged “other.” Too often we find ourselves in spaces where we cannot declare our entire being. We are here; we have our own voices; we have our own lives. We can’t rely on others to represent us adequately, or allow them to deny our existence. Hence I am producing this photographic document to encourage individuals in my community to be brave enough to occupy spaces—brave enough to create without fear of being vilified, brave enough to take on that visual text, those visual narratives. To teach people about our history, to rethink what history is all about, to reclaim it for ourselves—to encourage people to use artistic tools such as cameras as weapons to fight back.

Zanele Muholi, MaID X, Durban, South Africa, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Mussai: Yes. Gordon Parks’s notion of the camera as his choice of a “weapon . . . against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs” comes to mind, as well as Audre Lorde’s potent rejection of being “crunched into other people’s fantasies . . . and eaten alive.” And perhaps most relevant, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s bold declaration to use “Black, African, homo-sexual photography” as a weapon to resist attacks on his integrity and existence on his own terms.  I’ve been thinking further about the idea of “weaponizing” one’s practice lately, in relation to Somnyama—not necessarily in a militant fashion, but as a visually seductive call to arms, a protective mantle, a necessary reclamation. An occupation, manifesto, and invitation. These portraits are, essentially, about courage: the courage to emerge; the courage to reflect; the courage to exist, insist, resist; the courage to step in front of the camera—to literally “face oneself.” While you have featured in your work before, you refer to these earlier images as “portraits of the self,” as opposed to the self-portraits in Somnyama. Why did you choose to become an active participant and image-maker at this stage in your career? Why now?

 Muholi: I wanted to use my own face so that people will always remember just how important our black faces are when confronted by them—for this black face to be recognized as belonging to a sensible, thinking being in their own right. And as much as I would like a person to see themselves in Somnyama, I needed it to be my own portraiture. I didn’t want to expose another person to this pain. I was also thinking about how acts of violence are intimately connected to our faces. Remember that when a person is violated, it frequently starts with the face: it’s the face that disturbs the perpetrator, which then leads to something else. Hence the face is the focal point in the series: facing myself and facing the viewer, the camera, directly. Coming from South Africa, I doubt that it would have been possible to execute this project as a black person prior to 1994, for instance, because of the apartheid system and laws that were in place.

Zanele Muholi, Sthembile, Cape Town, 2012
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Mussai: Given both the personal nature and sociopolitical critique that underpins so many images in the series, I imagine that’s especially true. Was there a specific event that inspired the first portrait in Somnyama?

 Muholi: In 2012, I was on an artist residency in Italy, where I stayed in a very, very beautiful place: an old castle. But every morning I’d be woken up by gunshots. Even though the space was protected, and we were guaranteed our safety, these continuous gunshots were unnerving for me. When I inquired, I was told they came from hunters, hunting for boars. The catch of the day was described as a “wild, black pig.” At the same time, there was controversy around [the soccer tournament] UEFA Euro 2012: black Italian players were subjected to overt racism, with “monkey” chants and bananas being thrown at them on the pitch. It made me think of how we are perceived as black people—and how black bodies are routinely exposed to danger. Anything black is always positioned as wild, animalistic, uncontrollable.

It’s a painful notion, and I don’t want to go too deep into it, although it does not go away. Only recently, in December 2017, one of the most important photographs in our history—the famous image of Hector Pieterson by South African photojournalist Sam Nzima—was abused by Selborne College in East London, South Africa. The original image shows Hector’s lifeless body being carried by his fellow student Mbuyisa Makhubo on June 16, 1976, when South African police opened fire on marching schoolchildren in the township of Soweto. To illustrate a flyer for a class of 2017 event, Pieterson’s head was removed, and the faces of Makhubo and Antoinette Sithole, Pieterson’s sister, were replaced with dog heads. If an iconic image exposing the violence of the apartheid regime can be turned into a caricature, then what have we learned (or gained) in twenty-three years of democracy, with regards to the ethics of image production—or in terms of empathy and understanding, forty-one years after the Soweto uprising? This is the reason why Somnyama exists.

Mussai: Unfathomable, to think that not even an image this deeply emblematic of the anti-apartheid struggle is protected from parody. It also serves as a testament to the urgency and unabiding relevance of the series in this contemporary moment. I want to return briefly to the inaugural portrait: I vividly recall you telling me about a new project back in 2012, then tentatively titled the Black series before it became Somnyama. When you returned home to South Africa after Italy, you created Sthembile, Cape Town (2012), in response, correct?

Muholi: Yes. I used materials that spoke to my presumed cultural identity as an African, while referencing a particular historical mode of representation. All of this stereotyping inspires a deep-seated hatred of the black body, from head to toe: facial features, eyes, lips, everything. It could either be wild, as in uncultured, savage, or how your hair is defined as “nappy,” “dirty”—all those things. In August 2016, there was a high-profile case in South Africa at the Pretoria High School for Girls where pupils were reprimanded by one of the teachers because of their Afro hairstyles. As a student, how are you expected to concentrate if your educator tells you that your natural hair is “untidy”? You see this person on a daily basis, in a space where you are supposed to be receiving an education.

Mussai: And, instead, you are effectively told to police your expressions of blackness.

Muholi: Exactly.

Zanele Muholi, Dalisu, New York, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Mussai: It’s poignant to me that the inaugural portrait in Somnyama was inspired by an experience in Europe, as this sense of “otherness” becomes so much more . . . pronounced, perhaps, or dangerous, when you find yourself in spaces where your blackness is often experienced as the defining marker of difference. How has being on the road, constantly in transit, and living a nomadic life affected the series over the years?

Muholi: It’s obviously different between here and there. In America, Europe, or Africa, the experience is never the same. But that judgment, that discrimination, that lingering sense that you are not supposed to be here, persists—having to continually justify your presence. Especially at hotels, the ritual of checking into your room can be so traumatizing. Sometimes you’ll be the last person attended to; at other times, you are made to feel as though you are lost, or looking for directions, rather than treated as a paying guest.

Mussai: And these experiences are then translated into Somnyama?

Muholi: Yes. I made a portrait following one of my negative hotel experiences in September 2016 in New York, with strings of wool framing my face, like a scarf. The title of this piece, Dalisu, New York (2016), means “make a plan.” A majority of the photographs in Somnyama Ngonyama are based on my personal experiences. On their own, they might not appear extreme, but they accumulate; all those minor irritating questions add up to something. Sometimes it feels as if you’re inside a web—a web covering your face that you have to constantly peel back in order to breathe. Yet you are still giving yourself access to see—to check if what you are seeing or hearing is real. Dalisu talks about the feeling of being strangled alive. I felt entangled and confined, confused and angry. At the same time, it’s an affirmation to myself and others like me—a call to action. A reminder to ourselves not to allow anyone to undermine us, or to be restrained by exterior forces or others.

Zanele Muholi, Kwanele, Parktown, Johannesburg, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/Johannesburg, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Mussai: Conceptually, this recalls another portrait in the series, Kwanele, Parktown, Johannesburg (2016), where your face is enveloped by layers of plastic wrap.

Muholi: Kwanele responds to the experience of traveling through immigration at different airports where one is often racially profiled. The plastic around my face is the same material that covers my suitcase. So the image speaks about the need for protection, as well as the sense of feeling exposed, stripped of one’s dignity, and continuously scrutinized when passing through border control. In those moments, one often feels like a piece of trash as one moves from one space to the next. It speaks to the painful inconvenience of being delayed by these reoccurring experiences—humiliated, and unnecessarily exposed, as though you have committed a crime. Over and over, security guards will interrogate you: “Where do you come from? What’s the purpose of your visit? How long are you going to be here for? Who invited you?” And so on. You answer all of their questions, and you listen. But you are also very tired because you have been traveling overnight, and you think to yourself, I feel like my bag right now; I feel like trash; I don’t deserve to be asked all these questions.

While you watch another person, who might be of a different race or ethnicity, pass through the border without being troubled, for you, the questions continue: “What are you doing for a living?” “I take photographs . . .” “What type of photographs? Please show me.” But you are not supposed to open your phone at security, acknowledging the sign that says, “No mobile phones.” As you know, I don’t travel for leisure—this is work, always. The portrait is about traveling as a black person, as a photographer.

Renée Mussai is senior curator and head of archive and research at Autograph ABP, London.

This interview is adapted from Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, now available from Aperture.

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Are We All Cyborgs?

From biohacking to vitamins, photographer Matthieu Gafsou’s latest series questions the relationship between human bodies and technology.

By Annika Klein

Matthieu Gafsou, Businessman Igor Trapeznikov, a member of Russia’s transhumanist movement, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

What does it mean to improve human life? Does improvement mean to be as healthy as possible, as productive as possible, to live as long as possible? For adherents of transhumanism (often abbreviated H+), these are some of the main goals. Or, as philosopher Max More wrote in 1990, it is “a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form.” Eight years later, More, along with an international cohort, wrote the Transhumanist Declaration and founded an organization now known as Humanity+. But in the quest to evade or delay death, what gets lost along the way? Swiss photographer Matthieu Gafsou, whose previous series have focused on religion, drug abuse, and the meeting of technology and nature, explores these questions in his book H+, which eerily catalogues the spectacle of body modification and optimization. Recently, I sat down with Gafsou to discuss how these threads coalesce, and how his newest work weaves an exciting, and often disturbing, web of what our future may hold. 

Annika Klein: Many of the technologies you show in H+ are so ubiquitous—such as contact lenses or protein bars—that few people would think of them as biohacking in the sense that one would think of, say, someone like Kevin Warwick, who has a computer chip implanted in his arm. Yet the main difference here is really just how long these technologies have existed. Why is getting a pacemaker seen as “normal,” while having a computer voluntarily connected to your nervous system is extremely eccentric? How did you determine the scope of your project?

Matthieu Gafsou: For me, this was one of the interesting topics about transhumanism. Is it an extension of actual medicine becoming more extreme, or is something changing in our relationship with technology, or even changing human nature? Even after working on this project for four years, I’m not sure that I have an answer to give, but we are already used to using technologies and having technology related to the body. It’s not something new. It’s a long process and now we are arriving at this moment called transhumanism, which is an old dream resurfacing about eternity, about humanity. It was important for me to have this historical dimension in the project.

Matthieu Gafsou, The intra-uterine device (IUD) is a contraceptive invented in 1928 by Ernst Gräfenberg, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Klein: And that’s why you included things like contact lenses, or an IUD, right?

Gafsou: Yes, exactly. They’re very banal, we see them every day, but in these cases, the objects are directly related to the body. It’s not about science; it’s more about technics and technology. Maybe transhumanism is a new word for something that is not that new. The perfect transhumanist object is the smartphone: even if it isn’t (yet) inside the body, it is always near the flesh and it creates a relationship of dependency. It gives many abilities, but it also steals from us: we lose memory or space orientation.

Klein: One of the scariest—or most exciting, depending on your viewpoint—parts of this project is realizing how we are already changing our bodies without thinking about what that means philosophically. This embrace of medical technology—take orthodontic braces, for example—is an interesting contrast with, say, the natural food movement. I can imagine many parents having no qualms with putting their child in braces, but not wanting them to eat GMOs.

Matthieu Gafsou, Classic orthodontic treatment using braces, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Gafsou: The food chapter of this project was more about how food can become a prosthesis for the body. Transhumanist food is generally vegan and non-GMO, but what was really important to me is the lack of pleasure related to this kind of food. For me, the body should remain the place of pleasure and feelings. Transhumanism is a way to live longer, but also sometimes means forgetting what makes us human beings. I was reading a French anthropologist, David Le Breton, who also wrote a text for H+, about how food and nootropics are chemical prostheses. To answer your question, our society can be seen as techno-progressivist: it connects technology and social improvement, and this is something I was also curious to dispute.

Klein: It’s unusual to have a body of work that is cohesive, and yet spans portraiture, documentary, and studio photography. The light, too, changes between a dark background with an illuminated scene or object and a strong, sometimes overexposed flash. Why did you vacillate between these different techniques and modes?

Matthieu Gafsou, Mice that have received a gene responsible for bioluminescence glow when exposed to UV rays, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Gafsou: I like the idea of nonnarrative and fragmented language because it resonates with how we are connected to data or information today. I am also passionate about the notion of rhythm inside a book or exhibition, and I believe that different typologies of photographs really help to create meaning. Seen alone, some of my pictures might not mean much, but when you connect those together in a network, they make sense in a complex way. I also knew that my project was going to be incomplete, because there are too many topics related to transhumanism—too many new objects, experiments, people emerging every day.

Regarding the variation between darkness and light in this series, I can say many things. It is a mystical way of showing things and it refers to a religious idea. I wanted to have this connection with religion in H+, as my belief is that transhumanism is a new religion. Finally, this alternation of white and black reveals some anxiety. The bright light leaves nowhere to escape, and the dark could engulf us. Many of the philosophical questions raised by transhumanism, such as death, eugenics, or an increase of social disparities, are disturbing and can cause anguish.

Matthieu Gafsou, “Total” foods are not dietary supplements but food substitutes, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Klein: You also borrow a lot from the language of product photography, which isn’t usually mixed with documentary.

Gafsou: Yes—this was to contaminate my body of work with an aesthetic coming from the business world, as transhumanism is also a very big business. Most of GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) are already involved. I think it is interesting because art photography language also has stereotypes. Being contaminated by a commercial language makes the work a bit more ambiguous. Am I doing publicity for those products or thinking about them as an artist? Am I an activist or a critic?

Klein: You have a master’s degree in philosophy and literature. Which authors and books were you reading and thinking of while working on this body of work?

Gafsou: I’ve been reading the cyberpunk writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Then there’s Douglas Coupland and Donna Haraway, the American intellectual. Le Breton, who I mentioned earlier, and his book called L’adieu au corps (2013), which translates roughly to “forgetting the body.” An American reference for me is Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. He’s not a transhumanist at all, but his book Industrial Society and Its Future (1995) is really interesting as a way to question our dependency on technology—even if the guy was extreme. Then there’s Philip K. Dick, who speaks a lot about how living beings look more and more like the inanimate, and how the inanimate looks more and more lifelike. Some philosophers, too—Peter Sloterdijk, Jürgen Habermas. What was really difficult with this project was to deal with this huge amount of information available. It took me a long time to process the data, to classify it and to forget about what seemed nonrelevant.

Matthieu Gafsou, Incubator, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Klein: The part of this project that relates to reinventing the self via reinventing the physical body makes me think of this very American, Enlightenment-era idea of anything being achievable through work and progress. Was this something you had in mind?

Gafsou: Yes. Transhumanism fits completely into this kind of ideology, along with Silicon Valley, and libertarianism. Transhumanism fits our society of information, of neoliberalism, of start-ups, of business. This is a bit frightening, too. You think of transhumanism as a philosophical or intellectual movement, and you discover that it perfectly fits into business. Ayn Rand’s idea of yourself against the world, doing what you are able to do—it totally matches with transhumanism.

Klein: Besides life expectancy, how does health play into this?

Gafsou: I was surprised that, for some people I met, what we would consider a healthy body is for them a sick body. The line between healthy people and sick people is not that easy to draw.

Matthieu Gafsou, STIMO (Epidural Electrical Simulation with Robot-assisted Rehabilitation in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury) aims to improve the motor skills of people with injured or diseased spinal cords, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Klein: Do you mean that people who subscribe to transhumanism think that a body that’s not augmented with technology is a sick body, even if medically it’s not a sick body?

Gafsou: Yes. And this idea is really fascinating, because it helps us to understand how transhumanism can be seen as a prosthesis for the soul! I believe we all have weaknesses, and the biggest of those is our common fear of death. It makes us look fragile, pathetic, and beautiful at the same time. If you consider transhumanism, it anesthetizes the fear but prevents us from learning to live by facing the inescapable. We can see this movement as a new opium for the people.

Matthieu Gafsou, Laboratory designed by French architect Dominique Perrault on the campus of EPFL, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Galerie C, Switzerland, and MAPS

Klein: On the other hand, someone who does not adhere to transhumanism might think that someone who implants a device that is not deemed medically necessary into their body has a sick body. It goes both ways. With all this on your mind, what’s keeping you up at night? What are you most concerned about?

Gafsou: Just after the end of the project, a few months ago, I started thinking about how transhumanism is just a way to accelerate the process of consuming too much, not thinking about the way we are using resources, and is also about individualism. I started working on this project because I’m going to die, of course, and I was fascinated by transhumanism because I am fragile (as maybe we all are). I still am. But the more I worked on it, the more I wanted to be free from it. I’m not saying I’ll refuse to have a pacemaker; I’m saying that choosing life extension or immortality as a goal in life seems presumptuous and perhaps even immature.

Annika Klein is assistant editor of Aperture.

H+: Transhumanisms was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2018.

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Energy Charts and Cosmic Light

Working between portraiture and documentary, Khalik Allah’s new book tracks Harlem by night.

By Jovonna Jones

Photographer and filmmaker Khalik Allah’s monograph begins with a manifesto entitled “Camera Ministry.” He writes: “I shoot people who find them-selves in the worst possible situation, but I recognize their invulnerability and reflect it back to them. These are psychic x-rays. I consider my photographs energy charts.” This empathic insight notably was brought to bear in his film Field Niggas (2015), an acclaimed documentary about New Yorkers facing homeless-ness, substance abuse, and harassment on 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. Souls Against the Concrete (University of Texas Press, 2017) compiles 105 analog portraits made on those street corners over three years, foregrounding Allah’s long-held commitment to cinematic storytelling and nocturnal light. Rather than frame his nighttime Harlem subjects through terms of social abjection, vulnerability, and redemption—an over-determined lexicon typically used to regard people who occupy the streets—Allah practices a visual language of impenetrable self-possession. He acknowledges metaphors of darkness as both freeing and debilitating, but tables them. Instead, light is his driving concept and technical method, in service of what he terms soul consciousness.

Khalik Allah, Untitled, 125th Street, 2014
© the artist and courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York

As a child of the 1990s growing up between Queens and Harlem, Allah found his practice shaped by two sites of knowledge: the camcorder and the corner. He started out by capturing the everyday lives of his family, the streets, and anything around him—“the rays of [their] lives.” But it was the philosophy of the Five Percent Nation, or the Nation of Gods and Earths, that would define Allah’s photographic mission and form. Harlem serves as the Mecca for the Five Percent Nation, a cultural-religious movement founded by a former student of Malcolm X in 1963, and popularized by the legendary hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan (whom Allah photographed early in his career). Members ground their teachings in tenets such as “Black people are the original people of the planet Earth,” and “each one should teach one according to their knowledge.” They are committed to the social and ideological liberation of African Americans, and Allah’s work bears traces of their influence.

Khalik Allah, Untitled, 125th Street, 2014
© the artist and courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York

Since the early 2000s, Allah has created five documentary films concerned with collective consciousness and self-possession within a racist and classist social order: The Absorption of Light (2005), Popa Wu: A 5% Story (2010), Urban Rashomon (2013), Antonyms of Beauty (2013), and Field Niggas. In Souls Against the Concrete, Allah centers on the individual, seeking out the moments when a person’s inner life creates both tension and harmony with their surround-ings. The series opens with an elevated and unfocused city shot of 125th and Lexington, taken from the vantage point of an overpass overlooking the intersection. The scene stretches from the cross of the Iglesia Pentecostal to the Pathmark retail sign beaming up across the street. Traffic congeals on both sides of the road, shooting two dotted, receding vectors of white and red light that dissipate where the night sky meets the city’s horizon.

Khalik Allah, Untitled, 125th Street, 2013
© the artist and courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York

Nearly eclipsed by the activity of traffic and dwarfed by signage, two micro-stages take shape on the concrete. On the sidewalk, three figures stroll through the frosty light from a convenience store. At the major intersection, three more figures lean against a parked car, while another starts down the crosswalk past a chorus of headlights. Abundant yet sparing, artificial light organizes and renders the figures complete in their concealment. For his portraits, Allah wields competing light sources, luminosities, and gradations with flexibility and precision, keen to the ways people conduct visible energy, yet protect their sacred interiority. Fluorescent light becomes corporeal in some portraits and abstracted in others. Glows emerge through a person’s face, their gaze, and the angle of their pose, whether contemplative, elusive, playful, or performative. The lucent coordinates featured in the opening street view reoccur through-out the work: they frame a dapper man between sips of his beverage and drags from his cigarette; they’re cradled in a woman’s palm as she gives her hair a quick pat. Distant and contained forms of light become two-dimensional shapes or planar gradients behind a muse, appearing chromatic and translucent, even cosmic.

Khalik Allah, Untitled, 125th Street, 2013
© the artist and courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York

Allah maintains a theatrical, narrative space within this landscape-format book, with each portrait appearing widescreen against a facing page of black ink, forcing the eyes on a single subject. But unlike a documentary with credits and captions, Souls Against the Concrete includes no titles, no photo index. (The project ends with a heartfelt acknowledgments section, simply thanking everyone who cocreated the work.) At the intersections of portraiture and documentary, Allah breaks through the limited visual conditions of the night to figure light differently through the human form, and to portray the streets freely through light. As he writes, “I shoot at night to remind people that we’re in outer time, outer space. Time is over, and the world has ended. Only the Light continues.” Here, light animates the prolific outer-worldliness of people—people deemed out of time and at risk. People who “shoulder the world’s blame” and live to refuse it.

Jovonna Jones is an art critic and doctoral student at Harvard University. She researches black aesthetics and the history of photography.

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