Aperture's Blog, page 97

On the Front Lines of Art and Fashion

Aperture Foundation announces the five finalists for the New Vanguard Photography Prize.

Photograph by Igor Pjörrt. Courtesy of Document

This spring, Aperture Foundation, in partnership with Document Journal, Calvin Klein, and Ford Models, welcomed applicants from around the world to submit their work to the New Vanguard Photography Prize. Having received the support of thirteen esteemed judges, including Aperture editor Michael Famighetti, and over 17,000 total public votes from around the world, Document is excited to announce the five finalists. Each finalist will get the chance to shoot a Document story, with one select winner receiving the chance to photograph a special cover of the Fall/Winter 2018 edition of Document Journal. The twenty-five semifinalists will be showcased in an exhibition at Aperture Foundation in October 2018.

Photograph by Quil Lemons. Courtesy of Document

Quil Lemons

American, based in New York

A student at The New School in New York, Lemon creates an expanding vision of what it means to be African American in America.

Photograph by Jan Philipzen. Courtesy of Document

Jan Philipzen

German, based in Antwerp

For the past three years, Philipzen has been working on an autobiographical project: raw, intimate images which capture the stories of the photographer’s close friends as well as the physicality and fragility of the photographic medium.

Photograph by Lucie Khahoutian. Courtesy of Document

Lucie Khahoutian

Armernian, based in Paris

Khahoutian’s work creates encounters between western contemporary culture and traditional Armenian references. Khahoutian tends to go back and forth between collage and photography to emphasize the magical and spiritual qualities in her work.

Photograph by Igor Pjörrt. Courtesy of Document

Igor Pjörrt

Portuguese, based in London

Pjörrt traverses the intersections of masculinity, intimacy, and temporality through his work. Pjörrt often takes inspiration from his own experiences of isolation and trauma, approaching photography as a tool of exploration as he seeks avenues of personal and collective healing.

Photograph by Ward Roberts. Courtesy of Document

Ward Roberts

Australian, based in the United States

Roberts’s images draw on themes like the effects of loneliness and isolation in the modern world, but he still maintains a fresh and engaging perspective. Roberts’s ornate style is often contradicted by life’s unscripted moments.

Photograph by Tahia Farhin Haque. Courtesy of Document

Special Reportage Prize: Tahia Farhin Haque

Bengali, based in Dhaka

Originally a biochemistry major, Haque switched her focus when she was awarded a full scholarship to photography school in Dhaka. Haque wants her work to shatter traditional stereotypes about women Islamic countries and bring their unique perspectives to the forefront.

The Jury

Nick Vogelson, Document

Sarah Richardson, Document

Olivier Rizzo, Stylist

Mario Sorrenti, Photographer

Doug Lloyd, Lloyd & Co.

Christopher Michael, Ford Models

Michael Famighetti, Aperture

Drew Sawyer, Brooklyn Museum

Lorna Simpson, Artist

Roxana Marcoci, The Museum of Modern Art

Candice Marks, Art Partner

Willy Vanderperre, Photographer

Peter Fitzpatrick, Swipecast

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9 Swimming Pools

Beat the heat wave with these scenes of poolside splendor.

Slim Aarons, A poolside party at a desert house, Palm Springs, 1970
© the artist/Getty Images

Slim Aarons

A former army photographer, Slim Aarons came back from the front lines with a mantra: to photograph “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” True to his word, Aarons’s scenes show tony sunbathers dotting sublime landscapes from Palm Springs to Marbella.

Nan Goldin, Simon and Jessica kissing in the pool, Avignon, 2001
© the artist and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles

Nan Goldin

In the early 2000s, Nan Goldin traveled to Europe, where she photographed couples making love. Heartbeat, the resulting slideshow, features 245 images—all in her intimate, signature style.

Jodi Bieber, Orlando West Swimming Pool, Orlando West, Soweto, December 19, 2009, from the book Soweto
Courtesy the artist

Jodi Bieber

Soweto, a township of Johannesburg, is often defined by its shantytown origins and as a site of resistance to apartheid. But South African photographer Jodi Bieber adds nuance to these views with her dynamic portrayal of daily life and leisure, such as this bathing beauty caught in the chaos of a crowded pool.

Martine Franck, Pool designed by Alain Capeilleres, Town of Le Brusc, France, 1976
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Martine Franck        

This iconic photograph departs from Martine Franck’s primary pursuit of humanitarian reportage. Her dexterity with form, composition, and shadow is immortalized in a moment of summer bliss.

Larry Sultan, Untitled, 1982, from the series Swimmers, 1978–82
© the artist and courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan and Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco

Larry Sultan

“Between 1978 and 1982 I photographed people learning to swim in several pools in San Francisco. I was interested in making pictures that were excessively physical, sensual, and painterly,” said Larry Sultan. Unlike the composed work Sultan is best known for, these snapshots invite the viewer to jump on in.

René Burri, Stable, horse pool and house planned by Luis Barragan and Andres Casillas, Mexico City, 1976
© the artist/Magnum Photos

René Burri 

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, René Burri visited his friend and Pritzker prize winner Luis Barragán several times, often photographing the architect’s buildings and gardens, including his home. The resulting photographs are an ode to Barragán’s keen sense of shape, depth, color, and beauty.

Martin Parr, The Artificial Beach inside the Ocean Dome, Miyazaki, Japan, 1996, from the series Small World, 1996
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Martin Parr

Martin Parr, famous for his satirical photographs of tourists, fully embraces the cliché of the overcrowded beachfront in Ocean Dome. The indoor pool comically masquerades as a natural body of water, as the horizon line smashes up against the far wall, painted to look like the sky.

Deanna Templeton, Ed, 2008
© the artist and courtesy Gallery Fifty One

Deanna Templeton

For eight summers, Deanna Templeton photographed her friends skinny-dipping in her pool, beginning with this image of her husband, Ed. The photograph is a graceful testament to summer and the nude form.

Hannah Starkey, Untitled, September 2006
Courtesy of the artist; Maureen Paley, London; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Los
Angeles

Hannah Starkey

Hannah Starkey has been making singular, large-scale photographs of women throughout her career. In this scene, at once peaceful and full of anticipation, the central figure is an icon of beauty and desire.

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Pushing the Boundaries

A preview of the artist Loredana Nemes’s first major museum exhibition.

Loredana Nemes, Rasim, Neukölln, 2009, from the series beyond © the artist

Loredana Nemes, Gier #07, 2014–17 © the artist

Loredana Nemes, Beine, from the series Ocna. Eine Annäherung, 2017 © the artist

Loredana Nemes, Café Esto, Neukölln, 2008, from the series beyond, 2008-10 © the artist

Loredana Nemes, Fatih, Kreuzberg, 2009, from the series beyond, 2008-10 © the artist

In her first major solo museum show, the Romanian-born artist Loredana Nemes pushes the boundaries of portrait photography, frequently landing on unusual approaches. In the series beyond (2008–10), which explores the male world of Turkish and Arab cafés, Nemes experiments with blur in portraits and enigmatic depictions of cloudy facades. She draws on cinematic effects in the group portraits of teenagers that make up her series Blossom Time (2012). Recently, Nemes has utilized abstraction as a means of “visualizing basic feelings,” says curator Ulrich Domröse. The exhibition will include a new politically relevant series, 23197 (2017), in which Nemes employs abstraction to explore ideas of fear, and Greed (2014–17), which engages with themes of desire in its black-and-white images of tangled seagulls.

Loredana Nemes: Greed, Fear, Love: Photographs, 2008–2017 is on view at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, from June 22 to October 15, 2018.

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The Land and the Landscape

A conversation with David Goldblatt, who throughout his long career used the camera to reflect the social realities of South Africa.

By Jonathan Cane

David Goldblatt, Mrs. Miriam Diale in her bedroom, 5357 Orlando East, Soweto, October 1972, from the series Soweto
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

“Events in themselves are not so much interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events,” David Goldblatt says to interviewer Jonathan Cane. While other photographers have focused on the turmoil of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid years, Goldblatt, who is now eighty-four, tends to train his lens on quieter subjects emblematic of the prevailing social order. He will soon be republishing his series In Boksburg (1979–80), in which he looked at daily life in a white middle-class community in the years of apartheid. Among his many series are Some Afrikaners Photographed (1961–68); On the Mines (1973), documenting South Africa’s mining industry; and The Transported of KwaNdebele (1989), addressing the plight of black workers forced to travel great distances for employment. More recently, for Ex-Offenders (2010–present), he photographs individuals on parole at the scene of their crimes.

The conversation that follows took place last May at Goldblatt’s home in an old Johannesburg suburb; like much of Goldblatt’s work, it was framed by events in the news—the controversy over a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the mining magnate and imperialist symbol, at the University of Cape Town, for instance. In protest of the university’s faculty, overwhelmingly dominated by white men, an activist threw human feces on the Rhodes statue in March 2015; the statue was subsequently removed, and has since become a symbol for “decolonizing” the university. This concern with monuments has been central to Goldblatt’s work for many years. Also happening around the time of Goldblatt and Cane’s talks were xenophobic conflagrations across South Africa—deeply unsettling violence involving exiles and refugees from other African countries. The photojournalism documenting these recent conflicts throws into relief the incisive work Goldblatt made during the most violent times in South Africa, and which he continues to make still.

David Goldblatt, Fifteen-year-old Lawrence Matjee after his assault and detention by the Security Police, Khotso House, de Villiers Street, October 25, 1985, from the series Joburg
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Jonathan Cane: You’ve photographed many walls, fences, boundaries. I think of your 1986 photograph Die Heldeakker, The Heroes’ Acre: cemetery for White members of the security forces killed in “The Total Onslaught,” Ventersdorp, Transvaal, or any of the precast fences in your iconic 1982 book In Boksburg.

David Goldblatt: They occur in my work because they are part of our life, absolutely. But I haven’t particularly sought them out. I am very conscious when I drive around the country of the number of game fences we have, and what the effect of those are, and I have photographed those. A lot of farmers have switched to farming with game, because they save on labor and they are able then to fence off their land in such a way that they make it virtually impossible for people to walk over it, and to use their land as a means of getting from point A to point B, never mind doing anything else on the land. So there are these very high fences dotted around the country now, many of them electrified, and it’s not clear to me whether the electrification is to keep the game from moving too close to the fence or to keep people out.

Cane: You live in a gated community, which is typical in South Africa. How do you feel about that?

Goldblatt: I feel very negative about it. We have a boom at the only motorcar entrance in the suburb, and a guard there, and by municipal regulation he’s not allowed to stop anybody, so it’s meaningless, really. And he might question a person coming through but he’s not really supposed to. We have an electrified fence that we put up after my wife and I were held up inside our house by men with pistols. It protects us, but I don’t kid myself. We’re not in Fort Knox. It would be very easy to break in again. I just think that I’m not a very tempting take, you know.

David Goldblatt, A plot-holder, his wife and their eldest son at lunch, Wheatlands, Randfontein, September 1962, from the series Some Afrikaners Photographed
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: The vibracrete fence of prefabricated, modular concrete slats and pillars, for me as a Joburger, is emblematic. My father always said we must turn the fence outward—have the good side out and the crappy one facing in. That was our civic duty to our neighbors.

Goldblatt: I’ve never thought about that subtle variation on the use of the vibracrete fence. I think they are very significant as part of our makeup, really. It’s a cheap way of fencing your property, and obviously very popular. If I had to refence our property, I might be tempted to use it, but I would most certainly reject it. And I have photographed some in the course of my work.

Cane: You’re republishing In Boksburg. Why republish this book three decades later?

Goldblatt: Well, there’s a man in Germany by the name of Gerhard Steidl, who is probably the prince or the king of photographic books, who is totally obsessed by quality. And I am in the very fortunate position of having become a sort of favored photographer of Gerhard. He told me at lunch a few years ago, “I want twenty books from you in the next twenty years.” So I’ve got an extensive program to fulfill [laughs]. Of course, it’s not possible to do it; it would be quite impossible to do. But he more or less accepts whatever I suggest we publish.

David Goldblatt, Die Heldeakker, The Heroes’ Acre: cemetery for White members of the security forces killed in “The Total Onslaught,” Ventersdorp, Transvaal, November 1, 1986, from the series Structures
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: You wrote in your original introduction to that book that in Boksburg you observed the “wholly uneventful flow of commonplace, orderly life.” This included weddings, garden maintenance, and sports in a whites-only town. Observers have noted that you are interested in the commonplace rather than the dramatic, that your violence is the violence of a vibracrete fence rather than “necklacing” [the apartheidera style of execution where aggressors forced gasoline-filled tires around their victims’ torsos and then set them alight].

Goldblatt: Yes. This is perfectly true. First of all, I am a physical coward. I shun violence. And I wouldn’t know how to handle it if I was a photographer in a violent scene such as James Oatway photographed last week for the Sunday Times [of the so-called xenophobic violence]. I think he is very brave. But then I’ve long since realized—it took me a few years to realize—that events in themselves are not so interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events. These conditions are often quite commonplace, and yet full of what is imminent. Immanent and imminent.

In Boksburg was partly about the banality of ordinary, law-abiding, and also, on the whole, moral people, who were knowingly living in a system that was quite immoral and, indeed, insane. We were all complicit in it. And that complicity is, I suppose, what In Boksburg is about.

Cane: Do you think by republishing it you’re saying something about a kind of continued complicity?

Goldblatt: I wouldn’t. First of all, I claim nothing for my book.

Cane: That seems like a spurious claim to me.

Goldblatt: No, I don’t think it is. I would claim that the work is done with some insight, and that possibly these insights are relevant, and possibly these insights will percolate and, by osmosis, become part of the consciousness. But I’ve never, ever thought that what I do will actually directly influence someone to do or not to do something.

David Goldblatt, Girl with purse, Joubert Park, Johannesburg, 1975, from the series Particulars
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: Is that why you’ve always claimed you’re not an activist?

Goldblatt: Because I am not an activist. An activist takes an active part in propagating their views. My colleagues in photography in the 1980s were activists, undeniably. They acknowledged it. They claimed that this was their role. And I respect them greatly for that.

Cane: Some people disrespected you because they felt you weren’t enough of an activist.

Goldblatt: Yes. That’s par for the course. I have to accept that. But I wasn’t prepared to compromise what I regarded as my particular needs. For a time, I think some of the people who later became very good friends of mine, and who are still my best friends, were rather suspicious . . .

Cane: . . . because the world was burning, and you were taking photographs of people mowing their lawns. Did that seem to you at the time to be a very interesting, strange approach?

Goldblatt: I thought it not only strange, but very uncomfortable. I mean, just now with Alexandra burning and Soweto burning, and parts of KwaZulu-Natal, I have felt what I often felt during those years, that what I was doing was probably irrelevant, but I had to accept that this was the way I am. I am not James Oatway or Paul Weinberg or John Liebenberg, who went right into the depths. I am what I am.

Cane: You talk to the people you photograph, in the sense that you don’t sneak a photograph of them.

Goldblatt: I don’t sneak a photograph of them, but I often don’t talk.

David Goldblatt, Paul Tuge where he hid after shooting a policeman in 2001, February 18, 2010, from the series Ex-Offenders
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: But do you always ask permission?

Goldblatt: Oh, yes, invariably I ask. But in general, I try not to talk. The reason being that I want the subject to be very aware of the situation, and conscious that he or she is being looked at. I set up the camera, and then I don’t look through the camera, because I want the subject and me to be in eyeball-to-eyeball contact. It’s sometimes quite difficult, because you’re dealing with a powerful person. You are really trying to assert your mastery of the situation. And you have to be in control of the situation. That’s quite tricky. I want the subject to feel tension. I don’t want the subject to feel particularly comfortable with me. I used to do a lot of portraiture of leading people: Mandela. [Joaquim] Chissano. [Robert] Mugabe. [Kenneth] Kaunda. And so on. Not [Samora] Machel. I never photographed Machel. I would insist—often at the cost of serious differences with security, police officers, and the like—on putting the subject into a straight-back chair, something like that, rather than an armchair, or what I call a goma goma chair, which you sink into.

We had an interview with Mandela just before he became president. It was in the house in Houghton where he was living then. Anyway, he’d been up since four o’clock in the morning doing exercises and whatever else he did. He came down at five for that appointment, and I had insisted—because the house was full of goma goma chairs—that I wanted the straight-back kitchen chair. The press officer, Carl Niehaus, who was later in disgrace [for his financial improprieties], said, “You can’t put Mr. Mandela onto a kitchen chair.” I said, “I insist.” I said, “I’ve come to photograph Mr. Mandela, not the furniture: I want a kitchen chair, and I insist.” Eventually, when he saw the photograph, he conceded that it was the right thing to do. You’ve got to take control of the situation. Otherwise, it’s a runaway.

Cane: Language is fundamental to what you do.

Goldblatt: Well, the kind of photography that I am interested in is much closer to writing than to painting. Because making a photograph is rather like writing a paragraph or a short piece, and putting together a whole string of photographs is like producing a piece of writing in many ways. There is the possibility of making coherent statements in an interesting, subtle, complex way.

David Goldblatt, A farmer’s son with his nursemaid, Heimweeberg, Nietverdiend, Western Transvaal, 1964, from the series Some Afrikaners Photographed
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: You are known for your long captions.

Goldblatt: I usually offer them in a form where they can be split. I learned from Life, Look, and Picture Post, which were expert at conveying information on three, four levels really. There were the photographs, which were the simple focus of what the magazines were doing, and then there were three layers of wordy information. There was the main caption, which was short, pithy, and gave you some basic text. There was a subsidiary caption, usually written in a lighter face or a smaller point size. Then there was a text. By means of these three layers of information, or verbal information, or written information, they conveyed a great deal in a really digestible way.

Cane: You have collaborated with some of the most respected South African writers: Nobel Prize–winner Nadine Gordimer wrote an essay for your first book, On the Mines, from 1973, and recently you published TJ & Double Negative with Ivan Vladislavic. Tell me about your relationship with Ivan.

Goldblatt: I admire him greatly, first of all, his ability to write books. But perhaps more relevant and more important is his ability to seize upon often insignificant details of our life here that are key to an extrapolation of our life. So in one of his books, there’s a man who is the proofreader for the Johannesburg telephone directory. I mean, you’ve got to have an extraordinary imagination to imagine that. In the book that came out of what we did together, he exhibits a similar kind of imagination. Part of the story involved [the collection of misaddressed] “dead” letters of a Portuguese man who used to be a doctor, and one of the highly qualified men in Mozambique, who comes here and can’t get work but becomes a letter sorter.

Ivan has this ability to, I don’t know, to somehow extrapolate our life in terms that are often amusing and yet tragic, and always, always relevant to our life.

David Goldblatt, Saturday afternoon in Sunward Park, 1979, from the series In Boksburg
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: Which writers do you still hope to work with?

Goldblatt: I would say that there are two people with whom I would love to collaborate. Marlene van Niekerk [Afrikaans novelist, poet, and professor]. I can’t imagine what we might collaborate on, but I’d dearly love to. And Njabulo S. Ndebele [author and former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town].

Marlene and I have had a couple of public discussions. That was when I realized what a formidable person she is, and her grasp of things. She knew my work intimately, and she asked questions that penetrated right to the heart of things and yet without harassing me. Subsequent to that, I asked whether I could meet her. At that time, as an extension of what I had done in Particulars [made in 1975 and published as a series in 2003], I was attempting to do some nudes, and I had done one or two, and then formed the idea that I would like to do portraits of people in the nude. So we made a date to meet outside Cape Town for lunch, at which I told her my undisguised and unlimited admiration for her, and I said to her, “I would like to do a portrait of you in the nude.” She laughed. She said, “Absolutely out of the question.” She said, “First of all, I am in the academic world here and that just would be unacceptable, but secondly, I am a very shy person, and I just wouldn’t do it.”

Cane: Do you have an archive of projects that could not or should not be done?

Goldblatt: Over the years, there have been things that I have wanted to do, but, for one reason or another, couldn’t. Mainly these have been things that were just very difficult to do. For example, in the 1980s I wanted to photograph subjects who had been detained and tortured, and I photographed some of them in the course of providing visual evidence for a court case. A number of photographers did this. Lawyers would want pictures of people who’d been shamboked [whipped] in prison; they’d want pictures showing the wounds. I did a number of those. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to do portraits of people who had been tortured. I did one or two, and it was terribly difficult because people were afraid. There is one picture that has been published quite often of a young man with his arms in plaster. I did two photographs of him, one front and back, and I photographed one of his colleagues. But I gave it up. It was just too difficult to get people who were prepared to accede to this.

David Goldblatt, Saturday morning at the Hypermarket: Semi-final of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition, June 28, 1980, from the series In Boksburg
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: You mentioned that you are digging back into your archive. What does it feel like to look back—and to still have twenty books planned?

Goldblatt: Well, I wish I had twenty books still planned. Every now and again I catch myself and say, “Am I really this old?” I don’t feel very old. But at the same time, I am aware that my body is changing, and my ability to handle complexities. Age has affected me. I think it would be true to say that when I was younger, the sex drive was a very potent force in what I did. That is less the case now, partly because of physical changes in the body. Do you know the work of Borges, the Argentine writer? He said something marvelous once, and I can never quite remember it, but basically he said that in your youth—this referred to a writer—if the stars are right, and everything is in place, then in his or her maturity, his work might contain a subtle, hidden complexity.

Cane: You’ve always insisted on a strict boundary between your “professional” work done for clients—including the powerful South African mining houses—and what you call your “personal” work. After the 2012 Marikana massacre, when thirty-four striking miners were shot dead by the South African police, did you have occasion to reflect on that dividing line in your work?

Goldblatt: Well, I don’t think I fully grasped the depth and extent of the exploitation of migrant men working in this country. That became clear to me during this incident at Marikana. It was clear that the migrant workers were in the position of sellers of their labor, in a very weak position, whereas the mining houses were immensely powerful, and there’s no question that they exploited that difference in power, if you like, over many years. They exploited it. There is currently a class-action suit against the large mining houses for the damage done by silicosis, which is a chronic lung disease caused by the silica dust miners breathe in while working. I photographed some aspects of this. I came along at the end of this long, sorry tale. They had stopped mining asbestos when I came into it. I have to acknowledge that I did things for the mining houses that, in the light of what I now understand better, I should not have done, and should have refused those assignments, those commissions. Or I should have handled them differently.

In my own personal work, in my book On the Mines, I have touched on these things in quite brutal photographs. But I didn’t sufficiently illustrate that much. And we’re not out of that yet. The relationships still stand. Just in the last week or two, there was an announcement of the take-home pay of the executives. It was appalling. Not one of them came up and met the strikers and sat down and talked to them. Not one.

David Goldblatt, Team leader and mine captain on a pedal car, Rustenburg Platinum Mine, Rustenburg, 1971, from the series On the Mines
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: What has age taught you?

Goldblatt: I will say that I’ve learned to be a good craftsman. That goes without saying. I don’t think you can seriously engage in photography if you’re not a craftsperson. You have to be reasonably competent at handling situations, and the camera obviously. But I have to say that as I’ve entered my ancient years, my craftsmanship has deteriorated. I forget too much. I take too much for granted. I had a very good friend who was a great architectural photographer, Ezra Stoller, an American man, who was so famous for his architectural photography that great architects would want to “Stollerize” their buildings. And he said to me once—and he was then about the age that I am now—he said that he had lost the ability, the critical faculty to make judgments of prints. Ja, I’m sad to confess that I think this is happening to me. I’ve been printing now for the last few months, and I’ve reestablished my connection with my work that I had lost for a time.

Cane: I always wanted to be old. Does that sound silly to you?

Goldblatt: No, no, not at all. I had a brother, Nick, ten years older than me, and I loved the lines in his face. I had a smooth face. I used to envy him to no end. In many ways, I wish I were younger. But I think, on the whole, I accept growing old. What I am very conscious of is that I probably don’t have many years left of active work. I have to be able to climb onto the roof of my camper. I have to be able to drive fourteen hundred kilometers to Cape Town. I must be able to do these things. And my ability to do that is probably limited within the years left. When I was forty, fifty, sixty, and seventy, it seemed like there was an unbroken span in front of me. Now that I am eighty-four, it’s a bit unrealistic to hope that it’s still an unlimited span. Gerhard Steidl’s twenty books in twenty years is somewhat unrealistic maybe.

David Goldblatt, Drum majorette, Cup final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, 1972, from the series Soweto
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: Did you know that you are very much in fashion right now? If you visit any fashionable person in South Africa they will have a David Goldblatt in their lounge.

Goldblatt: I didn’t know that. My sales figures don’t bear that out.

Cane: They even have a particular way they’re framed and they’ll be hanging next to, like, a Zander Blom or maybe an early William Kentridge print. How do you feel if I tell you that you are at the height of fashion right now?

Goldblatt: I feel very vulnerable, because that’s bound to change. Fashion is essentially a passing phenomenon, and ja, I am absolutely not at peace with it.

Cane: I want to talk about the South African veld. I was driving across the country the last two days and was struck by how exquisite, how devastating it is in some ways. J.M. Coetzee wrote in White Writing that whites lacked a vocabulary for the light and the color of the place. I think some people would say—you said it yourself, I think, once—that there was a time when you stopped running away from the light of this place, and tried to find, or did find, a language for that here.

Goldblatt: I think that’s true. Just now, in the Karoo, where I went after photographing the student dethroning [of Cecil John Rhodes’s statue at the University of Cape Town], I went up to an area near Langford that I’ve often looked at with the idea of photographing it. I once went there about four years ago, five years maybe, and got permission from the farmer to go over his land. I was in my camper, and I drove in there, and I did a photograph that I’ve never really liked. But I knew that there was something there that I wanted to explore. Just a few weeks ago, I went back there, and for two days, when I had a weekend, I went back to that farm and walked over it, found a koppie [a small hill], drove along the Cape Town–Johannesburg railway and did some photographs, which I think are the beginning perhaps of something. For me there is no question that the land itself, that “land” as opposed to “the landscape,” is something that I would like to explore. I don’t quite know how. But when we speak of “the landscape,” that already is a value judgment. It considers that you have looked at the land, and formed a picture around it that makes it into a scape.

David Goldblatt, The monument at left celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Republic of South Africa. The one at right is to JG Strijdom, militant protagonist of White supremacy and of an Afrikaner republic, who died in 1958. At rear is the headquarters building of Volkskas (“The People’s Bank”) founded in 1934 to mobilize Afrikaner capital and to break the monopoly of the “English” banks. Pretoria, April 25, 1982, from the series Structures
Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

Cane: Making a photo of the land without making a landscape.

Goldblatt: A photographer who I really admire, Guy Tillim, has done that in São Paulo, in Tahiti, and he has done it in Johannesburg. The photographs that he did in Johannesburg are amazing. They appear to be fuck all. I think they are great. It’s something that, ja, I’ve been conscious of for a long time.

How do you resist this need to find order? And yet, how do you do that so the photographs are not just chaotic?

Jonathan Cane is a writer and researcher who lives between São Paulo and Cape Town.

This interview was originally published in Aperture Issue 220, “The Interview Issue” and republished in Aperture Conversations: 1985 to the Present. 

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Gardens of Earthly Delight

Wander through cherry trees and orange shrubs with photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz, Collier Schorr, and Luigi Ghirri.

By Sarah Anne McNear

Joel Meyerowitz, Vivian, Bronx Botanical Gardens, New York City, 1966
© the artist and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Though it is impossible to state unequivocally that the biblical Garden of Eden is a referent for all photographers working in the garden, the idea of Eden, or rather its cultural hallmarks—innocence, tranquility, simplicity, abundance, florescence, and, above all, beauty—are found in many photographs made in the garden, such as this one. Here, Joel Meyerowitz photographs a young woman on the verge of adulthood posed against a profusion of azalea blossoms that seem to spread their transformative and seductive color across her chest in a magical embrace.

Sam Abell, Picnic Table, with Hail Stones, Colorado Springs, CO, 1980
© the artist/National Geographic Creative

While not a gardener, by his own admission, Sam Abell is among the ranks of people who look to gardens as places for inspiration, recreation, and pleasure: “I’m not a gardener or even a garden photographer. I’m a traveler who visits gardens for solace and visual inspiration. That means I seek from gardens what I seek from life itself—visually layered scenes that hold the possibility for meaningful photographic moments.” In this picture, Abell captures a transformative act of nature—a hailstorm in high summer—as a moment of enchanted incongruity.

Lori Nix, Wasps, 2002
Courtesy the artist; ClampArt Gallery, New York; and George Eastman Museum

Photographed from the perspective of a child, Lori Nix’s Wasps appears to be a picture of insects buzzing above the handlebars of an abandoned bike in an overgrown garden. In fact, the picture is a constructed image, made by photographing a small studio diorama created by Nix and her collaborator, Kathleen Gerber. Even so, the picture functions as a very effective aide-mémoire,  recalling dreamy summer evenings when real magic seemed possible.

Luigi Ghirri, Versailles, 1985
© the Estate of Luigi Ghirri and courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles

The modern landscape of Europe and its mooring in history were both blessing and burden to photographer Luigi Ghirri. At Versailles, Ghirri grappled with how to represent a historical landmark and its expansive garden as they are experienced by tourists in the present day. In this picture, the visitors, tiny figures in the landscape, serve as a gauge of both the scale and the marvel of the place.

Martin Parr, Loders Street Fair, England, 1999
© the artist and courtesy Magnum Photos

In Martin Parr’s photograph of Loders Street Fair, the flowers, not the humans, are the focus. The unusual composition, which crops out the women’s faces and any other signifiers of place, turns a quotidian sight into a surreal fantasy. Parr explains, “I placed the flowers into some form of social context by making the backdrop as important as the flower in the foreground. I wanted to turn the image of the flower, so often regarded just as a beautiful object, into a social landscape.”

John Pfahl, Threadleaf Japanese Maple Tree, Hershey Gardens, Pennsylvania, October 1999, from the series Extreme Horticulture
© the artist and courtesy George Eastman Museum

John Pfahl was looking for “the unusual, the bizarre, the abundant, and the exuberant” when he created the series that he calls Extreme Horticulture. Pfahl worked with a 4-by-5 field camera and a wide-angle lens to achieve both expansive and highly detailed images, explaining, “Perceptually, when one walks through a garden, one looks at specific plants sequentially while everything else becomes a blur. However, having everything from foreground to infinity in focus creates a surreal dream-like image where everything is equally seductive and inspectable in minute detail.”

Sheron Rupp, Trudy in Annie’s Sunflower Maze, Amherst, MA, 2000
© the artist

Sheron Rupp has lived in the foothills of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts for over forty years, where she made this photograph of an elderly woman strolling through a sunflower maze. Dressed as if for church, the woman, while identified as Trudy, is a mysterious presence on an equally mysterious quest.

Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, White Lilacs, Emigrant Gulch, Montana, 2001
© the artist

“The work insists on restarting a complex conversation about the ways our lives are intertwined with the spaces and substances of the earth, a conversation that seems to have its origins behind the camera, with two visions and voices rather than one shaping each image,” writes Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee’s series No Ordinary Land. Here, the photographers capture a mundane garden gate made briefly magical by its lilac mantel.

Jacqueline Hassink, Haradani-en 1, Northwest Kyoto, 2010, from the series View, Kyoto
© the artist

Jacqueline Hassink photographed Zen Buddhist gardens in Japan for ten years for her series View, Kyoto. Haradani-en 1, Northwest Kyoto (2010) represents one of the most famous gardens in Japan at the peak of sakura matsuri, or the cherry blossom festival. Traditionally, visitors at this time will picnic under the blossoms, a centuries-old tradition known as hanami. Hassink, having taken her camera off the prescribed path, eschews a more cultivated image of the cherry blossoms in favor of celebrating their wild embrace and florescent abundance.  

Collier Schorr, Lily Pads 3, 2006, from the series Blumen
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

For her series Blumen, Collier Schorr pushed the notion of flower arranging out into the field—quite literally—where she would playfully construct still lifes with flowers, string, and sticks, making a game of creating her own ephemeral garden. Schorr admits to stealing the flowers that she used from other people’s gardens, in order to create this small temporary tableau in which, according to Schorr, “the flowers begin to wilt, changing shape and color. And inevitably, the wind blows them down.”

Abelardo Morell, Tent Camera Image: View of Monet’s Gardens with Wheelbarrow, Giverny, France, 2015
© the artist and Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York and Zürich

In the series After Monet, Abelardo Morell borrows from an existing garden, Monet’s garden at Giverny, to make something entirely new. Working in a tent that he transforms into a camera obscura, Morell rephotographs the image of Monet’s brightly patterned garden as it is projected onto the gravel of the garden path. The texture of the gravel dissolves the otherwise straightforward image into something decidedly more impressionistic and paradisiacal.

These photographs are included in The Photographer in the Garden by Jamie M. Allen and Sarah Anne McNear.

 

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At Least They’ll See the Black

In two recent films, Kahlil Joseph and Arthur Jafa consider the poetics of African American life.

By Antwaun Sargent

Kahlil Joseph, Fly Paper, 2017. HD monochrome digital video and 35mm film with Funktion-One sonic universe. Installation at the New Museum, New York. Photograph by Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio
Courtesy the artist and the New Museum

In 1953, the renowned Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava snapped David, a black-and-white portrait of a young black boy from the neighborhood: Hair nappy, his hands are folded behind his back as he leans against a lamppost. A single button holds his shirt closed, and yet the frown he wears allows him to peer, fully represented, directly into the camera’s eye. “He don’t never smile,” observed the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes when the image appeared in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 admixture of 140 of DeCarava’s quotidian images—of black men, women, and children going about their days and celebrated jazz luminaries playing music—paired with Hughes’s narrative. It’s DeCarava’s impressionistic image of black interiority that sits at the center of filmmaker and artist Kahlil Joseph’s film Fly Paper (2017), a monumental, twenty-three-minute ode to black Harlem, past and present.

In Fly Paper’s rapidly moving sequences, you can see DeCarava’s influence in the light and shadow Joseph builds into his portrayal of Harlem as a place of black cultural triumph and loss. Presented last year in a pitch-black installation in the exhibition Kahlil Joseph: Shadow Play (2017), at the New Museum, New York, Fly Paper contains a nonlinear narrative that expands upon the director’s use of the postwar black photographic image to, as DeCarava did, present Harlem as both a real mecca of black America and a fantastic and psychic region of the black imagination. In this way, Fly Paper recalls not only DeCarava’s pictures of black life, but also those of image makers who were part of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group DeCarava led in the early 1960s, including Ming Smith, Louis Draper, Anthony Barboza, and Ray Francis, and other documentarians of black life, such as Gordon Parks, Pittsburgh’s Charles “Teenie” Harris, Dawoud Bey, and Andre D. Wagner. These black artists’ photographs poetically employ light, shadow, and darkness to portray the ordinary and the sublime. Images like DeCarava’s portrait Elvin Jones (1961), of the jazz musician, reveal the varied textures of blackness, and push the boundaries of what can be seen and imagined in the black spaces and faces of a photograph. They are part of a contemporary canon of black images that provide what DeCarava once described as “the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which …only a Negro photographer can interpret.”

Ming Smith, Lagree Baptist Church, Harlem, New York, ca. 1985
© the artist and courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

“Black people are light-years more advanced than the ideas and images that circulate would have you believe,” Joseph said in 2013, in an interview with Nowness. “The spaces we control and exist are my zero for filming.” It’s a sentiment running throughout his depictions that blends the essence of what DeCarava and other photographers see in black skin and the absorbing fantasy at the heart of the hip-hop music video. Joseph remixes and distorts both media to produce black cinema rooted in the structural photographic. It is like nothing we have ever seen before, because often photography and film center whiteness even in depictions of blackness. As one of the directors of Beyoncé Knowles’s visual album Lemonade (2016), the artist behind Flying Lotus’s Until the Quiet Comes (2012), and the creator of Alice Smith: Black Mary (2017), Joseph uses film as a container to show the multiplicity of blackness by creating small black worlds. Time is suspended, space is distorted, light on black skin is a metaphor, and black music, cut into sounds of salvation, carries the narrative. It’s a cinematic experience that displays on-screen something that mirrors real black life.

This approach is seen clearly in Joseph’s Wildcat (2013), a black-and-white film that makes visible the erasure of the black American cowboy, which largely occurred through Westerns, a genre of film that whitewashed the American cowboy story. Wildcat takes us to Grayson, Oklahoma, during its annual August rodeo, an event that brings African American cowboys and cowgirls from across the Midwest to this small town. In one moment, Joseph’s camera hovers on a young girl wearing a white gown, representing the spirit of Aunt Janet, her late elder who started the rodeo; her eyes are small and searching. These few seconds of film, which appear to upset an entire genre that would have us believe she doesn’t exist, also represent what the gender and race theorist Tina Campt calls a “still moving image.” Wildcat is filled with the stillness one would find in a DeCarava image. There’s no dialogue, a decision that seems to reinforce the idea that Joseph wants us to watch blackness unfold on film in ways we have rarely observed. Guiding us is the melodic score by Flying Lotus, a frequent collaborator of the artist, as we watch contemporary black American cowboys, bull riders, and barrel racers create majestic new images of blackness.

Ray Francis, Harlem, New York, late 1960s, from the book Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge
Courtesy the artist and Schiffer Publishing

Fly Paper is also filled with scene after scene of black images, retracing bits and pieces of the history of America as it played out in Harlem and the contours of history that placed black people in starring roles. The film opens with the self-determination of civil rights leader Malcolm X as he is delivering a speech on a Harlem street corner. His seriousness brings to mind DeCarava’s famous picture of stony-faced determination, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963, and also Parks’s black-and-white portrait Malcolm X Gives Speech at Rally, Harlem, New York (1963). Soon the screen is flooded with mercurial, strange, and ghostly moving images that tease out the complex emotions embedded in black space: the surrealism of Smith’s Sun Ra space II (1978); singer Lauryn Hill jamming; a black mother and child in repose; a dreamlike rendering of the late painter Barkley L. Hendricks’s Lawdy Mama (1969) seen at the Studio Museum in Harlem; black fictive characters, captured in poses that evoke DeCarava’s Dancers (1956), in a darkly lit room flexing in slow motion. At one moment, the legendary performer Ben Vereen lies in a bathtub, fully clothed. These short sequences collide with the bombastic and disorienting sounds of drums, Harlem’s trains, the hustle of 125th Street, and melodies Joseph skillfully turns inside out. Joseph’s personal home videos fade in and out too. We meet Joseph’s father, Keven Davis, gossiping on the street with hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy, and after surgery at home in his uptown New York apartment before his death, at the age of fifty-four, in 2012. Joseph’s mixing of his family videos with newer original footage is reminiscent of the artist’s m.A.A.d (2014), a fourteen-minute film he made for Kendrick Lamar that blends the rapper’s personal home videos with fresh scenes of his native Compton, California.

“I wanted people to feel like they saw a Harlem that they can’t see,” Joseph recently told the New York Times. He achieves this by showing what another of Joseph’s influences, the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, calls “the power, beauty, and alienation” of black Harlem. Jafa believes Joseph achieves his humane representation of black sociality because “he’s self-authorizing. He’s not waiting for things to become canonical,” Jafa said last year before an audience at the New Museum. “I would say I have a little of this as well. If we like the shit, it’s in the canon.”

Kahlil Joseph, Still from Fly Paper, 2017
Courtesy the artist

In 2016, Jafa created the film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, a tour de force that, like Fly Paper, reimagines the possibilities of narrative, sound, and movement in the construction of the moving image by relying on the black photographic, hip-hop music videos, and memory’s ability to create montage. Jafa’s Love Is the Message draws on a two-decade-long photographic study into what the filmmaker, who was the cinematographer for Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994), calls “black expressive modalities,” which resulted in two hundred notebooks of cataloged clippings of images from magazines of black athletes, entertainers, and ordinary people in motion. In twenty-four frames per second, soundtracked to an elongated mix of Kanye West’s 2016 rap gospel “Ultralight Beam,” Jafa seamlessly pulls together disparate images of violence and creativity. Before our eyes appear samplings of clips from YouTube of black voguers dipping, dash-cam video of Walter Scott being gunned down, former president Barack Obama emotionally singing “Amazing Grace,” LeBron James, Nina Simone, and black-and-white B-roll from his 2014 documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death and Joseph’s Wildcat.

“How come we can’t be as black as we are and still be universal?” Jafa asked, in 2016, after the release of Love Is the Message. “How come we have to refuse who we are in order for someone to be able to identify with us? How come the audience can’t see themselves in that thing, whether or not it looks just like them or not?” He said, “It’s what black people do because most of what we see are white people. It’s what women have developed the muscle to do because mostly what they see are men. It’s what gay people are able to do because mostly what they see is heteronormative stuff. It’s a muscle that everybody needs to develop: the ability to see themselves in someone else’s circumstances without having to paint that person white, make that person straight, or a man.” Jafa added, “I’m trying to make my shit as black as possible and still have you deal with my humanity.”

Arthur Jafa, Still from Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, 2016
Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome

In the final sequence of Fly Paper, the sound of a woman’s voice, lifted from photographer and filmmaker Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), makes a declaration. As the screen flickers black, and the sound of striking lightning crashes, she says, as if responding to Jafa, “If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”

Fly Paper and Love Is the Message are works of black cinema that use available images of blackness in film and photography to probe the lack of full representations of blackness in the frame and on the screen. When Jafa presented his film in a recent solo exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2017), he displayed the photography of Ming Smith as an exhibition within an exhibition that showed, as the art historian W. J. T. Mitchell observed in his 2005 book, What Do Pictures Want?, that black pictures, like all pictures, “arise in all other media—in the assemblage of fleeting, evanescent shadows and material supports that constitute the cinema as a ‘picture show.’” Joseph’s Fly Paper is a new kind of picture show, one using the still black image to help us see more.

Antwaun Sargent is a writer based in New York.

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

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Inside Aperture’s Fifth Annual Patron Cocktail Party

Russet Lederman, Jon D. Smith Jr., Andrew E. Lewin, and Jeff Gutterman

Willard Taylor and Chris Boot

Aperture board chair Cathy Kaplan addresses guests

Edward Messikian and Melissa O'Shaughnessy

Susanna E. Singer, Ren Martin, Cathy Kaplan, and Harriette Silverberg-Natkins

Scott Switzer and Maeva Freeman

Bernard Lumpkin and Aperture executive director Chris Boot

Maeva Freeman and Severn Taylor

Rita Anthoine and Mark B. Levine

Emily Grillo, Mary Ellen Goeke, and Thomas R. Schiff

Guests mingle at the home of Aperture trustee Willard Taylor and his wife, Virginia Davies

On Wednesday, June 13, Aperture Patrons, board members, and special guests gathered for the fifth annual Spring Patron Cocktail Party at the home of Aperture trustee Willard Taylor and his wife, Virginia Davies. As the sun set, guests enjoyed a cocktail reception on Taylor’s terrace overlooking the Hudson River. “All of this is in the cause of changing artists’ lives and exciting people about the narrative of photography,” Aperture executive director Chris Boot said during remarks. “In addition to sharing a passion for photography, photographers, and artists, we really enjoy the discourse and spending time together,” board chair Cathy Kaplan said of Aperture Patron events.

Aperture Patron events bring together Members, trustees, and photographers. To join Aperture’s Patron Program, click here or contact Jean Son at json@aperture.org or 212.946.7146.

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John Chiara: Experimenting with Photography

John Chiara, Grizzly Peak Boulevard at Claremont Avenue, Oakland, 2011; from John Chiara: California
(Aperture/Pier 24 Photography, 2017)

John Chiara, Kansas Street at 22nd Street, San Francisco, 2004; from John Chiara: California (Aperture/ Pier 24 Photography, 2017)

 

Join photographer John Chiara for a two-day workshop intended for photographers who are looking to have fun and experiment with photography. Whether you’re a novice, professional, or enthusiast of photography, this workshop will display a raw, hands-on, alchemist approach to the medium. Known for making large-scale photographs with hand-built cameras—the largest being 50 by 80 inches—Chiara will teach participants how to make one-of-a-kind images using a variety of cameras and techniques.

 

On the first day of the workshop, participants will photograph the New York City landscape using both large-scale, 4-by-5, and small pinhole cameras. Chiara will guide participants on how to set up the cameras, locate the perfect scene, and photograph the landscape. Using these techniques, participants will learn how to slow down their approach and take all aspects of the scene into consideration when making an image. Participants will spend the second day of the workshop in the darkroom developing their images. Chiara will teach participants how to work in the darkroom and develop their images using black-and-white processing methods. The workshop will end with a group critique back at Aperture. Participants will take home their own one-of-a-kind photographic print.

John Chiara (born in San Francisco, 1971) received a BFA in photography from the University of Utah in 1995 and an MFA in photography from the California College of the Arts in 2004. Chiara was Artist in Residence at Budapest Art Factory (2017); Crown Point Press, San Francisco (2006, 2016); Porch Society, Clarksdale, Mississippi (2013–14); Gallery Four, Baltimore (2010); and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California (2010). In 2011 and 2013, the Pilara Foundation in San Francisco commissioned work that was included in two group exhibitions at Pier 24 Photography: HERE. and A Sense of Place.

 

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Objectives:

Discover and learn how to use various cameras and methods of photography

Learn basic darkroom techniques

Create a personal one-of-a-kind photograph (that you get to take home!)

Materials to bring:

Participants will be notified regarding required materials

Tuition:

Tuition for this two-day workshop is $600 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, August 29, 2018
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 ten students is required to run this 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.

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Hidden Mothers

Through uncanny vintage photographs, Laura Larson tells a story of love and attachment.

By Carmen Winant

Photographer unknown, ca. 1860s–70s
Courtesy the collection of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr.

When I moved to Ohio in 2014 for a teaching job, I had no idea what kinds of artists and friends I might encounter. One of the first people I came to know was Laura Larson, a professor of photography at Ohio University, who was living in Athens, Ohio. She gifted me her new book, Hidden Mother; I’ve been wanting to write about the way it moved me ever since. In the slim volume, Larson braids together her personal narrative of adopting her now nine-year-old daughter with a history of nineteenth-century photographs of “hidden mothers”: children propped up for the camera by their mothers, who are literally dislodged from the image through drapery, plate scratching, or other methods of erasure. The writing behaves at once as memoir, poetry, biography, and creative nonfiction, keeping company with the likes of Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Wayne Koestenbaum, and, of course, Roland Barthes. But its content, which moves through the tender and the uncertain to arrive somewhere in between, feels entirely its own.

Carmen Winant: I am struck by how, as you describe in this book, you came to meet your daughter through pictures. She was in an orphanage in Addis Ababa; you were across the world in Athens, Ohio. As someone who spent their life dealing in pictures—and perhaps being skeptical of their capacities to transmute truth or evidence—did this experience affect your understanding of photographs?

Laura Larson: I received approximately fifteen photographs of Gadisse during the legal process of the adoption with a two-month gap between the first photograph and the second set of images. Bear in mind I had already waited nine months while my application was being processed and that time had passed relatively easily. But, once I had an image, I became a mother, Gadisse’s mother, and she became my daughter. It felt real to me and disconcerting, too—extraordinary to feel this intense attachment based solely on a photograph. I’ve spent so much time as an artist thinking critically about the medium; I’m not a sentimental person, and here I was, drowning in affect! There’s a speculative aspect of becoming a parent, wondering who this little person’s going to be, what will their life be like? Gadisse’s photographs supplied a screen, a real face, for those projections. I struggled to navigate those fantasies, those questions, and those very intense fears because my rudder, my skepticism, was gone.

Photographer unknown, ca. 1920s–30s
Courtesy Laura Larson

Winant: I keep thinking of this line, toward the end of the book, when you come to meet Gadisse in person: “When we first met, I hesitated to pick her up, pausing at the threshold when we became real.”

Larson: Right. Strangers were making these photographs—government officials, agency employees, visiting families. I was jealous and sad because of the contact they had with her and here I am on the other side of the world with a few digital files. Those photographs varied wildly in quality since they were all made by amateurs and this added to the strangeness of the experience. I found myself getting frustrated. Get closer! Use the flash! You could really tell when the photographer spent time with her and when she was just another child of many who was documented. There’s one photograph of her—I don’t write about it in the book—where there’s a small dry-erase board propped in the frame with her name written on it. That picture destroyed me. All of this intensified her vulnerability for me, my distance from her. So, when I do finally meet her, here is this very real person and those photographs are a very faint approximation of her. I still recognized her but I didn’t know her at all. I had anticipated this but it’s something else to see and hold your daughter for the first time after looking at her photographs for seven months.

Winant: There is a direct relationship between photographic process and healing explored in these pages. You write of the early chemistry: “During the Crimean War, collodion was also used as a kind of liquid skin to dress and seal wounds on the battlefield.” I’m struck by this fact, that the same chemicals that were used to make the Hidden Mother tintypes were used to save lives, keep limbs together.

Larson: I was really taken by the idea of how collodion’s capacity to repair a body, to make it whole again, circled back to representation—in this case, of mothers, of mothers and children, of adoption. With the hidden mothers where the emulsion is scratched off, that’s a tear in the collodion, a wound. I’m thinking of the book as a form of feminist triage! The book mends these bonds that are disguised or marginalized or severed in the photographs. You can physically repair a wound and tend to psychological pain, but trauma steeps in the body and scars remain. It’s a way of thinking of healing in a more complete way, that it’s ongoing, never resolved.

Photographer unknown, ca. 1860s–70s
Courtesy the collection of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr.

Winant: Can you speak to this in a more direct way, as it relates to your daughter?

Larson: Yes, this all comes back to the stream of photographs of Gadisse. I grew attached to her and the bond felt whole but that bond was predicated on some delicate psychological suturing. There’s another connection here too with the role of attachment in adoption. Attachment plays a fundamental role in child development but with adoption, it’s a critical aspect of healing. Forming a bond with a new parent is key to a child’s emotional health and their capacity to recover from trauma.

While I was writing the book, I took a workshop on wet collodion to get some insight into the process. This is where I learned of its role as a surgical binding agent. What I love about wet collodion is its messiness, its stickiness—there’s so much power in this liquid material. There’s something poetic about how bodily the process is; a comparison could be made to birth. Those plates stand for a physical touch between the photographer and the subject, which in turn echoes the touch of the subjects’ bodies. It’s moving to think about how healing can come from a substance so mercurial and how images—photographs of bodies—emerge from this fragile economy of light and chemistry.

Winant: Can you talk a little bit about the structural form this project takes? The short, interweaving sections recall Barthes’s figures, so notable in A Lover’s Discourse (1977). This form allows you to weave together distinct narratives: your own personal history, and a larger, photographic one.

Larson: Barthes looms large in this work—his notational forms, short chapters, circling structures, prismatic effects. There hadn’t been any scholarly writing about hidden mother photographs, so for a while, I internalized a pressure to position the practice within a critical framework. I realized at a certain point that the writing could be organized around my experience as a photographer, rather than as a historian or critic, and that was enormously freeing. I know the physical demands of making a photograph, that it’s a form of emotional exchange, and the ethical and political questions around representation, and the pleasures of experimenting with shooting and printing. I wanted my identity as a maker of photographs to run up against my identity as a mother-to-be.

Photographer unknown, ca. 1860s–70s
Courtesy the collection of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr.

Winant: When did this book begin to come into focus?

Larson: The project was seeded by an essay I wrote when I was assembling my adoption dossier. I was introduced to the hidden mother photographs at the same time and I knew I wanted to tell the story through these images. The photographs were like a release valve for all my longing, a distraction from the situation at hand, and I could take shelter in them. I didn’t want to write a conventional memoir or a confessional. I’m an intensely private person, so considering its subject, I think it’s a reserved work. The photographs allowed me to spin out the different parts of the story.

Winant: Had the adoption been formalized when you began to write? So much of it takes place in the beginning months, the back and forth, the bureaucracy, the anticipation.

Larson: I actually wrote the book when Gadisse was four. We were still in the moment when childcare is so physically demanding. The adoption process is so disorienting, it would have been impossible to write the book when she was a baby. During those early years as a single parent, I had no time to make work, to get to the studio, but I could sneak time to write. Not that this is a small thing! When I was weaning her from co-sleeping to being in her own bed, I would sit on the floor of her room by the door. It would typically take her an hour to fall asleep and she needed me close by. So, in the dark, I would write on my laptop, pieces of ideas, between comforting her, singing. It started with writing around and about each of the photographs. The book grew from these fragments and the fragments were tied to the actual experience of mothering. Its structure developed as a constellation from that writing, rather than linear essay.

Winant: Has that informed the way you work in the studio as well?

Larson: Writing this book has fed back into my studio practice in really positive ways. Historical research plays an important role in my work but typically as a point of departure. In working directly with appropriated imagery, I’ve shed some baggage around authorship, baggage I didn’t even know I had, and I’m excited about where this is taking the work.

Photographer unknown, ca. 1920s–30s
Courtesy Laura Larson

Winant: I’ve been making a lot of work about motherhood lately, and all that attends it. It is an area that’s made me nervous. I’ve worried that I might cloister myself, that I might not be considered serious. Can you talk a little bit about taking on motherhood—not to mention adoptive motherhood, and single motherhood—as the subject of this work?

Larson: I share these fears, too. The motherhood ghetto is one of the ghettos where women’s work is placed. So, with that understanding, I felt less anxious about that space because I know those terms of marginalization well and I’m committed to resisting those terms, the outskirts, so to speak. I’ve been very fortunate to have mentors who were role models not only as artists and scholars but mothers as well: Patricia Mathews, Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly. To be honest, I was more terrified of writing an autobiographical work—to share my experience publicly, especially the loss of my own mother, with whom I had a difficult relationship. I felt vulnerable writing an autobiographical work that takes Barthes’s writing as its model. To answer your question, I wanted the book to weave together the strands of experience that shaped my desire to be a mother and how they’re intimately tied to my work as an expression of how I want to live in the world.

Winant: Perhaps it is because I am not close to this experience, but I cannot recall reading any narratives about adoption, especially in this context. I only realized that during my first reading of your text. It feels like a void.

Larson: Adoptive motherhood is understood as a second choice, the option available if you can’t get pregnant and, to a certain extent, if you become a single mother by choice. Since I was in my twenties I’ve known I wanted to be a mother, and adoption intuitively felt more primary. For me, it represented a decision to feel connected and to see mothering as an intentional, political act even with the knowledge that I will fail. Adoption is a serious and ongoing reckoning with privilege.

Photographer unknown, ca. 1860s–70s
Courtesy the collection of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr.

Winant: Yes, the line you’ve written—“With the uncertainty of our legal case, this sense of fate unmoors and my fears bloom that I am complicit in another mother’s loss”—stayed with me. It certainly complicates the already complicated terrain of motherhood, within and outside of artwork.

Larson: On a fundamental level, I think the desire to have children is a selfish act. I don’t mean this in a judgmental way. In our case, there’s no escaping the losses that are the very condition of her adoption and the implications for our life as a transracial family.

Winant: The hidden mother photographs themselves strike me as so desperately sad, and laced with trauma. They play to my deep fear that mothers need fade into the background, literally disappear for the sake of holding up their children. You approach them with more nuance in your writing.

Larson: Many of the photographs are so casually and profoundly violent. I didn’t think I had much to add to this other than to say, look at this, and let those images speak for themselves. Why not photograph the mother and child together? Some of the photographs are so extreme that it veers into black comedy—who are these monsters? Those ruptures open up the cultural schizophrenia around mothers. But, I found so many images where the bond between mother and child was so undeniably there—a mother playing peekaboo with the camera, the infant’s gravitational pull toward the mother’s obscured body—and I love these moments of insistence. I’m here! She’s here! Loss is a defining feature of mothering but I read ambivalence in these images as well. I know that I was already anticipating those feelings.

Photographer unknown, ca. 1860s–70s
Courtesy the collection of Lee Marks and John C. DePrez, Jr.

Winant: Right—as you say, “Like a hidden mother, I was bound to and separated from my daughter.”

Larson: Yes. Her first mother is hidden too, and to a lesser extent, the women who cared for her in Addis Ababa. I took great comfort in the photographs I received of Gadisse with the house mothers. I liked seeing her held by these women even though it was also very painful. It’s important to know that the nannies are mothers too and providing care for children is how they support their own. The work of mothering isn’t tethered to biology and I wanted the book to account for that labor in a broader framework.

Winant: A substantial portion of the book revolves around descriptions of Gadisse’s image, before you came to meet her in person. Can you speak about the decision to include only a single image of your daughter, at the book’s end? Neither of your faces appear; her little body is turned toward the laptop camera.

Larson: Hidden Mother is my story and I purposely withheld images of Gadisse because she’ll tell her own story someday. She hated having her photograph taken as a baby so the Photo Booth application on my laptop was the only way I could make photographs of us. In the photograph, we’re embracing, but her body’s turning to see herself on the screen, away from me. The photograph crops out our faces but you can see our bond through the touch of our bodies. It’s my nod to Lacan’s mirror stage (and to Mary Kelly too) as refracted through adoption—the moment when the child recognizes their identity as separate from the mother’s. We’re bonded, but she’s already moving away from me, like all children do. Gadisse came to me already separate, and separated from her first mother. Her experience of the world will be radically different than mine because of her race so I’m thinking of that rift, too.

Courtesy Saint Lucy Books

Winant: I’m struck here by your consideration of Barthes’s writing on his mother, Henriette, whom he mourns, seizing on a single picture of her five-year-old self. Though, you write, “He doesn’t reproduce the photograph in the book, and the text pivots on its deliberate withholding. Echoing this loss, he suggests that the medium itself is an invocation of the maternal—a subject and experience both present and lost.”

Larson: Barthes’s casting of photography as a maternal medium is so radical because it doesn’t privilege the idea of birth as the apotheosis of mothering. By this I mean the studium is all cause and effect while the punctum is wild and eschews this tidy economy. He insists on the looping and irrational rhythms of photography’s attachments, and this certainly rang true for my experience of feeling like a mother through those photographs. His sentences about seeing Henriette restored in the Winter Garden photograph—how looking back is one and the same with the present. He’s writing of losing her but there’s this devastating sense of how her wounds—I’m thinking of her parents’ divorce—become Barthes’s, too.

Winant: You make reference to Barthes’s withholding in the book specifically when you write about the second set of images you received of Gadisse, the images that showed her as thriving, two months after you received her referral photograph.

Larson: The first photograph was devastating, which made the second set so shocking in their difference. Those photographs are my Winter Garden photograph. I would never print them, out of respect for her privacy, but those images do contain her ineffable self. I part ways with Barthes’s mournful refusal by including the photograph of us, even if it’s a modest disclosure. Its reveal comes at the end of the book. It’s our happy ending even though it alludes to the complications that we face.

Carmen Winant is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Contemporary Art History at Columbus College of Art and Design.

Hidden Mother was published by Saint Lucy Books in 2017.

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Hale County Revisited

In photographs and a new film, RaMell Ross offers a poetic vision of Southern life.

By Salamishah Tillet

RaMell Ross, Ida Mae, 2012, from the series South County, AL (a Hale County), 2012–14
Courtesy the artist

“Their faces were secret, soft, utterly without trust of me, and utterly without understanding,” lamented journalist James Agee after meeting a young African American couple in Hale County, Alabama, in 1936. “And they had to stand here now and hear what I was saying, because in that country no negro safely walks away from a white man.”

Appearing quite early on in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the landmark text and photobook that Agee and photographer Walker Evans collaborated on to explore the impact of the Great Depression on Southern sharecroppers, Agee’s account of his encounter with these African American residents of Hale County is one of just a handful of descriptions of black life in their over-four-hundred-page epic work.

RaMell Ross, Here, 2012, from the series South County, AL (a Hale County), 2012–14
Courtesy the artist

Agee leaves that scene with regret for bothering them, and, more importantly, flooded by a distance that he feels is impossible to close. “I nodded, and turned away from them, and walked down the road without looking back.” Evans, on the other hand, appears to have been even more alienated. Despite the intense portraits of rural poverty that he produces, there is not one image of an African American in the entire book.

Although photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross is not directly responding to the absence of Hale County black life in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his series South County, AL (a Hale County) (2012–14) and his corresponding experimental film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), provide a poignant and subtle counterpoint to Agee’s and Evans’s willful blindness. Less concerned with maintaining the illusion of objectivity that typifies Evans’s detached, social documentary–style black-and-white photographs of rural tenant farmers and their families, Ross is not encumbered, but rather he dives into the lives of his subjects. His images—both still and moving—travel between the highly intimate and the breathtakingly panoramic in order to offer up an experience as dynamic and sweeping as contemporary Southern life itself.

RaMell Ross, Antonio, 2012, from the series South County, AL (a Hale County), 2012–14
Courtesy the artist

No longer exclusively shaped by the strident laws of Jim Crow, the New Black Belt of twenty-first-century America through Ross’s eyes is marked by possibility, minor movements, familial ties, and the everyday stillness of a black person, or an African American people, just trying to get by. Though his subjects face adversity—racial, economic, and gendered—he is far more interested in lingering in the quotidian, in those rarely captured moments not of mass resistance, but instead of far more ordinary instances of quiet refusal.

RaMell Ross, iHome, 2012, from the series South County, AL (a Hale County), 2012–14
Courtesy the artist

In South County, such occasions are captured through ambiguity. A well-dressed older African American woman wiping her eyes. A tear? A bead of sweat? Her fatigue buttressed and staved off by her sartorial respectability. In Antonio (2012), we witness a young African American man sprawled out on the ground. Exhaustion? Submission? Coercion? His fate somehow both filling in the outline of other black boys and men—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, whose deaths we have mourned collectively—and his ability to get back up, a potential defiance against our recent past. iHome (2012) is both forward-looking and backward-searching; part mediation on slavery as America’s founding sin and part homecoming, Alabama’s prodigal black children return home to reclaim both land and landscape and render them anew.

Still from Hale County This Morning, This Evening, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Hale County This Morning, This Evening pushes against our temporal expectations even more. Shot over five years, the film, in title and method, remaps time as a way of reorienting the viewer’s relationship not just to the South, but to Ross’s black subjects, too. Following the stories of two young African American men, Daniel and Quincy, with whom he became acquainted when he worked as their GED and workforce readiness teacher, Ross consciously tried to re-create the mundane, the banal, or the quiet moments that he experienced working with and learning from his students.

Still from Hale County This Morning, This Evening, 2018
Courtesy the artist

“If you just sit there and watch someone for a very long time, you tend to forget and begin to participate in the person’s life and not judge them,” Ross tells me. “It took three years of me living there to shed all of those platitudinal photographs and all of those empty images of the South and the people there that are ingrained into the ways that people understand that region. I used the camera as an investigation into my way of looking, as opposed to fulfilling these visions of things to which I had previously been introduced.”

Still from Hale County This Morning, This Evening, 2018
Courtesy the artist

“Quiet,” writes literary critic Kevin Quashie in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012), “is a metaphor for the full range of inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior—dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty.”

And while Daniel and Quincy do not govern the legal and social apparatus that ultimately limit their life chances in Alabama, Hale County This Morning, This Evening lingers in the spaces of their self-navigation and self-invention. Such stillness has a political power all its own.

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Term Chair Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University and a regular contributor to the New York Times.

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