Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 1998–2002.

This essay appears in Aperture #209, the winter 2012 issue of the magazine.

By Tim Davis

Photography used to be a blue-collar job. You were on your feet all day, out in the elements, hands in chemical baths. Now it’s white-collar; in front of a monitor. Still I went ahead and bought a digital camera, thinking it’d make my world time more fluid. I could walk faster than I did with the view camera I’d been shouldering all my life, and it would balance out the screen time (which I call “watching TV”). This was 2008, and the world was turning loud and ugly. I would stroll around the small cities within my reach, being the Bear Who Went Over the Mountain. Remember why he did that? To see what he could see.

I didn’t make too many good pictures with that digital camera. It was almost as if, with every frame costing me nothing, I couldn’t make a picture matter. But it was okay for collecting. A digital camera makes a good Sherpa; it can carry your necessaries. I listened to the news on the way to these small cities: the Republicans were blaming the poor for the financial meltdown. Seems they had gone and bought a bunch of houses they couldn’t afford. Neil Cavuto on Fox News came out and said it: “Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.”

But on the achy streets of Newburgh and Scranton and Pittsfield and Troy, it became obvious that very few of these “risky folks” owned their own homes. Mailboxes were festooned with names and coated and recoated with paint as families moved on. People rented, and their mailboxes told tales of just how hard it can be to get housed. These streets were very far from Ronald Reagan’s imaginary “Cadillac-driving welfare queens.” There were gas stations where the corner store ought to be, bathing porches in troubling alien light. Instead of McMansions bought with WIC checks, a lot of this country lives in an unzoned miasma of the almost-commercial. America loves its flux, and where we live is rarely solid, rarely stable. And it’s always been that way.

Carleton E. Watkins, Hacienda, View East, 1863.

De Tocqueville noticed how functional America’s landscape was: “If they repudiate all ornament from their architecture, and set no store on any but practical and homely advantages, it is not because they live under democratic institutions, but because they are a commercial nation.” Carleton E. Watkins was the first great poet of the American practical landscape. No one doubts why Watkins was photographing. A childhood friend of Collis P. Huntington—one of the robber barons Ambrose Bierce would refer to as “railrogues”—Watkins worked for logging and mine companies making majestic mammoth-plate pictures of their claims and processing plants. In among the factories and log piles, you can sometimes see where people lived. In Hacienda, View East, 1863, the sprouting hamlet of New Almaden, California, trails off in the distance like tailings of the quicksilver mine enveloping the foreground. Housing in Watkins is almost always an afterthought to commerce. Tiny clapboard houses cling to the San Jose road like remoras on the mouth of a shark, hoping for scraps. The landscape is so barren, the nonpanchromatic film emulsion blasting the blue sky white, that it is difficult to imagine anyone living in this place except to work. It had only been fourteen years since Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, where he noticed: “Men are as busy as the brooks or bees, and postpone everything to their business; as carpenters discuss politics between the strokes of the hammer while they are shingling a roof.”

It is difficult to look at this image without imagining all this activity burning itself out. Today the mine is the perfect American hybrid: a Superfund site and a museum. The village’s population hasn’t changed since 1863. Its most famous resident, Pat Tillman, died on a hillside in Afghanistan that would not look odd superimposed into Watkins’s photograph.

In America the landscape changes. And so house and home, the very seats of human stability, are always subject to alteration. Zoning is a relatively new concept here. There was none at all until the rise of the Progressive movement in the teens. So, in 1936, when Walker Evans and Peter Sekaer rolled through the South following an itinerary set by Farm Security Administration director Roy Stryker, they found natural clashes between the domestic and the commercial. Evans’s signature image, of two Atlanta frame houses bounded by a wall of billboards, perfectly describes the commercially contingent state of U.S. housing.

Walker Evans, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936.

The long lens on Evans’s 8-by-10 view camera helped to flatten the space between these Victorian houses—already decaying— and the rush of Hollywood advertising on the street. Just a few months earlier, in New Orleans, Evans had found a similar situation, photographing a two-story house with a ketchup ad for a neighbor. In the New Orleans image, the house is skittering with activity. Whole families lean out over balconies. The house is framed in its entirety and can be read like an advent calendar, with each columned bay revealing human activity. The billboard is cut off at the edge of the picture. In Atlanta, the houses are unpeopled, maybe uninhabited. The commercial hunger of Hollywood is outpacing the architecture.

Despite this clash between the residential and the mercantile, Evans’s picture-making style is, as ever, formally direct and solid. Its straightforward geometry makes it easy to look at this image and imagine the movie posters lasting as long as Roman inscriptions. Three years later, however, John Vachon, having started at the FSA as a file clerk, was sent to the Deep South for the first time as a photographer. He immediately tried to locate the houses in Evans’s picture. “I found the very place, and it was like finding a first folio Shakespeare. The signs on the billboard had changed, but I photographed it, and it’s in the file.” The two pictures together are a Muybridge-ish study of the ways an American house is as much a unit of measure of the country’s commercial climate as it is a home.

John Vachon, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1938.

Evans was delighted with his finds. Restlessly modern, he saw progress in old houses giving way to new advertisements. As the twentieth century rolled along, these piquant, ironic incursions into domestic life gave way to heady despair at the spread of the housing-industrial complex. Robert Adams’s What We Bought (1970–74) plotted the spread of housing as a metastasizing growth in the Denver landscape. In its opening image, a big square creosote bush sits in middle of the frame in the middle of the prairie. It’s white hot and timeless, except for the creep of prefab development deep in the background. From there, houses spring up on and are dug into the land. At the edge of the city, they struggle for space—both in the world and in the frame—in a jungle of convenience stores and service (Gigantic Cleaners, Birdie’s Hair Styling). By plate 51, beyond the final ring road, the new houses reign supreme, and it’s a wasteland of a kingdom. Houses are packed into lots spread soullessly to the horizon. It’s always midday. The housing itself has become industrial. You can’t imagine the buildings being built: they feel extruded or minted or mined. The photographer is angry at this development, and his pictures have some of the sentiment of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang: “These machine-made wastes grew up in tumbleweed and real-estate development, a squalid plague of future slums constructed of green two-by-fours, dry-wall fiberboard and prefab roofs that blew off in the first good wind.”

Robert Adams, Untitled (Mobile Home Park), 1970-74.

Photography is a complicated form of protest, though, because the camera is so accepting. Cameras are golden retrievers, and the world is a tennis ball. Adams is clearly horrified at the infectious spread of the prefab, but his photographs can’t help being moved by its patterns and symmetry and novelty. As photography moves to its new digs in the glitzy high rises of Contemporary Art, the seduction of American housing, even in its ticky-tacky suburban spread, tends to almost outstrip the politics and social concerns of its makers. The works in Todd Hido’s series Houses at Night are first-person accounts of life on the ground in this postpolitical neighborhood. The houses he photographs are exactly those Abbey described, barely able to survive their poor construction in the onslaught of car culture and the cul-de-sac. Hido’s pictures have a color palette all their own, an acidic roux of film emulsion and the color temperature of mercury- and sodium-vapor industrial lighting, in combinations no painter would stir up. And they are very much about this color, how photographic and how god-awful glamorous it is. Reasons and responsibilities, class and race and zoning and planning, fade into a sublime haze.

Todd Hido, #7373, 2009, from the series Houses at Night.

Larry Sultan’s series The Valley sums up the trajectory from house as social document to private fantasy beautifully. In Backyard, West Valley Studio, 2003, we have landed back in Carleton E. Watkins’s California. Again housing slips to the background of a vital U.S. industry. But this one is designed to bypass sight and cognition, and head straight for the pleasure centers. The housing on the other side of the fence, which could have been cropped easily from an Adams or a Hido, is a scrim, put up to protect a pornographic spectacle from real neighbors in real houses. Someday, on this spot, there will be a Superfund site and a museum.

Larry Sultan, Suburban Street in Studio, 2000.

Tim Davis is an artist and writer living in Tivoli, New York. His new project, an album of songs with accompanying music videos, is called It’s OK to Hate Yourself. He teaches photography at Bard College.

SUBSCRIBE TO TIM DAVIS’S MAILBOX OF THE MONTH CLUB and receive twelve signed, limited-edition monthly postcards of photographs of mailboxes sent to your mailbox.

Image credits:

Carelton E. Watkins, Hacienda, View East, 1863. Courtesy the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Walker Evans, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.

John Vachon, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1938. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.

Robert Adams, Untitled (Mobile Home Park), 1970–74. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 1998–2002. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Todd Hido, #7373, 2009, from the series Houses at Night. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Larry Sultan, Suburban Street in Studio, 2000. From the series The Valley. Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan.

This conversation between Anders Petersen and J.H. Engström originally appeared in Aperture #198, the Spring 2010 issue of the magazine, as Petersen was editing the work that would become City Diary, the three-volume publication awarded PhotoBook of the Year during this year’s Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

One of Sweden’s most influential photographers, Anders Petersen has been producing bold and intimate black-and-white photographs since the late 1960s. His seminal book Café Lehmitz was published in 1978 and remains in print today. Shooting in a beer hall located in Hamburg’s red-light district over the course of three years, Petersen depicted in that project the drunken revelry of a rowdy cast of outsiders, and explored the boundary between ecstasy and desperation.

In the 1960s, Petersen studied with fellow Swede Christer Strömholm, famed for his highly personalized approach to photography. Like Strömholm, Petersen has not shied from engaging a wide spectrum of human experience in all its rawness, photographing in prisons, mental institutions, and a home for the elderly. The searing intimacy of his images is a testament to the amount of time—often years—he spends on each series. Petersen aptly describes his working process as “finding a fever: a kind of vibration between the people.” That fever, or psychological resonance, is one of the most compelling aspects of Petersen’s work.

Aperture recently asked photographer J.H. Engström, who once worked as Petersen’s assistant, to speak with him about the course of his career and his approach to the medium. The two recently completed the collaborative book project From Back Home, focusing on the Värmlands region of Sweden; the project was awarded the Contemporary Book Award at last year’s Recontres d’Arles. Petersen’s latest publication, the three-volume City Diary, was released last November by Steidl.

—The Editors

JH ENGSTRÖM: As I look at your new photographs, I’m thinking about the first book you did, Gröna Lund [1973]. What do you think connects these new photographs with the work in Gröna Lund?

ANDERS PETERSEN: The people. Meeting people, looking. New people. Always people. I like people.

JHE: But you have also said that there are too many people in the new book you’re working on now.

AP: Right now, in the process, there are too many people. If there are too many people I have difficulties finding a fever: a kind of vibration between the people. But if you connect the people to the landscape, to structures, to the sky, to water, to fire, then something starts to happen. Then you might have a fever.

JHE: The photographs in your books Gröna Lund, Café Lehmitz, and the three that followed were all made in single spaces, limited by four walls. But in your more recent work, such as Du Mich Auch [Same to you] and Close/Distance [both 2002], this isn’t the case.

AP: No, it’s not the case in my later work. I now photograph under freer circumstances. I don’t have that spatial limitation in my more recent work. If I were to stay within four walls, as I’ve done so often in the past, I would only repeat myself. I’m not attracted to such repetition.

JHE: Knowing your work and your photographs, I think on the one hand that there is a big difference now that you’ve left the four walls. But on the other hand maybe the difference isn’t that big. The biggest change, maybe, is that the limitation of the four walls is gone. Were the four walls a way for you to simplify your work?

AP: Of course, yes. It was easier that way: you had a consistent light, you had almost the same people coming every day. And if you build up a kind of communication with the people, it’s even easier. But after a while it’s also more difficult, because you do repeat yourself. I have played so much with different sets of four walls. I have to be freer now. No more limits—or rather, only my own limitations now.

But people do still interest me. I have two different ways of shooting. One is when I meet people; the encounter can go on for one hour or three days . . .

JHE: . . . like when you go home with someone, and stay there . . .

AP: Yes—and then you leave. And my other way of shooting is just snapshots. Cutting is a good word for it. I cut . . . that’s what it feels like, because it’s so fast. Then I peel away layers.

JHE: The first of your books that reached a wider international audience was Café Lehmitz. That book consisted of photographs taken in a beer hall in Hamburg, in the Reeperbahn neighborhood— Hamburg’s red-light district. You once told me that the process of doing those photographs “tattooed” you. What did you mean?

AP: There was the fantastic feeling of belonging to something—belonging to the people I was photographing, and to the mood, and to the atmosphere. You could sit there and feel absolutely alone. On the other hand, you were accepted as you were. And that was really a relief.

JHE: When I look at your photographs, and also when I make photographs myself, it makes me think: when does it all start, really? The photographs themselves don’t make the living more intense; it’s the act of photographing that makes life more intense. . . . People sometimes say that one can hide behind the camera. But I don’t agree. I think it’s the opposite.

AP: For me, it’s more intense to be with a camera than without. I talk more to people with a camera in my hand than I do without one. But all this is of course very individual.

JHE: After Café Lehmitz, you went back to Stockholm and started a trilogy that includes photographs from a prison, an old-people’s home, and a mental hospital. Those three books took you ten years to complete. Three years for each book, all done in very specific places. It’s a long journey. Was it your decision from the beginning to do this as a trilogy?

AP: No, not from the beginning. The decision to make a trilogy came to me after some time. The prison project, Fängelse [Prison; 1984], was a clear decision. I’m not interested in prison, really. I was interested in the feeling of being locked in. The feeling of it. It took a while for me to be accepted there. . . .

JHE: So the prison project was kind of a method to get closer to specific existential questions?

AP: That’s right.

JHE: What did you find out, being locked in?

AP: That there is no freedom. The word freedom and what it stands for is a bluff. The only way to relate to the word freedom is when you’re locked in: freedom is never bigger than when you’re locked in. But when you’re outside in the so-called free world, there is no freedom. So it’s all connected with longings. And that’s also true of photography, isn’t it?

JHE: I agree. To me, all your work has a very strong existential side. It’s not so much about describing your subjects. There’s more to the photographs than that.

AP: Yes, and this comes very much from the fact that I always keep going with what I’m photographing. I never stay for just three weeks and then go away. I stay for years. After a while things start happening, when you do that.

JHE: After the “issue of freedom,” you moved on to the “issue of death.” The second book in the trilogy is Rågång till Kärleken [On the line of love; 1991], with photographs made in an old-people’s home.

AP: Yes. That work made me feel very alive. To be close to death is a way to feel alive. A lot of people died while I was there—I think that twenty or twenty-five people died during my three years working on that project.

JHE: Did that scare you?

AP: Of course it scared me.

JHE: Did it scare you because you were starting to think about your own death? Or about how it is to get older?

AP: Not really. I was starting to think in more existential terms. I asked myself questions like who am I, and why, and what am I doing with my life? . . . One thing became obvious to me: you’re in a hurry—you’re not supposed to sit on a sofa, waiting around.

JHE: The clock is ticking.

AP: Absolutely. If you have visions, if you have a goal—then you’d better hurry up. It’s up to you. You make the choice to act; you can’t blame anyone else if you don’t. You think about this when you walk those corridors, when you sit down with these old people. What became very distinct and present for me were the dreams, the secrets, and the longings that these old people had. It was like coming home to a family of children. They were so innocent, so vulnerable.

JHE: Had they “let go” in some way?

AP: Yes. Maybe you could say that.

JHE: The third part of the trilogy, Ingen har sett allt [Nobody has seen it all; 1995], was made at a mental hospital. I was working with you then, as an assistant, and I remember you had a rough time.

AP: I know. You saw me collapse. Everything I did was very bad. I stayed away from the mental hospital for a while. Then I finally realized I had to do just the opposite: I had to live there, sleep there, together with the patients and the people working there. And they let me do that, because they had seen me there over quite a long period, and they saw how I was working—giving away photographs and so on—I always do that. Living and sleeping there changed my way of approach. I got closer. Because many things happen at night at the hospital. People communicate then; you can talk a lot with people. You see a lot of things. And of course, sometimes you can also take pictures. But many of the photographs I took there were censored, by the patients’ relatives and so on. When you take pictures in a mental hospital the result is always just the tip of the iceberg of the work you actually did there.

JHE: Often when I hear people talking about your photographs, I realize they don’t understand the amount of work you put in to them. And it’s not only the actual act of photographing. You are really with the people you’re photographing in these projects. For a long time.

AP: That’s totally right. Photography is not just about “photography.”

JHE: So how has all this work with people changed your way of thinking and feeling about your main interest: the human being?

AP: There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures. That’s my approach. The answer lies in that. But questions interest me more. You’re in the middle of life, you’re living, making love, eating, sleeping—and photography is part of it. And I don’t say this because I’m being romantic. I say this because that’s just the way it happens to be.

JHE: I sometimes say that I don’t go to places to photograph, I photograph because I am at places.

AP: Yes, but when you get older you have to focus. You have to really say to yourself: this life is interesting; these people are interesting. You have to stick around and see what’s happening. Sometimes you have to dominate the situation and really make clear that you are a photographer. This is a way to direct yourself. Pictures, like birds, never come to you; you have to move your ass to get them. You can’t just stand there and say: “Excuse me, I’m a photographer.” You have to be in it and be a part of it.

JHE: So, as you continue working, do you think this is what you will keep doing as long as you have the strength to lift the camera? Some photographers slow down when they get older. But you’re working even more now than you did ten or fifteen years ago.

AP: It’s like jumping on a trampoline . . . I have a lot of fun. I meet a lot of people. Actually, I would like to do even more.

JHE: I think that’s because you’re not thinking so much in terms of specific projects anymore. You live and you photograph at the same time—and suddenly you have this pile of contact sheets, and you didn’t see them coming, so to speak.

AP: This is true.

JHE: Every time I come down here to your lab I’m overwhelmed by the amount of production. The pictures lying around here are for your new book, coming out from Steidl.

AP: Yes, it’s called City Diary. But it’s not finished yet; there is still a lot to do. Always.
—

Aperture 198

$14.80

Interview with Ivan Vartanian, first published in the issue 203 of Aperture magazine (Summer 2011). Moriyama’s latest volume, Labyrinth (Aperture, 2012), is now available.

Japanese master-photographer Daido Moriyama has been at the forefront of the medium for more than fifty years. He has published dozens of volumes of photographs, including Japanese Theatre (1968), Farewell, Photography (1972), Daidohysteric (1993), and Hokkaido (2008), as well as numerous collections of essays. On the occasion of his upcoming retrospective at Osaka’s National Museum of Art, Ivan Vartanian spoke with the photographer about vision and motivation, context and information, color and black and white, and the unending newness of photographs.

IVAN VARTANIAN: Could you speak about your thoughts on the connection between image and language?

DAIDO MORIYAMA: Language is a direct medium and communicates meaning and intention straight. A photograph, on the other hand, is subject to the viewer’s memory, aesthetics, and feelings—all of which affect how the photograph is seen. It isn’t conclusive the way language is. But that’s what makes photography interesting. There’s no point in taking photographs that use language in an expository way. Taking photographs for the purpose of language is for the most part meaningless for me. Rather, photography provokes language. It recasts language; within it, various gradations outline a new language. It provokes the world of language: looking at images leads to the discovery of a new language. That is what I am about. Certainly, photographers—in particular photographers like me, who take street snaps—don’t shuttle back to words with each shot. The outside world is suffused with language. I don’t carry language and apply it to the outside world; instead, messages come in from the outside. That is what provokes me and what I react to. That is the nature of the connection, I think.

That said, I cannot explain every image that I have taken. If I tried to, it would be a sham and boring; it would come across as trivial. That’s not the intention. Each photograph is felt, but there isn’t just one reason for releasing the shutter—there are several reasons, even with a single exposure. The act of photographing is a physiological and concrete response but there is definitely some awareness present. When I take snapshots, I am always guided by feeling, so even in that moment when I’m taking a photograph it is impossible to explain the reason for the exposure. Something might, for example, seem erotic to me. That in itself is a gradation that contains a multiplicity of elements.

IV: In your early magazine work, your photographs are often accompanied by texts you’ve written in an “editorial voice” of sorts.

DM: When I was young, I used to write accompanying texts for my images. Those writings had something of a didactic relationship with the images. In the end, the language with which the viewer sees the photograph changes the image’s content. Even if I chose a word or language with which to take an image, it would be impossible to have everyone feel the same way. Perhaps by chance, a viewer may have a similar feeling.

In working with my older photographs, I treat them as if they are something new—if I didn’t, presenting older work would be pointless. What I photographed at a certain point may have been vivid at the time, but with the passage of years, its luster weathers with it. All work is subject to format, ways of looking, editorial style—all of which influence and alter the work.

That process of alteration is one of the things I love about photography. In essence, through the process of recomposing the work, the photograph is revitalized as something that is contemporary—now. This can be done countless times with any image. In a way, this is like saying that within each image, there is a multitude of possibilities. A single photograph contains different images.

I happen to have produced many books of photographs. I work with others on them—people I trust to a certain extent—and I leave it to them to do the recomposition (as, for example, with Shashin yo, Sayonara [Farewell, Photography; 1972]). The work becomes more vivid than when I do it myself. If I do it myself, I cannot avoid being influenced by memory; I strain to stave off that impulse and inadvertently create a palpable tension—and the outcome is often odd! Whereas when I work with a third party—or even someone more removed—filtering the images through their eyes, the photographs come alive, I think. Photographs that I’ve taken ten years ago even now seem vivid. If an image is good, it is brought back to life by the feelings of the viewer.

IV: What about the function of the photograph as information? Your work, especially from the 1970s, had so much to do with destabilizing this aspect of photography.

DM: Photographs of any generation are in a basic sense, at that moment, information. Photography is underpinned by information. No matter how conceptual a photograph may be, it contains information at its most fundamental level. But the means by which information is communicated is specific to each generation. A recently shot photograph is just as viable to me as one shot ten years ago.

IV: Do you make a distinction between the different media in which your work appears—magazines and books, exhibitions?

DM: I don’t generally make a distinction between them. A magazine has a particular objective, namely it is about the now. In that sense, it uses the information aspects of photographs. And depending on the editorial direction, the photographs may radically change. So if the editorial direction of a particular magazine doesn’t sit well with me, I don’t allow my photographs to be used in it. But in principle, whether a photograph is framed and mounted as part of an exhibition or shown in a photo-book or magazine—these are just different modalities of the same image. Each is interesting in its way. For that reason, I don’t place a lower ranking on magazines. At times, in fact, the magazine reproduction has been the best format for an image, trumping other forms. Again, what interests me is seeing my photographs in a manner that makes them seem different. And in the magazine context, if the photograph doesn’t come alive, it doesn’t necessarily mean there was something wrong with the editorial direction; it probably means the photographs aren’t that strong. There are two sides of a coin.

All images Untitled, 2010, © Daido Moriyama

On the cover of Aperture’s Spring 2013 issue (#210) is a detail from an untitled 2012 photograph by Cologne- and Amsterdam-based artist Christopher Williams. The image is part of a new series of pictures he has taken of an East German Exakta camera, notable for the placement of shutter release, aperture dials, and other important components on the left-hand side of the camera body.

The issue’s theme is “Hello, Photography,” and offers articles on a broad selection of concerns for photography now. Beginning today, each week we will offer an exclusive insight into the design, production, and contents of the newly reconceived and redesigned Aperture. Stay tuned! The magazine launches on February 26.

Click here to subscribe to Aperture magazine.

The London-based graphic design studio A2/SW/HK (Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel) is responsible for Aperture magazine’s dramatic redesign. We asked Scott a few questions about process and inspiration.

Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams

Aperture: What’s your font-making process like? Do you start with historical samples? Your own sketchbook?

Scott Williams: It really depends on the project and context. Some of our typefaces are inspired by historical forms, others originate through sketching by hand, and others are created with a particular production method or outcome in mind (neon, laser-routing, weaving, etc.). In the case of the Aperture suite of fonts, our starting point was a work-in-progress sans-serif typeface that was inspired by the hot metal fonts Futura and Memphis. This modern, geometric typeface echoes the Aperture logotype and also acknowledges the original incarnation of the magazine from the early 1950s. By contrast Aperture Serif, developed parallel to the redesign of the magazine, is rooted in the classicism of the sixteenth century and has been designed to contrast and complement Aperture Sans across multiple weights and to offer another flavor to the pages of the magazine. The process of designing typefaces, and working with them, is one of trial and error, of testing various typefaces and weights with one another, across various point sizes. You’re searching for an optimum interline space and line length, hoping to arrive at a point were it just looks “right” and creates a balanced “color” when printed.

Aperture: How did the two of you meet, and how did you begin working together?

SW: We met as post-graduate students at the Royal College of Art in 1998, and started working together, informally, on various projects almost immediately. We opened our design studio in London in 2000.

Aperture: How do the two of you work together? Does it start with a conversation, is a file passed back and forth, or does one partner shepherd a project while another focuses on something else?

SW: It’s like cats and dogs! Only joking!

Aperture: You’ve designed many art magazines and journals as well as several book series. Can you talk about the difference between designing for a single project (like a book) and designing for a series or multi-issue publication?

SW: There is a unique rhythm to working on magazines and multiple-series publications, particularly periodicals. Natural lulls, between issues, are punctuated by intense periods of work as teams of people focus on what seems to be a “moving target.” The sheer pace and intensity of working this way can be exhilarating, though a little stressful, too!

Aperture: Name a dream future project for the studio.

SW: A newspaper redesign would be a challenge, but one that we’d embrace.

Aperture: How has your practice changed (if at all) since websites and digital publications have become more prevalent?

SW: Technology has changed, but our design process remains largely the same. Our focus is still upon crafting design for specific purposes, whether that takes the form of print, screen, or interiors.

Aperture: How do you stay inspired?

SW: Reading.

Aperture: Name three things you must have when you’re working.

SW: Clients, calm, and caffeine.

Aperture: Are there any past or existing designers that you look up to?

SW: To choose a favorite designer, working in any discipline, is difficult. But if I have to choose one, it would be Yves Saint Laurent for his groundbreaking work, creative flair, sensational use of color, and longevity.

London-based graphic design studio A2/SW/HK went on press with the Spring 2013 issue of Aperture magazine outside of Berlin this past December. Here, design team Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel document the process in pictures.

All images courtesy of A2/SW/HK.

By Gene McHugh

This essay is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s Spring 2013 issue, “Hello, Photography,” which examines the state of the medium in a time of great change.

Bunny Rogers, Untitled, from the series 9 Years, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Allison and Rob Tanner (Aaron Graham and Shawn C. Smith), Rob has this everyday for a snack, 2010, from Tanner America. Courtesy the artists.

Allison and Rob Tanner (Aaron Graham and Shawn C. Smith), Greyson’s Greyhounds got the steaks from the BBQ, 2010, from Tanner America. Courtesy the artists.

Ryan Whittier Hale, Caress, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

Katja Novitskova, Earth Call 1, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Baij, CL Still Life 04, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Ryan Whittier Hale, Abomination, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

Katja Novitskova, Earth Calls 2 (Night), 2012

Bunny Rogers, Untitled, from the series 9 Years, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Baij, CL Still Life 03, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Of all the changes the web has undergone since its inception in the early 1990s, the most jarring, of course, is the way in which its related technologies have become enmeshed in almost every avenue of daily life. The Internet (at least in the places on the globe where it’s freely available) is no longer a novelty or pastime; it’s a fundamental aspect of contemporary experience. Millions of users fluidly shuttle between online and off, often functioning in both realms at the same moment.

In this dual reality, photography has taken on an intriguing role. In a virtualized world of constant information intake, the ability to read photographs instantly, to say nothing of the unprecedented ease of taking pictures and disseminating them online, makes photographic imagery the new lingua franca.

But while photography is more pervasive than ever, it is also every day less consciously photographic. Photographs are now pics: the mutable, disposable flotsam of daily life. Beyond even the automated comforts of the point-and-click or the one-time-use disposable camera, a modest telephone can now snap and distribute a quick digital image with ridiculous ease—an image with a richness and clarity that would have been enviable to previous generations of photographers. For artists, these new conditions, and the changing valuation of photographs, present myriad creative opportunities.

This is by no means a new area of investigation. Throughout the history of photography, artists—from John Heartfield to Robert Heinecken to Cindy Sherman—have explored the shifting status of the photographic image: that is, the way photographs are distributed, used, and received. Many artists working in and around the Internet today continue this inquiry, opening up new ways of understanding how photographic imagery functions in contemporary culture, with the new technologies that have now taken hold of our lives.

Katja Novitskova, Earth Calls 2 (Night), 2012

Jeff Baij’s CL Still Life series (2010) explores the aesthetics of banal images uploaded to the classified-ads website Craigslist. His particular focus here is on inexpensive dishes, glassware, and other dull items of home décor. His eye is drawn to low-resolution images, most likely taken with cellphones, almost certainly uploaded without artistic intent. Every once in a while an image will (accidentally) have an interesting composition, or will strike Baij as so supremely boring that it transcends its ostensible function. When he finds such images, he imports them into Photoshop and slaps on a raw filter, making the subjects at once humorously self-important—but also glowing, haunted, memorably strange.

The pursuit of the banal is an amply rewarding endeavor. In their blog Tanner America, artists Aaron Graham and Shawn C. Smith pose as suburban parents Allison and Rob Tanner, who use default web 2.0 blogging tools to “share photos with family and friends.” Photographs found online are collaged together and combined with short captions, satirizing the way many Baby Boomers and other non-digital-natives often awkwardly use the Internet. The result could be a cheap stunt, but the artists are able to strike a David Lynch–like balance of funny, creepy, bland, and surreal. Like Baij, Graham and Smith are mining a particular type of photography familiar to anyone who surfs the Internet on a regular basis—but then playing with the images, making them alien to themselves.

Katja Novitskova’s Earth Calls (2012) presents two images, each featuring an empty landscape (found on Google Earth) combined with an image of a man holding a smartphone (photographs culled from the blog platform Tumblr). In Earth Calls I, a man is seen taking a nude self-portrait by holding the phone up to a mirror. In Earth Calls II, another man, in a baseball cap, looks down in order to manipulate his phone. By themeselves, these images, like the empty Google Earth landscapes, are no more than random Internet finds. Through Novitskova’s simple juxtapositioning, though, the generic landscapes become abstracted planes and the men’s poses are elevated to something almost classical: overall, the work has an air of the elusive and mysterious.

In each of these bodies of work, there is an element of in-between-ness: the photographs seem caught between two polar attractions. There is of course an essential, definitive, inescapable irony in the use of these particular images. But there is another side to them, too: a gentle humor, perhaps a genuine affection for the subjects. And although in some ways the images in these projects are richly colorful and well-composed, there is a decided anti-aesthetic to them as well: they revel in the sort of low-res trashiness that characterizes so much photography on the web.

This disorienting in-between-ness can take other forms as well. Bunny Rogers’s ongoing project 9 Years is made up of screen captures taken from the artist’s experiences in the virtual landscapes of Second Life. Rogers places her avatar, Bunny Winterwolf, in sexually provocative situations with other users’ avatars. She then snaps hundreds of screencaps, trying to get one that strikes the correct intuitive balance. The images she ends up with are lush and evocative, but also odd and dark—sexuality becomes something both erotic and detached, both giddy and nightmarish.

Ryan Whittier Hale, Abomination, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

With similar affect, in Ryan Whittier Hale’s Null Presence series (2012) android bodies exist in an uncanny space between emotional empathy and antiseptic nothingness. Borrowing compositional strategies from Mannerist paintings and imagery inspired by science fiction, Whittier Hale’s worlds seem on the verge of generating emotion—both between the figures and between the work and the viewer—but that feeling is swallowed into a void of artificiality and surface flatness. Whittier Hale says that with this project, he is “working with the idea of something that simultaneously has a presence and is completely vacant.”

Such dichotomies correspond, I believe, to a larger sensibility evolving on the Internet: the liminal feeling of life in the digital age—perched as it is between the virtual world and the physical, the organic and inorganic, the emotional and the disaffected. Without offering value judgments, these series open up those threshold sensibilities and allow viewers a peek inside.

—
Gene McHugh is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn.
—

Crisis of The Real

$19.95

Words Without Pictures

$24.95

By Christopher Y. Lew

This essay is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s Spring 2013 issue, “Hello, Photography,” which examines the state of the medium in a time of great change.

Trisha Baga, installation view of The Biggest Circle at Greene Naftali, New York, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photograph: Martha Fleming-Ives.

As smartphones and tablets become enmeshed in our daily activities and everything from the flat-screen TV to the kitchen fridge becomes connected to the cloud, our relationship to technology and to the Internet has changed dramatically. It is no longer a matter of yes or no, Luddite or first adopter, online or off. Rather, life entails a range of interactions that combine direct encounters with information that is pulled from the ether. Everyday experience is a triangulation of three points: first, what is physically in the world; second, what is on the touch screen in one’s hand; and third, how the mind processes it all. It is as common as meeting a friend over coffee while texting another and then checking which celebrity has been spotted where by the Daily Mail. These types of interactions have changed—in big and small ways—how we engage with one another, how we process images and information, and how we regard the world at large.

I do not propose that technology alone has radically reshaped contemporary life, but rather that recent innovations have facilitated tendencies that began with the rise of advertising and media culture in the first half of the twentieth century and continued through the explosion of images in the 1970s and ’80s. Art has always attempted to bring new meaning to the rapid changes caused by technology. Pop Art, which emerged in the late 1950s, and the Pictures Generation of the ’70s and ’80s examined and made use of images that held currency in their respective times. A new generation of artists is now utilizing early-twenty-first-century images and exploring what they mean. Unlike in previous decades, today’s pictures circulate in an increasingly interactive and participatory manner, and the distinction between original and copy has been rendered more and more inconsequential.

Helen Marten fully acknowledges the circuitous life of images. In a 2011 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, she says, “There is a viral mentality that borrows from a mass of known imagery, from accessible and generous vocabularies, but does so understanding that it will become dispersed, boot-legged, pirated.” Her sculptures and videos are populated with logos and brands—known forms that she draws together, alluding to rebus-like meanings—and yet comprise a shorthand that frustrates direct communication. By featuring BMW logos, bottles of Campari, and Oakley sunglasses, Marten takes advantage of the status and desirability companies have tried to impart to their products. Tracing the history of modern advertising in his 2002 BBC documentary The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis notes of this phenomenon, “irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols of how you want to be seen by others.”

Michele Abeles, Publicity Photograph, Artist Michele Abeles, Rob Pruitt 2010 Art Awards, 2011. Courtesy Roger Kirsby.

The circulation of images and a sense of visual literacy is made explicit in the work of Michele Abeles and Lucas Blalock, two artists who are steeped in photographic tradition and attuned to image dissemination. In her recent photographs, Abeles has incorporated details of previous compositions, making explicit the meme-like replication and development of images. In a performative mode, Abeles had actress Paz de la Huerta take her place at Rob Pruitt’s 2010 Art Awards, for which the photographer was nominated as New Artist of the Year. The hot downtown actress stood in for the emerging artist like one stock photo swapped for another. Blalock riffs on commercial images, still lifes, and architectural shots in humorous photographs made with a large-format camera and a computer. He takes pictures of ordinary objects like erasers, fabrics, and drinking glasses to create an archive of images that he later manipulates in Photoshop. One image may be layered onto another, or sections of a picture can be duplicated or erased; each manipulation is blunt and visible, as if the images had gone awry. Adept at moving between various styles of photography—a skill that goes beyond mimicry—his works make apparent the highly constructed nature of images and, at times, offer backhanded compliments to other artists mining similar ground.

Lucas Blalock, installation view of xyz, Ramiken Crucible, New York, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Ramiken Crucible, New York.

Margaret Lee, installation view of New Pictures of Common Objects, MoMA PS1, New York, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Hanley Gallery. Photograph: Joerg Lohse.

Margaret Lee creates lifelike sculptures of fruits and vegetables by casting them in plaster and then hand-painting them with acrylic. Lee aspires for the perfect fruit, one that never rots and appeals both to the eye and camera. Composed like ads, the photographs she takes of these objects often include hand models or decorative elements like ferns and furniture. In exhibitions the photographs may be presented with the sculptures they depict, as well as with furniture and objects reminiscent of those in the images. This is not to suggest a photo shoot, but rather to bring closer together the object and its image. The photograph—through the language of advertising—creates a context for the object that is related to, but different from, the sculpture in the same space. The eggplant’s marble base may differ from the one depicted in the image. The plant in the gallery does not match the photograph. And yet the work and its image seem to serve the same aims, in particular to narrow the gap between objects and images, a divide that is currently bridged by fingertips and touch screens.

Describing an attempt to sculpt clay, artist Mark Leckey says, “it was as if my body, the instinctual part of it, couldn’t grasp why I couldn’t just copy, paste, and flip the other half [of the material].” We are all babies learning when it is appropriate to pinch and swipe. A sense of this familiar but strange space, in which it is difficult to distinguish between the physical world and video images, is evoked in Trisha Baga’s installations. Her works bring together video projections, found objects, paintings, and other elements created by the artist. Video footage—a combination of material she shot herself and culled from pop-culture sources—is projected onto a field of objects to produce an array of shadows that nest themselves within the video images. For Baga, the shadows represent the space between the physical object and video—a gradient of light and dark she taps to treat unwieldy topics like American history.

Another artist who points towards future ways of making is Josh Kline, who has utilized 3-D scanners and printers to create sculptures of the hands and feet of creative workers. By scanning footwear designers wearing their own creations and the hands of tastemakers—writers, artists, and designers—holding bottled drinks of their choice, Kline has made fragmentary portraits that double as product displays. Presented on metal shelves with custom lighting, the metonymic works evoke the seemingly limitless supply of a convenience store; they become a shop that holds the promise of copies tailored for each customer. Additionally, Kline’s titles explicitly identify by name and profession the individuals whose feet and hands were scanned. By doing so he metaphorically point towards the social networks that connect us professionally and personally. Kline has taken the visual language of advertising and commercial display—a language in which he says we are not only literate but fluent—and uses it to do something other than push products.

Similarly playing against expectations, Darren Bader has been known to include the work of other artists, and even non-artists, in his solo exhibitions. Exhibited without attribution or marks of differentiation, Bader fosters a space of equivalence. A framed movie poster can be regarded alongside a French horn filled with guacamole or a live snake improbably accompanied by mittens and a dildo. How Bader’s work is presented in publications is just as surprising. He generally prefers that his images to run without captions; one is never sure if the images he submits are of another artist’s work or sourced elsewhere. Bader does not aim to trick the viewer. Instead, his published images suggest a placeholder or stand-in, an acknowledgement that these have been and will continue to be subjected to what Marten calls acts of dispersion, bootlegging, and piracy.

Within Pop Art, Hal Foster sees a politics “centered on its commitment to what is held in common, including our shared image world understood (perhaps perversely) as a newfangled commons.” The Internet has made manifest our shared image world. Despite the fact that much of it is colonized by corporations, it serves as a digital commons that exerts a force of equivalence. Minority voices like conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers are as easy to find as traditional sources of journalistic information. Because you can Google it does not make it true. In his essay on the role of journalism today, Der Spiegel reporter Ullrich Fichtner writes, “In the ever-chatting grinder of the web, facts can look like just opinions; and opinions can wander around like facts.” Such commingling of fact and fiction allows for notions untethered to reality to grow in popularity and furthers a frame of mind that blends news and entertainment—as seen on twenty-four-hour news channels. It also gives rise to the bizarre scenes in which acting and real life are nearly indistinguishable. How does one parse Sarah Palin’s bid to be vice president from her showdown with her Saturday Night Live impersonator, or Charlie Sheen’s “winning” meltdown and his role on Two and a Half Men? On their own, such incidents may not seem of consequence, but in times of climate change and political upheaval the difference between fact and fiction is one we cannot fail to see.

Christopher Y. Lew is assistant curator at MoMA PS1. He joined the museum in 2006 and has organized numerous exhibitions, including Clifford Owens: Anthology, Nancy Grossman: Heads, and New Pictures of Common Objects, on which this essay is loosely based.

Josh Kline, Tastemaker’s Choice, 2012. Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal. Photograph: Joerg Lohse.

Helen Marten, installation view of Plank Salad, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2012. Courtesy of the artist, Johann König, Berlin, and T293, Rome and Naples.

This essay is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s Spring 2013 issue.

Owen Kydd is a Los Angeles–based artist who has recently garnered attention for his “durational photographs,” video works that run four to six minutes and explore the interstitial space between still photography and cinema. Curator Charlotte Cotton discussed Kydd’s work in her article “Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles,” published in Aperture’s Spring 2013 issue. Here, Kydd speaks with Aperture about his work and its relation to still imagery, experimental cinema, and technology. The interview is one of a series of online-only texts commissioned to accompany the Spring 2013 issue, “Hello, Photography,” which examines the state of the medium in a time of great change. —The Editors

Aperture: How did you arrive at the concept of “durational photographs”?

Owen Kydd: I was thinking about the differences between cinematic moments with photographic qualities and static images with time added and decided that “durational” applied more to the latter. The idea of duration as “incomplete time” seemed to be a way of categorizing a flow of pictures without relying on models drawn from cinematic discourse. It was not a direct challenge to the definition of cinema—my work would likely fall into a strict definition of that category—but a way of proposing the possibility of undoing the time signature of the photograph. Whether a snapshot or a tableau, a photograph denotes the flow of time by its very lack of duration. It reveals the possibility of two types of time, one that is frozen and one that is always mobile. I am trying to reverse the typical effect of the still photograph, to ask people to think about creating stillness out of duration. It’s a performance of photography that I don’t think occurs so readily in the narrative activity of cinema.

AP: Photography’s evolution has always been determined by technology and your work reflects the fact that many cameras can now shoot both stills and video.

OK: That’s exactly it. I started making this work in 2006, when still cameras began to include decent video options. It seems so normal now, but I think when we look back at this development it will be seen not only as a democratization of filmmaking, but also as a considerable marker in the history of still images. In addition to these hybrid cameras, flat screens with resolution that made video look photographic became affordable. Before this people had to rely on projectors, which meant a darkened room, and, even in the gallery space, that’s cinema. It was really in about 2005 or 2006 that technology allowed duration to be a constant variable. I was hoping my project would retroactively define certain conditions of still photographs while actively reversing the absolute time of the photograph.

AP: Can you talk more about what you wanted to explore about “the conditions of still photographs”?

OK: I was looking for a set of “static” conditions that would make something look like it was in the middle of being photographed, even when in motion. That’s a difficult effect to categorize, and I decided that instead of directly trying to reproduce a set of photographic circumstances, I should start by confronting things that I found limiting in photography. I guessed that I might find this in the some of the clichés of the medium; for example, I started with straight or documentary photographs because they were problematic for me as still images. I wanted to know if adding time could allow me to avoid some classic presumptions associated with the documentary form yet still make good pictures. I was asking questions: if the subject of a photograph moves, can I say I’ve captured something decisive? And if not, can I create an image that continues to hold this type of charged moment?

AP: What was problematic to you about documentary images?

OK: It’s a big category and difficult to define, but I could say that certain photographs which claim to report the real have always had difficulties on some level. But luckily all photographs contain cells that eventually disrupt the certainties that were originally ascribed to them. I wondered if I could accelerate this process by changing the temporal status of the image enough to create a tension, or distance, between subject and viewer that would make us think about documenting in a more fluid form. The snapshot street image seemed like a good place to start because it is understood as the most instantaneous type of photograph.

AP: But many of your works are well-planned still lifes, not snapshots taken on the street. How does duration relate to the still life form?

OK: There were instances I felt like I was creating a camera-based “street” picture without a decisive moment, where I found a version of stillness that expressed an event. But there were other times when I felt duration trapped the subject in a succession of static moments that mimicked a more traditional search for the “essential” and did little to create the tension I was seeking. Ultimately though, I was learning about what made durational photographs work—different things that resisted the need to close the shutter just once. These were found in subtle temporal and atmospheric effects such as the movement of air and light, or materials and surfaces I was using—plastics, inorganic reflective surfaces, objects that had a trompe l’oeil or ambiguous appearance on the video screen. I brought back a collection of these elements to the studio to be assembled and filmed.

The most important thing for me, aside from the instrumental control that a studio offers, is the way it introduces a present tense. The studio erases temporal markers. I wanted to record the present-ness of the studio, possibly to ensure that there was even less chance of interning an event, but perhaps also to confuse the experience of viewing. I have been asked if my studio images are live feeds from another location, which I hope is a clue that something irregular is occurring.

AP: There is a sense of “crime scene” in some of the images—the atmosphere, the sense of oddity …

OK: I am both documenting and remaking storefronts from Los Angeles as a way of performing classic photographic subject matter; storefronts have been a consistent subject for wandering photographers like Atget, Walker Evans, or Lee Friedlander. I found window displays on Pico Boulevard that clearly hadn’t changed in years and that were lit all night, which is mostly when I filmed them, without pedestrians and only the traces of headlights in the glass. It wasn’t quite clear what many of the stores were selling—a florist selling party supplies and trophies, for example, and stores with the word “museum” in their name. Maybe it’s also the imagined history of L.A., but instead of Atget–like scenes, these locations took on a noir effect, meaning they still felt like the crime hadn’t been committed. A key to noir is the separation of subjects from the world around them through the contrast of light and dark, and this contrast helps create sense of distance in the picture, providing a tableaux effect.

Owen Kydd, installation view of Color Shift, 2013, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York.

AP: In terms of the concentrated looking and observation involved in your durational photographs, I’m wondering about how experimental filmmakers—people such as Michael Snow, Peter Hutton, or Andy Warhol—have been a point of reference for you.

OK: I am in debt to expanded cinema and works like Empire, Wavelength, or James Benning’s films, and the last eight minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, for making moving images appear as if they contain still photographic moments. But with most of those films, the viewer is always located in the same space as the work; there is a projector behind you, and a beam of light that situates you physically within the process of forming the image on the wall in front of you. And I should make the point here that even if you are able to watch these films on an LED screen today, they were initially constructed for projection in a darkened room. I chose flatness as a parameter in my work, and am thus bound to a form of picturing. Fiona Tan’s monitor portraits and David Claerbout’s slide shows, even though they are mostly projected, operate in a similar field. Essentially, I think that if the photographic instant has been aligned with the conditions of modernist pictorial space, then its inverse performance should share similar concerns with surface, distance, and time.

For more than thirty years, German photographer Thomas Ruff has investigated the grammar and structures of photography, through his many celebrated series, Sterne/Stars (1989), maschinen/machines (2003), and cassini (2008)—to name just a few. After turning away from straight photography in the mid-1990s, Ruff has worked mainly with found imagery culled from a variety of sources—from print catalogs and scientific negatives to the Internet, from which he purloined pornographic images for his nudes series, which he began in the 1990s. More recently,
 he has turned his attention to 3-D imaging software to continue his investigations
of the medium. For his newest project, Ruff has taken up a study of the photogram, updating the form for the digital era by creating his works in a 3-D digital studio environment and outputting the resulting images in the large scale he tends to
favor. Michael Famighetti spoke with 
Ruff, who is based in Düsseldorf, by phone in February as he finished work on this new series in preparation for its debut
 at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery
. That exhibition is on view now through April 27.
 
This article is included in the Summer 2013 issue of Aperture, which is organized around the theme of “Curiosity” and which hits newsstands on May 21. Subscribe to Aperture magazine now to ensure you receive a copy of the Summer issue as soon as it’s published. Ruff is also featured in The Düsseldorf School of Photography (Aperture, 2010).

Thomas Ruff, phg.02, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.10, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.04, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, r.phg.s.03, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, r.phg.03, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.06, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Thomas Ruff, phg.s.01, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

Michael Famighetti: Can you tell us about the process behind this new body of work? What were you after when you decided
 to produce photograms in a digital studio?

Thomas Ruff: The decision was quite simple. I have two photograms by Art 
Siegel in my collection and I passed by
them again and again. Two years ago, I had the idea to begin making some of my own photograms. When I started analyzing how these photograms were made, I realized that it would be quite complicated; photograms are limited to the size of the paper and to the limitations of the black-and-white darkroom. You don’t have much color—only a brownish or bluish tone. And the other thing was if you put objects on the photographic paper and remove them, and then realize that these objects would have been better shifted to the left or the right, you have to start over again. You need a lot of luck to get a good photogram, so I considered how could I do it in a different way. I had already been working with a 3-D software on my series zycles, so I thought, maybe this is the right tool to try with the photograms. I developed a virtual setup: the paper on the bottom, and the objects—lenses, chopsticks, spirals, paper strips, all kind of objects—I put on the paper. There is a camera above, recording the paper, and then I set the lights with different colors.

MF: You have continuously investigated a range of mostly representational photographic types: the jpeg, the nude, the scientific image. What attracted you to the photogram as a form?

TR: The photogram is a kind of “pencil of nature.” It’s cameraless photography—you don’t see the objects but only shadows, which reminds me of Plato’s cave. It’s a very vague photography; you can’t recognize things very clearly but you recognize something. Soon I realized if I use too much color, it doesn’t look like a photogram, it just looks strange and abstract.

MF: The images here are reminiscent of László Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with color photograms from the 1930s. How active did you want such historical references to be?

TR: The goal was really to make a kind
of “new generation” of the photogram.
 So it still should look like a photogram, 
but not old-fashioned. I tried different types of photograms: some with lenses, some with spirals. I want to experiment more with the possibilities of this kind of software to create different kinds of images. I can imagine that Moholy-Nagy would have been absolutely glad if he could have used my technology! You can do so much more than with the limitations of the analog darkroom. I am sure he would have loved the software.

MF: The “types” of photograms here are entirely determined by the objects?

TR: Yes, mainly by the objects. If you look
 at Moholy-Nagy’s photograms they show different typologies within the photograms. I wanted to make variations of these different types.

MF: Photograms are usually quite small—they are limited to the size of the paper available, as you mentioned. Will these images be on par with the usual large scale of your work?

TR: Yes, they will be really big.

Thomas Ruff, phg.06, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

MF: Why is large scale important?

TR: First of all, I wanted to break the world record of the size for the photogram! [laughs] The early photograms, from the 1920s and ’30s, are quite small, more postcard size. Photograms from the New Bauhaus school—by Art Siegel and his colleagues, for example—are approximately fifty by sixty centimeters. I work with the large format; I like the physical presence of the big size.

MF: You mentioned the connection between this new body of work and 
your zycles series, computer-generated abstract line drawings based on algorithms. Tthroughout your career you have worked in strictly delineated series. Is it common for one series to bleed into the next?

TR: Yes and no. I am using the same software, the same techniques—but one series doesn’t emerge from the other. It’s more like you have a Leica, and then you have a Linhof: a 4-by-5 camera, and then an 8-by-10 camera. They are just different tools, or cameras,
 or techniques. The output looks completely different.

MF: Much of your work investigates “systems” and the role of genre in photography. You’ve worked with many forms of found photography, from catalog to online imagery. Considering how much photography has transitioned in recent years—this explosion of imaging—do you see new systems and genres emerging?

TR: I see photography as a very classical medium, with of course all kind of genres—portrait, abstract, science photography, and so on. What I am also interested in right now is the negative, since it seems that it is going to disappear soon. When I ask my nine-year-old daughter, “What’s a negative?” she can’t say, as she knows only digital photography.

“Polaroid? What’s that?” she asked me some time ago. What interests me is the outcome of all these different kinds of photography and how they change our lives and our perception of the world. I just turned some photographs that I own into negatives, and they look strange. My interest in this process comes from working on the photograms—I make reverse photograms. And you still have these strange, old-fashioned darkroom techniques, like solarization, which I now also practice in the photograms series.

MF: How do you see photograms, or abstract images, shaping our perception of the world?

TR: The photograms are not so much about the perception and influence of photography in our daily lives. Maybe I just want to recall that artists used techniques in photography that enabled them to make completely artificial and abstract photographs and that these techniques are, unfortunately, nearly forgotten.

MF: You’ve taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where you also studied.
 How does your interest in the history and evolution of photographic technologies come into play in the classroom?

TR: I’ve used a lot of different photographic techniques in the past thirty years. I realize there isn’t just one way to take a photograph, there are a thousand different ways—and that’s what I’ve taught the students. They should not insist on their beautiful Leica, or their Hasselblad, or whatever they use. The technique must result from the idea that you have—and you may have to develop your own technology to bring
out the images. I’m not much interested in “straight” photography anymore. It has been practiced for more than 150 years, and most of it is too conventional. I’ve always wanted to go beyond the limits.

MF: But you are interested in photographic conventions. Why?

TR: I think photography is still the most influential medium in the world, and I have to deconstruct these conventions.

Thomas Ruff, phg.s.01, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York and London.

MF: Do you ever take pictures, in the traditional sense?

TR: The last photographs that I took in 
the traditional way, with an 8-by-10 camera and negative film, were architectural photographs of my studio some months ago. And, of course, if an idea for a new series requires a traditional analog photograph, 
I will use the camera again.

MF: Could you talk about the role of research in your work? Where does a project begin?

TR: If I see an image that attracts, upsets, or astonishes me—one that stays in my mind for a long time—I begin working. This is the starting point of the research: 
I try to find out how the image was created and in what context—historical, political, or social—the image belongs. After clarifying these questions I begin to create “my own” image, the image I have in my mind, the image that was triggered by the image I saw. Sometimes it can be done in a straightforward way, with
 a camera, but sometimes you need to reflect on how you can manage to make this technically. For example, when I had the idea of photographing the night sky, I realized that with my small telescope, I had no chance of getting high-quality images of stars, so I looked for an observatory with a big telescope where 
I could take the photographs myself. 
But they wouldn’t let me in. So I had to give up the idea of being the author of the photograph, and worked with large-format negatives from the observatory’s archive.

MF: It’s been written that when you were in high school you wanted to be either an astronomer or a photographer. Your cassini series connects the two occupations.

TR: I have an affinity for astronomy, so
 from time to time astronomical issues show up in my work. The cassini series consists
 of images of Saturn, its moons and rings, taken by a machine camera within the Cassini spacecraft. They are black-and-white photographs with an abstract quality that 
I really like. To highlight the abstraction,
 I colored these photographs so that they resemble a kind of “post-Suprematist” image.

MF: You’ve spoken of your interest in the writings of Vilém Flusser, whose ideas about imaging, written in the 1970s and ’80s, feel prescient today.

TR: [Flusser’s 1983 Towards a Philosophy of Photography] is a book I read twenty years ago. He was writing about the shifting of photography. There are a lot of different photographs, and different photographs have different intentions. Fine art, medical, propaganda, and of course the most influential image-production machine is advertisement. This transformation, let’s say, of the scientific photography into the art world, or advertising photography into politics (as seen in the last U.S. election)—this modification of images from one intention to another brings about interferences. The image, and the meaning of the image, changes.

MF: This notion of shifting contexts—and thereby shifting meanings—is central to your work. This is true with your nudes series, your first using Internet imagery. How does your image-collecting process work?

TR: I have a particular curiosity; I see things, I collect them, with no intention or without knowing what to do with them. I just keep them, because they trigger something within myself. A couple of years later, maybe even ten years later, these things appear in my mind again and lead to a new body of work. There’s no straight line or conscious scheme of collecting. It could be any kind of image—it’s just that I’m attracted to it.

MF: Does the medium continue to surprise you?

TR: No, not really. But of course I’m always happy when I see a new, never-before-seen example of a photograph. An image is just an image—it all depends on what you do with it.

JPEGS

$250.00

JPEGS

$85.00

The Dusseldorf School of Photography

$95.00

By Geoffrey Batchen

Joachim Schmid, from Other People’s Photographs: Self

It is surely telling that in the same month—January 2012—Eastman Kodak declared bankruptcy and Facebook, the world’s largest online social-network site, moved toward becoming a publicly traded company valued at $100 billion. The following April, Facebook spent one of those billions acquiring Instagram, a startup offering mobile apps that let people add quirky effects to their smartphone snapshots and share them with friends.

The inference could not be clearer: social media has triumphed over mere media, or at least over the photographic medium as we once knew it. But what is the nature of the social in digital image-sharing sites? And what about the nature of photography itself? Has it too become bankrupt, reduced to no more than a vehicle for conveying sentimental platitudes? Or does it continue more or less as it always has, banal or fascinating according to the prejudices or interests of each viewer, avoiding its own obsolescence through yet another one of its strategic technical transformations?

Everyone concedes that photography is now a medium of exchange as much as a mode of documentation. Able to be instantly disseminated around the globe, a digital snapshot initially functions as a message in the present (“Hey, I’m here right now, looking at this”) rather than only as a record of some past moment. This kind of photograph is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical. As Michael Kimmelman once put it in the New York Times, photographing has become “the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter.” That chatter demands a different kind of body language than in the past, with arm outstretched and photographer looking at, rather than through, the camera. Contemporary photographers gaze at a little video screen and decide when to still (or not) the moving flow of potential images seen there. In operating that camera, they enact a sort of cultural convergence, in which the distinction between production and reception, and between moving and still images, has clouded. Danish scholar Mette Sandbye has proposed we consider this convergence a “signaletic” one, such that the “that-has-been” temporality of photography once described by Roland Barthes has been replaced with a “what-is-going-on,” a sharing of an immediacy of presence.

That said, the sheer number of photographic images being loaded onto social-media sites makes any analysis of the phenomenon difficult. Facebook has reported that more than three hundred million photographs are uploaded onto its site every day, meaning that the site currently hosts more than 140 billion images. That makes Facebook about forty-six times more photographic than Flickr, the next largest depository. Established in February 2004 by a Vancouver-based company, Flickr reportedly gains about 4,500 new photographs every minute (so nearly 6.5 million a day), mostly gathered into the electronic equivalent of personal photo-albums. Nevertheless, even the White House releases its official photographs there. And it’s just one of a number of such sites (the oldest, South Korea’s Cyworld, has boasted that at one stage 37 percent of the South Korean population had an account). How can anyone examine a representative sample of contemporary photographic practice in the face of such overwhelming statistics?

As it happens, a German artist named Joachim Schmid spends six hours a day perusing and grabbing images from Flickr, using them to illustrate his own artist books under the title Other People’s Photographs. When I asked him why, he told me: “I do it so that you don’t have to.” In the process of saving me the trouble, he also provides a kind of anecdotal, surrealist ethnography of global photography today. Again, it has become a truism to remark on the refashioning of privacy in our digital age, with social media stretching the word “friend” to include a vast array of relative strangers. Schmid’s unauthorized publication of Flickr photographs merely extends this array to comprise discriminating denizens of the art and book-collecting world. His website discusses Other People’s Photographs:

Assembled between 2008 and 2011, this series of ninety-six books explores the themes presented by modern everyday, amateur photographers. Images found on photo sharing sites such as Flickr have been gathered and ordered in a way to form a library of contemporary vernacular photography in the age of digital technology and online photo hosting. Each book is comprised of images that focus on a specific photographic event or idea, the grouping of photographs revealing recurring patterns in modern popular photography. The approach is encyclopedic, and the number of volumes is virtually endless but arbitrarily limited. The selection of themes is neither systematic nor does it follow any established criteria—the project’s structure mirrors the multifaceted, contradictory and chaotic practice of modern photography itself, based exclusively on the motto “You can observe a lot by watching.”

Joachim Schmid, from Other People’s Photographs: Self

For one such book, Schmid first gathered some ten thousand images of “currywurst,” the local fast food of his hometown of Berlin, lovingly photographed by those unlucky souls about to consume it (he tells me that, over his many earlier years spent gathering discarded analog photos, he found only a handful of such images). People visiting Berlin apparently want to remember the food they are about to eat, or at least to share the experience of that want with others. Even within the apparent global homogeneity of Flickr we can thus find viral traces of the local asserting themselves—if, that is, we care to look for them.

In fact, it is only Schmid’s looking that turns this otherwise international genre of food photography into a regional, even an autobiographical, focal point. Indeed, it might be said that a collapsing of the global into the personal is at the heart of his practice, making it true to the character of social media itself. Sitting at his computer screen, he downloads certain subjects and motifs that seem to recur in the constant stream of photographs he sees on Flickr’s “Most Recent Uploads” page, which he refreshes constantly. Of course, there are now sites that set out to facilitate this same sort of distillation process, such as Pinterest, a social-media website launched in 2010, on which its twelve million users compile collections of pictures they find on the Internet. But Schmid brings both a distinctively ironic eye and the play of chance to this process (he finds his images rather than searching for them), thus allowing us to take note of exhibitionist desires that might otherwise remain scattered and lost in the infinity of digital space. In short, each of the thirty-two-page samplers in Other People’s Photographs imposes a thematic unity on an otherwise unruly universe of images. A diverse group, these samplers include the titillating flash of Cleavage, the deadpan documentation of Mugshots, the concrete poetry of Fridge Doors, and the more literally concrete jungle of Parking Lots (surely a choice of category inspired by Ed Ruscha), to name only a few of his titles.

Among other things, Schmid has recognized the sudden popularity of previously unknown genres of image, such as the proliferation on Flickr of photographs of camera boxes, apparently now the first thing everyone takes with their new camera: takes, and then shares online. In a similar vein, one of his recent books comprises nothing but photographs of the photographer’s shadow. Some things, it seems, never change. Or maybe they do: what’s interesting about this digital genre is that all these shadow-pictures seem to have been deliberately made, a significant shift in an amateur practice in which clumsy accident once ruled the pictorial roost. Here on Flickr, through the mediating agency of Schmid’s hunting and gathering, we get to see the art world, which once upon a time mimicked this aspect of the so-called snapshot aesthetic, now having that mimicry copied and reabsorbed back into vernacular practice. It seems the analog snapshot is indeed remembered in digital form, but only via a historic artistic mediator.

Another frequent image appearing on Flickr is the selfportrait made with camera in hand, arm outstretched, a type of photograph made possible only with the advent of lightweight digital cameras. Schmid’s book on this genre implies that there are many more young photographers doing this than those over thirty, and more women than men. His selection also leaves the impression that this practice is more popular in Japan than in other countries (although, as he admits, this could be because Japanese teenagers upload their files onto Flickr as he starts work in Germany, whereas American members upload while he is asleep). In Korea, this kind of photograph has its own name: selca (self-camera). Korean scholar Jung Joon Lee reports that many young women who practice selca adopt specific angles and facial expressions that are designed to give them bigger eyes, a higher nose bridge, and a smaller face. But this kind of specificity, and a critical engagement with the Orientalism it internalizes, is subsumed in Schmid’s book to the startling conformity of the genre, to a blithe repetition of form that appears to obey no identifiable cultural imperative beyond narcissism. Here, then, is the challenge his project lays before us—not just to make sense of contemporary photography, but to find ways to creatively intervene within it; not just to wonder at its numbing sameness, but also to exacerbate into visibility the abrasive political economy of difference.

Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of photography at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

This article was published in Aperture #210, Spring 2013.

By Brian Sholis

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #1 (Version 2), 2010. All works © Lisa Oppenheim and courtesy Harris Lieberman, New York, and The Approach, London.

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #3 (Version 2), 2010.

Lisa Oppenheim, Lunagram #9 (Version 2), 2010.

Lisa Oppenheim, A monstrous column of roaring flame. Star Oil Co. Loucke No. 3 on fire since Aug. 7, 1913. Most disastrous fire in Caddo oil field and largest single well fire in history of U.S. of A. Daily loss of oil estimated at 30,000 barrels. 1913/2012 (Version V), 2012. From the series Smoke, 2011–12.

Lisa Oppenheim, Billowing. As we were driving up to Norfolk yesterday I saw the Enfield fire; where a Sony distribution centre sat ablaze by rioters was just pouring out smoke over the motorway. The sheer amount of smoke was quite surprising, and today smoke was still covering the motorway. I feel such despair at people who have taken to looting; so angry at the destruction people can cause. 2011/2012. (Version V), 2012. From the series Smoke, 2011–12.

For nearly a decade, Lisa Oppenheim has teased apart the individual steps of picture-making, wringing from the medium’s technical apparatus a surprisingly broad range of meanings. She is informed by the legacy of Conceptual art, but her most recent series, sampled in the following pages, reach back further in time for their inspiration. Time is itself a central focus of this work, which meditates on the various ways photography registers duration—the length of the exposure, the gap between a picture’s making and its viewing—and how our sense of it dilates in a photograph’s presence. This effort is in the service, the New York– and Berlin-based artist has said, of recovering the surprises offered by photography’s materials, and of dwelling in “the magic of the photographic process.” Through cool calculation, Oppenheim has devised an art of surprising affectiveness, equal parts romantic and rigorous.

The emotional resonance of Oppenheim’s works has often rested in her use of (quite literally) universal subjects. The sun and the moon—giver of light and the ultimate light reflector—feature regularly, from a 2006 slide projection in which the artist holds postcards of sunsets in front of the real thing to a two-channel 16mm film installation, made in 2008, that is based upon images of the Earth and the moon made the night of the Apollo mission’s first lunar landing. The moon recurred as the subject of a 2010 series of unique silver-toned photograms she dubbed Lunagrams. To make these works, Oppenheim borrowed from the archives of New York University mid-nineteenthcentury glass-plate negatives by John and Henry Draper depicting the moon. She made large-format copy negatives, placed them on photographic paper, then exposed them to the moon at the time of the lunar phase depicted in the original. Decades collapse as one image, made by an enthusiast whose work was as much science as art, begets another. A related series of Heliograms was made in 2011: she exposed a photograph of the sun originally taken on July 8, 1876, to sunlight at different times of day during each month that year. Irregular amounts of sunlight means not every work is equally exposed, and there are gaps in the series where Oppenheim’s obligations prevented her from capturing a scheduled image. The individual results once again warp our understanding of two distinct instants, but when seen in aggregate, the Heliograms also chart the passage of the artist’s days. These silvery and golden works possess an elemental allure—the metals themselves, the primitive processes used by the medium’s first exponents—but also acknowledge that copies are always already imperfect, and that life and time conspire to make them so.

Lisa Oppenheim, Passage of the moon over two hours, Arcachon, France, ca. 1870s/2012, April 11, 2012.

Oppenheim literalizes her attempt to translate the essence of earlier images in her 2011–12 series Smoke. There, she isolated details of smoke from a wide range of images of fire, then turned these semiabstract compositions into digital internegatives. Rather than use the light of an enlarger to expose these negatives, Oppenheim used the flames from a match, from a culinary torch, and from other sources to expose—and solarize—these images. From a 1913 oil-field explosion to World War II–era aerial surveillance to journalists’ images of the 2011 North London riots, the absent fires implied by the smoke have been made visible by altogether different flames. The resultant works, which look like polished-silver outtakes from Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, add a canny rumination on presence and absence to Oppenheim’s usual investigation of temporality. As with all her recent works, the Smoke series resides in interstitial spaces: between two images separated by time and place; between materialist and conceptual approaches to the medium; between intellect and emotion. In these seams Oppenheim finds a locus of mystery.

Top row: Lisa Oppenheim, Heliograms, July 8th, 1876/December 8th, 2011, 2011. Middle row: Lisa Oppenheim, Heliograms, July 8th, 1876/December 14th, 2011, 2011. Bottom row: Heliograms, July 8th, 1876, December 21st, 2011, 2011.

What provokes us to pursue something, to want to find out more? “Curiosity is an oddly ambivalent word,” notes critic Brian Dillon in this issue. It can lead, he points out, to a range of conditions, from utter distraction to deep concentration, all stemming from the “urge to discover.” Photography has long served as a medium of choice not only for the curious practitioner, but also for his or her audience, whose curiosity may be either aroused or appeased by an image.
In the following pages, the desire to see and visualize—in the often interconnected fields of science and art—serves as a capacious framework for approaching photography’s relationship to curiosity.

Stephen Gill, from the series Coexistence, 2012. © Stephen Gill

As Berenice Abbott once noted, photography is “science’s child,” a familial relationship well illustrated by revisiting
the medium’s early decades. Historian Jennifer Tucker looks back into the nineteenth century, when photographic “first glimpses” of microbes, solar eclipses, or the surface of Mars had lives as both news items and entertaining spectacles,
and when the young medium of photography was itself still viewed as something of a technical marvel. Tucker points
out that in today’s atmosphere of image inundation “first glimpses”—if they still exist at all—make a less breathtaking impression. The images recently transmitted from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, for example, are uncannily similar to familiar photographs of the Earth’s deserts. Such comparisons of the terrestrial with the alien are investigated here by David Campany, who discusses photographs by an eclectic group—Man Ray, Frederick Sommer, and Sophie Ristelhueber, among others—that may cause viewers to wonder exactly what they are seeing. Curator Joel Smith examines an equally inscrutable group of images, by Katy Grannan, Frank Gohlke, Naoya Hatakeyama, and others, in his guide to making (and making sense of ) “photographs of nothing.”

While some artists have more or less intentionally confounded viewers, researchers in other realms of image making have used photographs to show us the world as it
is, in an attempt to come to a deeper understanding of the phenomena that surround us. Science historian Peter Galison and artist Trevor Paglen discuss the history of objectivity,
as well as how images—now digital, searchable, everywhere—may be shifting from being mere depictions to performing specific functions.

Whether obliquely sidling up to our attention or demanding it outright, one thing that photography has always done is reveal. Harold E. Edgerton, through his famous flash experiments, slowed time down to unveil what had once been “invisible” actions. Berenice Abbott, too, aimed to bring the strangeness and beauty of scientific subjects to the public—as with her renderings of interference patterns in light, or her illustration of static electricity, featured on this issue’s cover. Photography historian Kelley Wilder discusses Abbott’s work along with that of Edwin E. Jelley, a little-known research scientist at Kodak who was fascinated by the forms and structures of light. Jelley’s work paved the way for the commercially available color processes that would be taken up by artists such as Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, who experimented with color photograms in the 1930s. Moholy-Nagy’s images in turn
offer a departure point for Thomas Ruff’s latest body of work, also featured in this issue: photograms for the digital era, created with 3-D imaging software. German photographer Horst Ademeit was, by contrast, terrified of technology: his enigmatic and obsessive project, introduced here by curator Lynne Cooke, used the instant Polaroid form to document what he named “cold rays,” an unseen force he believed emanated from his apartment’s electrical sockets. While Ademeit’s fraught attentions were absorbed in an intensely insular world, other photographers train their lenses with equal fervor outward, toward the mysteries of the atmosphere and the celestial bodies. Lisa Oppenheim follows this impulse with her recent “lunagrams,” heliograms, and more, taking her cue from nineteenth-century astronomical imagery.

Whether investigations originate in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century, by using the latest technologies or by reviving older ones, the desire to lay bare the unknown is perpetual. Yet, whether the realm is art or science, photography—like any medium of investigation— may lead not to answers but to further questions: as Joel Smith observes here, photographs can “doubt as well as certify, negate as well as indicate, embody absence as well as substance.”

—The Editors

By Jonathan Griffin

Views of John Divola's house and studio. All photographs © and courtesy John Divola.

In the distance, a soaring elevated freeway intersection frames a widescreen view of the San Gabriel mountains. The dissonance is typical of Southern California: awesome nature matched by equally awesome urban development. Despite the seemingly endless sprawl, it is rare in the Los Angeles basin that one cannot see out of it to the wilderness beyond.

Down below the traffic lies a quiet industrial development—rows of identical roller-doored units off a street with young trees and clipped lawns. In one of these units John Divola stores the bulk of his archive, which spans five decades, in metal shelves, with a table and empty walls at the front for viewing work. Two doors down, weightlifters have rented a unit as a gym. To his knowledge, he is the only artist on the block.

It is, perhaps, an unlikely place to find an artist’s studio. The town of Riverside, where Divola has lived for over a decade and worked since 1988, is situated sixty or so miles east of Los Angeles, in the heart of the Inland Empire. It is a comfortable, suburban place—maybe even a little bland. Divola admits that most of his artist colleagues and students at the University of California Riverside, where he is a distinguished professor, choose to commute from Los Angeles.

What brought him to Riverside? Partly, perhaps, the same qualities that he cites for choosing the studio: “Being here is a practical consideration—it’s very inexpensive, convenient, clean, and air conditioned.” I point out that the area is not dissimilar to the San Fernando Valley, which he documented in an eponymous series of photographs from 1971–73, made at the outset of his career. In those images, I suggest, there was a sense of sociopolitical criticality, of the photographer’s estrangement from the outwardly conventional suburban environment in which he had grown up.

“That’s a misinterpretation,” he says. “Even though I was to some extent alienated, especially by the war in Vietnam, I never had a desire to get away from it. It was what I was. And actually, one of the reasons my work changed after that was that your reading of that work was everybody’s reading of that work—that it was critical. It wasn’t. That was my landscape, and I was moving through that landscape, and I wanted to bring back an index of my engagement with it.”

This widespread misreading of Divola’s position as an artist has dogged him throughout his career, and it has to a great extent shaped his subsequent work. Putting himself in the picture, implicating himself in the situations that he photographs, is for him a central strategy. After the San Fernando Valley series he made Vandalism (1973–75), black-and-white images of derelict houses featuring spray-painted marks that, it becomes clear, were made by Divola himself. He is the vandal—or one of them.

In Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone (1975) he photographed evidence of forced entry into empty houses marked for demolition. Was it the artist himself who had caused the damage? Additional photographs taken inside some of the houses suggest it probably was. In certain images from his Zuma series (1977–78), shot in an oceanfront house in Malibu, the camera flash pins objects such as a newspaper in midair, thrown into the frame by the unseen photographer.

Divola talks about himself as a “specter” haunting his pictures. He feels this especially strongly when he looks back at early photographs and tries to recognize himself in them. Retrospection has occupied him a great deal recently—not least because he is currently preparing for a three museum exhibition in California this October. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art will mount coinciding but separate exhibitions of his work, none of which, Divola insists, is a retrospective.

He also found himself reflecting on his photographs from the 1970s while scanning old prints for his book Three Acts, published by Aperture in 2006. Revisiting these images prompted him to look once again for abandoned houses in which he could make photographs—this time with far more advanced technology.

Divola’s Dark Star series, from 2008, was shot largely in an empty house fifteen miles inland from Riverside, at the eastern edge of the megalopolis that stretches all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Large discs of black spray paint recollect the mysterious markings he had made in Vandalism. In the same house, Divola made the more recent series Theodore Street (2008–12) using an ultra-high-resolution method of photography called Gigapan. Between 40 and 120 separate photographs are stitched together by software to make a picture that can be printed at large scale without losing detail. Divola says his early prints are small only because, printed any larger, the raw materiality of his subject—scraps of plywood, shattered glass—would have been overwhelmed by the grain and fuzz of the photograph. In prints up to five by ten feet, some of which will be shown in Santa Barbara, Divola physically enters the scene and secretes himself among the details. There is plenty of space for the artist to get lost.

Divola doesn’t actually make art in his studio. His “indoor practice,” as he calls it, is taken up with managing his archive, the logistical challenges that he likens to Napoleon marching through Russia (“because it’s hard to move forward when you’re looking after the stuff in the rear”). The studio also gives him space to assess prints, old and new, some of which, such as his unfinished multipart work Malibu Progressions, from 1984, he is revisiting now that he has large inkjet printers at his disposal.

The real work, however, is done out in the field. “The beauty of photography, or conventional photography, is that it draws you out into the world, it draws you into an engagement with present reality,” says Divola. And with that, we’re out the door.

–
This article is from:

Aperture 211

$19.95

On the cover of Aperture’s Spring 2013 issue (#210) is a detail from an untitled 2012 photograph by Cologne- and Amsterdam-based artist Christopher Williams. The image is part of a new series of pictures he has taken of an East German Exakta camera, notable for the placement of shutter release, aperture dials, and other important components on the left-hand side of the camera body.

The issue’s theme is “Hello, Photography,” and offers articles on a broad selection of concerns for photography now. Beginning today, each week we will offer an exclusive insight into the design, production, and contents of the newly reconceived and redesigned Aperture. Stay tuned! The magazine launches on February 26.

Click here to subscribe to Aperture magazine.

By Brian Dillon

Nina Katchadourian, Topiary, from Landscapes, part of the series Seat Assignment, 2010 and ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Curiosity is an oddly ambivalent word that historically has pointed almost as frequently to a condition of ruinous distraction as to a state of intense and productive concentration or to an urge to discover. To be curious or to be interested in curiosities is to be charmed by details, trifles, niceties, or subtleties, and to disregard fundamentals. Distraction has its uses, however, as the history of detective fiction tells us. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “ The Purloined Letter” (1845) the stolen object fails to reveal itself to the most sedulous searches; the suspect’s apartment is investigated long and hard, the walls and carpets peered at through microscopes, the furniture probed with needles. The very cobblestones in the courtyard are prised apart, to no avail. At length, Poe’s detective Dupin discovers the thing, tattered but undisguised, on a letter rack in the rooms of the minister who has stolen it. Dupin’s distracted, sidelong mode of attention has won out over the prefect of police and his zealous and methodical program of close inspection.

Poe’s prototypical sleuth springs easily to mind when considering the role of curiosity in photography, past and present. And once we have thought of Poe it’s a safe bet that somebody will invoke Walter Benjamin’s comment about the photograph looking increasingly, in the twentieth century, like the scene of a crime. This last is a conceit that does not apply only to photography’s evidentiary potential: it’s of a piece with the idea that the photographer sees more intensely into the heart of things, but also reminds us of all the lures and feints that he or she might employ to frustrate that assumption. The melodrama of appearance and reality conditions much of our thinking about photography and what it discovers about the world. But there’s another sort of photographic curiosity, something like Dupin’s state of oblique diversion or attention to the humblest, most fleeting scraps of the made world and their abject, slapstick, sometimes delicate poetry.

Consider Making Do and Getting By, the photographic series that British sculptor Richard Wentworth has been producing since the 1970s, and which amounts at this point to an archive of found semi-sculptural interventions in the fabric of the everyday. Many of them (as in Poe’s tale) involve scraps of paper slotted or crammed into slits and crevices. There are napkins and newspapers jammed under café tables, bits of cardboard or tape holding things together, or nearly. Wentworth is fascinated by how the ordinary world around us has been made—step into a London street with him and he will spin a narrative out of the history of manhole covers—but also by the materials we append to our surroundings by way of repair or warning or inadvertent decoration. Making Do and Getting By includes numerous curbside assemblages designed to keep drivers out of parking spaces: hulking agglomerations of old gates and busted chairs, or sparse but informative settings of bricks and broken plaster balusters. Elsewhere, the stuff superadded starts to assume the form and substance of its support, of a surface or structure that now serves as temporary storage: discarded paper cups seem to sprout like spring buds from the pipe they’ve been jammed behind; scribbled notes on somebody’s palm bleed into the hand’s lines; and a lost leather glove stuck on black metal railings takes on the spiny structure of the railings and the foliage in the background. Wentworth alights time and again on those moments when forms and substances transmute into each other, and the most incongruous additions seem organic outgrowths of ordinary infrastructures.

Richard Wentworth, London, 1994. Making Do and Getting By, 1999. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.

There’s something of Wentworth’s capacity for simply noticing things in Nina Katchadourian’s photographs; the two artists share a knack for spotting ephemera crushed in the street: a driver’s license plate (Wentworth) or an old music cassette (Katchadourian) so completely flattened by traffic that it has become a mere phantom stain on the asphalt. In fact, Katchadourian, whose hugely various work includes sound, video, installation, and performance, has described her art as precisely a process of noticing—of paying more attention to the world than the rest of us do. Her skewed sense of curiosity is to be seen, for example, in her long-running series Sorted Books, begun twenty years ago, in which the titles of books in a given library compose scurrilous or touching found poems, jokes, and legends: in one tellingly summarizing image from 1996, two volumes have come together to say: “What Is Art?/Close Observation.”

It’s a tendency that finds some of its keenest, and funniest, expression in Katchadourian’s Seat Assignment: a series of photographs—latterly also video and sound—made entirely in flight, with her camera phone. A subset of this series found unexpected celebrity in 2011 when her group of Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style were taken up by mainstream media outlets such as the New Yorker and even Oprah Winfrey’s website. (In March 2010, she spontaneously tricked herself up in an airplane bathroom, using tissue and paper toilet-seat covers, as a figure out of Flemish portraiture; many more such images followed.) But the admittedly hilarious Flemish pictures are just one small part of a much larger corpus of curious improvisations. In more recent images, for example, two small figures train a telescope on a night sky dominated by a salt or sugar constellation, and ectoplasmic clouds obscure photographed faces. The series has begun to splinter into more subseries—Landscapes, High-Altitude Spirit Photography, Creatures, Athletics, Disasters, even Top Doctors in America—all made with in-flight magazines, airplane food, and the crude lighting effects available at Katchadourian’s aisle seat.

Nina Katchadourian, Bather, from High-Altitude Spirit Photography, part of the series Seat Assignment, 2010 and ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

The comic register broached by Wentworth and Katchadourian feels light, almost frivolous, but it has something profound to say about the effort and pleasure involved in breaking habits of looking or not looking, of paying a new sort of attention. (I suspect that part of the appeal of Seat Assignment is in our envy that Katchadourian is the one person on the plane not bored senseless.) One version, philosophically speaking, of that process is summed up in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s definition of the aim of his discipline as “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” The aphorism ghosts British artist Jeremy Millar’s 2012 photograph of a fly on Wittgenstein’s grave in Cambridge, England. No doubt Millar, whose videos, photographs, and installations frequently address modes of museological or archival looking, knows that Wittgenstein’s fly is an ambiguous creature: natural curiosity has got the insect into trouble in the first place, and it takes some rigor and self-control to crawl back out to the other side of the glass.

The curious photographic impulse I’m trying to corral here is also capable of a kind of metaphysical facetiousness. All the works I’ve mentioned are as much about the boundaries of our native curiosity, the constraints in which we improvise our existence, as they are about acts of extreme concentration and discovery. There’s a cosmically scaled version of that comedy of ambition and overreach in Katie Paterson’s History of Darkness: a “lifelong project” (as she calls it) in which the Scottish artist is amassing images of darkness, sourced globally from observatories and laboratories and transferred to 35mm slides, that show vacant black fragments of the night sky or of deepest, emptiest space. The slides are exhibited in a box that allows them to be taken out and examined, and each is labeled with a date and location in the heavens; an offshoot of the project (with the same title) involves large-scale photographic prints, similarly void. We know or suspect, of course, that there is something beyond or behind the darkness shown there, but even the most prying look will not disclose it as we hold each slide to the light. It’s a lesson in the infinitude of human curiosity and its attendant hubris.

Jeremy Millar, Fly on Wittgenstein’s Grave, 2012. Courtesy the artist.

History of Darkness is just one of several of Paterson’s works that essay a cosmically laconic take on astrophysical discovery and the protocols of its recording. A 2007 work, Earth-Moon-Earth, involved translating the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata into Morse-code radio signals and bouncing it off the moon; in the gallery a player piano performed the piece—somewhat degraded during the transmission—as it returned to Earth. For The Dying Star Letters—like History of Darkness, a continuing project—Paterson is sent an email each time scientists note that a star has expired; she then writes a letter of condolence, directed for instance to a staff member at the gallery where the work is on display: “I’m sorry to inform you of the death of the star SN2011kd.” The piece composes an index of disappearances, the light winking out as previous discoveries vanish into the void.

As Poe’s Dupin tells us in another story, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), the best way to catch sight of a heavenly body is to catch it off guard by looking a little to the side—“it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.” An excess of application, in other words, may result paradoxically in a failure of attention, and the cure is an oblique curiosity, a faith in peripheral vision. (What is Paterson’s History of Darkness if not an archive of all that’s off to the side?) It’s an essential lesson, especially in an era when we like to guiltily accuse ourselves of regular failures of attention, dispersed as our minds supposedly are among digital distractions. The history of curiosity reminds us that accidents will happen, and instructs its contemporary adepts how to be waiting when they do.

Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches critical writing at the Royal College of Art. A collection of his essays, Objects in This Mirror, was published by Sternberg Press in May 2013.

Curiosity: Art & the Pleasures of Knowing, a Hayward Touring exhibition conceived in association with Cabinet, will be presented at Turner Contemporary, Margate, England, May 25–September 15, 2013. The exhibition will travel to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery (September 28, 2013–January 5, 2014) and then to de Appel, Amsterdam (June–August, 2014).

Katie Paterson, History of Darkness, 2010 and ongoing. Installation view, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, 2010. © Katie Paterson and courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai, and Haunch of Venison, London.

Photographs as Things

Photograph by Andrew Blum’s three-year-old daughter. Courtesy Andrew Blum.

 
Photographs, especially personal ones, have always served as physical manifestations of memory. Held between fingers or hung on a wall, photographic prints had a direct material connection to their subjects, from light to lens to film to paper. Today, of course, our photographs are born digital. Their power as images remains, gloriously so; but their reality as objects is often lost.
 
In my house, these two ideas collide in the small hands of my three-year-old daughter, compulsively snapping photographs with a phone snatched off the table. She has amassed hundreds of them (mostly of fingers and floors). They are not merely weightless, but evanescent. So in an effort to fix them in the most literal way, we bought a sixty-nine-dollar wireless printer. The effect was strange: a photograph taken with one magic box was magically transferred through the air to another magic box, out of which a photograph (on paper!) slowly emerged. Up it went on the refrigerator door. The images themselves are beside the point. What I am grasping for, perhaps foolishly, is the sense of a photograph as a thing, an object of value—something to be cared for in the physical world, as we care for each other.
 
—Andrew Blum, journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (Ecco, 2012)
 
CIA Torture Tapes

Production still from the film Zero Dark Thirty, 2012 (dir. Kathryn Bigelow). Photograph by Jonathan Olley. © Zero Dark Thirty, LLC. All rights reserved.

 
For the past several years I have been obsessed with images I’ve never seen. They were recorded and destroyed. These images document torture. In their absence, fictitious images have emerged.
 
Jose Rodriguez, the man who in 2005 ordered the destruction of ninety-two videotapes of torture committed by the Central Intelligence Agency, claims: “I was not depriving anyone of information about what was done or what was said. I was just getting rid of some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk.”
 
Rodriguez, a high-ranking intelligence officer, made the decision to destroy the torture tapes in response to the public reaction to the Abu Ghraib photographs in 2004. It is often forgotten that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was made “public” before those images were released. Four months before the publication of the photographs, the U.S. military issued a press release saying they were investigating claims of prisoner abuse in Iraq. The announcement received little media coverage or interest. Had the photographs not been leaked to the New Yorker and 60 Minutes, Abu Ghraib would likely have disappeared from history.
 
Without visual evidence of CIA torture, history is being written by Hollywood. In Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA torturers are the heroic protagonists. Can we imagine this happening with Lynndie England, the woman holding the end of a dog leash around the neck of a naked prisoner at Abu Ghraib? Or Sabrina Harman, who gives the “thumbs up” sign over the dead body of Manadel al-Jamadi, a man killed during a CIA interrogation?
 
If the CIA’s torture tapes had been made public, how would history be told differently?
 
—Laura Poitras, documentary filmmaker and MacArthur Fellow, whose work includes The Oath (2010); My Country, My Country (2006); The Program (New York Times Op-Doc, 2012); and Death of a Prisoner (New York Times Op-Doc, 2013)
 
North Korea’s Gulag

Screenshot of a Google Maps view of the Yodok Gulag in North Korea, 2012.

 
After Hurricane Sandy last year, photographer Iwan Baan captured an iconic shot of Manhattan, half in blackout: it is a photograph that will haunt our collective memory for a long time. At the same time, Google Maps recently added North Korean coverage by means of a clever juxtaposition of aerial shots, satellite imagery, and clandestine on-the-ground documentary photos by daring locals and visitors alike, giving us firsthand views of this notoriously media-shy country and its equally notorious death camps. With this ostensibly minor extension of its mapping service, everyone’s favorite search engine entered the political arena—and Google deserves great credit for this unexpected advance. In the end, this “citizen documentation” of actual gulags on North Korean ground is more likely to unsettle the restrictive regime than any international sanctions.
 
Both Baan’s image and Google Maps in North Korea have reignited my appreciation for straightforward reportage that channels and politicizes key issues via powerful visual records. When I think about Vietnam, the Cold War, or space-age advances—as well as events that occurred before my lifetime—I consider those times and events through iconic press shots that strike a mental, emotional, and sociopolitical chord. Images help us to contextualize topics, ideas, and historical events. Great press photographs trigger desires, anger, compassion: they get me going. I expect photography to play a powerful part in developing my political agenda. I believe that the decline of quality news outlets goes hand in hand with a decline in empathy, political involvement, and democratic engagement. We are ready for a new breed of earnest and enthusiastic photojournalists who can produce those shots that capture our hearts and minds.
 
—Robert Klanten, founder and publisher of Gestalten, Berlin
 
Possibilities of Pleasure

Maha Maamoun, El-Sayyida Park #02, 2006. © Maha Maamoun.

 
A favorite image from the past few years is by Maha Maamoun. What is depicted is a children’s playground in a Cairo park, dominated by an aging tubular metal slide, which is painted in the bright colors of the flag of the Arab Republic of Egypt and bears an inscription in Arabic that translates to: “Baby Land Welcomes You!” Two small girls and a toddler boy are about to climb the stairs to the top of the slide, while a young woman in gray veil is helping another woman, in a black niqab, who just slid down, to emerge from the industrial-looking orifice at the bottom of the slide.
 
The image, which is humorous, sad, and indicative of a certain psychosis, brings to my mind a 1920 drawing by Max Ernst called The Hat Makes the Man, which is full of colorful tubular forms and men’s black hats, and bears a cryptic inscription: “seedcovered stacked-up man seedless waterformer [edelformer] well fitting nervous system also tightly fitting nerves! (the hat makes the man) (style is the tailor).” Like Ernst’s drawing—which suggests a kind of an alchemical-industrial transubstantiation of masculinity— Maamoun’s photograph delicately charts a cosmology of women’s lives and the possibilities of pleasure within a certain conveyor-belt religious order.
 
—Anton Vidokle, artist and co-editor of e-flux journal

By Lynne Cooke

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (03.06.1992), 1992. All photos courtesy Galerie Susanne Zander/Delmes & Zander, Cologne.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (11.03.1994), 1994.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (27.09.1990), 1990.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (27.05.1992), 1992.

Horst Ademeit, Untitled (19.02.1994), 1994.

Horst Ademeit, 4883 (29.07.2002), 2001.

Horst Ademeit, 3570 (14.12.1998), 1998.

Horst Ademeit, 490 (10.02.1992), 1992.

Secret Universe is the title of the exhibition series under which, in 2011, the late Horst Ademeit’s work was first presented to a museum audience. It was a fitting choice for an exceptional corpus of Polaroid (and later digital) photography that was neither conceived as an artistic project nor intended for public exposure. Compiled over some fifteen years, beginning around 1990, these images were made for strictly personal, utilitarian ends.

Trained as a textile designer, Ademeit entered Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 1960s. When his work was rejected as too conservative—too academic—he left not only Beuys’s class but the art world at large. Thereafter Ademeit supported himself primarily as a manual laborer in the building trade. He took up photography in order to contend with a mounting concern: his belief that he was increasingly subject to the deleterious effects of what he referred to as “cold rays” and invisible radiation, emanating from electrical sockets and fittings in his apartment. To contain and counter the harmful yet undetectable rays, Ademeit photographed their sources at home, and, by extension, in his neighborhood, notating his feelings and impressions— as well as detailed data from electricity meters, thermometers, clocks, and other devices—in the narrow margins of his Polaroid prints. While capitalizing on the ease and immediacy offered by this particular process, Ademeit may also have valued the fact that, exceptionally among photographic media, the Polaroid camera produces a unique and unrepeatable image. On the evidence of those few among his six-thousand-plus Polaroid shots made public to date, it seems, however, that the making of the image— the pointing, shooting, transfixing, and hence warding off of the feared effects— took priority over the character of what was produced. The more rudimentary his methods, and the more seemingly happenstance his compositions, the greater the charge generated by the resulting images—as if something had, indeed, been caught on the fly. In short, these works are compelling almost in inverse relation to the degree of attention lavished on their production. Ademeit’s oeuvre has been likened by critics to a Conceptual art project of the kind that fueled the practices of On Kawara and Hanne Darboven. It might equally well be compared with works by certain individuals who have felt themselves subject to the wiles of what Viktor Traub (an associate of Freud) termed “influencing machines”: that is, machines that appear, in the words of the psychoanalyst, “a s an outer enemy, a machine used to attack the patient.” Among the most haunting precursors to Ademeit’s murky testimonials, the annotated drawings of Hugo Rennert, Jakob Mohr, and Robert Gie sometimes depict their authors entangled in the immaterial coils emitted by unidentifiable contraptions, and sometimes simply record the pathways traversed by sinister impulses. Had Ademeit picked up pencil and paper, in place of a camera, while grappling with his infested environment, he too would likely be identified as an Outsider artist. Fortunately, photography has not been subject to the same disciplinary distinctions as the other visual arts: it largely eschews hierarchies between what is produced by the marginal and/ or self-taught for leisure and utilitarian ends and the panoply of artifacts produced by mainstream professionals of various ilks. In photography’s short history, conventions based on notions of center and periphery, of accredited and amateur, are less determinant than they are in the discourses attending painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts. Indeed, one measure of the strength of Ademeit’s singular endeavor is that it can be viewed through multiple lenses.

Curator and art historian Lynne Cooke is currently Andrew W. Mellon Profesor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. She recently curated Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos, at the New Museum, New York.

By Jimena Canales

Front cover of notebook 31, in use January 11, 1973–August 17, 1975.

Page 88 from notebook 8, in use June 1, 1937–April 16, 1938.

Page 47 from notebook 1, in use June 18, 1948–February 7, 1950.

Page 122 from notebook 7, in use April 28, 1936–May 27, 1937.

Page 79 from notebook T-3, in use January 20–July 13, 1932.

Page 100 from notebook 9, in use April 18, 1938–June 12, 1939.

Page 3 from notebook 10, in use June 13, 1939–September 17, 1940.

Page 42 from notebook 9, in use April 18, 1938–June 12, 1939.

Page 73 from notebook 25, in use April 29, 1938–May 14, 1960.

Page 78 from notebook EE, in use December 8, 1948–April 8, 1951.

“Let a cannon-bullet pass through a room, and in its way take with it any limb or fleshy part of man.” This dramatic scenario was envisaged by the great Enlightenment thinker John Locke in 1689. The bullet, he reasoned, “must touch one part of the flesh first, and another after, and so in succession.” But the action would happen so instantaneously that no one would be able to “perceive any succession, either in the pain or sound of so swift a stroke.” Our rational minds tell us that rapid events occur in a certain order, even though this order cannot be perceived. Since Locke’s early speculations, generations of researchers have worked hard to understand an increasingly fast-paced world. With the help of electronic flash, photographers were able to arrest Locke’s imagined projectile in midair: in the 1930s, Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, captured a rifle’s bullet flying at the vertiginous speed of 2,700 feet per second. The first use of flash is usually attributed to one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1851 Talbot used a simple electric spark to illuminate a moving target—a page of the London Times that was pinned on a rapidly rotating wheel. To his amazement, the resulting photograph was legible. At the turn of the century, the British physicist A. M. Worthington used sparks to illuminate splashing drops, and in France during the 1920s the Seguin brothers developed the “stroborama”— a machine made first with mercury and then with neon arc lamps. As scientists extended the field of flash illumination beyond the spark, they increased the range of their visual studies.

Edgerton’s first announcement of strobe technologies appeared in a 1931 issue of the journal Electrical Engineering. James R. Killian, a young science writer (later president of MIT and one of Dwight Eisenhower’s most trusted scientific advisors), was immediately fascinated by strobe lights. For more than forty years, Edgerton and Killian worked as a team: one taking the photographs and the other writing about the “meaning of the pictures.”

Page 151 from notebook 26, in use May 14, 1960–January 18, 1962.

In 1932 Edgerton’s images were published in Technology Review, a student-run MIT journal edited by Killian, who also wrote the preface to Edgerton’s first book about strobe technology, the handsomely illustrated Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography (1939). When the United States joined World War II, Edgerton went on active duty; his night-reconnaissance work (using a 40,000-watt-per-second xenon flash) won him the Medal of Freedom. Upon returning home, he cofounded a highly lucrative defense-contract business from which he and his partners made a munificent living. Among their many endeavors, they developed a shutterless “rapatronic” (“rapid” and “electronic”) camera that was able to photograph the first stages of superfast nuclear explosions. In 1954 Killian and Edgerton republished Flash!. The original 1939 edition had included a photograph of a golf club hitting a ball; in the later volume this image was replaced with one of an atomic bomb explosion. While much had changed during a decade and a half of war and Cold War, Killian’s preface to the book was unaltered. Edgerton was, Killian noted there, “first of all a scientist and an electrical engineer, investigating, measuring, seeking new facts about natural phenomena.” Nonetheless, Killian also insisted that “these pictures are not only facts, but new aesthetic experiences,” which he compared to Edward Weston’s cypress trees and rocks, Edward Steichen’s sunflowers, and Alfred Stieglitz’s clouds and hands. He described Edgerton’s images as “literal transcriptions” of nature, broadly fitting within a realist theory of representation. They were, Killian asserted, “scientific records” written in a “universal language for all to appreciate.”

For Edgerton himself, strobe photographs were something else: records of the unforeseen and the unexpected. As he would put it decades later: “A good experiment is simply one that reveals something previously unknown to the student.” Many aspiring young engineers arrived at his MIT Strobe Lab believing otherwise: “Some students expect the results to prove the initial assumption, but I have always empathized with the student who sees new discoveries and knowledge that were not anticipated flowing from the laboratory.” According to Edgerton, there was “no such thing as a ‘perfect’ result or a complete study of the phenomenon.” His laboratory notebooks, filled with notes, handscrawled diagrams, and snapshots documenting his work, reveal the flowing stage of production—often referred to as “science in action”—which belies the static, “ready-made” outcome presented at the end. In contrast to the published photographs, those in his lab notebooks show a different behind-the-scenes spectacle: most interestingly, scientists (including Edgerton himself) working their machines. Killian was not concerned with the production process of science or with unexpected results that could suddenly surface in real time. For a number of like-minded thinkers—including Aristotle and Albert Einstein—time was as predictable as space. Edgerton’s machines “manipulate time as the microscope or telescope manipulates space,” Killian wrote. Modern science “ enabled us to see and understand by contracting and expanding not only space but time.”

Edgerton was not as optimistic as Killian. “Although I’ve tried for years to photograph a drop of milk splashing on a plate with all the coronet’s points spaced equally apart, I have never succeeded.” But he was hardly disappointed: “In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography.”

Page 46 from notebook 19, in use June 18, 1948–February 7, 1950.

Edgerton expected the unexpected. In 1952 came an ultimate case in point: in approximately ten nanoseconds, one of the handheld cameras he and his associates had developed captured the initial stages of the first hydrogen bomb explosion, which obliterated Elugelab Island, part of the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. Even those who had witnessed atomic tests were stunned by the bomb’s capacity for destruction: the explosion was more than twenty times the size of the Hiroshima fireball. Not only was Elugelab vaporized, but life on the surrounding islands was destroyed. Radiation blanketed most of the atoll, and hundreds of natives expelled from the island were left with nowhere to return to. As in Locke’s seventeenthcentury description, the pain on the ground did not match with the knowledge of the succession of events—this time on a scale never before imagined.

Jimena Canales is associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History (University of Chicago press, 2010) and numerous articles on the history of science, film, photography, art, and architecture.

All images courtesy MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Harold Eugene Edgerton Papers, Cambridge, Massachusetts. All rights reserved.

Olaf Breuning, Pattern People, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Over the course of her career Helen Levitt found no shortage of off-the-cuff comedy playing out in New York’s streets. It’s fitting then that Tim Davis shared Levitt’s images with his photography students as examples of both levity and joy in the medium. Davis, in a diagnosis in these pages of “ photogeliophobia”—fear of funny photographs—observes that photographers have tended to downplay their sense of humor while responding to a world full of unexpected hilarity. Famously laconic, Levitt didn’t comment much on her work— maybe explanation took the fun away—but she did once admit to “looking for comedy more and more,” a quality she often found by surreptitiously photographing children at play.

This issue is loosely organized around the title Playtime, a nod to French filmmaker Jacques Tati’s brilliant 1967 send-up of the absurdities of modern living. Tati’s signature pokerfaced slapstick is felt across these pages. Erwin Wurm, speaking of his jarringly illogical One-Minute Sculptures and other works, remarks that he views humor as a vehicle to arrive at other meanings, including pathos. With her Drape series, Eva Stenram digitally rewires vintage pinup pictures, performing a kind of détournement that takes the wind out of the original images’ erotic charge. Italian polymath Bruno Munari—who began his artistic career as a Futurist painter in the 1920s—also worked as an illustrator, designer, and inventor, and brought all these talents to bear upon his photographs, which are performative, inventive, and unabashedly fun.

What are games and play without rules? Invented, often arbitrary rules governed the work of the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s discussed by Robin Kelsey: figures such as John Baldessari and Eleanor Antin, who responded to a tumultuous, uncertain era—and to the machismo and self-importance of “serious” art—by making games and clever gags a purposeful artistic strategy. More recently, Maya Rochat, one of the artists in the portfolio of young Swiss photographers assembled by Bruno Ceschel, suggests that “ non-seriousness is a refusal to fall asleep.” This group of artists exchange austerity and formality for absurdity and humor, freely mixing media to create brash and messy images fueled by a curiosity about how the medium can be stretched and explored. A number of these figures are associated, as instructors or one-time students, with two of Switzerland’s major art academies.

Schools, clearly, can serve as incubators for experimentation, playful thinking, and productive distraction. Over the last few years, James Mollison has photographed the anarchic theater that unfolds each afternoon across the globe’s schoolyards. Campus antics are of course nothing new, as we see in a portfolio from the 1930s showing a group of daredevil students at the University of Cambridge performing a precursor to parkour: scaling the walls and turrets of King’s and Trinity Colleges as though they were alpine slopes. Their dizzying images are reminders of how vertigo can remove us from the everyday, that play is often purposeless—sometimes undertaken primarily for the benefit of a spectator. Jo Ann Callis’s darkly physical images, published here for the first time, suggest a game of what does-this-feel-like? enacted for the photographer.

Central Archway Gibbs building, King’s College, ca. 1937. © Noël Howard Symington, The Night Climbers of Cambridge. Collection Thomas Mailender.

In his 1961 book Man, Play, Games, philosopher Roger Callois noted that “secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activity.” Sophie Calle, an artist celebrated for her clever, mischievous projects, discusses her new series revisiting the brazen theft of artworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In her conversation with Melissa Harris, Calle teasingly suggests of her “documentary” project: “Maybe everything is invented. . . . Who knows?” Inversely, Japanese photographer Kazuyoshi Usui offers us admittedly fictional images that appear to be real, spinning Japan’s bygone Showa era into a pink-tinged future that never really happened. Poet Frances Richard speaks with Christian Marclay about his snapshots of found musical notation, repurposed and then literally played by musicians. Marclay notes that his approach to photography “includes a sense of playfulness because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.” This inquisitive spirit unites the many guises of play found in this issue—play as games, as fictions, as digital simulations; role-playing, playing music, and so on. The beauty of play, it seems, is that you never quite know where the game will take you.

After this issue, Diana C. Stoll, Aperture’s longtime senior editor, will be moving on to pursue personal projects. We will greatly miss Diana’s endless wisdom, brilliant editing, and impeccable eye. We wish Diana the best of luck in her new endeavors, but we don’t consider this a good-bye as we look forward to having her as a writer in our pages.

—The Editors