Aperture's Blog, page 96

The Camera as Portal

Shani Jamila, Larry Ossei-Mensah, and Teju Cole discuss travel, mobility, and the meaning of images.

By Laura Raicovich

Shani Jamila, Been Running Like a River, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Sitting on one of the easternmost shores of the United States, I close my eyes and listen to the Atlantic surf. Round and tumbling, like wet fabric flapping in strong wind. I am thinking of the violence witnessed by this ocean and this shore. This meeting point of water and land brought people ready to claim territory for a faraway king, not caring that Algonquins and so many other native tribes had lived on this terrain for thousands of years. The colonists also captained boats of human cargo from Africa to create wealth for themselves and the monarchy. Waves of immigrants from the world over have made their homes here. Every day people continue to cross invisible borders to seek a better life; many are making forced migrations brought about by the realities of power, war, and wealth exerted upon them. With the water in front of me, I’m thinking about how to live on these shores in the wake of these histories that are so very present.

Artist Shani Jamila has her own answers, answers that center diaspora and mobility, physical and intellectual, in photographs and collages that capture people and landscapes in foreign lands, as well as here in the United States. Having traveled to nearly fifty countries, she tells stories and makes meaning of the structures we have created to see ourselves and our differences in this globalizing world. The photographs and collages are both documents of travel and a visual journal of her thinking through space and time. The collages mash up faces, eyes, noses, and surreal abstractions of the human body, many of them making music, connecting what is similar and familiar rather than foreign. They represent the pleasure of movement, and they are resistance.

Jamila’s solo exhibition Portals (2017–18) has a title both evocative and profound. I imagine the portal of her camera, door to other lives and new experiences, even the door of no return, the edge of precarity and loss, the unknown. These are her gifts to her viewers. In the spirit of the exhibition, Jamila, curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, writer and photographer Teju Cole, and I got together to talk about the show, photography, meaning, and travel. What follows is an edited excerpt of this conversation that addresses mobility and its implications, particularly for black bodies in our times, and the meaning of images produced by Cole and Jamila. Both, in their diaristic approach to photography, contend with how constructions of home, borders, and nationality, among other intensely felt notions, are largely figments of imagination that, while powerfully experienced, are equally slippery when parsed. Further, Jamila and Cole both confront subjective and objective visibility of themselves as photographers, seers, and artists. The result is a complex discussion that emerges from the wake, in Christina Sharpe’s terms, often asking: “How are we beholden to and beholders of each other in ways that change across time and place and space and yet remain? Beholden in the wake, as, at the very least, if we are lucky, an opportunity (back to the door) [back to the Portal] in our Black bodies to try to look, try to see.”

Shani Jamila, Ulises Double Portrait, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Laura Raicovich: Shani and Larry, you both grew up in the States, right?

Shani Jamila and Larry Ossei-Mensah: Yes.

Raicovich: And Teju, you came to the United States when you were seventeen, having grown up in Lagos. How is your experience of travel inflected by that personal history?

Teju Cole: Larry grew up with African parents in the US, Shani grew up with African American parents, I grew up with African parents in Africa . . . But we three very much have a share in a kind of black global cosmopolitanism that becomes the lingua franca between us. The first fact is that we’re black and traveling.

Ossei-Mensah: A lot of my travel has been guided by curiosity and a desire for understanding. I do a lot of listening. I visit with artists and try to figure out how I extrapolate what I’ve learned and put that into the work that I do, whether an exhibition or essay.

Jamila: No matter how many times I step on a plane, I never get jaded about the idea that we’re able to traverse from one part of the world to another in a matter of hours.

There’s a privilege that comes with having an American passport in terms of our ability to be mobile, or the lack of a need for visas in a number of countries, or in terms of how you’re received once you get there. Once people hear your accent, sometimes the way you’re treated will change from the way the black folks who are indigenous to that country are treated. It can be jarring. So, it’s a privilege to travel, but then I think it also causes you to check your privilege internally.

Cole: That’s right. What’s particularly interesting to me is the impossibility of being a neutral black traveler. I think what we have to offer to history, historiography, to writing, to photography is our inherent subjectivity. If a lot of heteronormative white patriarchy is predicated on an impossible neutrality, we’re present to give light to that. When you walk into any library in any of the fine schools you folks have graduated from, 95 percent of the books are by straight, we’ll assume, white men. The standard pose is, these are the facts about this particular subject, I have no influence on any of this. When I started my work, it became clear to me that objectivity was neither interesting nor possible.

Jamila: It’s a pretense.

Cole: We know that we cannot leave behind our subjectivity, nor the subjectivity of our interlocutors, because we’re always already subjective. That’s what it means to be black in this country, to be in a position that isn’t the mainstream, and then that inflects every travel experience.

Teju Cole, Zurich, 2014
Courtesy the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Raicovich: Is the representation of that subjectivity happening through the photograph?

Jamila: The way that’s influenced me as a photographer is that when I’m making portraits of people, I’m aware of what it means to be a subject who’s been objectified as well. So I pay attention to the cultural context in a specific country and their cultural attitudes around the idea of photography. Because even the language of photography is often very imperialist: I’m taking your picture, I’m capturing this image.

Cole: Or militaristic: I’m shooting you.

Jamila: Right.

Cole: I’ve got you in my sights.

Jamila: Yes . . . there are all these things to be aware of and to negotiate.

Shani Jamila, Matanzas, 2017
Courtesy the artist

Raicovich: One of the remarkable things that bridges Shani’s and Teju’s work is a commitment to a very specific type of storytelling: a storytelling that is not facile. It is certainly legible, but not uncomplicated. It’s demanding of us, and requires a commitment to a type of image-making that is both evocative and without nostalgia for places traveled and people encountered. I want to explore why this might be so.

Cole: One of the really fascinating things about photography is its testimonial quality. Every photograph seems to declare, “I was there when it happened.” In an effort to subvert that, I’m usually there when nothing happens. Even when something is happening, I’m turning to the part where nothing is happening, because the stillness of the ongoing indecisive moment can be more revelatory.

But, you also simply cannot escape the fact that we carry cameras with us all the time, and working in this quasi-testimonial, quasi-diaristic form means that you’re actually catching a lot of life on the fly.

Shani Jamila, Long Live, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Ossei-Mensah: I think Shani’s photographs bring you closer to her. They’re a portal to how she’s seeing the world, how she’s experiencing the world, and how that’s shaped who she is as a woman right now.

Cole: I think one of the strongest things that immediately comes across is the sociality, maybe even the extroversion, of the many people you’ve encountered. But then, there is definitely a sense of you that’s somehow embedded in there. When you look at a photo, the body of the photographer is implied, even if not present, because somebody’s going around doing that and seeing things. Photos have to be—they generally have to be the result of adventure. One must be in the world making images.

Jamila: This idea of implied bodies also undergirds my collage work. They are largely sourced from portraits that I’ve made in the course of my travels and merged into surrealist images. I want to catalyze conversations about what it means to be at home and how identities are formed in a globalizing world.

Even in my film that’s playing in the back room [of the Portal exhibition], Altar—there’s a point midway through where my body leaves and then all you see is shadow and silhouette. 

Raicovich: So, you’re denying it, you’re denying access.

Jamila: My body is interchangeable, almost as an avatar. The film was shot in three different locations throughout Italy. I wanted to find places that were once sacred, but they’re now desecrated or no longer considered sacred. It felt like an apt metaphor for our bodies in this country. I inserted myself into these spaces and this organic sort of processing began.

I was far away from the US at a moment where I felt like, as an artist, I needed to be able to give witness and to document and to fight for our human rights—the most fundamental of which is the human right to life.

Cole: You have images in here that are not simply taken by you, but in which you’re the subject. It’s like you’re saying that you’re not going to pretend that there was a disembodied eye that took these. In fact, here you are in the picture, a picture either taken automatically by the camera or with the help of someone else. And so, you’re asserting that what actually matters is not to press the shutter, but the agency involved in selection.

Jamila: Right. It’s all stills—everything in this exhibition is photo based, whether it’s the collages or the film or the photos themselves. They’re all part of a multilayered conversation about what it means not just to preserve ourselves, but then also to be in response, constantly, to whatever it is that’s happening in the world . . . in any given moment, in any cultural context.

Teju Cole, Black Paper, 2017. Performance at Performa 17, New York
Courtesy Shani Jamila

Raicovich: I want to connect what Shani said about the film and using your physical body in space to Teju’s recent performance at Performa 17, Black Paper.

Cole: I had to put my body out there and express the fact that this was a moment that called for an extreme experience. It was a question of, what’s actually at stake here? Bodies are at stake. And it is visceral, it is physical, it is corporeal, it is personal, it is on your skin. The anger is in my body when this guy’s trying to like gin up violence against Muslim people who are our families and our neighbors. That anger is not just for me.

A lot of it was thinking about what is happening in darkness, what is visible in darkness and what’s not. So, very much a burial in fact.

Jamila: They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds, as the saying goes.

Cole: I find myself thinking about ancestors a lot more, just because we need help. One’s own personal ancestors, but then there’s questions of people who spoke to the moment.

A friend texted me like, “Man, fuck all this! All I can deal with right now is John Coltrane.” People are really desiring quality, like sitting with friends and listening to Nina Simone. You want somebody who’s really speaking to the deeper thing.

Jamila: Well, it’s necessary to just remember ourselves. We’re not all fight all the time. Like who are we when we’re not just engaged in this battle? And so, Nina Simone and John Coltrane will save your life.

Cole: Saved mine.

Jamila: Yeah, mine too.

Teju Cole is a novelist, essayist, photographer, and photography critic for The New York Times Magazine.

Shani Jamila is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and cultural worker. A selection of her collages is currently on display at the Manifesta European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Palermo, Italy, through autumn 2018. Portals was on display at Art@UJC in Battery Park from October 2017 through March 2018.

Larry Ossei-Mensah is an independent curator and cultural critic and a cofounder of ARTNOIR .

Laura Raicovich is a writer and art worker based in New York City.

The post The Camera as Portal appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Library as Studio

Where do artists go for inspiration? For some, it’s a museum, for others, it’s the stacks.

 

By Deirdre Donohue

Since 2010, thanks to artist Nayland Blake, founding chair of the ICP/Bard MFA program, I have had the privilege of teaching a class with the program’s advanced photographic practice students. Each autumn, I hand out blank catalogue cards and ask the MFAs to define the word artist on one side and librarian on the other. Then the cards are tucked away into an envelope and we revisit them in the last class of the semester. Over time, I have evolved my own definitions that are derived from these conversations—and still evolving.

An artist creates intellectually edifying (informative and inspiring) content of any kind.

A librarian creates enduring, intellectually mediated, and hospitable access to edifying (informative and inspiring) content of any kind.

The relationship between artists and libraries is one that cannot be well understood in such a simple exercise, but is one that I continue to explore.

What attracts artists to libraries as subjects? Often it is the notion of the library as memory—sometimes as an institution with the authority to select and preserve a canon, sometimes as a microcosm of all human society—and, as in the case of Taryn Simon, I would daresay that it is a celebration of the reorganization of knowledge that can/must happen within its walls.

In fact, there are many artists working in this space. I have selected a finite number of (mostly) photo-based projects that utilize images of—or from—libraries as a springboard to exploring larger philosophical questions that libraries can serve to elucidate.

Candida Höfer, Bibliotheque nationale de France XXIII 1998, 1998
© the artist, Köln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde, 1956

Toute la mémoire du monde (All the world’s memory) is a meditation on the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) with a thoughtful script by Remo Forlani. The film declares the BNF, as France’s national library, to be encyclopedic—and not just an encyclopedia of a single European nation, but of the entire world as seen through the acquisition of knowledge and goods that characterizes colonialist enterprise.

Carl De Keyzer, Henry Van de Velde: Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Ghent University Library 1797–1997
Ghent University Library, 1997

Carl De Keyzer, a Magnum photographer, was commissioned to document the two-hundredth birthday of the Henry Van de Velde Library in Ghent, Belgium, much as Alain Resnais commemorated the Bibliothèque nationale. The resulting images have a marked affinity: dramatically lit, dark, Gothic. It is actually a view of a library as a chaotic storehouse, and portrays its stewards and researchers in a kind of mannered way, with deep shadows and awkward moments of research and unconscious thought.

Philipe Gronon, Catalogue de la table des matières (A–Z), 1996

Philippe Gronon, Catalogue de la table des matières (A–Z), élément no. 4, Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale Paris, 1996

French photographer Philippe Gronon is a keen observer of utilitarian objects that are mysterious or generally unnoticed, yet stand in as symbols of a collective past. Two of his eponymous series of such objects portray those ubiquitous, mysterious elements in libraries called card catalogues, and reading/writing tables, which bear the subtle marks of human intellectual effort over time.

San Jose earthquake, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library, San Jose, California, October 30, 2008. Image by Carole Correa-Morris

Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, Fallen Books , 2008

Fallen Books, published by onestar press, is a collection of images taken not by the artists, but by the discoverers of libraries after earthquakes have shaken them. Each photograph is catalogued according to the level of the earthquake on the Modified Mercalli scale, and its location. While it is an index, and there is evidence of humans, it is chiefly a thought experiment about one very specific condition of stewardship: that libraries strive for order within chaos, but also preserve the documents of that chaos and add it, in order, to the shelves.

Taryn Simon, The Picture Collection, 2013

Taryn Simon, Folder: Handshaking, 2012
© the artist, Courtesy Gagosian

Taryn Simon’s series The Picture Collection is a conceptual project that turns out to be a love letter to the work that librarians do. Simon is an artist who researches, studies, and reads thoroughly into each one of her projects, so we cannot be astonished by the depth of what went into her elegant, formal exhibition of the selected folders: an examination more of the taxonomy underlying the collection, studying its archives, selecting folders, and simultaneously developing the online database Image Atlas, created by Simon and the late computer-programmer Aaron Swartz.

Deirdre Donohue is the Managing Research Librarian in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs of the New York Public Library (NYPL). Prior to joining the NYPL, she was the Stephanie Shuman Director of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections at the International Center of Photography in New York.

The post Library as Studio appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Editor’s Note

Libraries multiply the audience for a book—almost without limit.

By Dierdre Donahue

In October 2017, the Tate announced the acquisition of a remarkable collection of photobooks. These books are known to many photobook enthusiasts because a considerable number of them are included in the marvelous series The Photobook: A History, written by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, as well as in some regional examinations of photobooks in Latin America and China. Parr and the Tate (with the support, in part, of Maja Hoffmann of the LUMA Foundation) have made it possible for Tate Library visitors to study these photobooks in person, turning the pages, comparing them side by side, making their own microscopic discoveries.

Having spent half my career as a librarian at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, a school and museum of photography, I have naturally thought deeply about photobooks in libraries, as well as libraries’ relationship with artists. Libraries and photography have been dancing together since Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins recognized the medium as especially well suited for reproduction and, once those reproductions were bound together, as a vehicle for the distribution of information. Many photobook collections, in institutions such as the New York Public Library and the British Library, accidentally became great photobook libraries because of the pervasive use of photography as the kind of information that libraries aim to collect comprehensively. When we think of Eugène Atget or Walker Evans, we don’t think of them as suppliers for picture collections in libraries, yet that is what they were. Photobook libraries can also begin as one collector’s passion, transferred by some means into an institution and then appended with the results of others’ passionate collecting. The institution’s stewards then make judicious decisions about how to keep the collection safe, make it discoverable, and continue to add to it.

The greatest part about the young medium of the photobook is that it is so vast that it’s impossible to know fully. Every day I learn of new wonders from the past, present, and even future. This issue of The PhotoBook Review presents a few souvenirs of that daily serendipity: friends I have met in the library, books encountered, and ideas that have percolated there.

For example, I was first introduced to the artist Ishiuchi Miyako by the wise ICP alum Hisashi Murayama, who gingerly handed me Apartment (1978) and said that it was the greatest photobook ever made. It is truly among them, I acknowledge, and I am excited to have a new essay by this remarkable artist to read, thanks to the collaborative ethos of 10×10 Photobooks, a group of photobook aficionados on whose board I have had the pleasure of serving for a number of years. Other former ICP colleagues have likewise impacted my expanding photobook knowledge. ICP faculty Stephen Ferry showed me early maquettes of the book that became La Batea, a work about gold mining written by him and his sister Elizabeth Ferry. I am delighted to have it reviewed in these pages. Ed Grazda, also an ICP faculty member and one of my wisest teachers, is also featured here, as an avid photobook collector. What a fortunate thing it is to be a librarian, where I learn from such brilliant people every day and get paid to do it!

With subjects such as artists and photobook libraries, the greatest challenge as guest editor was whittling down the choices to a rational number to include. The photobook repositories I survey range from very old and established ones to one that is merely months old. (It would be a great service to put together a really comprehensive guide, as the George Eastman Museum staff did for photography collections in 1998—but that remains a project for another time.)

At the New York Public Library, I think a lot about all the collectors whose collections formed the basis of the material we are handing over to new readers each day, and even more about who, in the future, will add their collections to the treasure trove guarded by the lions. Including collectors’ voices recognizes their part in the ecology of the photobook and library community. What I would like is for everyone who collects books feverishly, as I do, to never forget that libraries multiply the audience for a book almost without limit. It’s also worth noting that photographers too would benefit from thinking about libraries and collectors as a critical part of their community and audience—they can be an invaluable part of the support system for bookmakers everywhere.

Dr. S. R. Ranganathan, a mentor for all librarians, published his five laws of library science in 1931, and the fifth and final law is: “A library is a growing organism.” I think this tenet should both guide and check any collector—to grow and learn and create new relationships among items in the collection, and check that there is sufficient room to add to it and build its audience.

That is the spirit I hope fuels this issue.

Deirdre Donohue is the Managing Research Librarian in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs of the New York Public Library (NYPL). Prior to joining the NYPL, she was the Stephanie Shuman Director of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections at the International Center of Photography in New York.

The post Editor’s Note appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Shirin Neshat’s Dreamlands

An artist and filmmaker contends with Iranian identity.

By Negar Azimi

Shirin Neshat, Still from Looking for Oum Kulthum, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Shirin Neshat is an image maker of ample gifts. Born in Qazvin, Iran, she moved to California in 1974 to study art. In 1990, eleven years after the (fateful) Iranian Revolution, she returned to Iran and soon began work on her debut photographic series, Women of Allah (1994). Like poetry to decipher, these stark black-and-white portraits of women, many of whom have text inscribed on their bodies, offer up complex emotional registers. Some of her subjects carry firearms, evoking a battle recently waged, or a battle to come. Since then, Neshat’s work has taken a zigzag journey from photography to video installation and, finally, to cinema.

Few artists have made such a seamless transition to creating feature films, and yet Neshat makes her restless movement between forms appear natural—necessary, even. From one work to the next, the aura of Neshat’s distinctive signature remains. Some critics have burdened her work with the specter of speaking for or about the fates of women, or women from the Middle East in particular. But a true accounting of Neshat’s art, and the rich range of her references, reveals that ambiguity is the land in which her work resides. As a self-described nomad, Neshat says, “we have this ability to approach different places and people and subjects and make them our own.”

Shirin Neshat, Stills from Women Without Men, 2009
© the artist and courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Negar Azimi: Shirin, as an artist you’ve brought images into the world that are burned into the mind. They’re literally stuck—certainly in my own. They’re images of such iconicity, of such jaw-dropping beauty and enigma. I’m thinking, for example, of the stark juxtaposition of the male and the female singer in Turbulent. Or Rapture, in which you see women marching defiantly into a murky sea. Your gift for composition is significant, and you’ve created a visual vocabulary that I think is all your own. Where do these images come from?

Shirin Neshat: I think that at root I’m an image maker and the images I’m drawn to are paradoxical, full of contradictions. Perhaps the only way I can explain it is that this is how I feel about everything around me. I feel like I’m full of contradictions, life is full of contradictions, and there’s a good and bad in everything. I never see anything in between.

Shirin Neshat, Still from Looking for Oum Kulthum, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Azimi: Your images are emotionally potent, but ambiguous too. Those women marching into the sea—are they running away from something? Or are they walking into the sea because they want to? Is the woman in the unforgettable first scene of Women Without Men flying, or is she in fact falling? That ambiguity is part of the power of your visual language.

You made an evolution from being a still photographer to authoring filmic videos and video installations. Now you make cinema. First, can you tell me a little about how you came to be a photographer?

Neshat: I guess I’ve become very good at building a profession out of things that I’ve never studied or had formal training in. This doesn’t mean that I’m naturally talented at any of them! But I do have a tendency to experiment. When I was making the series Women of Allah, I was not a photographer, but I was really struck by the power of the photojournalism that had documented the Iranian Revolution. No painting, sculpture, movie could have captured the spirit of the religious fervor.

Then, slowly, I moved from making images that had this borderline photojournalistic approach to storytelling, but without really knowing how to do it. I think the video installations in some ways prepared me. Videos like Rapture or Turbulent were like moving photographs; there was no real logic of filmmaking to them. Slowly, I had a protagonist. Then I had a beginning, middle, and end. There was a real director behind the vision. Over time, my work became more cinematic, and I felt like trying to tell a story rather than just create an environment. That led to my first entry into filmmaking, which was Women Without Men (2009).

Shirin Neshat, Still from Women Without Men, 2009
© the artist and courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Azimi: You note that images of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 were consequential, and somehow led you to the medium of photography. I immediately conjure Abbas’s haunting photographs of the revolution and its aftermaths, and Bahman Jalali’s too. But outside of that moment, what was your visual coming of age like? What marked or influenced you?

Neshat: Most of my young adulthood was spent in the United States, so my education was very much Western. I was away from Iran for so long, and was out of touch with what was happening there culturally. I was most influenced by American or European photographers, and Western art history. Later, I started to go to Iran. I was curious about the revolution and the changes taking place in my family. I spent a lot of time speaking to friends who had become involved with the revolution. But I wasn’t really in dialogue with artists. My family wasn’t really artistic.

When I came back to the United States, I worked at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and I was around people like Kiki Smith, Mel Chin, Vito Acconci, and David Hammons. My mind and life were divided, literally, between the bohemia of New York and what was going on politically in Iran.

Later, my life changed again. I now had an Iranian partner, my collaborators became Iranian, and I studied Iranian cinema. I began to see the similarities and differences between how I made sense of the revolution and its legacies, and how those who had lived in Iran made sense of it all. I saw a vast difference. I have a more diasporic or exilic … a kind of accented point of view. And a very Western, absolutely conceptual approach—never, ever to do with realism. So what I’m trying to say is that my New York life had everything to do with the evolution of my ideas. My subjects were Iranian, but I was never really inspired or influenced by Iranian artists.

Shirin Neshat, Still from Looking for Oum Kulthum, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Azimi: The question of influence is endlessly interesting. At the moment I’m thinking about the late avant-garde theater director Reza Abdoh, who was also of Iranian American background. And not unlike with your own work, there are many competing claims on his. Some say that his work was influenced by aspects of Shia Islam, like the Ta’ziyeh passion play. Others look at it through the lens of Artaud and his theater of cruelty. And yet others argue that it’s just deeply American, more informed by American TV than anything else. So the question is, can it be all of these things? Can one’s work be a collage, especially for someone like you with, as you said, an exilic background, a sort of pastiche of influences?

Neshat: Influence is such a mystery. I do believe there are elements in my work that have to do with my experience as a kid in Iran. I left when I was seventeen. But I feel like that Iranian part of me has deeply informed my work nonetheless, even though I’m very American too.

To continue reading, buy  Aperture   Issue 231 “Film & Foto,” or  subscribe  to  Aperture   and never miss an issue.

Negar Azimi is a senior editor of Bidoun.

The post Shirin Neshat’s Dreamlands appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Photographs Do Not Stop Wars

The celebrated photojournalist James Nachtwey has covered global conflicts for four decades. But in his current retrospective, politics is an afterthought.

By Wilco Versteeg

James Nachtwey, A Palestinian throws Molotov cocktails at Israeli army troops. Occupied Palestinian territories, Ramallah, West Bank, 2000
© James Nachtwey Archive, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Memoria, a large-scale retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, provides the occasion to review James Nachtwey’s era-defining, forty-year career. The exhibition presents 139 large, framed prints from a body of work that covers disease, war, famine, and death, from South Africa and Palestine to 9/11 and American prisons. On the heels of these riders of the apocalypse, we are led along Nachtwey’s signature-style photography: beautiful, close-to-the-bone images of immense suffering in high-contrast black and white or saturated color. One cannot help but be amazed by Nachtwey’s outlook and his sensitivity to what makes a great photograph. Yet, while Nachtwey’s astonishing oeuvre has accrued credulous praise over several decades, it’s essential to retain a critical eye and consider the chilling discrepancy between the intentions of this exhibition and the actual presentation of the work.

James Nachtwey, A bedroom becomes the frontline in a brutal civil war. Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1993
© James Nachtwey Archive, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Nachtwey fashions himself as a witness who sets out to photograph the crises that are tearing the world apart. In Memoria, we encounter the clichés and myths often associated with war photographs: victims regain their dignity through photography; viewers cannot help but feel compassion; and, by looking at the horrors of the past, viewers will not forget what happened. The act of memory is elevated here to an inconsequential political gesture: passive remembrance, it seems, takes the place of active political engagement. However, at MEP, the actual political context is relegated to a booklet. The accompanying catalogue, consisting of images and a celebratory essay, struggles with the same lack of in-depth context. The various sections of the exhibition are announced on the wall, but besides some quotes by and on Nachtwey, the exhibition space does not provide any didactics.

This radical separation between the photographs and their context evacuates the political from images that are nothing if not political. For instance, one theme in Memoria is “Famines,” as if famine exists in and of itself and is not the result of a complex web of political and natural disasters. Upon consulting the booklet, we learn that the pictures shown under this category were taken in Sudan and Somalia between 1992 and 2004. Instead of allowing the viewer to engage with the history and politics of two distinct nations, these beautiful images are heaped on top of each other, leaving them to speak for themselves as politically powerless icons of suffering.

James Nachtwey, A mother stands at her child’s bedside. Darfur, Sudan, 2003
© James Nachtwey Archive, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Seeking to portray a crisis in a comprehensive way, documentary photographers must use a familiar and accessible visual language. As Memoria makes clear, Nachtwey’s language is one of iconic transcendence, of the obliteration of the individual in the search for the universal. But that universalizing power also creates a weakness: the impossibility of entering deeply into the details of a conflict. Take, for example, a heartbreaking series on the intergenerational aftereffects of Agent Orange in Vietnam from 2004 to 2012. Natchtwey’s images of parents and their disabled children beg for contextualization that is otherwise lacking throughout Memoria. The accompanying booklet provides some context, but seems to ascribe emotions and motives to those portrayed that are impossible to verify and that, to me, seem to fit too perfectly into Nachtwey’s discourse of dignity and compassion. A text in the booklet describing the Agent Orange series states that “workers and rice farmers with few resources and no available remedies have redeemed the outrage with caring and with love.” Heroic as it may sound, it seems to deny the suffering of these individuals. This is even more problematic because we are talking about the results of imperialistic warfare.

Memoria suffers from a reliance on the photographer as auteur. While in our daily media consumption, we often encounter photographs without being aware of who made them, in the exhibition space the photographer is promoted to an oracle, a mythical figure who through his experiences becomes a sage. Our understanding of documentary images is still too often determined by the terms set by photographers or their willing critics. Words become a stumbling block in understanding the work of one of the greatest war photographers the world has known. Why not heed D. H. Lawrence’s famous dictum “never trust the teller, trust the tale” for documentary photography too? By placing the photographer firmly in the exhibition’s center, and not the photograph, the possibility to understand the singularity and interconnections between the many conflicts Nachtwey covered is harmed.

James Nachtwey, A woman wanders the ruins of the city. Kabul, Afghanistan, 1996
© James Nachtwey Archive, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

Nachtwey’s work needs words, but not necessarily those of the photographer himself. A recent example that is not featured in Memoria is Nachtwey’s collaboration with Time in documenting the American opioid crisis: here abundant images are contextualized with interviews, providing an ingenious example of documentary storytelling for the twenty-first century. Other examples are Susan Meiselas’s recent exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Mediations, showing how some of her work became iconic through a complex process of international publications over the years, and how some images were used by the people they portray as a form of political empowerment—or Christoph Bangert’s book War Porn (2014), which invites the reader to investigate mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship. In both projects, the visitor or reader plays an active part, whereas in Memoria the viewer is kept at a distance, in awe in front of Nachtwey’s works. Activating the visitor by showing how these images were made, and how they became the icons they are, might have done more justice to the complexities of the production, distribution, and reception of contemporary documentary photography.

James Nachtwey, Ash, smoke, and shattered glass rained down on Lower Manhattan following the destruction of the World Trade Center. New York, 2001
© James Nachtwey Archive, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

We need to accept that photographs do not stop wars from happening, and do not feed those starving to death—that our remembering past conflicts does not prevent us from waging new wars, and that, bluntly said, those whose “dignity” we celebrate in photographs could not care less for our compassion while reading a newspaper or visiting an exhibition on a Sunday afternoon. While it has been repeatedly stated that images of the Vietnam war, for instance, galvanized protest and, thereby, show that documentary photography is politically relevant, academic research has not been able to prove that images played a role in starting or furthering protest. Rather, many of the war’s most iconic images were only published when critique of the war had become common currency among intellectuals and politicians, and was no longer seen as treasonous or unpatriotic.

Our fascination with and aestheticization of suffering should not be an end in itself, but instead a starting point in attempting to understand the intricacies of worldwide conflicts and our role in them. Memoria is, in fact, a moving-away from politics, from history, and from complexity. What remains are stunning images, high points in contemporary documentary photography, but how should we contend with that when war and suffering are involved?

Wilco Versteeg is a researcher in visual culture and war photography at Université Paris Diderot.

Memoria: Photographies de James Nachtwey is on view at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, through July 29, 2018.

The post Photographs Do Not Stop Wars appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Can You Hear Me?

Bouchra Khalili wants to make a platform for migrant and minority voices—but when do images become theater?

By Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Bouchra Khalili, Still from The Tempest Society, 2017
© the artist/ADAGP and courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris

In 1970, while presenting their newly formed Dziga Vertov Group to a packed audience at Yale University, the French filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin compared their conception of militant cinema to the blank blackboard in the lecture hall: a space of possibility for all attendants to discuss and take part in the construction of knowledge. This anecdote inspired Blackboard, the title of Moroccan French artist Bouchra Khalili’s first survey, at Jeu de Paume in Paris. Made over the past decade, the ensemble on display includes two series of photographs, a series of silkscreen prints, and eight documentary projects running on small monitors or projected onto large screens, which together unfold over four hours of mostly single-channel video.

In the introductory wall text of her survey, Khalili cites Pier Paolo Pasolini’s civic notion of poetry as a major influence. During the Second World War, the late Italian writer and director started composing poems in Friulan—an endangered language spoken in northeastern Italy—to oppose the growing linguistic and cultural hegemony in his country. To varying degrees of success, Khalili has also committed her practice to giving a platform to socio-political minorities silenced all over the world: carrying discourses of unyielding resistance, no less than twenty-five languages and dialects can be heard throughout the exhibition.

Bouchra Khalili, Still from Mapping Journey #1, 2008
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris

One example is The Mapping Journey Project (2008­–11), a multi-projection installation comprising eight videos concurrently running on four double screens, which are suspended from the ceiling in the middle of a dark room. Seven men and one woman, who were forced into exile for economic or political reasons, recount their clandestine journeys to reach Europe from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and Macedonia. Each account takes the form of a static shot displaying a map, onto which one of the migrants factually retraces the complex itinerary of his or her own perilous expedition. Only a hand appears on screen, maneuvering a red indelible marker, whereas their voices are relayed through a single pair of headphones per video. This creates a palpable sense of disconnect for the visitors deprived of sound while waiting for their turn, even though the speeches are also subtitled in both English and French. Despite this sense of detachment, the overall cinematic simplicity of this installation makes it the most engaging work on display. Not being able to see the narrators’ faces draws full attention to the uncanny twists and turns of the maps in the making, which reflect the true resilience of people willing to risk their lives to meet, perhaps, more favorable fates.

Bouchra Khalili, Still from Chapter 1: Mother Tongue, 2012, from The Speeches Series
© the artist/ADAGP and courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris

Unapologetic resistance continues in the video trilogy The Speeches Series (2012–13), which was produced in Paris, Genoa, and New York. Titled Mother Tongue,Words on Streets, and Living Labour, respectively, each chapter, playing on its own screen, shows five different people who share personal manifestos, touching upon their denied rights and citizenship as immigrants in their chosen countries. Most discourses were authored in English, French, Italian, or Spanish through preliminary one-on-one interviews with the artist, and the participants’ voices are relayed through two pairs of headphones for each screen. “America is a prison for its immigrants. The bars of this prison are injustice, racism, lack of moral values, and loneliness,” a man called Kante declaims in French about the life of hardship faced by undocumented workers in New York. “I don’t know what the American dream is, but now is not the time to dream, now is the time to rise up,” he fiercely concludes. From one portrait to the next, Khalili’s didactic use of video editing makes speech emerge as an emancipatory gesture. For instance, close-ups on the protagonists’ hands alternate with wider views of busy city streets, where discourses privately echoing one another finally unite in a collective voice.

Bouchra Khalili, Lost Boats, Fig. 2, 2012, from The Wet Feet Series
© the artist/ADAGP and courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris

Vestiges of resistance from recent, yet untold—if not forgotten—history inform all the photographs on display. In The Wet Feet Series (2012), realized in Florida, nine pictures of seemingly random stranded boats and rusted containers capture (metaphorically, at least) traces of the dreadful “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which applied to Cuban immigrants from 1995 to 2017. The ones who managed to reach the American shore were allowed a chance to stay, but if intercepted in national waters, they were immediately sent back to Cuba. The fifteen photographs of Foreign Office (2015) document the former, and now-deserted, headquarters of many liberation movements in Algiers. Throughout the 1960s, the city offered asylum to political opponents from all over the world, including members of the African National Congress and the Black Panther Party. As the authorities currently in place have favored different national narratives, this cosmopolitan part of Algiers’s revolutionary past is little known to younger generations.

Bouchra Khalili, Hôtel El Safir, Ex-Aletti, Algiers City Center. Residence of the Black Panther Party delegation during the 1969 Pan African Festival of Algiers. Fig 1: Entrance of the former casino, 2015
© the artist/ADAGP and courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris

Taking this into account, Khalili further explores if not the moral obligation, then perhaps the uncertainty of historical transmission in Twenty-Two Hours (2018). The forty-minute-long video brings together the figure of Jean Genet—the late French writer and activist who clandestinely traveled to the United States in 1970 at the Black Panthers’ request, in order to take part in the “Free Bobby Seale” campaign—and Douglas Miranda, a former Black Panther who was involved in Genet’s tour. Archival footage, shared memories, and Miranda’s interview are narrated and supposedly orchestrated by Quiana and Vanessa, two young African American women, prompting the audience to question the role of witnesses, in general, and the nature of their discourses.

Nevertheless, this video fails to properly engage the viewer, but not only because of its unsuitable duration for an exhibition context. (It is worth noting that the majority of these works, which are all scripted, could have benefited from a scheduled screening program, in order to garner proper attention. The longest one—The Tempest Society [2017]— runs for one hour alone, which feels rather unsuitable in the context of an exhibition, where on-the-move viewers might find it difficult to take in.) What’s more, the sharp grasp on reality that Khalili’s earlier works so strongly possess gets lost under thick layers of overly scripted, theatrical cosmetics, which turn all potential witnesses into amateur actors lecturing some play. Over the past three years, the artist’s theoretical fascination with the aesthetics of Pasolini, Godard, and Gorin appears to have reached a literal level. No matter how politically engaged her pieces’ participants are individually, their voices have become inaudible, and their subjectivities disturbingly subsumed by affected didacticism—ultimately raising the question that punctuates the entire survey: who really speaks when someone speaks?

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

Bouchra Khalili: Blackboard is on view at Jeu de Paume, Paris, through September 23, 2018.

The post Can You Hear Me? appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Threat of Being Seen

In her latest series, Alex Prager conjures the drama of Golden Age Hollywood.

By Rebecca Bengal

Mark Williams and Sara Hirakawa, Alex Prager, 2017
© the artists

When Alex Prager first began teaching herself photography, at the age of twenty-one, in 2000, printing black-and-white pictures in a home darkroom in Koreatown, Los Angeles, she’d hang them in the laundry room of her apartment building. Some prints disappeared; this was intentional. “I was curious to find out what people liked, which pictures they were drawn to,” Prager says from her studio in LA. Since those formative days, the artist’s work has radically transformed—most visibly in her emergent predilection for lurid, captivating color and a consciously narrative approach. Prager is known for photographing psychological, hypervivid, theatrically constructed scenes that evoke stills from classic Hollywood films, as evident in her new monograph Silver Lake Drive (2018). Cinematic and filmic are adjectives frequently applied to Prager’s photographs, but for Prager that means more than a purely aesthetic quality. “It’s about sparking a story in peoples’ minds,” she says. “I’m most interested in the way people connect to my work based on something that happened to them, on life experiences I’ve never had. For me, emotion trumps everything else in the picture.”

Alex Prager, Hand Model, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Over the years, Prager’s work has earned comparisons to Cindy Sherman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and filmmaker Douglas Sirk. When citing her influences, it’s filmmakers she mentions first—Maya Deren, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Sidney Lumet. When her work was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography 2010 exhibition, Prager debuted her first short film, Despair (2010), and the earliest images from her dynamic and tableau-like photographic series Face in the Crowd (2013), which contain so many interworking storylines that they give the sensation of being moving pictures, in the purest sense of the words. Among Prager’s other abiding influences are the films Jaws (1975) and The Wizard of Oz (1939); she identifies with their psychological, visceral depictions of crowds.

Alex Prager, Radio Hill, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

With Radio Hill (2017), shot from above, the viewer is given an omniscient overview of the bizarre constructs and strange, heightened characters in the street below: a woman in curlers walks through the rain with a half-eaten hotdog; a cop brandishes an ice-cream cone; three smartly dressed men, all in fedoras, look as if they’ve wandered in from some other era. “I’m looking at real life and figuring out how to amplify and exaggerate and add humor and drama and make it more palatable,” Prager says. And yet, in this image, she directs emotional attention to her main character, the lone figure in the picture who gazes upward and toward the camera, her anxiety palpable, aware of having been seen.

Alex Prager, Cats, 2017
Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

The thread, and threat, of seeing and being seen is one Prager continues to explore in photographs of crowds, including ones composed of nonhumans, as in Cats (2017), and in short films, as with the haunting La Grande Sortie (2016), which stars Émilie Cozette as a ballerina who becomes overwhelmed by her awareness of her audience. Film, Prager explains, enables her to approach still photography in novel directions, incorporating a narrative sense of interconnectedness in her pictures in literal ways too. “I’m fascinated with finding ways of bringing these fabricated worlds together,” Prager says.

Rebecca Bengal is a writer based in New York.

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

The post The Threat of Being Seen appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Radical Poetics of David Wojnarowicz

A preview of the Whitney Museum’s survey of the iconoclastic New York artist.

David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz 1983–84Courtesy the collection of Brooke Garber Neidich and Daniel Neidich

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79, 1990Courtesy the estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One day this kid . . .), 1990Courtesy the estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1988–89Courtesy the estate of David Wojnarowicz, P.P.O.W, New York, and Second Ward Foundation

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79, 1990Courtesy the estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York

The first major monographic exhibition of David Wojnarowicz’s work will bring his artistic output—including photo-text collages—to a new generation. “Few people are familiar with the visual side of his unfortunately short career,” says exhibition cocurator David Kiehl. “Wojnarowicz used the camera as other artists would use a sketchbook: a source for images to be used and readapted within his work, as well as an early tool—even if borrowed—to express visually his literary notions.” In the late ’70s, Wojnarowicz photographed himself and his friends around New York with a picture of Arthur Rimbaud’s face covering each of their own—a conceptual intervention. But the series is also personal: Wojnarowicz strongly identified with the French poet, who was born almost exactly one hundred years before him and, like Wojnarowicz, was gay.

David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from July 13–September 30, 2018.

The post The Radical Poetics of David Wojnarowicz appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Jamel Shabazz: On the Streets

Join Jamel Shabazz for a two-day workshop available to photographers of all levels. Shabazz, best known for his iconic photographs of New York City during the 1980s, will teach photographers the necessary skills one must have when photographing on the street. During the first day, participants will view the work of noted street photographers and images created by prominent writers. Participants will then venture onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan, learning various aspects of street photography. On the second day, participants will review each other’s work and have a discussion about the experiences and challenges they faced when photographing.

Some of the areas that will be discussed during the workshop are preparation, themes, composition, body language, techniques, and career opportunities.

No prior knowledge is needed. Participants should come with an open mind.

Jamel Shabazz is a documentary, fashion, and street photographer who has authored eight monographs. His work has been exhibited in Italy, France, Korea, Turkey, Germany, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Japan and throughout the United States. Shabazz’s work is housed within the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Shabazz was the 2018 recipient of the Gordon Parks Documentary Photographer award.

Image: Jamel Shabazz, Dancers, Brooklyn, NY. 1997. Courtesy of Jamel Shabazz. All rights reserved.

 

div.important {
background-color: #eeeff3;
color: black;
margin: 20px 0 20px 0;
padding: 20px;
}

 

 

Objectives:

Become comfortable with photographing people on the street
Learn how to prepare and compose images
Leave with a better understanding of street photography

Materials to bring:

Participants must bring a digital camera to use during the workshop

Tuition:

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

 

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

 

REGISTER HERE

 

Registration ends on Wednesday, October 10

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

 

GENERAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

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

Aperture workshops are intended for adults 18 years or older.

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

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

 

RELEASE AND WAIVER OF LIABILITY

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

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

 

REFUND AND CANCELLATION

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

 

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

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

The post Jamel Shabazz: On the Streets appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

America’s Desert Dystopia

Susan Lipper’s sun-bleached pictures reimagine a stereotypically masculine landscape.

By Adam Bell

Susan Lipper, Untitled, from the book Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures, New York

The American desert has always been contested and occupied. Full of masculine self-aggrandizement, the stories Americans tell themselves about these landscapes and their past do little to clarify matters. Despite the belief otherwise, the desert is not a clean slate that absorbs the sins of America. Atom bombs, genocidal slaughter, military exercises and secrets are all reduced to dots on a map, hidden in the expansive terrain, but their erasure is never complete. Constructed from a pointedly feminist perspective, Susan Lipper’s Domesticated Land (MACK, 2018) offers a subtle but insistent counternarrative. Lipper’s project shares an affinity with the diaries of women who traveled west in the nineteenth century, but also draws on the deep photographic history that has addressed the American desert, joining a long (and continuous) narrative of settlement and resistance in a hostile and alien landscape. What Lipper finds there is unsettling yet all too familiar, but she offers hope. That we’re not slaves to the narratives or aggressive forces surrounding us. That we can carve out a space amidst the madness and the stark light, a space we can cultivate and perhaps someday call a home.

Adam Bell: Domesticated Land is the final part of a trilogy that includes the books Grapevine (1994) and trip (1999). You’ve talked about how the three projects form a “synthetic road trip.” How did you come to see these projects as a trilogy? And what led you to the American desert?

Susan Lipper: I am taking some creative license. Although Grapevine and trip were basically consecutive, there is a thirteen-year gap before Domesticated Land starts. Some time after finishing Grapevine, I manufactured a photographic persona, and it is through her eyes that we see. Like myself, my persona is a liberal native New Yorker (but probably, as a more romantic type, doesn’t obsess over the news), looking for a reason to believe in the myth of new beginnings. She has not lost faith in America fulfilling its utopian promise—or at least in some regional or geographic part of it retaining the promise. She is also looking for something pure and viable outside of global consumerism and all-encroaching mainstream culture. This unrelenting search for freedom and transparency leads her to the West, as it has led Americans since the country’s inception. In addition, she is fascinated by the well-trodden, mostly male trope of the American road trip.

Susan Lipper, Untitled, from the book Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures, New York

Bell: The American desert is a vast, complex landscape, often associated with Hollywood Westerns and other traditionally masculine narratives of conquest, settlement, and militarization. You shot these images primarily in the Southern California desert, east of LA and west of Las Vegas. What drew you to this particular American desert, and how do you see your work reacting to or pushing back against more dominant narratives of the U.S. desert and Western landscape?

Lipper: Deborah Bright, in her famous 1985 essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men,” threw down the gauntlet asking why “the art of landscape photography remains so singularly identified with a masculine eye,” and referring to the American landscape as “an exclusive white male preserve.” My interest was in revealing my persona’s subjective response to the California desert and in adding her voice to the canon. I believed this voice to be subversive and antipatriarchal. When researching, my only parameters were that I/my persona needed to be in California and the desert. What mattered was that California represented the end of the line both historically for emigration and also the end of the line, period. The desert too is obviously a very loaded metaphor. Sure, there are American and photographic references, but also less concrete ones that relate to the Bible and science fiction. It’s been said somewhere, I think by the theorist Dick Hebdige, that the desert continues to be a blank slate for multiple contradictory projections.

Susan Lipper, Untitled, from the book Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures, New York

Bell: Although the landscapes appear empty at times, the spaces are full of people or human presence—abandoned foundations, piles of rusty food cans, solar panels, and, most dominantly, the U.S. military. While the U.S. military has long used the deserts of California and other western states as staging grounds for military exercises, civilians have also settled the landscape and sought to carve out a “domestic” space, to borrow a word from your title. One of the protagonists in the work appears to be a group of friends (or family) with a dog, who seem to be searching through the sparse settlements they find—looking for clues, or perhaps looking for a place to settle down. Contrasting images show large crowds moving towards a military base under the watchful guidance of men in desert fatigues, perhaps tacitly accepting the occupation, or their presence. How do you see these two impulses playing out in the work?

Lipper: One of the things I am playing with in Domesticated Land is a somewhat fantastical apocalyptic narrative, a bit like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where there is a story told sequentially, but embellished by transhistorical leaps both forward and back. Besides asking the viewer to construct their own tale, I am also asking them to reject seeing only the descriptive power of the medium—the eternal and knowable present.

Additionally, embedded in Domesticated Land is a subplot featuring actual people, a rock band, who interacted with my persona—a family who took her in. This bonus content is a bit like finding an Easter egg in computer software. Awareness of these individuals might only emerge to the obsessed or careful reader after the multiple readings that are allowed and encouraged by the photobook format.

In the course of events, my persona comes to understand that the desert homesteader group/mankind is living on borrowed time, and that it is only military conglomerates or governmental forces that can assemble enough technology to sustainably survive the harsh conditions that exist in the desert/free world. The men in fatigues you mention represent those as-yet-undefined factions.

Susan Lipper, Untitled, from the book Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures, New York

Bell: Despite the high-key light, there is an underlying darkness to the work. The light is unrelenting; it obscures details, burning them out, but also forcing us to pay attention. What drew you to the light in the desert? And what, if any, metaphoric role do you see it playing in the work?

Lipper: In the novel The Stranger, by Albert Camus, the hero, or antihero, commits a random murder solely because he has become disoriented by the elements, namely the extreme bright light. His exposure to the glaring whiteness creates some kind of psychic transformation, classified as neither good nor evil. Like famed mirages, things in the desert are not what they seem. I am also reminded of the surreal sun-drenched dueling scorpion scene that opens Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, where there is no explanation offered. La Jetée by Chris Marker also alternates between light and dark worlds, but does not give preference to either one.

Susan Lipper, Untitled, from the book Domesticated Land, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures, New York

Bell: Your book is interspersed with several quotes by female authors—Margaret Atwood, the noted author; Annette Kolodny, an academic writing about female pioneers; and Catherine Haun, a woman from that period who wrote a diary. There are also lyrics from the rock band The Sibleys’ song “Cold Duck.” Can you talk a little about how you picked these quotes (and lyrics), their authors, and how you see them functioning in the book?

Lipper: The beginning and final passages pertain to largely forgotten female pioneers from the 1800s who kicked off my persona’s quest from the East to the West. These quotations are startlingly relevant today, especially when one considers that ours is still a broken and noncontiguous nation. As for Margaret Atwood, she popularized the term speculative fiction, tangible dystopian happenings in the near future that are not beyond imagining. The rock band’s lyrics, which one is presently able to listen to on Spotify and YouTube, frame a state of mind or vibe that embraces an inertia ubiquitous among current desert dwellers.

The texts and photographs are independent of each other and amongst themselves. Meaning is ordered in the mind of the reader. I suppose I was attempting to create a picture of ideas and emotions that were relevant in and around the time of the book’s assembling. I finished photographing in 2016, just before the U.S. election. The final edit and sequence took place during its aftermath.

Bell: The book ends on a slightly hopeful, albeit open-ended, note. The final sequence begins with an image shot from a window, looking past a curtain, out onto a sparsely inhabited landscape. The group of people we’ve been following may have found a spot to call their own, but may still be passing through, searching. What do you see as the trajectory of the book, and is the ending really an ending?

Lipper: The tale is meant to remain open-ended and be seen as a premonition relevant to these times. Though, it is not one without hope.

Adam Bell is a photographer and writer based in New York.

Susan Lipper: Domesticated Land was published by MACK in 2018.

The post America’s Desert Dystopia appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.