Aperture's Blog, page 95

Back in the Days

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

By Carribean Fragoza

Photographs in Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, 2018
Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture

Guadalupe Rosales moved to New York with little more than a stack of wallet-sized photographs to remind her of home. She’d left Los Angeles in 2000, a few years after her cousin, Ever Sanchez, was stabbed to death at a party. Nearing her twenties, at the beginning of a new millennium, she decided to relocate her life to New York, where she’d remain living for over a decade. During that time, as she came of age away from the violence that had marked her youth, she held on to those photographs not only as reminders of unresolved trauma, but also as important links to her past. The photographs, given to her by family and friends she had grown up with in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, were all made in a similar “glamour-shots style” using hazy filters. In the pre-selfie era, young people would flock to their local malls wearing coordinated outfits, sharply outlined lips and eyebrows, and meticulously teased perms to pose with friends in front of ambient backdrops. The diffused lighting spared them from blemishes, including emotional ones, and saturated the images with sentimentality that with time would turn into acute nostalgia.

Photographer unknown, Booker and friends, 1992
Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales and Eileen Torres

For Rosales, these photographs were placeholders for a history that had yet to be told. Their pull eventually compelled her to come back home to LA. “I was thinking a lot about my crew days,” she told me. “And I was always attracted to photographs not just for their images, but also for the notes written on the back. They were like relics; they reconnected me.”

In 2015, Rosales started Veteranas y Rucas, an Instagram archive focused on youth culture in LA’s Latino neighborhoods. Its point of view is from the women’s perspective. She posted photographs from her own collection, along with brief anecdotes, in hopes of eliciting feedback. Before long, she had a steady stream of followers that eagerly shared photographs and memories of their teenage party days in LA in the 1990s. Then, in 2016, she developed a second Instagram project, Map Pointz, to collect images and memories of Southern California raves and party crews.

Photographer unknown, Mind Crime Hookers party crew on 6th Street Bridge, Boyle Heights, 1993
Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales

Rosales’s project is twofold: The physical collection of objects that she keeps in her studio consists of thick binders and albums filled with hundreds of party flyers, photographs, and party paraphernalia such as glow-in-the-dark beaded necklaces, pagers, and customized backpacks, along with stacks of magazines that document various youth subcultures. But it’s also her Instagram projects, Veteranas y Rucas and Map Pointz, that have quickly grown into expansive and generative digital archives of photographs that document scenes of LA. Both have become multigenerational as followers share photographs of family members and themselves, tracing as far back as the 1910s. In all of the images, we see young women and men expressing and embodying Mexican American culture through fashion and posture in their homes, in the streets, and, of course, at parties. The photographs and comments in combination begin to shape the narrative of these deeply rooted communities that have largely remained unrecognized at best and criminalized at worst.

Swing Kids party crew from San Gabriel Valley, 1994
Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales and Deborah Meza

However, Veteranas y Rucas, says Rosales, was not originally conceived as an archive. While in art school at the University of Chicago and far from home, she began with the idea of creating an installation of a teenage raver’s or party crew member’s bedroom. But she was also thinking of her work as a broader historical project, using photographs and other objects as documents to show what it was like to grow up in 1990s LA as a young woman of color. “I started the work with the intent of finding material on my own time in the 1990s,” says Rosales. “But if you don’t have the material, you can’t use it.”

Though Rosales’s process of collecting photographs of these unrecognized communities has largely been guided by instinct, it is in step with the work of radical historians such as José Esteban Muñoz, who called for building an “archive of the ephemeral.” In his groundbreaking 1996 article “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Muñoz posits that contrary to traditional archives that exclude marginal communities—the poor, queer, and colored—an ephemeral archive allows us entry into transient spaces, such as dance floors and cruise spots, where we can begin to find their stories.

While the invisibility of these and other marginalized communities, especially youth, has all but erased them from official history, it also once protected them. The 1990s were dangerous times for young people of color in LA. It was a decade of increasing economic disparity, police brutality, and social turmoil that led up to and followed the 1992 LA riots, along with gang violence and rampant anti-immigration policies that prompted days of student walkouts.

 

Photographer unknown, Guadalupe Rosales’s cousin, Ever Sanchez (right), and unidentified woman, East Los Angeles, 1995
Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales

“Kids went underground. At raves and parties, we were creating safe spaces for ourselves when everything like the riots and Prop 187 was going on,” Rosales recalls, referring to Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that would prohibit undocumented immigrants from accessing public services such as education and health care. Rosales attended many of these parties when she wasn’t going to protests and marches with her mother and sister. Effectively, it was in the underground that youth like Rosales created a world of their own, away from the institutional establishments that had betrayed them.

Map Pointz focuses on the rave party scene. The name refers to what in the 1990s were the coordinates of a party location that could only be accessed by following a specific set of instructions. Flyers often directed partygoers to call a phone number to learn where they would receive an address for the event, usually only hours before the doors opened. The purpose was to keep the location secret from unwelcome party crashers, including police, parents, and rivals.

Party crews would often drive out into the far reaches of Greater Los Angeles, even venturing into Southern California’s Inland Empire. “Sometimes we didn’t even know where we were going. We’d just carpool and end up in places,” recalls Rosales. Very naturally, party culture intersected with Southern California’s distinct car culture. Veteranas y Rucas includes many photographs, from across several decades, of young Chicanxs posing with cars, as if this recurring shot marked a coming-of-age or, for women, a display of empowerment. Photographs of young people cruising along LA’s Eastside boulevards in customized cars show a weekly urban pageantry of polished chrome, jewel-toned fiberglass, sculpted hairstyles, and the finest hoochie garb. They were parties on wheels.

Shrine to Ever Sanchez, Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, 2018
Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture

As these underground parties proliferated and became more sophisticated, they developed an ephemeral infrastructure that suited LA’s decentered and transient character. According to Rosales, partygoers became party-promoters who created entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves; amid a barren landscape, they took warehouses gutted by deindustrialization and transformed them into temporary venues for large-scale events, turning these underground scenes into businesses. They taught themselves, and each other, skills as they photographed, laid out, and published their own magazines. They designed their own flyers, booked venues, and found creative ways to promote carefully planned events. “These parties were being organized by teenagers using their own resources,” Rosales says. “Schools were not providing us skills. The party scenes allowed us to develop these skills.”

Photographer unknown, Booker (right) from the Together We Stand crew and friend (left) from Mind Crime Hookers, Whittier, California, ca. 1993
Courtesy Guadalupe Rosales and Eileen Torres

Concurrent with the rise of these cultures, print magazines like Low Rider, Street Beat, Teen Angels, and Urb thrived as they documented the various scenes and effectively trained new generations of publishers and photographers. Rosales met one of these photographers, Eddie Ruvalcaba, on Instagram and soon began collaborating with him on an installation project at Commonwealth and Council, a gallery in downtown LA. Ruvalcaba was a self-taught photographer for Street Beat. His portfolio extends beyond party scenes, including photographs of daily street life, as well as striking images of the 1992 LA riots and their aftermath. This collaboration is an example of how organic partnerships can grow out of collective archive-building processes such as Rosales’s, which are, in fact, part of a growing movement of nontraditional, DIY archive projects dedicated to recovering lost histories.

Magazines in Guadalupe Rosales’s studio, 2018
Photograph by Mike Slack for Aperture

Rosales and Ruvalcaba held one other thing in common: they were both still coming to terms with the trauma of violence and drug addiction that came to afflict so many of their generation.This is also what brings so many Instagram followers to share their experiences with Rosales, as they attempt not only to ruminate on memories of times past, but to make sense of the chaos they experienced. More than just Instagram projects, Veteranas y Rucas and Map Pointz also involve a process of healing, which is why Rosales continues to hold onto them so closely. She says that though she feels some pressure to conserve the objects in the collection she is building, she is not ready to hand them over to a formal or institutional archive. “The project is still evolving, and it’s still a part of me. I feel responsible for these things.”

Even today, Rosales guards the stack of wallet-sized photographs, keeping it within arm’s reach in her studio as if it were a deck of tarot cards. The ink of the neatly written notes on the back of the photographs is now smudged but still clearly says, again and again, “Keep in touch.” And she does.

Carribean Fragoza is a writer from South El Monte, California. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in BOMB, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and LA Weekly.

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

The post Back in the Days appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

A Range of Vision

Aperture’s free On Sight curriculum brings together students of different backgrounds in Los Angeles.

Annabel Z., Untitled, from the series GIRLS, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Harvard-Westlake

In April 2018, Aperture educator Alice Proujansky traveled to Los Angeles to be part of a collaboration between Harvard-Westlake School and East LA’s Humanitas Academy of Arts and Technology (HAAT). Coming from opposite sides of LA, and using Aperture’s On Sight curriculum, students met at HAAT to look at each other’s work, and find common ground through photography. Activities included playing a “telephone” game from Proujansky’s book Go Photo! (Aperture, 2016), during which they shared cameras, taking turns photographing in response to each other’s images.

The ongoing collaboration began in October 2017, when the two classes met at Harvard-Westlake. There, each student planned out a thematic project using a “mind map,” a visual thinking tool that allows students to explore new themes and ideas for their projects. The two teachers—Adriana Yugovich of HAAT and Harvard-Westlake’s Joe Medina—also planned an exchange of photographs, made using film cameras provided by Harvard-Westlake.

Roman, Untitled from the series LA, 2018
Courtesy the artist and HAAT

The students’ resulting pictures are quiet, clean, playful, and strange. Students worked with a range of digital cameras for their themed projects: some of the resulting photographs are technically precise, while others are blurry, or show signs of digital grain. Sometimes the photographs are carefully observed and thoughtfully constructed, other times casually noticed. The range of vision is broad, which is fitting, as these teenagers are about as diverse a group as any in Los Angeles.

“With the help of Aperture On Sight, we investigated how photographs work as symbols and metaphors,” explains Medina. “It provided us with a way to at least start a conversation and try to understand each other using photography as a groundwork. Otherwise, these kids never would’ve come in contact with each other even though they live in the same city.”

Pablo G, Untitled, from the series Dreamer3, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Harvard-Westlake

This breadth of vision points to a teaching approach that is both structured enough to support students in seeing clearly, and flexible enough to accommodate a range of visions. Aperture On Sight, a free, open-source curriculum, was written by Proujansky; Sarah McNear, then deputy director of Aperture; and a team of teaching artists, and was tested over two years in seven New York City schools.

Yugovich says, “I was super excited to know there is a sequential curriculum for teenagers because it is really hard to teach photo at the high school level. There’s no textbook, there’s no test, there are no standards, really. This was great because it’s got hooks, it’s not boring. A lot of the stuff out there is very technical or basic, and nowadays everyone’s a photographer—kids are composing pictures all the time and they’re not thinking about it.”

Heidi T., Untitled, from the series Sense of Place, 2018
Courtesy the artist and HAAT

While Aperture’s previous community education focus was providing direct services in New York City schools, the organization has now finished testing the curriculum and is providing professional development workshops and education consulting. The team writes curriculums, sends artists to visit classrooms, and works with teachers to adapt lessons to their needs.

In 2018 alone, Aperture On Sight has been used by 450 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade at schools across the country, including Harvard-Westlake and HAAT, as well as at Avenues: The World School in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, MS 136 Charles O. Dewey in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Success Academy’s middle schools throughout New York City.

The curriculum is free to use; contact Alice Proujansky at edupartners@aperture.org for more information.

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A Hidden History of Abortion

Laia Abril’s new book provides a harrowing record of women’s struggles to access family planning.

By Kristen Lubben

Laia Abril, On Abortion
Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, UK, 2018

Every year, forty-seven thousand women die from botched illegal abortions. On the front cover of Spanish photographer Laia Abril’s excellent new book on the subject, the official title, On Abortion, is vigorously crossed out in black marker and below, handwritten in pencil, is the essential problem: “the repercussions of lack of access.” It is not abortion itself, but barriers to access—laws, secrecy, shame—that cause these deaths and innumerable other tragedies for women and their families. The series title at the top magnifies the project’s scope even further: “A History of Misogyny, Chapter One.” Misogyny is a chronicle with many, many chapters, and the control of women’s fertility is one of its canonical texts.

 

Laia Abril, from the book On Abortion, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing

How can photography reveal hidden histories? One strategy that artists have used is to reconstruct narratives or fill in overlooked chapters of history using archives and found photographs. But what about stories that are so secret that they were never photographed in the first place? Abril, first trained as a journalist, came to the conclusion that conventional reportage was too limited and confining a strategy for telling the stories she wanted to tell. In On Abortion (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2018), a wrenching and beautifully designed book, she takes on the ambitious—and radical—project of making invisible histories visible.

The book opens to endpapers made up of nineteenth-century advertisements for abortion and fertility cures for “married ladies” who “wish to be treated for obstruction of their monthly period.” These are bracketed by more recent color ads from Peru with offers to treat the same ancient malady, using the same euphemistic wording, over a century later. In between these endpapers is a painstaking recounting that peels away the layers of pretense and hypocrisy that have rendered this enduring history obscure.

 

Laia Abril, Magdalena, thirty-two, Poland, from the book On Abortion, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing

A series of objects from a medical museum, many of which look like torture devices, demonstrate the ancient and gruesomely inventive history of fertility control. These still lifes are followed by profiles of women who survived illegal abortions. Their unabashed frontal portraits stand in contrast to the heavily blurred faces of women who died from their botched abortions. It is a subtle but profound design gesture that draws a distinction between participating subjects (the brave women who have chosen to partner in Abril’s project of demystification) and those who are powerless to consent to the use of their images. Abril also includes photographs that she staged or recreated based on documented cases. The book’s rigorously ethical treatment of vulnerable subjects, combined with its disregard for the conventions of documentary photography, offers an updated and useful model for photographers grappling with the ethics of representation, who are often overly concerned with technical issues and not concerned enough with the impact on those photographed.

Interspersed throughout are photographs that piece the overarching story together: methods of self-induced abortion, mug shots of early twentieth-century abortion providers, a drone that airlifts abortion pills into countries where they are outlawed, and the ultrasound of a nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl raped by her own father and denied a termination of her pregnancy. Each episode in this history is treated with a distinctive design solution—different paper stocks and sizes, unfolding flaps and layers—which keeps the viewer engrossed in what could otherwise be an unrelenting experience. On Abortion first appeared in exhibition form, a fact that contributed to the book’s inventive and experimental design.

Laia Abril, Spreads from the book On Abortion
Dewi Lewis Publishing, Stockport, UK, 2018

While the book is detailed, it is not especially graphic, a surprise given the long history of weaponized photographs on both sides of the abortion debate. Where violent images are used, they are heavily altered. At the book’s center, in a section called “Visual War,” is a vivid red color photograph of an aborted fetus from an anti-abortion website, pixelated to the point of abstraction. Lift that photograph and you find another iconic image: the naked body of Geraldine Santoro, face down in a hotel room after bleeding to death from a botched abortion attempt in 1964. This black-and-white crime scene photo became an icon of the American pro-choice movement, and has appeared in every edition of the women’s health bible Our Bodies, Ourselves. The chilling photograph accompanies the rallying cry that “we won’t go back” to the time of back-alley abortions, when deaths like Santoro’s were all too common. Abril has chosen to reproduce the image so faintly that it is barely visible—easily legible if it is burned into your consciousness, as it is for many American women, but otherwise more idea than image, only readable because of its accompanying caption.

 

Laia Abril, from the book On Abortion, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing

Abril says that her project aims to “visualize the comparison between the present and the past, so we understand that things are not as certain as we think—so we don’t forget what is in the past and don’t get too comfortable in the present.” In the United States, where hard-won abortion rights are being eroded, the wire hanger has become a symbol whose referent has largely faded from our collective memory. Abril’s absorbing, galvanizing, and beautifully constructed book is a timely reminder of what is at stake—not just here in the United States, but globally.

Kristen Lubben is the executive director of Magnum Foundation.

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Koudelka’s Prague, Fifty Years Later

When Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia’s capital in August 1968, Josef Koudelka was one of the first on the scene.

By Melissa Harris

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

That everything has happened by chance might seem an odd way to begin a discussion with a photographer whose focus, intensity, precision, and sheer will are evinced in every aspect of his being, not to mention in every project he has ever undertaken. And yet this is where Josef Koudelka has chosen to begin our discussion of the work he did that one extraordinary week in Prague, August 1968, when “the big Soviet army invaded my country, everybody was against them, and everybody forgot who he was—if he was a Communist, if he was young, or old, if he was anti-Communist. Everybody was Czechoslovak. Nothing else mattered. Miracles were happening. People behaved like they never had before; everyone was respectful and kind to each other. I felt that everything that could happen in my life was happening during these seven days. It was an exceptional situation that brought out something exceptional from all of us.”

Unrelentingly alert, Koudelka is poised “to seize these chance occasions, because they can be the most revealing.” He works with an open mind and heart, knowing intuitively when, as Arthur Miller once wrote, “attention must be paid.” His acute, almost feral instincts left him with little choice but to go immediately out on the street and start photographing when Prague was invaded by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact tanks on August 21, 1968.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Koudelka is an unsentimental photographer who approaches his work without preconceptions, and with phenomenal energy and humanity, and whose own essence appears profoundly intertwined with a hunger for personal freedom (seemingly satiated). And consistent with this spirited way of being in the world is his respect for the freedom and individualism of others. Koudelka is not at all interested in talking about his photographs, or in insisting on a way of thinking about them, or advocating a particular point of view. He is, however, “interested in the picture that may tell different stories to different people,” and in what others find in his images.

Ultimately, it is all about seeing, and so the synergy between photography and painting, for instance, is a given for him—this I learned when I brought up Piero della Francesca, issues of perspective, balance, weight, and form, and how space is broken up. Consider the faces of the people in Koudelka’s photographs; look at his rendering of the gestures, the expressions of the courageous Czechoslovak people as they attempt to resist invasion, and how these photographs, taken quickly and at great risk, are so exquisitely composed. None of this is by chance.

The chance in this work is that he had returned from photographing Gypsies in Romania the day before; that a friend called him up to tell him the Soviets had indeed entered Prague, so he was one of the first to witness what was occurring; that he actually had film; that the Soviets never took his film; and that the work got out of Prague and was published one year later to commemorate the invasion. And so we begin . . .

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Melissa Harris: Can you tell me a little bit about your life before 1968, before what became known as Prague Spring? Not just photographing, but what else was important to you, and whether or not you were political.

Josef Koudelka: No, I was not political. To be political in Czechoslovakia meant being in the Communist Party, which I was not. But in the period of ’68, everybody in the society became involved in politics. Czechoslovakia had been a country where nothing was possible, and suddenly, at that time, everything was possible, and everything was changing very quickly. However, what was happening in Czechoslovakia was not about revolution. It was about regaining freedom. It was the writers who first started calling for more freedom, and who, in doing so, also expressed the feelings and desires of the whole society.

Harris: Milan Kundera’s speech supporting freedom of expression at the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in June 1967 is so powerful:

All suppression of opinions, including the forcible suppression of wrong opinions, is hostile to truth in its consequences. For the truth can only be reached by a dialogue of free opinions enjoying equal rights. Any interference with freedom of thought and word, however discreet the mechanics and terminology of such  censorship, is a scandal in this century.

Koudelka: With the abolition of censorship, everything started to change. Seven days after the Soviet invasion in Prague, we heard that one of the key conditions in the Soviets’ agreement to remove their tanks from the streets of Prague was the reestablishment of censorship.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Harris: What was important to you at that time?

Koudelka: The same as today: to do what I wanted to do. There was no political freedom in Czechoslovakia. I found my freedom through doing my work. I worked as an aeronautical engineer and at the same time I was taking photographs. I loved airplanes as much as I love the camera, but in 1967 I left my job because I realized that I could not grow much more as an engineer and I wanted to try to go as far as I could in photography. In order to be permitted to quit my job and become a photographer, I needed to officially join the Czechoslovak artists’ union, which was difficult, but I succeeded in 1965. I had already started photographing Gypsies and the theater in 1962, and continued photographing these subjects before and after the invasion of Prague. I’m always looking at many things simultaneously.

Harris: What drew you to the Gypsies?

Koudelka: I’ve always loved folk music. When I went to Prague to study I played the violin and bagpipes in a group. We used to play at traditional folk festivals. There, I met Gypsy musicians and got to know them. That’s when I began to photograph Gypsies. I think my interest in folk music helped me when taking photographs. While visiting their settlements I often made recordings of Gypsy songs. Gypsies are good psychologists: they probably understood that if I liked their songs, then I must have liked something more.

I could never have photographed the Gypsies the way I did if, in 1963, I hadn’t by chance acquired one of the first 25 mm wide-angle lenses that came to Czechoslovakia. This lens changed my vision. My eyes, my vision became wide angle. It enabled me to work in the small spaces where Gypsies lived, helped me to separate the essential from the unessential and to achieve in bad light the full depth of field that I had always wanted. By my understanding and respecting the rules of its proper use, it determined the composition.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Harris: And what about your theater work?

Koudelka: When Otomar Krejča founded the Theater Beyond the Gate in 1965, he asked me if I wanted to work with him. One of my conditions for agreeing was that when taking photographs, I could move freely among the actors on the stage. I wanted to be able to react to situations between the actors directly onstage, photographing the performance in the same way I photographed life outside the theater. I hoped to get at something real within the artificiality of the theater. By working with Krejča in this way, I learned to see the world as theater. However, to photograph the theater of the world interests me more.

Harris: Were you aware of photojournalism at the time?

Koudelka: In 1968, I knew nothing about photojournalism. I never saw Life, I never saw Paris Match. When I photographed the Soviet invasion, I did it for myself. I was not thinking about a photo-essay or publishing.

Harris: I read a great quote by Ian Berry, who I gather was the only Western photographer in Prague that week. He said: “The only other photographer I saw was an absolute maniac who had a couple of old-fashioned cameras on string round his neck and a cardboard box over his shoulders, who was actually just going up to the Russians, clambering over their tanks and photographing them openly. He had the support of the crowd, who would move in and surround him whenever the Russians tried to take his film. I felt either this guy was the bravest man around or he is the biggest lunatic around.” Apparently, Josef, this brave lunatic was you.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Koudelka: It must have been a dangerous situation but I didn’t feel it. For me, the people with real courage were those seven Russians in Moscow—the only ones out of millions—who protested that week in Red Square against the invasion, knowing they would be arrested and go to prison. I think what happened in that time was much bigger than me, much bigger than all of us. The invasion was tragic, but if it was going to happen, I’m glad I was there to witness and photograph it. During the invasion, I took photographs but didn’t develop them. There wasn’t time for that. It was only later that I processed everything. I left some photographs with the photography historian Anna Fárová. She showed them to various people, including Václav Havel. He offered to take them to America—where he had been invited by Arthur Miller—but then he was not allowed to go. Several photographs were eventually taken out of the country by Eugene Ostroff, curator of the photography department at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Fárová had shown them to him. Ostroff showed them to his friend Elliott Erwitt, who was then president of the photo agency Magnum Photos. Erwitt wanted to know whether there were photographs other than the ones he had seen, and whether I would be willing to send the negatives to Magnum. I wasn’t too keen on that—having lost my negatives previously.

Harris: What had happened earlier with your negatives?

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968 © the artist/Magnum Photos

Koudelka: I wanted to take a photograph of the Soviet tanks and soldiers alone in Wenceslas Square after the people of Prague had decided not to demonstrate so as not to give the Soviet occupiers a pretext for a massacre—the Czechs realized they were being set up. In my photograph of the hand with the watch, you don’t see the Soviets . . . I climbed to the top of one of the buildings, and the Soviets saw me. They thought I was a sniper and started to chase me. I ran through hallways into another building, and by chance found that a friend of mine was living there. I left all the film I had shot that day—about twenty rolls—with him, just in case the Soviets caught me when I left the building. The next day I returned to get the film, but he had given the rolls to someone to take to Radio Free Europe in Vienna. I wanted to kill him. So when things had quieted down, about two weeks after the invasion, and while I still had my passport (which I had only just gotten for the first time during the Prague Spring), I went with this guy to Vienna. I wanted to get my film back. Radio Free Europe had already sent five rolls to their office in Munich. We were told they were not interested in the material. I was happy to get the rest of the rolls and I brought them back to Prague, but I never got back the five other rolls.

Anyway, to go back to what happened later with Magnum, in the end, the negatives got safely out of the country and arrived in New York. Magnum supervised the printing of the photographs and their distribution all over the world.

I happened to be in London in August 1969 with a theater group that I was photographing. We went out one Sunday morning (the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion) and someone bought a copy of the Sunday Times, and there were my pictures. That was the first time I saw the pictures published. To protect my family and me the photographs were credited to an “unknown Czech photographer,” and for its internal use, Magnum stamped the backs of my pictures simply with “P.P.”—“Prague Photographer.” Then I received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for the work—anonymously—and this was announced on the Voice of America radio station. Lots of people in Prague listened to that when it was not blocked, and some of my friends began to ask me if the pictures were mine. I started to be afraid that the Czech secret police would find out that I was the author of these pictures. Magnum arranged for me to get permission to leave Prague in 1970 by inviting me to photograph Gypsies in Western Europe, and then I was given asylum in England.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Harris: This work both covers and bears witness to the Soviet invasion of Prague. Do you think of it as evidentiary?

Koudelka: Yes—which is why the Soviets and Czechoslovak government were not very happy that the pictures exist. These photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers who occupied Prague during that period. They say: “We came to liberate you. We came to help you.” I say:

“Listen. I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.” They say:

“No. We never . . . no shooting. No. No.” So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say: “Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.” And they have to believe me.

Harris: How did you feel when it finally became known that you are the author of the 1968 invasion photographs?

Koudelka: I didn’t really feel anything when people eventually understood I had taken those pictures. I was happy that Communists in Czechoslovakia could not say that I had only become known because of these pictures, because by the time people found out I had taken those photographs, I was already known for other work.

The first week of the resistance to the Soviet invasion was fantastic, but it didn’t last. What happened during the next twenty years was less heroic. The government became increasingly oppressive, destroying the lives of many Czechoslovak people, and trying to eradicate any memory of the Prague Spring and the resistance. I was in the Czech Republic ten years ago for Magnum’s exhibition about 1968. More than half of the young generation there didn’t know anything about the events of 1968, and most of the population that did know chose to forget. But so much has changed since then. The Prague Spring played a role in the eventual fall of Communism, so the events had significance beyond Czechoslovakia. The Czech publisher has ordered four thousand copies of my new book Invasion 68: Prague (2008).

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Harris: Why did you wait forty years to do this book?

Koudelka: Nobody was interested in publishing this type of book. I wasn’t either. For me, it was much more important to produce new work.

Harris: So why now?

Koudelka: Again, it all happened by chance. I was in Prague in early 2007 talking to my publisher, who asked me about projects I was doing that winter. I answered that I wanted to finally finish the dummy of the next Gypsies book I’ve been working on for the past forty years. He said that the following year was going to be the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion, and suggested that we do a book on that.

Harris: What are some of the differences in the way you structurally conceive your books—for instance, Gypsies [=(1975), Exiles (1988), and Invasion 68?

Koudelka: Gypsies is the result of an approach that could be called construction, in the sense that I made a conscious effort to cover the spectrum of life . . .

Harris: . . . in the sense that this body of work suggests a common experience, aspects of human life that we all share?

Koudelka: You could say that. And when I thought there was something missing, I made an effort to find and photograph it.

Exilesis the title that my editor, Robert Delpire, gave to a group of photographs we selected in the mid-1980s mainly from those I made after I left Czechoslovakia.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Harris: So the approach was in part about recognizing relationships among photographs that already exist, and in this case, the images cohere around the concept of exile?

Koudelka: Being exiled insists that you must build your life from scratch. You are given this opportunity. When I left Czechoslovakia, I was discovering the world around me. Of course, one is still drawn to certain people . . .

Harris: To me, the images comprising Exiles have a distinct choreography. The sensibility seems based in gesture and a dispersal of movement. At times there are several focal points— the feeling is not linear. So the book as a whole radiates a vitality that is different from both the intimacy of the Gypsies work, and the more reportage-like Invasion 68. What were your goals with the Invasion 68 book?

Koudelka: My aim was to present the Soviet invasion of Prague in all its complexity, and to render the atmosphere of those seven days while respecting the chronology of events. I worked with the Czech graphic designer Aleš Najbrt. Together we selected the strongest photographs and came up with the structure of the book.

We decided that the best horizontal photographs, and also the most important in terms of covering the events, would spread across two pages, and then that there would also be groupings of four photographs, which would play off each other to give more information about a particular moment or event; and then there would be sixteen photographs on a spread, which together would illustrate what was happening more broadly. Once we agreed on this concept, we started to place the images.

Harris: Did you go back through your contact sheets or the negatives previous to preparing this book?

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Koudelka: Yes. Looking through all the work in my archive and at my contact sheets, I found a lot of photographs that I decided to use in this book, but I didn’t discover one picture that I would add to the ones that I have always considered the best. A good picture is the one that gets in your mind that you can’t forget. Most of my books are composed that way. The concept of this book is different. As we started placing the photographs in the structure we had determined, the book began to crystallize. Normally I work very slowly. I need to be certain that the edit, the sequence, the design . . . everything . . . has to be like that—that it could not be any other way. So I cannot believe that Invasion 68 took just one year to make.

We worked with three historians who are specialists of this period. We asked the scholars to write explanatory introductions that would be short but informative and to find documents that directly relate to the photographs.

Harris: You have a lot of primary sources in the book: official statements from the Czechoslovak government, testimonials, statements made by the press, by Soviet officials, as well as articles and other documents from the period, and information drawn from The Czech Black Book, an eyewitness, documented account of the invasion of Czechoslovakia prepared by the Institute of History, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, in the fall of 1968.

Koudelka: At the end of the book there is also a short chronology that allows the reader to follow precisely what happened, day by day. We also structured the book so that someone can immediately find the most important information: these texts are printed on black. And we always tried to preserve the essential sequence of events, although I could not always be certain of the chronology by looking at my contact sheets. Everything got mixed up when the negatives first came to Magnum in New York and they made contact sheets. Nor could I always be certain of the chronology by looking at my negatives: I photographed these pictures using a type of film that was for the cinema, which had no numbers on it.

It is for this reason that when we made the book, I wanted all available documentation to identify as closely as possible the sequence of what happened.

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Harris: Invasion 68 seems unlike any book you have made before— in terms of your goals and methodology.

Koudelka: I attempt to find an approach that suits the essence of each project. I do not like to repeat myself. Repetition is not interesting after you take an idea as far as you can and get what you want to get. Otherwise repetition leads to getting stuck in your habits, which soon become rules. You get locked up in the rules and you cannot get out. So what can you do? One way is to destroy them.

Harris: To me, there seems to be a duality or tension infusing your projects. I sense always the loner, the solitary man, and yet at the same time there is often a poignant camaraderie. A feeling of tragedy permeates your work, while simultaneously it is profoundly luminous. And then, while you insist that “the most beautiful word is next,” you are one of the most present and engaged individuals I have ever encountered, which is manifest in the intensity and emotionality of the photographs. Yet you seem to just as easily leave a subject once you’re done . . .

Koudelka: What I mean by “next” is moving, continuing, never stopping. I am not leaving anything. I was born a certain way. I think I am a visual person. I look at everything. It’s not that I suddenly drop the Gypsies, or the theater . . . I may not photograph them anymore because life has changed and I am not confronted by the same situations. But one builds on what came before.

Harris: You have spoken a lot about personal freedom and not wanting to stay in one place for too long. Do you not want to be attached to things? Is it about not wanting to be too comfortable, so that you keep experiencing freshly?

Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, August 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Koudelka: First of all, you have to understand who you are.

Harris: Do you?

Koudelka: I am trying.

You asked before about attachment. I don’t want to be attached to material things. I now have two places where I can work—in Paris and in Prague. Before this, I did not have a place for fifteen years. I didn’t need, nor did I want places. I have always tried to adjust my life to the way in which I wanted to live. I am now seventy years old, and so far I’ve never had a television, a car, a mobile phone, or a computer. Sometimes I will use them. I have nothing against them. But what I don’t have I don’t need.

Harris: So what matters, Josef?

Koudelka: Everything. Everything matters. Everything. Every day is a gift. Everything matters. This morning, it mattered very much that the sun came out at 8:18 am. Tomorrow it is going to matter very much, if I am here, that the sun is going to rise at 8:16 am. Everything matters. I don’t take things for granted. Everything is present for me. And if something beautiful happens, I try to enjoy and appreciate it as much as possible.

You know, we are all different. At the same time, we are all very much the same. And each of us is trying to find the way to be in this world, and there is no one way.

First published as “Invasion 68: Prague Photographs by Josef Koudelka,” Aperture Issue 192, Fall 2008, and republished in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present (Aperture, 2018).

Melissa Harris is the former editor-in-chief of Aperture magazine and the author of A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols (Aperture, 2017).

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On the Cover: Aperture’s “Los Angeles” Issue

Photographer unknown, Gata and Tootsie from Boyle Heights and East LA, Newberry’s Department Store, Downtown LA, 1971
Courtesy Michelle Padilla

The cover of Aperture’s fall 2018 issue, “Los Angeles,” features of snapshot of two women named Tootsie and Gata. Taken in 1971, the picture was submitted to the digital archive Veteranas & Rucas by Gata’s daughter, Michelle. “This photo embodies what my work is about,” says the artist and founder of Veteranas & Rucas, Guadalupe Rosales. “It is a photo taken at a photo booth of two strong, beautiful women from Los Angeles.”

Like any metropolis, LA is dynamic, changing, evolving, contested. Photographs often provide some sense of permanence, of telling and holding on to history. In 2015, Rosales began assembling archives of Chicano life in the city, from 1990s underground raves to car culture to groups of young women posing for DIY glamour shots. Through her popular Instagram accounts and installations, Rosales carefully collects and showcases vernacular images that speak to how traditional archives often exclude the stories of underrepresented communities. Her projects underscore the idea that the pluralism, adaptability, and expansiveness of photographs are commensurate with the multitudinous and sprawling character of the city itself.

“The reason I started doing this was because so much imagery of LA out in the world was stereotypical,” Rosales says. “The archive shows communities in the city that weren’t represented. Collectively we are reframing history, retelling the story of the city through personal experiences, reexamining the past through an insider’s point of view.”

Read more in Aperture, issue 232, “Los Angeles,” now available for pre-order. Guadalupe Rosales: Legends Never Die, A Collective Memory opens at Aperture Gallery on September 20, 2018.

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Our Births, Ourselves

Carmen Winant’s archive considers the terrors and pleasures of childbirth.

By Amanda Maddox

Carmen Winant, My Birth, ITI Press, 2018

I have feared childbirth since it was first explained to me in graphic detail at the age of ten. Twenty-seven years later, I find myself a childless woman of a certain age, by which I mean a woman on the verge of the inability to define oneself as a biological mother (and, perhaps, less of a woman in the eyes of my mother, some friends, or certain colleagues who suddenly and increasingly ask if I want kids). Will I experience childbirth before it’s too late? Could it be as terrible as I imagine? Do I have the hips perfect for birthing, like my mother does?

Carmen Winant’s brave, forceful project My Birth presents its own line of inquiry about childbirth, but it approaches the subject from the peripartum perspective. Produced between her first and second pregnancies, her book begins with a slate of fifty-four questions that range from “Has there ever been so much unknown?” to “What did you do with your hands?” What follows is a cascade of found photographs of women (often shown alongside their partners, doctors, nurses, friends, and midwives—the otherwise invisible community that surrounds birth) in various stages of pregnancy and labor, sequenced from gestation to postdelivery. Winant sourced many of these images from what she describes as “deaccessioned material”—from magazines, pam­phlets, and even books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves. Also featured among this selection are photographs of Winant’s own mother, whose three births were docu­mented in pictures that Winant discovered in her par­ents’ bedroom.

Carmen Winant, My Birth, ITI Press, 2018

The images in My Birth are challenging and oddly unfamiliar despite the ubiquity of what they depict. Women appear unladylike, uncomfortable, unglamor­ous, and unposed. Bodies contort in strange positions in response to crippling pain and the need to control the pace of labor. There are placentas, epidurals, infants crowning, and cervixes spread wide. There are inscrutable scenes of medical procedures and activities presented without captions or explanations. And the chaos of the process laid out before us foreshadows the difficulty of raising children, something established at the moment of birth.

The act of looking at these pictures mimics the expe­rience of active labor—they invite us to slow down, feel squeamish, and flip quickly past the more visceral images as if we are bearing down during a contraction that we hope passes soon. Those who visit Winant’s powerful pre­sentation of this project in the exhibition Being: New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art (on view until August 19, 2018) can witness the birthing process take on a more physical form: museumgoers will encounter more than two thousand photographs fastid­iously taped up on two walls of a corridor, effectively simulating a birth canal, facilitating passage between the galleries that showcase the exhibition.

Carmen Winant, My Birth, ITI Press, 2018

With this book and the related installation at MoMA, Winant has made visible a process that, as Robbie E. Davis-Floyd stated in Birth as an American Rite of Passage, is “rarely lived out in the public or peer domains.” Moreover, the limited representations of pregnancy or childbirth that exist in the public con­sciousness (think Lennart Nilsson’s photograph of a fetus on the cover of Life in 1965, or Stan Brakhage’s short film Window Water Baby Moving, 1959, of his wife in labor with their daughter) have typically been produced by men. This begs the question as to why, a curiosity that drives Winant’s exploration. In the eloquent text included in her book, Winant posits that “childbirth has not successfully been contained or described by means of secondary depiction,” whether visual or verbal. The lex­icon specific to childbirth, for example—which includes words or phrases such as “delivery,” “labor,” and “giving birth”—fails us, obfuscating the trauma and physical pain associated with this experience. Winant struggles with the notion that there is “no language” to accurately describe the pleasures and terrors of childbirth, wonder­ing if it is “too big for words.” However, her own mus­ings in My Birth amount to an impressive creation, one that conjures Hélène Cixous’s conflation of writing and childbirth, activities described as similarly physical, mus­cular exercises. In her essay “Coming to Writing” (1991), Cixous states: “She gives birth. With the force of a lion­ess. . . . She draws deeply. She releases. Laughing. And in the wake of the child, a squall of Breath! A longing for text! Confusion! What’s come over her? A child! Paper! Intoxications! . . . Milk. Ink.”

Carmen Winant, My Birth, ITI Press, 2018

Reflecting on the birth of her first child, Winant rec­ognized a similar twinning effect: “There is no other way to say it: when I gave birth, I also experienced my own deliverance.” Viewed in the context of Betty Friedan’s belief that “the only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own,” Winant has effectively spawned her third child with the publication of My Birth. Employing the posses­sive pronoun “my” in the book’s title, Winant confirms ownership—she has composed this work, introspective and intimate, for herself. But as with her children, she has also released this one-time possession into the world, something she wants to be shared with many people. “Is birth a process of connecting to our bodies, or of leaving them far behind?,” Winant asks the reader as much as she asks herself, only to land at the conclusion on the final page that she is “no closer to understanding who takes possession of this process, or locating the words to make it known.” The candor present in her concise text, combined with the unvarnished images she thoughtfully selected for us to inspect, fosters a dialogue that feels groundbreak­ing and vital. In the end, we have all experienced birth. We shouldn’t be afraid to study it or discuss it. As Winant declares in the preface to My Birth, “I shed any nervous­ness on this topic along with the solids and fluids. I want to beg: just ask me.” Come in, join me, the water is warm and already broken, she assures us.

Amanda Maddox is assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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Demanding Justice for Shahidul Alam

In Bangladesh, the brutal arrest of a prominent photographer incites an international outcry.

By Brian Palmer

Shahidul Alam, Jubilant people take to the streets after the dictator agrees to step down, Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 4, 1990
© the artist/Drik Images

On August 5, 2018, Dr. Shahidul Alam, the preeminent Bangladeshi photojournalist and human rights advocate, was abducted from his home by dozens of police officers. Alam had given a frank interview to Al Jazeera about protests that had erupted in Dhaka days after two youths were killed by an out-of-control bus. Alam reported on the brutal backlash against demonstrators by vigilantes, presumed to be aligned with the ruling party, the Awami League. But Alam, a veteran advocate for genuine democracy, did not stop there. The protests are about more than just road safety, he told the interviewer; the “unelected government” has been “clinging on by brute force. The looting of the banks, the gagging of the media . . . the extrajudicial killings, the disappearances, the need to get protection money at all levels, bribery at all levels”—these are the root causes of the current popular outrage and unrest.

The government charged Alam under the International Communication and Technology Act for “giving false information to different media and for provocative comments,” said a police official interviewed by Al Jazeera. According to his partner, Rahnuma Ahmed, and his attorneys, Alam has been beaten and tortured by his abductors. After a city judge remanded Alam to police custody for seven days, Bangladesh’s High Court ordered that he be sent for medical treatment. On the morning August 8, was taken to a government hospital, but was returned to police custody the same afternoon. Alam is still in custody, incommunicado, as of this writing.

In 2002, Aperture published a story about Chobi Mela, a biannual international photography festival in Dhaka founded by Alam, a chemist by training but a journalist/photographer/educator/activist by inclination. This was only the second time Alam and his team had held the event, a wildly ambitious, multiday, multivenue mix of exhibitions, panels, workshops, and parties across Dhaka. It is a city known for frequent, crippling transportation strikes and stunning population density. Alam also chose to hold the event during the holy month of Ramadan, when many businesses—and all restaurants—are closed during daylight hours.

Shahidul Alam, For the first time in the history of Bangladesh, a fair and free election. A stamp on a ballot paper in exchange for Nur Hossain’s death, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1991
© the artist/Drik Images

There were hitches, big and small. Customs officials impounded shipments of photos slated for exhibition. Ominous rumblings came from government departments. Venues fell through. None of this mattered. With the help of his team—his students at the school he started, Pathshala; their instructors; colleagues; and his partner, Ahmed—as well as festival attendees from around the world, Chobi Mela succeeded. Photographers, curators, editors, and artists from Malaysia, Singapore, Norway, the US, India, and many other countries showed work, exchanged ideas, shared meals, learned, bonded. “This whole thing defies gravity,” Alam said at the time. And indeed it did.

Alam had set out to do something audacious: to create an international festival of photography in the “majority world,” the nations and regions of the Global South whose stories have historically been framed by European and American journalists. He wasn’t simply out to compete with the famous conclaves in the US and Europe. Alam’s goal was—is—to transform the very nature of international documentary photography and photojournalism by building a hub for these fields in South Asia. He has done that. The event draws participants from dozens of countries. The tenth Chobi Mela is scheduled for February 2019.

Shahidul Alam, Nur Hossain had written on his back “Let Democracy Live.” He was the first to die. A mural on a campus wall is painted in respect, Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1990
© the artist/Drik Images

Since Alam’s arrest, social media has erupted with messages of support from around the globe, with the hashtag #freeshahidulalam. Dozens of international NGOs, among them Amnesty International, PEN America, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Human Rights Watch, have called for his release. Several petitions are circulating, including one by change.org. This and more pressure is needed to secure his freedom.

Alam will undoubtedly thank the thousands of people speaking out against his unjust detention. But he would also remind us, immediately, that protesting students and journalists have also been beaten and jailed. We should be advocating for them just as loudly.

Brian Palmer is a visual journalist based in Richmond, VA.

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The Tunnel is Made of Light

In a series of haunting Polaroids, Ryan Spencer draws upon neo-noir movies set in Los Angeles.

By Dana Stevens

Ryan Spencer, Untitled, 2016, from the series There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light
Courtesy the artist

In one image from Ryan Spencer’s recent series There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light (2016), a man holds up a camera to the lens, as if to photograph the viewer. At least, we assume, based on the blinding white circle emanating from the object in his hands, that it must be a camera. In Spencer’s work, light obscures as much as it illuminates.

Ryan Spencer, Untitled, 2016, from the series There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light
Courtesy the artist

These pictures, taken with a 1970s-era Polaroid Land camera using Fuji FP-3000B instant film, capture still images from dozens of neo-noir movies set in Los Angeles. In this encounter between black-and-white camera and color TV screen, light takes on unexpected forms, sometimes enshrouding entire images in a pale gray wash—as in an image from Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia (2006) of a figure, perhaps a child, whose face and shoulders are barely discernible through a thick veil of what looks like smoke or fog—and sometimes creating a lens-flare halo that renders an otherwise sinister figure weirdly beatific. Such effects distort or mask the stills’ original meanings—Which movie is each image from? Does knowing the answer make a difference in how you see it?—and place them in the service of a new, obscurely glimpsed narrative. The ambient glare can suggest an interrogation room, a crime scene, or a traffic pull over. Spencer chose only movies made in the 1990s or later for a reason: reminders of the civil unrest at that time in Los Angeles, of the trial of O. J. Simpson and Los Angeles Police Department officers’ brutalization of Rodney King, thread their way through these unsettling photographs, many of which seem to either precede or immediately follow some decisive instant of transformation, be it sublime or terrible.

Ryan Spencer, Untitled, 2016, from the series There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light
Courtesy the artist

The city whose archaeological traces these images show us, filtered first through the medium of narrative cinema and then through the gaze of one Polaroid-wielding viewer, never properly existed, on-screen or off. LA comes to life— lurid, uneasy, often menacing life—only in the meeting of these two recording media and the excess of luminosity their encounter produces. The photographs that stay with me most from this haunting series affect the viewer like the glowing eyes of a coyote in a still from Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004): they are both sources of light and holes into which our gaze disappears. Whether it emanates from a gun, a cigarette lighter, a glittering nighttime cityscape, or a mysterious offscreen source, the light in No Light functions as a doorway to some other space, behind or beyond the image itself.

Ryan Spencer, Untitled, 2016, from the series There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light
Courtesy the artist

This conversation between photography and movies was initially sparked by neither medium, but rather by a piece of music—Black Love, the 1996 Afghan Whigs album— that struck Spencer as “incredibly cinematic in its themes. I always thought of it unfolding as the suicide note of a doomed protagonist, sort of the way that Sunset Boulevardis told from the point of view of the narrator who we see floating dead in the pool.” The images in No Light arrive from a similarly impossible place; if they do form themselves into a story, it’s one told by a ghost.

Dana Stevens is the movie critic for Slate.

Read more from Aperture, Issue 231 “Film & Foto,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Inside the Revolutionary Work of Artist and AIDS Activist David Wojnarowicz

On July 25, Aperture Members joined the Whitney Museum of American Art for an in-depth discussion and exploration of the work of controversial artist, writer, and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz in the full-scale retrospective exhibition History Keeps Me Awake at Night, on view through September 30, 2018, at the Whitney.

Members connected with Wojnarowicz’s graffiti, sculpture, film, conceptual photography, and profound neo-expressionist paintings, which document and illuminate outsiders, friends, lovers, and strangers affected by government inaction and conservative politics in the 1980s through the 1990s. The symbols and images in Wojnarowicz’s art not only break through to an authentic reality, disrupting the oppressive social order of the time, but also celebrate beauty, love, and the natural world.

The tour concluded with Wojnarowicz’s iconic letterpress edition, Untitled (One Day This Kid…) (1990–91), featuring an image of the artist as an innocent and smiling child, encompassed by bold text describing Wojnarowicz’s dysfunctional family, and the condemnation of societal homophobia the boy in the photo will inevitably endure in his life because he is gay.

Aperture’s book Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, begun in collaboration with Wojnarowicz before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged what the artist would refer to as his “tribe” or community. Brush Fires is also the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz’s work with photography.

Aperture Members receive an up to 30 percent discount on publications, such as Brush Fires, and 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.

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A Pioneer of Latinx Identity

Laura Aguilar’s unapologetically queer bodies.

By Yxta Maya Murray

Laura Aguilar, In Sandy’s Room, 1989
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Photographer Laura Aguilar was one of the pioneers of Latinx identity. In her fin de siècle pictures, Aguilar depicted “Latina lesbians” in pompadours, families all cuddled together, and nonbinary babes showing off their bodies. In creating this community of images, she left us a foundational text for how we invent and collaborate on brown selfhood today.

Laura Aguilar, Plush Pony #2, 1992
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

The term “Latinx” first appeared on the web around 2004, according to scholar Arlene B. Gamio Cuervo. The term descends from the appellations Latina/o, Xicanx, Chicanx, Latin@, and Latine, which rebelled against the gender-assuming “Latino” and “Latina,” and the grumble-inducing but always popular “Hispanic.” Latinx evokes a pan-gender brownness that possesses blurry edges, queer sensibility, and an intersectionality of affections and oppressions.

Laura Aguilar, Xerox Collage #2, 1983
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Today, these values are expressed by artists such as the conceptualist Rafa Esparza, who makes built environments out of tierra alongside his father, who had expressed discomfort with Esparza’s sexuality. They also imbue the photo art of Guadalupe Rosales, whose work engages found snapshots of manifold Latinx party crews, as well as that of trans musician/banshee Elysia Crampton and critical race burlesque performer Xandra Ibarra. Each of these creators burns down the cells in which supposedly discrete Latin American personas have been segregated. In so doing, they live out some of “Latinx”’s promise, which was imagined decades earlier in Aguilar’s coruscating photography.

Laura Aguilar, Los Illegals, 1984
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Born in San Gabriel, California, in 1959 to the Mexican American Paul Aguilar and the half-Irish Juanita Grisham, Aguilar was dyslexic, large-bodied, lesbian, and of a complex racial background. Around 1988, Aguilar produced the famous Latina Lesbians suite, which describes identity as an evolving community invention. In her own self-portrait, she’s shown smiling in her bedroom, wearing shorts and a cowboy hat. Beneath the picture, she’s written: “Im not comfortable with the word Lesbian but as each day go’s by I’m more and more comfortable with the word LAURA.” And in Yolanda, an unsmiling, square-jawed heartbreaker, wearing jeans and a navy Izod polo, poses with her hands in her pockets. Under her image it says, “My latina side infuses my lesbian side with chispa & pasión.”

Laura Aguilar, Clothed/Unclothed #14, 1991
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Aguilar’s art gained energy and texture as the ’80s crested into the ’90s. In her early ’90s Clothed/Unclothed series, she represented a Latinx woman with a little sign reading “Fuck Your Gender” affixed to her vagina. Aguilar included this model within a panoply of other portraits that are naked, multiracial, queer, and beguilingly interfamily. From 1996 to 1999, Aguilar made some of her most well-known works: Her Nature Self-Portrait and Stillness portfolios reveal Aguilar undressed in the southern California desert, positioned next to rock pools, burned trees, and stone outcroppings. Her body’s lush curves and vibrant attitudes—arms up, dancing; standing with her hands on her hips and staring into the forest—do not hide the frailty of her skin, or the vulnerability of her breasts. To be a brown, gay, full-framed woman in the world takes courage, these images say, and you have to invent a self that the hegemony insists does not, and could not, exist.

Laura Aguilar, Plush Pony #15, 1992
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

With their gentleness and beauty, the Nature Self-Portrait and Stillness photos glimpse at Latinx melancholy experienced avant la lettre. These works cap off Aguilar’s decades-long study of the ways in which exclusion and anguish helped forge the brown and contingent self. In one of the installments of 1993’s Don’t Tell Her Art Can’t Hurt Her series, Aguilar stands nude before the viewer while mouthing the barrel of a gun: “So don’t tell her Art can’t hurt,” she printed neatly beneath the portrait. “She knows better. The believing can pull at one’s soul. So much that she wants to give up.”

Laura Aguilar, 12 Lauras, 1993
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Aguilar created other narratives of agony, too—the 1990 Three Eagles Flying shows her standing before a black background, with her head wrapped in the Mexican flag, her breasts bared, the U.S. flag tucked around her waistline, and a rope tied around her throat. And Aguilar fearlessly demonstrated how poverty and neoliberalism shaped identity with their own carving knives in 1993’s Will Work for #4, which portrays her standing under the word “Gallery” (perhaps she was at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station) and holding up a sign that says Artist Will Work for Axcess.

Laura Aguilar, Stillness #25, 1999
© and courtesy the artist and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

In the way back of the ’80s and ’90s, Aguilar taught us that living as Latinx meant looking hard at what’s within, while also reaching out to the larger world. Like the writings of Audre Lorde,Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa, her work presaged the vision of contemporary artists who embrace unbounded community, not to mention the intersectional activism of Black Lives Matter and #NoBanNoWall. Aguilar died tragically at the age of fifty-eight in a hospice in Long Beach, California, on April 25, 2018, and deserves to be remembered as a foremother of the modern Latinx state. Without her photographs, this morphing and creative identity would not exist in its current form.

Yxta Maya Murray is Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and the author of the novels The King’s Gold (2007) and The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Kidnapped (2010).

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