Aperture's Blog, page 99

May 2, 2018

Southern Futures

Mark Steinmetz’s project on the Atlanta Airport portrays the American South in all its complexity and contradiction.

By Izzy Leung

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

The most recent iteration of the High Museum of Art’s Picturing the South series features the work of Mark Steinmetz, originally from Athens, Georgia, who focused his project on Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In one of the world’s most heavily trafficked airports, Steinmetz explores the paradox of the space as the crossroads of Southern identity, both in the mainstream and on the periphery. The sixty hazy, black-and-white photographs featured in the exhibition imagine the South in a new light, and ask questions about the future of southern photography. I recently spoke with Gregory Harris, the High Museum’s assistant curator of photography, about the show.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Izzy Leung: Can you tell us about the history behind the Picturing the South series?

Gregory Harris: The Picturing the South project was initiated in 1996 to coincide with a major survey of southern photography in order to bring some new, fresh work into the exhibition. The first artists commissioned were Sally Mann, Dawoud Bey, and Alex Webb, and the the project has continued to roll from there. The South has had a fairly significant role in the history of photography, with the photographs that Walker Evans and William Christenberry both made in Hale County, Alabama, the photography of the civil rights movement, being some notable examples. At the High, we try to emphasize the South’s place within the history of photography as a subject that has been compelling to people who are natives of the region, but also for people from other parts of the country and the world. The commissions are a way we can add to that ongoing conversation.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Leung: So, in order to properly picture the South, why did the High Museum choose photography, rather than a different medium?

Harris: Photography may not seem like an obvious answer, but I can’t think of a medium that’s better suited for telling stories and representing the region. A lot of the work that has come out of this commission has been documentary in nature. Richard Misrach’s long-term examination of “Cancer Alley” along the Mississippi River is a great example. There have been some artists who have taken a more experimental approach, like Sally Mann, who started seriously investing in the collodion process in relation to the Southern landscape. Abelardo Morell made pictures using mirrors and frames set in some of the natural environs around Atlanta. But, for the most part, it’s been a representational documentary project. Photography gives artists a way to articulate a distinct vision and a distinct approach to whatever subject matter they happen to be dealing with.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2012
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Leung: How are Mark Steinmetz’s images representative of the South? What about the Atlanta airport conveys something greater about the South?

Harris: Mark’s pictures position Atlanta as a global hub. The Atlanta airport is the busiest airport in the world—you can get basically anywhere from Atlanta. By digging into that idea, he’s looking at a contemporary South that is a player on a global stage. Between the music, film, and art scenes, which are all definitely becoming more robust, Atlanta has developed an outsized cultural presence. Despite the fact that it’s a relatively small city, Atlanta is a major hub for a lot of activity on a national and global scale, and the airport is in some ways a mechanism and also a metaphor for that activity. Mark presents the airport as a paradox, contrasting the human-made with the natural world, the public with the private. That kind of complexity and contradiction are emblematic of a region as large and varied as the South.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Leung: The title of Steinmetz’s series, Terminus (2018), positions the city as the end of the line or the terminating point, yet, as you said, maintains Atlanta as an intersection of culture and transit. How do you think the word terminus fits into the vision of his project and the cultural history of Atlanta at large?

Harris: Terminus comes from the original name of the city when it was built at the intersection of two railroad lines. Since its founding in the 1830s, Atlanta has been this intersection for various kinds of transportation, moving people and goods around the region and country.

One of the things that interested Mark about the airport is that it is a liminal place where people are leaving one place behind and going off to another. Thinking more broadly or metaphorically, they could be leaving one chapter of their life behind and starting off on a new adventure. A lot of Mark’s work looks at people and places on the margins of the mainstream, and the edges of cities. He takes a lot of pictures on the road, particularly on highways. The highway becomes a metaphor for transition and a way of expressing a longing for something. The airport fits in perfectly—it is literally at the edge of the city; it’s something that despite its size and how busy it is, it’s still peripheral to our everyday thinking. The airport is so outside normal, everyday life for many people that they have a different kind of experience in the airport. In the pictures that Mark took of people, they’re almost completely lost in thought, often alone, or if they’re near other people, they are gazing out a window, or looking at their phone. They are lost in their own world, disconnected and lost in contemplation.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2016
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Leung: When Mark was taking the photographs, was he in the midst of traveling, or did he make special trips to shoot?

Harris: For the most part, Mark made the photographs during his normal travel. He would arrive at the airport early or stay late after a flight and make pictures while he was waiting. He also didn’t get any special access for anything he was shooting. There are no pictures of security checkpoints or behind-the-scenes areas. Everything he photographed is open and accessible to the public. He didn’t make many special trips, with the exception of the times he went to shoot in the neighborhood at the edges of the airport that are completely overgrown by kudzu and trees. There are also several pictures he made at night from a hotel that is located along the runway. He would get a room that overlooked the runways, set up a tripod, and make long-exposure pictures of the planes taking off and landing.

Mark tends to make his work wherever he happens to be, and out of whatever is happening around him. There’s no staging or setup—it’s intuitive and improvised. He’s very much an old-school photographer in that vein.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2017
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Leung: What can we expect to see from the next two Picturing the South exhibitions, featuring Debbie Caffery and Alex Harris?

Harris: Those commissions are both still ongoing. Debbie is pretty close to completing her commission. She photographed agricultural communities in the Mississippi Delta that, over the last twenty to thirty years, have rapidly been losing population as the economies have shifted and people have moved into urban centers. Debbie’s work is very emotionally charged and evocative. She shoots in black and white and has an amazing sense of light and tonality that creates a mood that give the pictures an edge.

Alex Harris has been photographing on independent film sets throughout the South. He is really interested in how the South is portrayed in cinema. He was the set photographer for Steven Soderbergh’s film about Che Guevara and that sparked his interest in shooting on film sets. Alex has been photographing in ways that reveal the artifice of the production while also photographing the scenes themselves as they’re being acted out in such a way that you might never know he was on a film set. Some of these pictures clearly have a melodramatic quality that almost look like a Jeff Wall. It’s clear that something is being played up for an audience of one kind or another. The ways that he’s playing with narrative and artifice is really exciting.

Mark Steinmetz, Untitled, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Leung: The two upcoming photographers are distinctly from the South, whereas previously commissioned photographers, such as Martin Parr, Richard Misrach, and Alex Webb, are not. How does this change the project?

Harris: There had been a lot of discussion amongst the photography community here in Atlanta, in which people asked, “Why have there not been more southern photographers who have received this commission? Why aren’t we celebrating and highlighting the talent that is here in the region?” So with this group, there was a conscious choice made to commission artists who are from the South. But, historically, our curators have used the projects as a way to collaborate with some of the most prominent and promising contemporary photographers and give them an avenue to create new bodies of work and try out something new, whether that’s a new process or a new subject. The commission is a way to open up possibilities and present opportunities for artists to engage with the southern landscape and culture.

I think one of the things that the High’s photography program has done really well over the years is to look closely at the South, but to do so in a way that isn’t provincial. We show work from all over the country and across the world, and place that in conversation with the unique, complicated history and culture that is characteristic of the South. To embrace the region, but not at the expense of everything else that is going on in the wider world.

Izzy Leung is the editorial work scholar at Aperture magazine.

Mark Steinmetz: Terminus is on view at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, through June 3, 2018.

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Published on May 02, 2018 09:14

April 30, 2018

Behind the Scenes at Foam Talent

During a private tour at Red Hook Labs, Aperture Members learned the about up-and-coming photographers taking the field by storm.

On Saturday, March 24, Aperture Patrons and Members met at Red Hook Labs for a private viewing of the annual Foam Talent exhibition, hosted by the Amsterdam-based, internationally operating photography museum. Since 2007, Foam has organized a yearly scout for “exceptional talent,” which includes a traveling exhibition, a dedicated magazine issue, and the possibility of entering the Deutsche Börse collection. The call has, in artistic deputy director Marcel Feil’s words, a very simple premise: “If you are a photographer and you think you have talent, let us know, share your work!”

Feil began by presenting the organization and its vocation of being an “open house for photographers and photography.” Feil also stressed that one of their foremost concerns is to display a broad range of work covering diverse subjects, areas, and styles so as to better grasp the state of photography today, while highlighting current trends. After describing the process of narrowing down the submissions, Feil presented each of the featured artists. Some photographers are absolute newcomers, such as Weronika Gęsicka, whose playful and surreal collages comment on the constructed role-playing in the television-mediated image of suburban baby boomer lives, and Wang Nan, who photographs her young pupils’ uncanny imagination as a means of helping them unleash their potential in a repressive school system.

Others, like Vasantha Yogananthan and Erik Madigan Heck, have enjoyed their fair share of online and festival attention. Yogananthan’s ambitious project A Myth of Two Souls(2013–ongoing) reinterprets the epic poem The Ramayana’s prevalence in contemporary Indian culture, while Heck’s futuristic and minimalistic fashion images explore ideas of beauty in an industry both influenced and burdened by art history. Feil provided insightful keys for engaging with the projects and explained why Foam decided to bring these artists to wider art-world attention. Despite the intention not to constrain the exhibition to a particular genre, Feil noted a tendency among some of these emerging photographers to channel our society’s topical concerns in an engaged and almost activist way.

At the end of the tour, each Patron and Member received a copy of the current issue of Foam and enjoyed snacks and wine. Participants were able to ask questions, talk about photography and the work they’d had the chance to discover with Feil, and chat with each other in an informal and convivial atmosphere.

The Photographers Selected for Foam Talent 2018:

Sushant Chhabria (India), David De Beyter (France), Mark Dorf (USA), Alinka Echeverría (Mexico/UK), Weronika Gęsicka (Poland), Wang Juyan (China), Thomas Kuijpers (The Netherlands), Quentin Lacombe (France), Clément Lambelet (Switzerland), Namsa Leuba (Switzerland/Guinea), Erik Madigan Heck (USA), Alix Marie (France), Martin Errichiello and Filippo Menichetti (Italy), Wang Nan (China), Kai Oh (South Korea), Viacheslav Poliakov (Ukraine), Ben Schonberger (USA), Sadegh Souri (Iran), Harit Srikhao (Thailand), and Vasantha Yogananthan (France).

Click here to join Aperture’s membership program or contact our membership office at 212.946.7108 or membership@aperture.org

Aperture Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that relies on the generosity of individuals for support of its publications, exhibitions, and public and educational programming.

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Published on April 30, 2018 10:26

April 26, 2018

The Photographer’s Hand in a Digital World

An exhibition at the Getty deconstructs an identity crisis in contemporary photography.

By Travis Diehl

Matt Lipps, Models, 2016
© the artist

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography gathers together six artists whose work over the past decade is coping with an identity crisis in photography. In the nineteenth century, the daguerreotype offered jewel-like uniqueness to match that of painted portraits, while today, artists’ attention to (and even assault of) C-prints pits another sort of physicality against the mass dissolution hastened by digital process. Each of the six artists of Cut! leverages their handiwork against the anonymity of the apparatus. See, for instance, Photographers (2013), a large-format image by Matt Lipps: lining glass shelves like paper dolls are cutouts from the work of the great auteurs—a nude by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, a twisted tree by Edward Weston, a skull made of nude women by Philippe Halsman. The work glorifies the paper-ness of photography at a time when paper is less and less a factor. Nostalgia and appreciation intermingle, and Lipps’s mastery of color lighting and color printing techniques—the figures floating like crisp grayscale ghosts above an aquamarine wash—constitute less a deconstruction of and more an homage to the “straight photograph.” Likewise, Daniel Gordon’s still lifes of “fruit” and “vegetables” collaged into the round from chopped-up color photos inflate the medium into brilliant, volumetric space, only to collapse it again.

Daniel Gordon, Potatoes and Leeks, 2016
© the artist and courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles

In this self-aware spirit, the photographers of Cut! uphold the medium’s investment in the significance/signification of even minor things. In a 2012 series shot in the Getty Research Institute’s archive, Thomas Demand zooms in on paper-and-plastic models by the architect John Lautner, making lush abstractions of their rust-red, dusty planes. Similarly, his impressively lush and fine-grained Landscape (2013) appears to glorify the sheer mundanity of a patch of ground cover. Yet what the image actually depicts—an intricate, life-size paper diorama—brings with it the untold work hours of Demand and his assistants, cutting and folding all those shades of green.

Soo Kim, Midnight Reykjavík #5, 2005
© the artist

Where the subject itself isn’t hand-rendered, the artist’s hand embellishes the mechanical result. Soo Kim creates intricate latticeworks from layered photographs of cities and wharves by making incisions according to the logic of the image—for instance, in Midnight Reykjavík #5 (2007), by excising the flat planes of walls and roofs. This subtractive collage thus maintains a relationship to the subject’s geometry, while rendering the glass a window; Kim’s landscapes are as aware of the wall as they are the frame, folding the structures they depict into the structures on which they hang. In comparison, optically ambiguous, geometric 3-D collages of cut photographs by Christiane Feser pop both visually and physically into space. Where this (faux) tromp l’oeil becomes its own virtue, clever formalism is given undue substance by calling it “play.”

Christopher Russell, Budget Decadence, 2008
© the artist

Indeed, it’s no great revelation on its own that the photographic process is plastic and fungible at all points. While many of these artists leverage the objecthood of the photograph to reach smart new territory, others seem to slash out blindly for a novel approach. Among a series of five prints of an interior window by Christopher Russell, variously augmented with razor points, dirt, and semen (only three are on view), is Budget Decadence (2008), an “Ultrachrome print hacked with meat cleaver.” Russell’s other selections nod to the artifacts of the medium, such as Explosion #31 (2014), in which he scratched tattered arabesques into a print of a lens flare, and Mountain XXIX (2017), where a cloth veil draped over a perfectly configured, high-end lens produced a gossamer blur. It’s hard to get excited about a photographer’s efforts to frustrate their own equipment, but worth noting that, even so, they keep making photographs.

Travis Diehl is a critic based in Los Angeles.

Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography is on view at the Getty, Los Angeles, through May 27, 2018.

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Published on April 26, 2018 14:10

Abbas (1944–2018)

Aperture remembers the legendary photographer.

By Chris Boot

A. Abbas, Children bathe and play in the Rio Balsas, Village of San Augustin de Oapan, Mexico, 1985
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Abbas’s practice as a photographer was forged on the frontlines of war and revolution during the 1970s, when he was working as part of the Sipa and Gamma news picture agencies, which were then at the peak of their influence and economic power. After ten years as one of the most successful agency photographers of his generation, Abbas sought the kind of independence and scope for visual authorship that Magnum could offer. Master of the picture story format, he made tight, singular, and particularly useful icons of conflict and society that made his pictures among the most reproduced of the Magnum group during the 1990s. He simultaneously pursued his own visual poetry, particularly in Mexico, and drew on his experience of war to pursue a comprehensive documentary account of the world’s religions over thirty years. Take any single picture or story from this major work, and one assumes Abbas both detached and neutral. But take the body of work as a whole, and one sees Abbas treat religious fury not only as one of the great themes of our time, loaded with visual opportunity, but instead as cause for much of the world’s suffering. Abbas was larger than life, a unique character among Magnum’s larger-than-life roster. One of its leaders, one pictures him at Magnum meetings stroking his beard, gravely, while pondering the path ahead. Photography will miss him.

Chris Boot is the executive director of Aperture Foundation.

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Published on April 26, 2018 14:08

A. Abbas (1944–2018)

Aperture remembers the legendary photographer.

By Chris Boot

A. Abbas, Children bathe and play in the Rio Balsas, Village of San Augustin de Oapan, Mexico, 1985
© the artist/Magnum Photos

Chris Boot is the executive director of Aperture Foundation.

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Published on April 26, 2018 14:08

From Gaza to Florida

At Aperture’s gallery, Palestinian photographer Taysir Batniji discusses his new book and exhibition, Home Away from Home.

small03_14_18_Batniji_Opening_MReid-0087

Taysir Batniji, Cathy Kaplan, Chris Boot

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

Catherine Tsekenis, Taysir Batniji, Sophie Jaulmes-Batniji, Peter Malachi

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

Catherine Tsekenis, Taysir Batniji, Sam Stourdzé, Chris Boot

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

Safa Batniji, Vanessa Leiva Santos

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

Yazam Khalili, unknown, Rima Abdul-Malak, Taysir Batniji, Sophie Jaulmes- Batniji

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

Omar Batniji, Kamal Batniji, Turkya Batniji, Safa Batniji, Taysir Batniji, Sophie Jaulmes Batniji, Saleem Batniji

Madison Reid © Aperture Foundation

On March 17, 2018, Aperture Foundation and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès presented a talk with Aperture’s executive director Chris Boot and photographer Taysir Batniji about his new book and exhibition, Home Away from Home. Guests congregated in Aperture’s Chelsea gallery for the third and final installment of Immersion, a French American Photography Commission, a joint project by Aperture and Hermès.

Home Away from Home is a singular and intimate portrait of Batniji’s own familial diaspora. Born in Gaza, Batniji now lives and works in France. His most recent work explores the idea of home through visits with several family members who have relocated to the U.S. In the book and exhibit, he brings together photographs, documents, drawings based on his memories, videos from interviews, and selections from his family’s archives to explore a sense of dislocation and a state of “between-ness,” both culturally and geographically. The resulting body of work questions what it means to share a history—even among relative strangers—and what happens to the sense of past and of belonging when opting for new identities and homes.

Boot and Batniji’s conversation began with a philosophical discussion on the state of photography—authorship, methods of presentation, technicalities, and appropriation. Batniji then spoke about his photographs of Israeli military watchtowers, taken along the edge of Gaza and formatted into a grid-like sequence, which references Bernd and Hilla Becher, in particular Water Towers (1972–2009). After the watchtowers series, Batniji photographed the war-torn and uninhabitable homes in Gaza following the 2008–9 Israeli attacks. Borrowing from the commercial language of the real-estate industry, Batniji pairs photographs of rubble-strewn homes with descriptions such as, “living room, dining room, kitchen, 2 bathrooms/wc. 900m2orchard of olive trees, fig trees, vines, and a fountain. Garage in the garden. Unrestricted sea view. Inhabitants: 5 families (23 people).”

Batniji describes his work as dealing with life and with people. Politics and conflict exist in, but are not illuminated by, his images; his work doesn’t masquerade as political speech. Batniji notes, “Walls and suffering, they are inescapably there, but juxtaposed to this is life. Even in the middle of conflict is modernity.”

Taysir Batniji (born in Gaza, 1966) trained as a painter at An-Najah National University, Nablus, prior to continuing his studies in France at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges, and the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée. His work incorporates drawing, video, photography, and installation, and has been shown widely in Europe and the Middle East, including at the Venice Biennale; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Kunsthalle Wien; and Witte de With, Rotterdam.

Home Away from Home is copublished by Aperture and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès on the occasion of Immersion, a French American Photography Commission. Taysir Batniji: Home Away from Homeis on view at Aperture Gallery through May 10, 2018.

Click here to join Aperture’s membership program, or contact our membership office at 212.946.7108 or membership@aperture.org.

Aperture Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that relies on the generosity of individuals for support of its publications, exhibitions, and public and educational programming.

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Published on April 26, 2018 13:30

April 25, 2018

Truth and Reconciliation

What does it mean to confront the history of racial violence in the United States? In a wide-ranging conversation, Bryan Stevenson and Sarah Lewis discuss images, power, and justice.

Bryan Stevenson at the office of the Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, October 2017
Photograph by John Edmonds for Aperture

A visionary legal thinker, Bryan Stevenson has protected the rights of the vulnerable through his work as a death-row lawyer. With the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization he founded in 1994, Stevenson has made strides to end mass incarceration and challenge racial and economic injustice. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court, recently winning a watershed ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children seventeen and under are unconstitutional. Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, recounts his experiences navigating an unfair criminal justice system.

But his work extends beyond the legal realm—Stevenson is invested in shifting cultural narratives and making history visible. This is work to which Harvard professor and art historian Sarah Lewis, guest editor of Aperture’s 2016 “Vision & Justice” issue, is uniquely attuned. Lewis has written at length on the urgent role of art in social justice, on the corrective function of images and how they enable us to reimagine ourselves. Last October, Lewis visited Stevenson at his office in Montgomery, Alabama, for an extended conversation. Central to their discussion were Stevenson’s next projects: on April 26, 2018, he will open the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which will honor the lives of thousands of African Americans lynched in acts of racial terrorism in the United States, and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which will trace a historical line between slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration. Of his work, Stevenson remarks, acts of truth telling have a visual component. “If we just go to the public square and people say some words, it doesn’t have the same power.”

Sarah Lewis: It’s a rare privilege to be able to talk with someone doing work in the realm of justice who understands the role of culture for shifting our narratives regarding racial inequality. I want to have a conversation about how culture, specifically photography, has shifted national narratives on rights and race-based justice in the United States.

Bryan Stevenson: Yes.

Lewis: To begin, I would say that we must consider the journey from 1790 with the Naturalization Act, when citizenship was defined as being white, male, and able to hold property, to the present-day definition of citizenship. The question becomes: Is this journey a legal narrative or is it also a cultural one?

Stevenson: Absolutely.

Lewis: You’ve spent a lot of time dealing with this history as it relates to emancipation and slavery, up until the current day. How did you arrive at a place of seeing the importance of culture for getting people to understand this work?

Stevenson: When I first started going to death row in the 1980s, I was constantly seeing things that communicated really important truths about the experience of the men and women I was meeting in these desperate places. You would see people interact with each other, constantly sharing gestures of compassion and love and support. You’d witness people acting in ways that were so human. And yet they were being condemned, in large part, because there was a judgment about their absence of humanity.

To counter the unforgiving judgment, I wanted other people to see what I saw. And, if anything, it was through the experience of being in jails and prisons, year after year—seeing this rich humanity and the redemption and transformation of individuals, despite the harshness of the environments—that I became persuaded that if other people could see what I see, they would think differently about the issues presented in my work. So, in the 1990s, when we first started representing our work in a modest way, images became an important part. In our first report we used a picture of the Scottsboro Boys. And we also used a picture of a client with compelling features who had been on death row for twenty years. For me, it has always been clear that there is a way in which photography can illuminate what we believe and what we know and what we understand.

It led me to increasingly use imagery to try to help tell the story of our clients. After twenty years of doing that work—and we had a lot of success, but we also saw the limits—I became aware that the rights framework, the insistence on the rule of law was still going to be constrained by the metanarratives that push judges to stop at a certain point: the environment outside the court. That’s what pushed me to think more critically about narrative, not just within a brief, within a case, within an action, but more broadly. And when it comes to narrative struggle, there is nothing that has been more confounding than racial inequality.

Soil from Alabama lynching sites, collected as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, October 2017
Photograph by John Edmonds for Aperture

Lewis: There’s much work happening in the arts around the nexus of art, justice, and culture. But you’re doing the work of having this become more understood in the wider realm. It’s so crucial. Something that I asked myself as I began this work was: What is the connection between culture and justice? This piece about “narrative” is what unlocks that.

Stevenson: That’s absolutely true for me. Because in many ways, our inattention to narrative is what has sustained the problems we’ve tried to overcome.

Lewis: Yes. Inattention and also unconscious conditioning by it.

Stevenson: Absolutely. So if we think differently about what happened when white settlers came to this country with regard to native populations, if we actually identify what happened to millions of native people as a genocide, the word genocide introduces something into the narrative that is quite disruptive. We’ve been hesitant to use the word genocide, because the narrative would shift in really powerful ways if we understood the violence and exploitation of native people through that lens.

I think the same is true when you look at the African American experience in this country. I’ve gotten to the point where I believe that the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. They were able to hold on to the ideology of white supremacy and the narrative of racial difference that sustained slavery and shaped social, economic, and political conditions in America. And because the South won the narrative war, it didn’t take very long for them to reassert the same racial hierarchy that stained the soul of this nation during slavery and replicate the violence and racial oppression that existed before the great insurrection.

It’s the narrative of racial difference that condemns African Americans to one hundred years of segregation, exclusion, and terror, following emancipation. Had we paid more attention to the narrative, we would not have seen the U.S. Supreme Court strike down all of those acts by Congress in the 1870s that were designed to protect emancipated black people and create racial equality. But the Supreme Court embraced the narrative that basically maintained that black lives are not worth risking further alienation of the South. It wasn’t about law for the court. The law said that we were all equal, but the narrative allowed the court to accommodate inequality and racial terror.

Narrative struggle is where we have to pay attention if we want to avoid replicating these dynamics as we continue to face the same problem of racial divide.

Memorial plaque to the Montgomery slave trade, placed by the Equal Justice Initiative, October 2017
Photograph by John Edmonds for Aperture

Lewis: On this point about looking at the ways in which whiteness became conflated with nation through narrative, there are a number of things to mention. But just to get back to the Native American piece and the criminalization of rights-based action, it was, in large part, photography that legitimated acts of genocide. Edward Curtis’s photographs, for example, naturalized and supported the genocide.

Stevenson: That’s right. Because if you can create the idea that these native people are savages and you can create a visual record that supports that idea, then people don’t view the abuse and victimization as they ought to.

What’s interesting to me about some of that early art and visual work is that it’s really about perpetuating the politics of fear and anger. And fear and anger are the essential ingredients of oppression. Art is complicit in creating these narratives that then allow our policymakers to perpetrate acts of injustice, decade after decade, generation after generation.

Lewis: Absolutely. But before we get more to the current day, I think there is a framework here that we should acknowledge, and a thinker who did the courageous work at the time, during the Civil War, to put out this idea about narrative—and that is Frederick Douglass. He gave a speech during the Civil War that he called “Pictures and Progress.” He confused his audience at the time by speaking about what seemed like a trifle during this nation-severing conflict. Something seemingly as small as a picture, he argued, could have as much force as a political action, as a law. It’s a fascinating speech. He was interested in what he called “thought pictures.” This was his gesture toward narrative; he used this term to describe the ways in which culture, what we consume daily through pictures, can shift our notion of the world. That is what he thought would effect the change. Douglass was the most photographed American man in the nineteenth century, for good reason. He believed in this idea.

Stevenson: It’s a really powerful insight, that he could appreciate how getting people to see his humanness was critical for them to understand the inhumanity and degradation of slavery. In many ways, Dr. King had that same insight.

Lewis: Yes.

Stevenson: He understood that the spectacle of nonviolent resistance to white, armed, military repression could create a consciousness about the African American struggle in the South that could not be created any other way.

As we’ve been working on our Legacy Museum, which explores slavery and the human suffering created by the domestic slave trade, it’s been frustrating, because there is so little photography or imagery that exposes the inhumanity of enslavement. It’s almost as if there was a real effort to avoid visual documentation that might have implicated us and revealed our complicity in facilitating such great suffering.

I have found in the published narratives of enslaved people this unbelievably rich source of content, not visual in the sense of photography or art, but visual in terms of language. They tell stories. They use the narrative form to create a very intimate picture of what it was like on the day when their children were taken away on the auction block, or when they lost their loved ones. In our museum, we’re using technology and video to give animation to these words through performance. I’m really excited about it because it creates a kind of intimacy, it paints the kind of picture that Douglass tried to achieve.

Charles Moore, Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested for loitering outside a courtroom where his friend Ralph Albernathy is appearing for trial, Montgomery, Alabama, 1958
Courtesy Charles Moore Estate and Steven Kasher Gallery

Lewis: We’re sitting here in a building in Montgomery that functions as a kind of narrative correction. Is that right?

Stevenson: Yes. We’re a few blocks from Dr. King’s church and from where Rosa Parks started the modern civil rights movement. However, what we didn’t appreciate until we began our racial justice project is that we were also in the epicenter of the domestic slave trade. That part of the historical narrative of this community had largely been ignored. But it became clearer to us that this street, Commerce Street, was one of the most active slave-trading spaces in America. Tens of thousands of enslaved people were brought here.

Lewis: Hence the name.

Stevenson: Yes, that’s right, hence the name. Thousands of black people were trafficked here by rail and by boat. Montgomery had the only continuous rail line to the Upper South in the 1850s.

So this knowledge made me reimagine how this space could contribute to a more honest American identity. And the marker project was the first thing we did locally, to try to create awareness of this past. If you come to Montgomery, there are fifty-nine markers and monuments to the Confederacy in this city. They are everywhere. “The First White House of the Confederacy” is the sign you pass when you drive into town. Our two largest high schools are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High. But not a word about slavery. So putting up these markers that introduced facts about the Montgomery slave trade and the domestic slave trade and the slave warehouses and the slave depots that shaped this city, which were avoided by local historians, was really important.

Lewis: You talked about the need to shift our cultural infrastructure in the United States because of the deliberate silence about racial terror, and, of course, this connects to mass incarceration. But can you talk about the shifts that you’re hoping will occur in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the museum in Montgomery?

Stevenson: I do think we have to make our history of racial inequality visible. We have been so inundated with these narratives of American greatness and how wonderful things have been in this country that it’s going to take cultural work that disrupts the narrative in a visual way to force a more honest accounting of our past. People take great pride in the Confederacy because they actually don’t associate it with the abuse and victimization of millions of enslaved black people. So that has to be disrupted.

What appeals to me about the markers is that they are public; everyone encounters them. We can create a museum. We can create indoor spaces that try to express and deal with these issues. But a lot of the people who need this education are never going to step inside those places. Public markers, however, can’t be ignored, and we have continued that effort with our work on lynching. Our goal is to mark as many of the lynching sites in America as possible. We use the words racial terrorism on each one of the markers. We name the victims. We give a narrative that contextualizes the brutality and torture black people endured. I do think that’s important, to challenge the public landscape, which has been complicit in sustaining these narratives of white supremacy and racial inequality. That’s another way in which acts of truth telling have a visual component. If we just go to the public square and people say some words, it doesn’t have the same power as permanent symbols of collective memory.

We are opening the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which will acknowledge over four thousand victims of lynchings and identify over eight hundred counties in America where racial terrorism took place. Hundreds of six-foot monuments will be on the site, including sculptures created by artists who contextualize lynching within an understanding of slavery, segregation, and contemporary police violence. Deeper exploration of these issues is then possible in the museum, and all of this, for me, is really exciting. Particularly in these political times where you’ve seen the retreat and obfuscation of historical truth. It was a shock to me in 2008 how quick people were to assert that we now live in a postracial society; that was obviously incredibly naive.

Photographer unknown, An airman pauses to examine the “Colored Waiting Room” sign at
Atlanta’s Terminal Station, January 1956
© Bettmann/Getty Images

Lewis: It occurs to me, and I wonder if this is correct, that you focused on your own experience of needing narrative to communicate what you were seeing with your clients—how racial terror and lynching have structured the criminal justice system and the landscape of racial inequality.

Stevenson: Yes, absolutely. It’s not a surprise that after emancipation, people went from being called “slaves” to being called “criminals.” Convict leasing and lynching were about criminalizing black people. Rosa Parks makes her stand, and she’s immediately criminalized. Those women who fought for equality on buses here in Montgomery, what they were being threatened with was a formal designation as criminals: Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, all of these women.

The notion that resistance to racial inequality makes you a dangerous criminal has always been there. So, then, it’s not a surprise that after the success of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, prosecutors begin focusing on “voter fraud” in the black community, followed by this new War on Drugs, which then leads to the United States having the largest incarcerated population in the world. The rate of incarceration is just unprecedented.

I think that the criminalization of black people, and now brown people who are deemed illegal because of their state of national origin, is very much a part of the American story, and it’s been present with us in ways that we just haven’t acknowledged. We criminalized Japanese Americans during World War II and put them in concentration camps, but were unconcerned about Italian Americans and German Americans.

Lewis: One of the interventions of the civil rights movement, it seems, is to reframe criminality and rights-based behavior as actually a positive, an act of citizenship.

Stevenson: Right.

Lewis: Or as an indicator of such. The 1958 image that Charles Moore took of Dr. King is probably iconic in that regard.

Stevenson: Right. We used that for one of our calendars. I think the images we often see of Dr. King are with him poised, speaking in front of thousands of people in these esteemed spaces, where his leadership is what’s being highlighted. What’s powerful to me about this image is that here he is being criminalized. He’s being brutalized by law enforcement. And there is some fear in his eyes, because there is the uncertainty of what will happen. Because the long history of black struggle is that once you are put in this criminal status your survival is not guaranteed, your safety is certainly not guaranteed. And yet, he persists, and he continues. I love the way Coretta Scott King is witnessing his abuse with such dignity and confidence. It just says a lot about the kind of courage that is needed to fight a fight like this.

Rosa Parks is also so powerful in that regard. One of the first people we want to honor in our memorial garden is Thomas Edward Brooks, a black World War II veteran who shaped Rosa Parks’s activism on the buses.

In 1950, Mr. Brooks returned home to Montgomery, in his uniform. The segregation protocol on the bus was, of course, that you get on at the front of the bus, you put your dime in, then you get off the bus, and you walk to the back door, and get back on, and head to the back. Mr. Brooks gets on, puts his dime in, but he doesn’t get off the bus. He walks down the center aisle to the back. The bus driver is screaming at him and calls the police. The police officer comes on the bus, and Mr. Brooks is in his military uniform in a defiant posture, according to witnesses. The police officer just goes up and hits him in the head with the club, knocks him down, rattles him, and he starts dragging him toward the front of the bus, and when he gets to the front of the bus, the black soldier gathers himself and jumps up and shoves the police officer and starts running, and the officer takes out his gun and shoots him in the back, and kills him.

Two years later, the same thing happens to another black soldier. Rosa Parks was the person who was documenting these tragedies, as a secretary to the NAACP. And that sense of violent repression and menace—the understanding that police officers could kill a black soldier, shoot him in the back—took her commitment to change conditions to a whole other level. It was no longer just insult and subordination. It was lethal, which makes her protest all the more inspiring.

Chandra McCormick, Young Man, Angola Prison, 2013
Courtesy the artist

Lewis: Your work allows us to understand the narrative of black veterans and the way they were targeted and subjugated to racial terror. It’s a feature of the landscape that we need to understand.

Stevenson: Well, it’s an important part of the story, because, you know, W. E. B. Du Bois and others said, We go fight for this country; let’s save this country, and then they will save us. And it didn’t happen after World War I. In fact, it was the opposite. They were targeted and victimized for their military service. It complicated the idea of black inferiority to have black soldiers go to Paris, France, and be triumphant and successful. That’s why, in some ways, the lynchings increase during this time, in 1919, 1920, 1921, when black soldiers are returning home and creating a new identity. The same thing happens after World War II; you see this increased racial violence in the 1940s targeting black veterans.

My dad just passed away. He was born in 1929, and he fought in the Korean War. He was very active in the church, and he talked about his faith all the time, but he never talked about his military service. For economic reasons he wanted to be buried at the veterans cemetery, and there you see all of these U.S. flags, and there’s all of that symbolism of nationalism and American pride. When I got to his grave site, they put on the little plate, “Howard C. Stevenson, Corporal, U.S. Army, Korean War,” and a flag. But it wasn’t completely true. He served in a racially segregated unit and was denied most of the rewards white veterans received for their military service; his rank and service were diminished by racial bigotry. And there is no acknowledgment of that. I believe his willingness to serve despite racism should be recognized. For me, this highlights how much work we still need to do in this country around truth telling. I believe that truth and reconciliation are sequential. You have to tell the truth first. You have to create a consciousness around the truth before you can have any hopes of reconciliation. And reconciliation may not come, but truth must come. That’s the condition.

Lewis: If someone were to say that we’re having a conversation about culture and mass incarceration or racial inequality, they might think that it’s about the portrayal of that specific group that has been terrorized or dehumanized by these actions. But, in fact, it’s also about the opposite, the way in which the presence of racial terror has also conditioned the entire population.

Stevenson: Absolutely. That point is so critical. Terrorism, the violence of lynching, is critical for understanding how you could have decades of Jim Crow. No one would have accepted drinking out of the inferior water fountain or going into the less desirable “colored” bathroom unless violence could be exercised against you for noncompliance with segregation with impunity.

Racial-terror lynching propelled the massive displacement of black people in the twentieth century. The idea that black people went to Cleveland and Chicago and Detroit and LA and Oakland as immigrants, looking for economic opportunities, is really misguided. You have to understand that they went there as refugees and exiles from terror and lynching.

Today we have generational poverty and distress in urban communities in the North and West, and black people are criticized for not solving these problems, and most people don’t understand how the legacy of racial terror shaped the structural problems we continue to face. That’s what provokes me when people come up to me and they talk about problems in the black family. I’m thinking children and their husbands and their parents by white slave owners, and the commerce of slavery. During the lynching era, black women had to send away spouses and children who were threatened with mob violence for something trivial. We haven’t addressed the devastation and trauma to black family life created by this history.

Chandra McCormick, Line Boss, Angola Prison, 2004
Courtesy the artist

Lewis: I’m looking at the EJI report “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” The photographs demonstrate that watching a lynching was a family activity for some white Americans.

Stevenson: That’s exactly right. And this effort to acculturate white people to accept and embrace the torture, brutalization, and violence they see black people around them experience … it’s a tragic infection that afflicts our society. Nelson Mandela says, in effect, “No one is born hating someone else; you have to be taught.” The way in which we have taught racial violence and white supremacy is intricate, and devastating. It won’t go away without treatment.

Lewis: Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun’s work Slavery: The Prison Industrial Complex, begun in the early 1980s and ongoing to this day, shows the continuation of this violence through photographs of life at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Stevenson: We represent lots of people who are at Angola now. Angola has one of the largest populations of children sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in the country. We have clients who received write-ups for not picking cotton fast enough in the 1980s when prisoners were forced to toil in the fields. Now these men are parole-eligible, and we have to explain to the parole board why refusing to pick cotton thirty years ago is not something they should hold against this person when they were sentenced to die in prison. You still have officers on horseback down there, riding around. You still see men going out into the fields. It is a former plantation.

So I think images are really important. The narrative of putting imprisoned, largely black people out in the fields to hoe and pick cotton, which you would think would be just unconscionable to a society trying to recover from slavery, is actually exciting to a lot of people. It’s like the chain gangs they brought back to Alabama twenty years ago. Some people loved the visual of mostly black men in striped uniforms chained together along the roadside and being forced to work. The optics are so important, and it sort of reminds me of those images around lynching. It’s the same thing: Let’s use this imagery to excite the masses so that we can recover something that has been lost, restore something that has been taken from us, and allow us to reclaim an identity that replicates the good old days of racial hierarchy in precisely the same ways. It’s why the phrase “Make America Great Again” is provocative to many of us, and why our indifference to mass incarceration is so unacceptable. I’m persuaded we are still in a struggle for basic equality and there is much work still to be done.

Sarah Lewis is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (2015).

Read more from Aperture Issue 230 “Prison Nation,” or subscribe to Aperture and never miss an issue.

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Published on April 25, 2018 09:56

April 20, 2018

India Takes Houston

From colonial legacies to gender politics, FotoFest tackles photography from the country and its diaspora.

By Michael Famighetti

Anoop Ray, Untitled, October 2011, from the series Friends and Their Friends, 2010–15
Courtesy the artist

Founded in 1983, Houston’s FotoFest has since offered global takes on contemporary and historical photography. Its globetrotting founders, Wendy Watriss and Frederick Baldwin loosely modeled the festival on the Rencontres d’Arles, the venerable, rosé-soaked photography festival and “meeting place” held annually in the idylls of southern France. By contrast, FotoFest set up shop in energy-rich, zoning-free Houston (the only French here might be the concept of laissez-faire) and established itself by taking deep dives into capacious themes: a recent edition took on the environment, while past iterations have delved into the photographic cultures of particular geographies—such as Latin America, Russia, and the Middle East and North Africa—to highlight image makers unknown in the United States.

This year’s edition, curated by photographer Sunil Gupta alongside Steven Evans, the festival’s current executive director, takes an expansive look at recent photography from India and its diasporic communities. The festival, titled India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, features forty-seven artists and is staged across multiple venues throughout the sprawling city, which is home to a number of top-flight arts institutions (notably the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which is concurrently staging a Raghubir Singh retrospective). One standout venue is a monumental converted rice packaging facility, recently converted to artist studios, with soaring eighty-three-foot-tall silos that bear the word “Success” in colossal lettering. Another group exhibition is installed at the elegant Asia Society Texas Center, designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

Sandip Kuriakose, Untitled, 2017, from the series It has the Appearance of a Deliberate Transgression
Courtesy the artist

While some artists might resist having their worked framed by geography, curator Sunil Gupta, in his catalogue essay, lays out the open-ended motivating questions that underpin his selection of works: “How do contemporary photographers and artists of Indian origin imagine the diverse and complicated subjectivities of Indian-ness regardless of where they live? How do they talk back to photographic history that has remained Eurocentric for over a century and a half? How do they absorb the legacy of colonial anthropological photography where the photographs depict their own ancestors?” Gupta also questions what it means to speak of Indian photo history versus global photo history. Is there a need for separate regional histories? Or do global histories—usually written from a blinkered Western vantage—need to do more work to recognize that other histories of photography exist? Both, of course, are necessary. Also challenging for the country’s contemporary photographic culture, Gupta notes, is the dearth of institutions teaching photography, building archives, and creating a critical framework for thinking about pictures.

Even so, through a range of photographic styles and media (all work is made post-2000), the featured photographers delve into a host of ideas—legacies of colonialism, gender politics, identity performance, the caste system, environmental degradation, ethnic violence, growing inequality, and life in the diaspora—and make clear that representations of India, the second most populous country in the world, must reflect the immense diversity and complexity of the place itself.

Rishi Singhal, Farrukhabad 01, Uttar Pradesh, India, 2007, from the series A River Story
Courtesy the artist

Rishi Singhal

For more than a decade, Rishi Singhal has photographed along the Ganga (Ganges) River. His aim has been to capture life in the communities along the banks of the river. Framed by sublime views of the majestic Himalayan mountains and the Bay of Bengal, his images capture the tension between human settlements and the natural world.

Pushpamala N. with Studio Harcourt, The Slave and her Slave (After Ingres), 2009, from the series The Harcourt Set

Pushpamala N.

Among the most internationally recognized artists on view is Pushpamala N. Her project The Harcourt Set (2009) was commissioned for a show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. For this work, the artist collaborated with the famous Studio Harcourt—known for its polished photographs of film stars—to recreate iconic images from nineteenth-century France.

Tenzing Dakpa, Arrival, 2016, from the series The Hotel
Courtesy the artist

Tenzing Dakpa

Tenzing Dakpa’s series The Hotel, shot in high-contrast black and white, is based on his family’s own hotel and his hometown of Gangtok, Sikkim. Playing on themes of cultural displacement—Dakpa is a second-generation Tibetan who moved to New Delhi and then to the United States, where he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design—he enacts an oblique narrative of his family as they move through the daily motions of hotel upkeep, performing memories of what the artist describes as a “temporal existence introducedby migration.”

Sandip Kuriakose, Interested, 2017, from the series NPNR
Courtesy the artist

Sandip Kuriakose

Kuriakose’s work takes on photography as it operates in digital space, delving into the language of images posted to gay dating sites, which become both a means of communication and a performance of identity.

Vidisha Saini, Mr. Shekar House, 2012, from the series Mr. Shekar
Courtesy the artist

Vidisha Saini

A highlight of the festival is Vidisha Saini’s installation of inkjet prints on newspaper, which have the subtle palette of watercolor. The project, You Like Mr. Shekhar, hones in on the story of Hampi, a village in the state of Karnataka. Once the capital of the largest Hindu Empire, the village eventually became abandoned, before becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 1980s. More recently, families living there have been relocated from the location to conserve the architecture. Saini’s installation—with vitrines of castaway objects, presumably from the families who have left—amounts to a form of archaeology on the part of the artist.

Gauri Gill, Untitled, 1999–2007, from the series Jannat
Courtesy the artist

Gauri Gill

Gauri Gill is celebrated for her 2012 photobook, BalikaMela, composed of deceptively simple yet poignant portraits of young girls at a fair in Rajasthan, Western India. At FotoFest, Gill’s series of forty-four gelatin-silver prints, installed sequentially in cinematic storyboard fashion, focus on the daily life of a young girl living in a Muslim settlement in a stark desert environment.

Anoop Ray, Untitled, March 2012, from the series Friends and Their Friends, 2010–15
Courtesy the Artist

Anoop Ray

Anoop Ray adds to photography’s longstanding diaristic tradition of dissolving barriers and turning the camera on those in one’s immediate circle—in this case, the intimate moments of his friend group.

Sohrab Hura, Pam “Oprah of the South” Chatman, the First Female African-American News Director in the State of Mississippi, Greenville, Mississippi, 2016, from the series The Levee
Courtesy the artist, Pier 24, San Francisco, and Postcards from America

Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura, who is based in New Delhi, traveled throughout the American South to make this body of work. He was originally motivated by images his father had made in the region, earlier on, when he had been employed as a sailor on a commercial ship. Hura plays with the idea of being an outsider, wandering a geography that is haunted by history and local stereotypes that he encountered on the other side of the world.

Michael Famighetti is the editor of Aperture magazine.

India: Contemporary Photography and New Media Art is on view in Houston, Texas, through April 22, 2018. Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through June 3, 2018.

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Published on April 20, 2018 14:27

April 18, 2018

If Photographs Could Talk

How has an experimental platform for photographers created a new form of image making?

By Max Campbell

What does it mean to talk in photographs? In 2014, the photographers Ben Alper and Nat Ward started an image-based conversation, and they haven’t stopped talking since. A lot has come up in that time, and, through alternating contributions, their exchange has covered topics such as violence, fantasy, patriotism, nature, and death. The dialogue formed as an open-ended experiment, but they have stuck to the same format throughout: a photograph from one, a photograph from the other, repeat.

“It’s like an ‘exquisite corpse’ exercise, or the sequencing of a book of photographs,” Ward said recently. “The visual content has to talk from one image to the next, making and augmenting a legible kind of meaning along the way.” It didn’t take long for a compelling rhythm to emerge in Alper and Ward’s give-and-take, which stirred up curiosity about how other photographers might use pictures to talk. They invited friends to start conversations of their own and the project expanded outward from there. Today, A New Nothing, the website Alper and Ward created to house these exchanges, has over one hundred active contributors.

The parameters of the project are simple, but A New Nothing is full of layered and provocative interactions. A column of paired names works as the table of contents on the website, each pair cueing a gallery containing the back-and-forth between two photographers. Images are accompanied only by bare-bones captions that list the date the post went up and the contributing photographer’s initials. There are no statements or bios, and each exchange moves at its own pace (in some, weeks pass between posts).

The pattern of alternating posts established in Alper and Ward’s founding interaction unites the conversations. Otherwise, each duo develops the tone and guiding principles organically, as their discussion unfolds. “Those impulses and decisions remain largely hidden or unverbalized,” Alper said. If photographers decide they no longer want to continue participating the contributed work remains online in archived conversations (some of which Alper and Ward plan to release in book form in the future), but such end points are never established up front. Context and intention here are meant to evolve publicly.

Sometimes, it’s easy to make out the connective tissue between individual photographs in the conversations. “Talking” often means making playful turns to echo and invert colors and shapes between pictures. In a photograph by Eric Ruby, someone has slung a friend over their shoulder to carry them down the beach. As a response, Damien Maloney shows us a snail atop a green melon; the tie-dyed striping on a T-shirt in Ruby’s picture has jumped to the melon’s skin in Maloney’s scene. When images are enlisted as responses and rebuttals, compositional elements might be mimicked repeatedly, until the original form dissolves, like an object fading into its own reflection between two mirrors, or a message getting garbled in that children’s game “telephone.” Certain subjects will appear and then travel between frames. In a conversation between Joy Drury Cox and Peter Happel Christian, we see flowers, wrapped and ready to be bought, then backlit on a windowsill, and, before the motif is abandoned, placed in vases affixed to headstones.

As subject matter and form are batted back and forth between two photographers, as if over a tennis net, stylistic choices take on a gestural quality. Because photographers get to choose whether to recognize, reject, or repeat elements in their partner’s picture, their aesthetic inclinations look a bit like character traits. Tracking the patterns, or the flowers, or the range of greens that bridge from a pack of pickles sprawled on a painted surface to a tree-shaped car air-freshener floating in some sludge, we see lots of clever ways to shift expectations.

We also see how talking in pictures, like any sort of conversation, reveals the interlocutors’ dispositions. Photographers whose work pulls from too expansive a palette, either aesthetically or in terms of subject matter, might seem scattered or ineloquent. On the other hand, sticking too closely to a subject, like when Arthur Ou posted only photographs of tree trunks in his conversation with Grant Yarolin, might make you look stubborn or obsessed.

Many photographers appear liberated by the purpose (or purposelessness) of the format, which encourages a particular sort of uninhibited expression. Humor often results. One of Irina Rozovsky’s photographs was shot from the driver’s seat of a car on a snowy day. On the camera’s side of the windshield, a hand is pinching a hard-boiled egg between thumb and forefinger. A bite is missing from the egg and, outside in the slush, a bundled man is in the middle of the crosswalk. In response, Mark Steinmetz shows us a line of chickens crossing the road. Why? Because of the driver’s snack.

“It’s this sort of prism of different places, different things, linked by something unspoken,” Rozovsky said of her conversation with Steinmetz. Their exchange began with two photographs of the same scene, taken in Athens, Georgia, in 2014, while Rozovsky was visiting Steinmetz. They were friends then and have since moved in together and had a child, continuing the conversation throughout. The exchange “loses a little bit of energy when you’re together, seeing the same things,” she said. “But it’s really fascinating when you’re in different parts of the world. The resonance of the echo across the divide is really exciting.” Methods for these visual interactions—the flipping, the mirroring, the inversion of ideas—have a give-and-take quality good for shaping everything from visual puns to the bridging Rozovsky describes.

Divorcing these images from traditional sequence editing, accompanying text, and layout decisions creates a spare, fluid atmosphere where subjectivity swells. At the same time, there is this unspoken but apparent etiquette in each conversation on A New Nothing, and the tension between those aspects is part of what makes the project such an engaging trove. Messaging here rides entirely on the form and content within the frame, and the capacity of individual photographs expands in unlikely ways. We watch as it happens, guessing at what will be said next. All of this makes scrolling through the conversations feel like listening in on friends talking in the codes of inside jokes reserved for private spaces, or, as Ward said, “like reading the body language between two people at the other end of a bar.” The playfulness, the humor, and the challenges the conversations present have a way of deflating—rather refreshingly—the objective authority photographs so often assume.

Max Campbell is a writer and photographer based in New York.

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Published on April 18, 2018 09:55