Aperture's Blog, page 98

Into the Darkroom

At Ted Partin’s studio, Aperture Connect Members take a peek behind the curtain.

On Thursday, May 17, Aperture Connect Members met with photographer Ted Partin at his studio in Long Island City. The evening, which began with refreshments, was an opportunity for five of Aperture’s younger patrons to speak with Partin about his life and work. Partin, who received an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art in 2004, introduced the small group to his first black-and-white photographs, made with an 8-by-10-inch camera. The group also looked at Partin’s experimentations with Cibachrome, a photographic process that yields film transparencies instead of negatives. Partin, rather than developing the images onto photographic paper, created unique, large-format transparencies with extremely vivid colors and light; for instance, an image of a standing woman illuminated in a lush forest struck the group as peculiar, surreal, and graceful. These resulting one-of-a-kind photographs have become even more rare since Cibachrome shut down production in 2012. (Partin keeps a stockpile of film in his freezer.) The studio and darkroom tour provided an opportunity for young photography enthusiasts to learn about the technical specifications of shooting with large-format film.

Aperture’s Connect Members particularly enjoyed an open discussion of the photographer’s large-format techniques in relation to an ongoing body of work. As members contemplated Partin’s framed color photographs of young, beautiful, and often nude women, the warm tones, intimate bedroom settings, and openness in the women’s gazes sparked a conversation about the relationship between Partin and his subjects. He explained that he will often meet the women and request portrait sessions via Instagram. Keeping in mind the stereotypical portrayal of women as passive subjects, Partin aims to create a collaborative, empowering exchange. The women in his photographs are self-possessed and unposed, and his large-format techniques facilitate a slow, methodical way of making pictures with the women rather than taking pictures of them.

Finally, Members gathered around images of women obscured in black, murky tones, as if Partin had snapped the shutter with the lights off.  Following an error in the darkroom around 2011, Partin spent a year refining another unique large-format process, making what he calls “dark pictures.” In order to see the image in detail, Members had to view each photograph from different angles and distances, much like a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. The group then discussed the ways in which Partin’s “dark pictures” further subvert the viewer’s gaze and expectations of looking at women. After the studio tour concluded, the group retired to a neighborhood bar for a more casual conversation over drinks.

Click here to become an Aperture Connect Member today and to receive an invite to the next meet-up this September!

For more information on Aperture’s membership program, visit our website or contact the membership office at 212.946.7108 or membership@aperture.org.

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13 Photographers on What Freedom Means to Them

Highlights from the Magnum Square Print Sale

Photography has long been a tool of freedom, enabling many to find a voice, discover their identity, and exercise freedom of speech. From Bruce Davidson’s and Leonard Freed’s images of the US civil rights movement, to Newsha Tavakolian’s nuanced portrayals of everyday life in Iran, Magnum photographers are documenting the search for and limitations of freedom, as well as their personal expressions of creative freedom.

This week, for five days only, get signed and estate-stamped, museum-quality, 6-by-6-inch prints by acclaimed Magnum photographers for $100 each. Use this link to make your purchase and a proceed from each sale will support Aperture Foundation.

Bruce Davidson, Alabama, 1965
© the artist /Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson

“From 1961 to 1965, I bore witness to various demonstrations in the civil rights movement. In this photograph, a group of civil rights demonstrators march from Selma to Montgomery to fight for the right to vote. Freedom was then, as it remains today, something that had to be fought for.” —Bruce Davidson

 

Bieke Depoorter, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015
© the artist /Magnum Photos

Bieke Depoorter

“I used to think that I was a street photographer. I pushed myself to take photos on the streets, but in a way, it never felt comfortable. I always had the feeling that I was ‘stealing’ photos from people. With Ou Menya, my project in Russia, things changed. I entered people’s homes to photograph the intimacy of families, and for the very first time, I felt both connected and at ease with the medium, as well as toward the people I was photographing. Although I may have been physically ‘trapped’ inside the house for the first time I felt free. The relationships I built with the people I photographed was crucial to this evolution. I now see photography as a conversation, even though we don’t often share the same language.” —Bieke Depoorter

 

Leonard Freed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. being greeted upon his return to Baltimore after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, October 31, 1964
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Leonard Freed

“Dr. MLKing Jr.: an icon of peace and freedom.” —Elke Susannah Freed, daughter of Leonard Freed

 

Paul Fusco, Robert Kennedy Funeral Train, USA, 1968
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Paul Fusco

“The freedom to make pictures is essential to my being. When I boarded the train that carried RFK’s body from New York to Washington for his burial in the Arlington National Cemetery, the press corps was not allowed to take pictures within the cars themselves. I was frustrated by my inability to record the event—until the train came out of the tunnel and into the light, and I saw the tracks lined with folks wanting to say goodbye to Bobby. By turning my camera outside of the train, and photographing these people, I created my own freedom to chronicle this important event in a way I had not anticipated when I received the assignment from Look magazine at the time.”—Paul Fusco

 

Hiroji Kubota, Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1990
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Hiroji Kubota

“December 1990 was the one hundredth anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre. In this image, Native Americans travel to a gravesite to honor members of the Sioux tribe who were slaughtered in 1890. At the time the Sioux, led by Spotted Elk, had been trying to migrate from one campsite to another when they were intercepted by the 7th Cavalry Regiment.”—Hiroji Kubota

 

Susan Meiselas, Wall, Managua, Nicaragua, July 1979
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Susan Meiselas

Dear Parents: I’m sure you’ve noticed my odd behavior over the past months. I no longer go to parties. I appear and disappear. This is because I’ve become a revolutionary. . . . Our country is full of misery and backwardness. All Nicaraguans have the sacred mission to fight for the freedom of our people.

Excerpt from a letter written by Edgard Lang Sacasa to his parents. His father, Federico Lang, was a wealthy Nicaraguan businessman and supporter of Somoza. Edgard was killed by the National Guard on April 16, 1979, just before the FSLN overthrew the Somoza dictatorship on July 19, 1979.

“Watching from afar as events rapidly unfold in Nicaragua today, I can’t help but think of the dreams that propelled the Nicaraguan people nearly forty years ago, and what they continue to demand and deserve as they struggle again for their future.” —Susan Meiselas

 

Diana Markosian, Doud, Age 11, Wolfsburg, Germany
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Diana Markosian

“It was night when Doud boarded a small rubber boat. It was his first time seeing the ocean, and now he was amongst a group of refugees, escaping their homes in search of freedom elsewhere. Doud didn’t know how to swim and feared the boat would sink. A year later, now in Germany, he is with a handful of other refugees learning to swim as a way of overcoming their fear of water associated with the journey they made to Europe. When I look at this image, I see the trauma that accompanied Doud’s sacrifice. It’s a constant duality for me: there’s no freedom without that risk.” —Diana Markosian

 

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Village of Jayyous, West Bank, Palestine, 2003
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Alessandra Sanguinetti

“I made this picture on my first trip to Palestine. I remember how coming upon this scene felt like a mirage. All around it were checkpoints, barbed wires, Israeli military jeeps, and the hum from the construction of the separation wall; this woman seemed oblivious to it all as she calmly filled her bucket with olives.

The wall now cuts through this village, making 75 percent of the land inaccessible to her and to the farmers who’d worked the land for generations. I dedicate this picture to her and to a future where Palestinians are free from the Israeli occupation of their land and lives.” —Alessandra Sanguinetti

Alessandra Sanguinetti’s profits from this sale will be donated to Lajee Center, a local cultural center in Aida Refugee Camp in Palestine’s West Bank: http://lajee.org.

 

Alec Soth, Cambridge, Minnesota, 2017
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Alec Soth

“After the most recent US election, I stopped traveling and stayed home in Minnesota. I also stopped photographing strangers. I preferred to drive into farm country without talking about politics or ideology. But I was also aware that my ability to do this sort of apolitical wandering was the result of the enormous freedom and privilege with which I was born. Every landscape, no matter how subdued, can be seen as a political landscape.” —Alec Soth

 

Newsha Tavakolian, Iran, 2017
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Newsha Tavakolian

“The young woman in red hesitates as she enters the water. Perhaps this is the first time she has seen the open sea. I did not ask her. I just watched. Her two female family members rest in the sand, their feet in the water.

Everywhere in the world, freedom and eternity find one another on the far horizon of the endless sea. Freedom is often described with big words, but we encounter it every day in the little things we do.” —Newsha Tavakolian

 

Larry Towell, West Bank, 2000
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Larry Towell

“Freedom is something you must struggle for even if you don’t achieve it in your lifetime.” —Larry Towell

 

Alex Webb, Miami Beach, Florida, 1989
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Alex Webb

“In the late 1980s, I often found myself stuck in the Miami airport en route to Haiti, a vibrant and troubled Caribbean country I’d been photographing for a decade. From time to time, election-related riots would engulf Port-au-Prince in violence, and force the shutdown of its airport. While stranded in Miami, I started to take a closer look at Florida—this strange and often confounding state of immigrants and senior citizens, land speculators and migrant farm workers, theme parks and strip malls, alligators and sun seekers. Born out of the frustration of waiting to return to Haiti—and the freedom to wander wherever the Floridian light led me—this series of photographs ultimately became my third book, From the Sunshine State.

Would I have seen this beach scene unfold before my eyes if I hadn’t already spent years photographing in Haiti, with its tropical light and volatile weather? This particular afternoon on Miami Beach, a gust of wind caught this boy’s tangerine-colored towel as he rushed off the beach before the storm. Only later did I notice how the sweep of his beach towel echoes the sweep of the dark clouds overhead.” —Alex Webb

 

Christopher Anderson, Untitled, New York, New York, USA, 2014
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Christopher Anderson

“Free enough to take pictures of things that don’t matter, like spilt cherries on a crosswalk, for instance. . .” —Christopher Anderson

 

Support Aperture today through the Magnum Square Print Sale, open online June 4–8, 2018.

The post 13 Photographers on What Freedom Means to Them appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

BookMaker Symposium

 

Aperture Foundation presents the BookMaker Symposium a day filled with presentations and discussions by key members of the photobook community. Participants will hear from designers, printers, editors, artists, and more, on ways to successfully edit, design, and produce a photobook. The day will consist of short and sharp presentations offering different perspectives on the ecosystem of the photobook. Whether you’re new to bookmaking or have previous experience, this symposium is intended for photographers of all skill levels looking to take their work to book form.



The day will begin with mini-presentations by industry leaders, including Christina Labey and Jason Burstein, cofounders of Conveyor Arts; Craig Mathis from Printed Matter; João Doria, graphic designer and printer; Kris Graves, founder of Kris Graves Projects; and David La Spina, Dana Faconti, and Michael Vahrenwald from ROMAN NVMERALS. In the spirit of creating a space for artists to support one another and share ideas, the day will conclude with a small reception where participants and speakers can get to know one another.



Schedule:

11:00 – 11:10 AM: Introductory Remarks

11:10 – 11:40 AM: Kris Graves from +KGP

11:45 – 12:15 PM: Jason Burstein and Christina Labey from Conveyor Arts

12:20 – 12:50 PM: João Doria

12:55 – 1:25 PM: Sophie Mörner from Capricious

1:25 – 2:30 PM: Lunch Break

2:30 – 3:00 PM: Craig Mathias from Printed Matter

3:05 – 3:35 PM: Nelson Chan from Aperture

3:40 – 4:10 PM: Small Publishers Panel with ROMAN NVMERALS, moderated by Lesley A. Martin

4:10 – 5:00 PM: Reception



schedule subject to change

 

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Tuition:

Tuition for this symposium is $75.

First 20 people to register will receive a free copy of Self Publish: Be Happy

Currently enrolled students and Aperture Members at the $250 level and above receive a $5 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 23
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 or symposium will constitute your agreement to the terms and conditions outlined.

Aperture workshops and symposiums 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 day of the event 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 or symposium 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 and symposiums 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 or symposium less than two weeks 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 and symposiums. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop or symposium up to one week prior to the start date, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of forty participants is required to run this symposium.

 

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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Sofia Coppola on Pictures

The acclaimed director reveals the photographs that inspired her films.

By Philip Gefter

Paul Jasmin, Laura, Los Angeles, 2009
Courtesy the artist and WM Artist Management

“I never thought I would be a filmmaker. It wasn’t something I ever planned,” Sofia Coppola recently told the Guardian. “I felt frustrated at art school. I had so many interests—design, photography, music.” By turning to film she no longer had to choose. The form allowed Coppola to engage all her passions, especially photography, which has been central to shaping her cinematic language. From Coppola’s debut with The Virgin Suicides (1999) to Lost in Translation (2003) to Marie Antoinette (2006), the filmmaker has turned to the history of photography for inspiration for the interiors, costumes, and atmosphere of her films. Storyboards, replete with photographic references, were key to Coppola’s most recent—and controversial—film, the Civil War–era The Beguiled (2017), for which she won the Best Director Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Each of her six feature-length films is visually distinctive, and yet it’s possible to identify in all of them a directorial signature, one that might be characterized by visual calm and compositional clarity.

One sunny morning in early January, writer Philip Gefter sat down with Coppola at her home in Lower Manhattan to discuss the influence of photography on her filmmaking. On the walls hung a number of framed photographs: a William Eggleston of a girl lying in the grass holding a Brownie camera; a Tina Barney from the series Theater of Manners (1997); a Lee Friedlander nude; an Andy Warhol polaroid of Tina Chow. These pictures provided clues not only about Coppola’s knowledge of photography, but also about the subtlety of her sensibility—and became a starting point for their conversation about the look and feel of film.

Guy Bourdin, Untitled, for Charles Jourdan, Fall 1977
© The Guy Bourdin Estate

Philip Gefter: I wonder if you think that there is a tension between photography and film—the still image versus the moving image. Is photography threatened by film? Will video render the still image extinct?

Sofia Coppola: For me, photography and film are two totally different things. My filmmaking begins with images from photography, so I think of it as a starting point for making a film. I love photographs.

Gefter: Yes, I can see that by looking around the room. You mentioned, too, that you have a print upstairs by Helmut Newton of Charlotte Rampling, nude, sitting on a table; also, a picture by Larry Sultan of his father swinging a golf club indoors. So, obviously, you collect photographs.

Coppola: But not in a serious way.

John R. Hamilton, Clint Eastwood, Breakfast in Bed, 1958
© the artist

Gefter: Did you study photography or film?

Coppola: I went to CalArts in the fine art program. I wanted to be a painter but I wasn’t good at it, and my teacher wasn’t encouraging, so I went to ArtCenter, in Pasadena, where I met Paul Jasmin, who taught photography. I sat in on his classes. Then I started spending time in Japan, where a kind of girly snapshot photography was popular in the early ’90s. A friend of mine had a magazine called Dune, and he would hire me to do little fashion jobs in Tokyo—snapshot-like pictures of my girlfriends. I never had the patience to learn very much technically, but I could take snapshots. That’s the extent of it.

Larry Sultan, Dad on Bed, 1984
Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan, MACK Books, and Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco

Gefter: Your first film, The Virgin Suicides, was about teenage girls. How did you make the transition from taking snapshot-like photographs to making movies?

Coppola: Paul Jasmin encouraged me. He thought I had a point of view that was worthwhile, and Dad [Francis Ford Coppola] was always talking about writing. I wasn’t planning on being a filmmaker, but when I read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides (1993), I loved it and thought I would try adapting it. I ended up writing the script and putting a book of visual references together—photographs—to show how I wanted to make the film.

Gefter: Where did the visual references come from?

Coppola: My relationship with photography started as a teenager in the ’80s, looking at fashion magazines. I would also go to art fairs with my mother. Mom encouraged me to start collecting photography because it was the more affordable art at that time. At one art fair, I first saw the photographs of Bill Owens—his series on suburbia—so when I started working on Virgin Suicides those Bill Owens pictures became a reference. I bought one print—an image of girls at a school dance with stars hanging from the ceiling. That picture was definitely in my mind when I worked on the film.

Bill Owens, Eighth Grade Graduation Dance, 1973
Courtesy the artist

Gefter: And, so, the book of photographs you put together—how did you use it for the look of the film?

Coppola: I made these color-xerox books, which included Bill Owens’s photographs from Suburbia (1973); also ’70s Playboy photography, with the nature girl, soft style; and Eggleston colors. The story in the film is a memory, recreated in faded snapshots. I worked with Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, showing him photographs of what I wanted the film to feel like. That’s how I start every movie, sitting with the cinematographer and the art department, looking at photographs, and saying, “This is the look or feeling,” so everyone is informed by it. It’s always the starting point for me, the images.

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

Philip Gefter, the author of Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe (2014), is at work on a biography of Richard Avedon.

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What’s In An Image?

Sharing, surveillance, and data are changing the way we look and see.

By Marisa Olson

Shelly Silver, What I’m Looking For, 2004
© the artist

In the fall of 2016, two American pop cultural icons became unwitting touchstones in the discourse surrounding the contemporary relevance of data. Naturally, I’m speaking of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, both reality-TV celebrities and entrepreneurs. Kardashian was the victim of a horrific gunpoint robbery in her Paris hotel room, only to be brutally victim-blamed in the media for her constant sharing of selfies containing metadata that might lead criminals to her whereabouts. Trump arguably stole the US presidential election by not only bucking the odds—as they had been laid out in predictive national-poll results leading up to Election Day—but also by carrying out essentially civilian psy-ops through contracts with big data firms like Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, whose official tagline is “Uses data to change audience behavior,” and who were also behind the recent buyer’s remorse–laden Brexit vote. While Kardashian’s photosharing practices—a staple of her brand—came under heavy scrutiny, Trump’s big-data battle was armed by info. The firms gleaned from millions of social-media users’ online posts, from photos to text posts to likes.

In fact, today we are seeing a simultaneous and paradoxical blurring of the boundaries between photographs and their associated (formerly meta-)data, and between a media user/consumer’s clinging to a right to privacy versus a tendency to rampantly overshare. This blurring—whether in the name of branding, neoliberal critique, perceived activism, social/familial bonding, or a desire to be validated, i.e., “seen” (given the Pew Trust’s designation of the Millennial generation as that of “Look at Me”)—somehow persists in aligning recognition with the scopic apparatus.

Natalie Bookchin, My Meds, from the Testament series, 2009
© the artist

Make no mistake: The fact that I describe these simultaneous developments (one social, one formal/technological) briefly and in the same breath should not discount the fact that they are both epic in their ramifications and wholly different, even if their coincidence is worth exploring. After all, as artist and writer Trevor Paglen said in a “1,000 Words” feature in Artforum, the intervention of AI and algorithms into photography over the last decade has displaced the human eye in the act of seeing, and has become, in his estimation, “more significant than the invention of photography” itself.

When I think of a photograph today, I think of the actual image floating askew, like some intergalactic curtain, aimless over the liminal threshold between public and private. A steganographic decoy, the site of cathexisquadata for the photographer’s or poster’s (who’s who again?) attendant fears and fantasies, mirror images of twin drives etched into the photo like a watermark in invisible ink.

We began to hear horror stories about this right after 9/11. Terrorists swapping JPEGs that were literal fronts for the cryptic messages buried inside the files. Meanwhile, the “if you see something, say something” administration was erecting a theater of security in which airport lines, public transportation, teenage bedrooms, online profiles, and selfie phones were all players in the newfangled Globe Theatre. Soon millennials and Gen Z social-media users were born, many after 9/11 or too young to remember a time before such visibly increased state surveillance in the name of “homeland security,” for whom a “photo” was almost exclusively a digital object. This is the era in which reality-TV shows like Big Brotherare no longer shocking outliers, but as my colleague Gene McHugh once said succinctly of postinternet art, the medium has shifted from novelty to everyday banality.

Joseph Maida, from his reflection “Pictures without Words” in Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self, 2018
© the artist

I would argue that we’re in an era of photography marked by data ennui. Consider a morning in the life of my own media consumption: Yesterday I checked my email only to find a shockingly prescient promotional message with the subject line, “Is being online fun anymore?” Then I read an article about Roomba vacuum cleaners autonomously collecting data about their owners’ home layouts and lifestyle. After this, I came across a well-received tweet by someone proposing that blood-alcohol levels and their GPS coordinates be collected on people’s social-media posts. Finally, I read Paglen’s article, which points out the politically repressive implications of machines attempting to “recognize” photographic subjects (their race, gender, and age, for instance) according to normative criteria. Somewhere in these scattered scenes, the concept of consent melts away in the hazy playtime of convenience and fooling around online.

Earlier this year, a study out of the Max Planck Institute quantified this data ennui in regard to the privacy risks that users take in posting photos, which are often at odds with their own stated privacy preferences or policies. They were able to identify sixty-eight categories of risk (far more than I think many of us typically realize—part of the point) in the form of information that machines are able to glean in photos. This includes details like recognizable geographic features in the background, a wedding ring suggesting relationship status, objects in the image that might indicate medical history, a child’s hand holding an object that might indicate parental status, and many more elements to which people might not give a second thought. The study’s authors were advocating for what they called a “Visual Privacy Advisor,”distinct from general, categoric text descriptors that could algorithmically recognize and warn users that images posed privacy risks. The machines could see better than humans or could be trained to care more.

Zach Blas, Fag Face Mask, October 2012, from the series Facial Weaponization Suite
©the artist
October 20, 2012 , Los Angeles, CA

Negotiating participation in image culture in an era of constant state surveillance and self-broadcasting is not easy. For the last fifteen years, there’s been increasing pressure to participate in both arenas, to some extent. One is compelled to submit to surveillance “for the greater good,” if not to participate in various layers of sousveillance—sous being the French counterpart to sur, a looking from below rather than above. Citizens’ countersurveillance has thus only amped up in the six decades since the phrase “the whole world is watching” has been in circulation, following the rapid proliferation of cameras under the doctrine of media convergence.

It’s not just the word photo that is up for redefinition today. There is a casual slippage between many of the terms we previously used to ground ourselves—in the art world, the sphere of computing, and in digital culture writ large. For instance, I’ve written previously about how one of the primary symptoms of network culture, in the post-internet era, is a slippage between the definition of transparency-as-visible in surveillance contexts to transparency-as-invisible in computing parlance. We also tend to conflate participatory art and participatory media, assuming equal levels of informed consent on the part of participants.

And that is the ultimate question raised above: to what extent are people informed participants in the sphere of photography today, and subsequently, in the world of image-embedded data? The participation question might be the easier half to address: there is a tug of war between a desire to expose and a desire to be protected. But to be informed feels nigh on impossible in the undertow of the theoretical singularity invoked by rapidly advanced encryption, AI, and surveillance technologies and their deployment.

Joseph Maida, from his reflection “Pictures without Words” in Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self, 2018
© the artist

Regardless of the everydayness or banality of the photos at stake (or perhaps because of this uncannyness), the more one thinks about it, the more one feels like the subject of a Hollywood virtual-reality production. The piece of paper, the screen, the pixel, the contact lens, or the neural implant stands in for the representation that is perceived to be not-there/previously-there/ there-not-there—whether it is ultra-high-resolution or the kind of “lossy-copy” Hito Steryl has called the “poor image” (a digital artifact accelerating toward a thing of the past; an accidental fallacy). No matter how generous one is in theorizing the materiality of conceptual or digital or performative or time-based or otherwise “ephemeral” media, we have to remember that it is not only image quality that distinguishes digital from analog; it is data, the code itself. The digital is always already a medium of doubles, if not duplicity—not necessarily because it is simple to forge, as we easily assume when we swap the term “Photoshop” for “digital,” or forget how long predigital cinema carried out special effects—but because alphanumeric code is one language now capable of telling a story altogether different or adjacent to the images that overlay it.

Those of us interested in photography and new media have spent much of the last fifteen years theorizing and aestheticizing digital archives, but we would be remiss not to recognize that individual photos are now archives. That is, not just indices of their immediate metonymic namesake (the light that winked them into being, or the space/time event to which the photo bears an immediate, proximate, and consummate relationship) but also carriers (carrions) of whole libraries of information. Consider this in context of a society with ubiquitous image-making devices, where taking and sharing images is de rigueur. People are walking around with databases of databases of databases, ready to post them to public databases that will be hosted on other civic or corporate databases, for analysis by other unforeseen data firms, with unknown aims. The disparity of access to public and private information, the corporate colonization of the net that seeks to monopolize the space, and the looming legislative threats to net neutrality that hover over the landscape of cloud computing only compound this vista. Suddenly the once-novel concept of “database aesthetics” sounds not only trite but Pollyanna.

Artists and other supporters of the photographic arts (by which I mean good old-fashioned point-and-shoot, then print-on-paper photography) who are, at this point, still reading might feel that their practice has been sidestepped in this essay. On the contrary: One of the reasons I so related to the email that asked, “Is being online fun anymore?” is that I once made internet art, cofounded a “pro-surfer” net art community, and curated new-media art at a time when the internet felt like a more utopian, adventurous, less litigious, more neutral place in which the art we were all making had neither become co-opted by corporate channels nor was up for comparison (by us or anyone else) with social media. Likewise, I do not mean to cast “fine art” photography as a fledgling outlier kicked to the curb by the evil internet. In fact, I would invoke the French dramatist Antonin Artaud in arguing that in this era of questionable “truthiness” and threatened arts funding, the nation is in greater need than ever of the arts, if not art therapy.

Ann Hirsch, Here For You (Or My Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca), 2010
© the artist

Few people realize that it was Artaud who coined the term “virtual reality” in 1933, when articulating the concept of the theater and its double in his initial manifesto on the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud wanted artists to show everyday viewers what was at stake; to create a moment in the middle of all the other moments of buzzing from here to there, one that virtually re-creates or doubles the everyday, but allows us to bifurcate and peel off our consciousness from the imitation—not unlike a nightmare that allows us to wake up from a worst-case scenario and be relieved it didn’t happen, a sort of reverse wish-fulfillment.

I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to change in order for theater to change; but I do believe that theater, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things.

That is why I am proposing a theater of cruelty … Not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly severed nostrils through the mail; but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And theater has been created to teach us that first of all … But it should not be forgotten that if a theatrical gesture is violent, it is also disinterested; and that theater teaches precisely the uselessness of the action which, once accomplished, is never to be done again.4

“Never to be done again” would be nice, but this, too, may be Pollyanna and reaching for the stars. Nonetheless, I like Artaud’s idea of deploying the creative work to split use from uselessness and violence from healing.

Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and curator. 

This essay is adapted from Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self, now available from Aperture.

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Mary Virginia Swanson: Beyond Print: The Life of Your Photobook Beyond Publication

 

Mary Virginia Swanson led a two-day workshop at Aperture Foundation, working with photographers who were interested in how to build their audience, establish value for their work, and extend the life of their photobook beyond publication. The workshop focused on ways newly published photographers can conduct targeted research; from examining existing and desired audiences to discussing the possibility of exhibitions, participants broadened their perspectives about methods that will aid in securing exposure and longevity for their work.

        On the first day, Swanson introduced the photobook market and explained how to research and build an audience. She discussed the importance of knowing your audience, the value of extending the work into exhibition form, and how to build a dialogue beyond the printed work. Then Swanson took a brief intermission from the discussion, and participants had the pleasure of visiting sepiaEYE gallery—upstairs from Aperture—and viewing various prints and photobooks on display, as well as speaking with the gallery director, Esa Epstein. In the afternoon, participants presented their photobooks and works in progress, and practiced marketing concepts to the group, in addition to strategizing methods of targeted research.

        On the second day, participants continued to present their works in progress for photobooks and beyond. Swanson provided valuable critique and advice to participants in regards to their work and the existing art markets, including academic, fine art, and commercial. Swanson explained simple but useful ways that one could adjust their social and media platforms to better target their audience and market to it. In the afternoon, Swanson shared examples of her favorite photobooks and publishers with participants, explaining that every publisher has something different to offer—and thus that not every publisher will be the right fit. The workshop concluded with a discussion about the various types of exhibitions and their usefulness, social media tools, and educational programming that could be tied to a photobook project. Participants left the workshop with a wealth of new knowledge and a plan on how to tackle the task of executing and marketing their work beyond print.

 

Mary Virginia Swanson is an author and educator who helps artists find the strengths in their work, identify appreciative audiences, and present their photographs in an informed, professional manner. She draws from her thirty-year career spanning the fine-art, documentary, photojournalism, publishing, and licensing arenas to lend sage advice to artists at all professional levels. Swanson coauthored with Darius Himes the acclaimed Publish Your Photography Book, which was revised and updated in 2014 (Princeton Architectual Press). Visit mvswanson.com or @maryvirginiaswanson.

 

Aperture Foundation NY.

Queer Looking, Queer Being

How can photography transform representations of non-binary and transgender bodies?

By Rowan Renee and Arno Mokros

Rowan Renee, Untitled, 2015, from the series Z
Courtesy the artist

This conversation is excerpted from a much longer dialogue between artist Rowan Renee and critical viewer Arno Mokros. Our conversation has spanned over two years, fifty written pages, and many hours of recorded audio. We first met in 2015, during an open studio at Pioneer Works, where Rowan presented work as an artist in residence. The photographs on view were from Z, a series of nude ambrotypes dealing with gender ambiguity across a spectrum of trans, cis and gender-nonconforming identities. Arno’s first encounter with Renee’s photographic work at Pioneer Works sparked an initial conversation, which then expanded into an ongoing dialogue.

Rowan Renee: Do you have an image that stands out in your mind? When I met you during the open studio, I remember watching you look at the images and thinking that I could tell that they were making an impact on you. I wonder if there was an image you saw on that visit that particularly struck you?

Rowan Renee, Untitled, 2015, from the series Z
Courtesy the artist

Arno Mokros: I think the image pictured above was in your studio the first time I was there. If you’re someone who’s familiar with the trans community, there’s a series of symbols or signifiers attached to trans male bodies that are very recognizable. One of them is chest scars, top surgery scars. They are so visible in this image. I have an immediate recognition of that signifier because of my own trans identity and internalization of what trans men look like. Actually, I consider that to be part of the process of initiation to being trans: learning what it means to live a trans experience on a bodily level. That aspect of initiation has involved me studying what the body is “supposed” to look like as a trans man.

Renee: What do you mean when you say what a trans man is supposed to look like? Are you talking about assimilating to conventional representations of masculinity?

Mokros: What trans men look like as a type. What an attractive trans man looks like. What is acceptable for that body. I read this model’s body as masculine for particular reasons, in response to certain signifiers, which all operate to facilitate “passing” as one gender or another. I think there’s a distinction between recognizing a body as masculine-of-center, as opposed to discerning “maleness” and “femaleness” in terms of sex. This image puts on display the intersection of masculinity and female-embodiedness. Something I always say is that “I’m a queer-bodied person.” And that’s because queerness is always visible on my body if it is exposed. So I see a specifically queer body in this image, a representation of an expression of trans masculinity, in both an embodied and performative sense. As a viewer, I don’t actually know this person’s identity, but the judgments and determinations through my own perception are inseparable from my queer subjectivity. I acknowledge that I project a lot of myself onto that image, onto what I’m arguing that this image puts forth. In part, my insecurities about maleness/masculinity, femaleness/femininity, bodies, sex, and gender are on display through my own reading of this image.

Renee: The queer embodiment in this image is legible to you as a trans man.

Mokros: Yes, but I know the signifiers. Like being able to recognize chest scars as part of the trans body—that’s legible to me.

Rowan Renee, Untitled, 2015, from the series Z
Courtesy the artist

Renee: In the experience of talking to different people who have seen this image, there are a lot of people who don’t know the signifiers, and read it in a very confused way. In the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative that is so widespread in the mainstream understanding of trans identities, I think there’s an underlying feeling that there is a contradiction present if the genitals don’t match what is assumed to be biologically essential to gender. Like that all men have penises.

Mokros: Really? I can’t even fathom that level of unfamiliarity anymore, but that just shows how invisible trans bodies are, really. The first time I saw this in your studio I didn’t have a context for your work and I didn’t have any assumptions about the content of your work, or who your work would represent. So I walked in and I was honestly quite pleasantly surprised to see bodies like mine. In my own life, I seek out images of trans bodies for a variety of reasons, but they’re usually not presented to me spontaneously. Seeing your work was a moment of realizing someone else was on the same wavelength. I don’t mean that I felt a connection to this person because he is also trans, but rather that I could recognize that you considered some of the same questions that I did in the process of documenting, in considering other trans bodies. It introduced me to an immediate sense of trust with you. Probably if I hadn’t seen this image I wouldn’t have talked to you at all. As much as I would have liked your work anyway, it would have been really different. I might not have been as curious.

Renee: Am I projecting if I say that you connect to this image because you are able to empathize with the sitter, and that you recognize in him a vulnerable visibility of the body that you relate to?

Rowan Renee, Untitled, 2015, from the series Z
Courtesy the artist

Mokros: I think it evokes the potential, the possibility (and maybe even the risk) that my own body will be made visible. I think about how other people read me every day. It is part of my routine to be sure I pass as male whenever possible. I avoid situations in which I am forced to explain my gender history. I don’t often—or really ever—present my body to other people on its own terms. I don’t know what it feels like to have everything on display. I think some people are confused by the bodies in these photographs or trans bodies in general because they are simply ignorant of the diversity of bodies in this world. I spend time wondering: twenty years from now, will the general population recognize that trans bodies are not anomalous, but rather just some of many possible forms? Will we be at a place when people no longer assume bodies are either male or female? Personally, I don’t know what it would feel like to occupy space in my body on its own terms, to not try to be seen as a cisgender male to the outside world. But this image is visible to the outside world now, and it isn’t about being seen as a cisgender male.

Renee: It’s about showing that you’ re not.

Mokros: So often, and I would say too often, images of trans people have been about—especially in erotic or porn settings—gender expression as a trick. As if a person’s genitalia reveals that you’ve been fooled and “this is really a man” or “really a woman.” I was attracted to your work because I felt that you were doing something more than “documenting” trans and gender-nonconforming bodies as curiosities to be fetishized or as human interest pieces. The models in this body of work are vulnerable as nude subjects before the camera, and yet I feel they are safe within your frame, and that you resist and protect your models from being fetishized and misunderstood because of how you capture them. When I came in contact with your work, I felt that you were contributing to the representation of queer and trans bodies, but also thinking beyond representation—perhaps even navigating your own relationship to gender. It’s  often assumed that trans people are subjects, while photographers occupy an objective, masculinist, cisgender perspective. As an artist, I think you make clear that you are a part of the community you photograph, and that you are immersed in the same questions about queer identification, representation, and self-determination.

Renee: Yes, I think you’re touching on the myth of objectivity in documentary work. I wasn’t following a proper documentary photographic practice. I didn’t see myself as an outside observer while making Z, but I also didn’t yet see how I fit into the conversation. I was searching for a language and a community that gave form to feelings that otherwise seemed illegitimate in a heteronormative (and homonormative) society. I was learning how to be queer. I worry that it sounds narcissistic to shift the focus of a portraiture project to my own inner landscape, but I also think the motivations of the photographer are relevant and inevitably affect the work. I’ve been thinking a lot about how queer knowledge is transmitted through dynamics of interpersonal relationships between queer people. How a queer education often plays out in relationships rather than within institutions.

Rowan Renee, Untitled, 2015, from the series Z
Courtesy the artist

Mokros: I actually think your work creates a queer space, and it sounds like you’re saying that the photographic process itself was a creation of queer space in which queer knowledge passed between you and the models you worked with.

Renee: Yes! That’s it. Part of the process of making Z was to fight against power dynamics of model-photographer relationships. But, I don’t want to sound overly naive about power or my role as a photographer. There’s a reason why queer spaces often radically challenge systemic power structures, and part of that is an underlying recognition of how power does not necessarily have to be wielded as an absolute. I thought of my role as a photographer as a constant negotiation of the terms and boundaries of the artist-model relationship, which implies that consent isn’t fixed or absolute. It’s in flux and always on the table for renegotiation. There were aspects of my process that were about surrendering control, both in how I worked with people and the technical limitations of the wet-plate collodion process. For me, this helped me understand why I seek out queer images: to access queer possibilities for being in the world. It is especially important as a genderqueer person, because this is still a contested area without legal recognition in most places.

Mokros: It seems to me that, in your practice, seeking out queer images also involves producing queer images. They are disseminated to all your viewers, but might especially resonate with a viewer like me, or other queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks. You’re queering our sense of possibility.

Rowan Renee is a lens-based artist working with dynamics of gender and power.

Arno Mokros is a writer and print-based artist and the coeditor of Little Pharma.SaveSave

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The ’90s are Back

Six artists on the photobook at the end of the millennium.

It was the age of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Friends, grungy flannel shirts and supermodels in Calvin Klein underwear, dial-up modems and fruity-colored iMacs, Lady Di and Tony Blair’s Britain, Bill Clinton’s White House, and the moment when Americans learned what the definition of is is. The fin-de-millennium decade of the 1990s—that “bridge to the twenty-first century”—marked a moment of immense cultural change, most notably with the arrival of the internet and the wired information landscape, the rapid rise of Photoshop, and desktop publishing. The ’90s was also an uncertain moment in photography. Would Kodak and Polaroid survive the leap to digital imaging? Would Corbis and Getty Images control the future of image distribution? Would the interactive CD-ROM become the preferred delivery system for photographers?

In the 1990s, the photobook juggernaut as we know it today was in embryonic form. Its DNA was in place: digital layout, type, and printing techniques were chipping away at the barriers to entry of traditional publishing models. Gerhard Steidl was cutting his teeth as a printer, and working closely with Walter Keller’s Scalo, which made critical contributions to the photobook as a medium. Scalo improved upon traditional models with new titles by Nan Goldin (The Other Side, 1993), Paul Graham (Empty Heaven, 1995; End of an Age, 1999), and Michael Schmidt (U-ni-ty, 1996), as well as with expansive contributions, such the first major monograph on Seydou Keïta (Seydou Keïta, 1997), which remains a touchstone in the world of African photography. Japanese photobooks had begun to reclaim their international stature with titles like Nobuyoshi Araki’s Tokyo Lucky Hole (1990) and Takashi Homma’s Tokyo Suburbia (1998). By the 2000s, advancements in technology allowed for far superior printing and reproduction quality, and DIY publishing became easier than ever. With the saturation of smartphones worldwide and the popularity of tablets and e-readers, the photobook—an object to be held, placed on a shelf, and shared hand-to-hand—may have become all the more valuable, an artwork in itself. Looking back at the decade that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, and ended amid the inconvenient truth of the 2000 US presidential election, what did the photobooks from that era mean to photographers coming of age in the 1990s and early 2000s? —Lesley A. Martin and Brendan Embser

 

Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh, Scalo, New York, 1996

Laia Abril on Richard Billingham, Ray’s a Laugh

I perfectly recall the first time I saw this book. I remember something ripping through me as I stepped inside Richard’s father Ray’s house, as if I could smell the dampness of the carpet mixed with the sweet-sour taste of overripe fruit, the acidity of alcohol infused with his mother Elizabeth’s tobacco roughness. I remember the intensity of the colors, the overwhelming composition, the stifling layout. I remember turning the pages as if moving through the corridors, facing their unfiltered, raw intimacy and dancing between the hate-love of a tedious routine frozen in time. I remember empathizing with Richard’s frustration, with his own photographic catharsis.

Laia Abril is a multidisciplinary artist.

Gerhard Richter, Atlas, Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 1997

Hannah Whitaker on Gerhard Richter, Atlas

Flipping through Gerhard Richter’s Atlas now is different than it was in the ’90s: the gridded image archive lacked the strong association with the digital milieu. Reissued in 1997, it was the time before the proliferation of writing on the proliferation of images.  Then, it seemed to say something about negotiating the personal and the universal, apparently a preoccupation of many twentieth-century Germans. Now, its prescience is overwhelming. What has remained constant in looking at Atlas is its defiance of a photograph’s habitual instrumentation—that is, to show, sell, or remember something. Its seemingly endless grids of iterative images show that photographs can also be mute. They can be blunt objects, incapable of meaningful operation outside of a system, like a neuron without a brain.

Hannah Whitaker is a Brooklyn-based photographer.

Neil Winokur, Everyday Things, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1994

Matthew Leifheit on Neil Winokur, Everyday Things

The Smithsonian Institution’s seminal Photographers at Work series published Everyday Things, Neil Winokur’s only monograph to date, in 1994. With an essay by Vince Aletti, the slim paperback abridged Winokur’s vast archive, showing the democratic treatment he continues to give to all objects, people, and animals that cross in front of his camera. In the book’s sequence of images, a portrait of Andy Warhol sits between a close-up of a woman’s shoe and a study of an ear of corn standing on end. They are followed by a toy gun, then a picture of an Irish setter named Doc. A few pages later, one of my favorite photographs of all time is reproduced: a blue, full-frame still life of a cold glass of water, ripe with condensation. All are given the same semi-glamorous, semi-weird isolated treatment against an atmospherically neon-hued background. It’s somewhat like a commercial studio, but less slick, purposefully nodding to the genre of amateur photography, to family snapshots, to the things that actually matter in peoples’ lives. Winokur’s this-equals-that approach to both public and private representation set a precedent for the quasi-commercial work of photographers such as Roe Etheridge, as well as for the torrent of brightly colored still lifes common on websites like Tumblr since the early 2010s.

Matthew Leifheit is a photographer, curator, publisher, and interviewer.

Mike Mandel, Making Good Time, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1989

Clare Strand on Mike Mandel, Making Good Time

Mike Mandel’s Making Good Time currently travels in the trunk of my car. I’ve been driving around with it for the past four years or so, and it has transferred through at least one change of car. I’m an advocate of driving books around and keeping them close. I think of the phrase “book osmosis”—the idea being that one doesn’t necessarily have to read books, but can consume them through close proximity.

Making Good Time is an awkward book. It doesn’t fit well on a shelf—another reason it’s in my boot—and with its glossy, hardback cover, it has the object quality of a withdrawn local-library book that has been sold off in a charity store. This is partly why I like it.

I bought Making Good Time in 2004, when I was researching a new work, The Betterment Room: Devices for Measuring Achievement, which referenced the savvy American husband-and-wife team Lillian and Frank Gilbreth. I attached a homemade set of lights to my hands and recorded the act of making a photograph—the intangible rendered tangible, or perhaps the tangible made intangible; I’m still working out if there is a difference when it comes to photography. Ideas and propositions seem central to Mandel’s work—making photographs for the stomach, which then direct the eye. Mandel’s oeuvre, for me, rejects visual repetition and “styles” in favor of the need to understand the photographic medium, and, more important, the idiosyncratic nature of life. With its absurdist aims and disco lighting, Making Good Time is a perfect example.

Clare Strand is a British conceptual photographic artist based in Brighton, England.

Jita Hanzlovà, Rokytnik, Museum Schloss Hardenberg, Velbert, Germany, 1997

Gregory Halpern on Jitka Hanzlová, Rokytnik

One of the great, underrated photobooks of all time, Rokytník  consists of pictures Jitka Hanzlová made in her hometown, Rokytník, Czech Republic, in the early 1990s. Between 1982 and 1990, Hanzlová lived in Germany, in exile from the Communist regime that had taken power in her homeland. When Communism fell, she returned to Rokytník and began this work, photographing old acquaintances, neighbors, and other people known to her family. The passage of time—and its losses—are ever-present in the work: the book opens with a clothesline in summer and ends with the same clothesline in snow. She disproportionately photographs children and old people, and she does so with a kindness and sensitivity that steers clear of romanticism. Her photographs of children are particularly profound, as they manage to describe the vulnerability of childhood as well as its pleasures and wonders. A direct, powerful work that never tries too hard, Rokytník’s power lies in the visual glory of what simply is. Unlike any other, this book reminds me that simplicity—in style, form, and concept—is powerful when the content is good.

Gregory Halpern is a photographer who published five photobooks of his work, including ZZYZX (MACK, 2016).

Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home, Abrams, New York, 1992

Hank Willis Thomas on Larry Sultan, Pictures from Home

When I was a student at NYU, I was a library monitor, so I sat in a room full of photobooks and had nothing else to do because there was no internet. I looked through photobooks all day throughout my shift and that was really what gave me an encyclopedic knowledge of ’80s and ’90s photobooks. Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home was in a lot of ways inspiration for my book Pitch Blackness, about my cousin’s murder and my family’s—and my own—response to that. Larry’s book made the personal and private, public. It showed a level of vulnerability of the artist, and his family members as collaborators in the making of the work. I think Pictures from Home really helped me to see how a photographic project can actually translate beyond just what happens in the camera, and what’s presented in a book, through the use of text, interviews, and archival images as well as the photographs that Larry took. I think it really taught me a lot about how multifaceted a photobook can be.

Later, I went to go see Larry give a talk about his work and collaborations with Mike Mandel; that, and also seeing Jim Goldberg talk about Rich and Poorand Raised by Wolves, led to my going to the California College of the Arts and to Larry’s becoming my mentor and friend.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist based in Brooklyn.

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Starring Sanlé Sory

Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, Untitled, 1965/75
© the artist and courtesy Florent Mazzoleni

Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, Tiamodjan, the lead guitarist for Echo del Africa Nacional, 1965/75
© the artist and courtesy Florent Mazzoleni

Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, Untitled, 1965/75
© the artist and courtesy Florent Mazzoleni

Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, Double-exposure self-portrait in Place du Paysan Noir (Black Farmer Square), ca. 1970
© the artist and courtesy Florent Mazzoleni.

Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, A Fula man, 1970/80
© the artist and courtesy Florent Mazzoleni

Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, Untitled, 1965/75
© the artist and courtesy Florent Mazzoleni

The full title of the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty Country of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) speaks to the depths of the relationship between Ibrahima Sanlé Sory and the communities he photographs. Customers flocked to the portrait studio Sory opened in the style-conscious city of Bobo-Dioulasso around 1960, the year the West African Republic of Upper Volta gained independence from France. Volta Photo gathers approximately eighty, mostly vintage photographs of the 1960s and 1970s, together with photographic album covers from the era. The exhibition also includes Sory’s signature painted backdrop, along with studio lamps and props that he still uses today. As Sory says, in his studio “religious people, artists, musicians, and everyone could become a hero.”

Volta Photo is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through August 19, 2018.

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Man Ray as You Don’t Know Him

Rediscovering the surrealist artist’s Unconcerned Photographs.

By Simon Baker

Man Ray, Unconcerned Photograph, 1959
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

In 1960, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held The Sense of Abstraction, its second show on the relationship between photography and abstract art in under ten years. Following Abstraction in Photography, in 1951, which mixed scientific and fine art photographs, The Sense of Abstraction shifted direction, redefining the topic at hand. The curatorial approach of the 1960 show was bolstered by the international profile of Abstract Expressionism, particularly the posthumous celebrity of its fastest burning star, Jackson Pollock. MoMA curator Grace Mayer brought together three hundred works by over seventy artists, with many names that one would expect at this time, such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer, but also with a look back to the generation of László Moholy-Nagy, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

Recently, while researching in MoMA’s collection, I was not surprised to find Man Ray on this list of artists, but the body of work appearing with his name, Unconcerned Photographs (1959), was unfamiliar to me. In response to Mayer’s invitation to contribute to The Sense of Abstraction, Man Ray sent MoMA a group of Polaroids produced by swinging the camera around on its strap in his Paris studio. He indicated very minimal cropping instructions and suggested that they be reproduced as gelatin-silver prints. The museum then ordered seven Masonite-mounted enlargements for the exhibition, so that, as objects, they would sit happily alongside the works of Man Ray’s contemporaries.

Man Ray, Unconcerned Photograph, 1959
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

It’s interesting, however, to reflect on the fact that both the process and title of Man Ray’s contribution ran counter to the prevailing values of most of the photographers celebrated in The Sense of Abstraction, for whom painstaking composition and exceptional printing were de rigueur. Could it be that Man Ray’s Unconcerned Photographs were offered to MoMA with more than a hint of an ex-Dadaist’s wink? And that the relative lack of concern, since 1960, for this body of work suggests a deeper poetry in Man Ray’s sense of abstraction than even he might have dreamed possible? With the inclusion, more than fifty years later, of Unconcerned Photographs in the 2018 Tate Modern exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, Man Ray finally finds himself in the company not just of photographers, but of the painters and sculptors who contributed to the invention of abstract art.

Simon Baker is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography), Tate.

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art is on view at Tate Modern, London, May 2–October 14, 2018.

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