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Redux: Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Photographer”

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By Aveek Sen

Italo Calvino, Paris, January 1984. Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images.

Italo Calvino, the Italian writer, began his tribute to Roland Barthes in La Repubblica with a horrific image of defacement. Barthes, Calvino noted, had been disfigured beyond recognition by the accident that had killed him on February 25, 1980, lying unidentified for hours in the hospital. This reminded Calvino of the book that he was reading only a few weeks before its author’s death: La Chambre Claire, or Camera Lucida, as it is better known today. Sitting down to write the tribute in April 1980, Calvino was struck by how Camera Lucida was more a book about love and death than about photography. It made him think of Barthes lying dead, “name unknown,” in Salpêtrière, “the frail and anguished link with his own features . . . suddenly torn as one tears up a photograph.”

Most of us find it strangely difficult to tear up a photograph, even when it is of an inanimate object, a landscape, or someone we do not know. We find ourselves stopping short of the imagined violence of the act, finding it much easier to tear up, say, a letter. The flea markets of Europe, as Tacita Dean discovered while making Floh (2001), are full of photographs that have been abandoned rather than destroyed. Yet, the tearing up of photographs as an extreme gesture that fuses madness and violence forms the climax of a story written by Calvino in the mid-1950s. It is called “The Adventure of a Photographer” and became part of Difficult Loves, a collection of finely reflective short stories, or “adventures,” each involving a different figure: a poet, a reader, a traveler, a soldier. Written more than two decades before Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Photographer” reads, to me, like a far more contemporary parable about the medium than those canonical texts by the Sontag-Barthes-Benjamin trinity that remain mandatory for serious photographers or writers on photography today.

Calvino’s photographer, Antonino, is a “hunter of the unattainable.” Initially reluctant to pick up the camera his friends use so avidly, Antonino’s relationship with photography starts as a pursuit of “life as it flees,” but soon turns into a “passion difficult to put up with”—a state of isolation caught between obsessiveness and a pervasive sense of loss; everything that is not photographed is lost. Antonino realizes very quickly that what lurks in his “black instrument” is nothing but a kind of madness. This madness is a forking path. One path beckons outward, toward the doomed and impossible desire to document everything that exists and happens before it is lost forever. The camera must record all reality, all history; only then would it begin making some sort of crazy sense. The other one leads inexorably within, into the labyrinths from which the eyes, windows of the soul, look at the world outside. Yet, in his studio, as the photographer focuses the camera on his model, her body forced into a sequence of grotesque poses, the two roads, inner and outer, seem to cross again “in the glass rectangle.” It is “like a dream, when a presence coming from the depth of memory advances, is recognized, and then suddenly is transformed into something unexpected, something that even before the transformation is already frightening, because there’s no telling what it might be transformed into.” “Did he want to photograph dreams?” the half-mad photographer asks himself, and the suspicion strikes him dumb.

Italo Calvino, Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves) (Einaudi, 1970). Courtesy Fondazioni Luigi Einaudi, Turin.

In recording Antonino’s descent into a psycho-pathology of everyday life driven by the camera, Calvino shows how photography could lead, through an obsession with capturing the real, toward the unhinging of the mind from that very reality. It is, paradoxically, the compulsion to document that dooms photography to transgress the limits of the visible, opening up a terrain that belongs to the imagination rather than to empirical certitude. In his tribute to Barthes, Calvino described the capacity of language to speak about things “that are not”: this was its fundamental difference from photography. Yet, in this story, Antonino takes photography close to the inwardness of the imagination unshackled from the real, and to the irreducible logic of memory, dream, and fantasy. This is also the domain of fiction and, dare one say, of art. It is the rigorous unruliness of fiction— rather than the discursiveness of theory, or the objectivity of history—that becomes the mode in which Calvino fathoms the meaning and possibilities of photography. It is fiction that rescues photography from the risk-averse middle path of empiricism by toppling the eye, and the eye’s mind, into the abyss of the invisible. As he lets go of the hope of capturing with his camera the “essence” of the woman he desires, Antonino stumbles upon his art’s most difficult secret: “Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.”

Aveek Sen writes usually from Calcutta. In 2009, he was awarded the Infinity Award for Writing on Photography from New York’s International Center of Photography


Gus the Bear

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By Sylvia Plachy
 
This essay was first published in issue 206 of Aperture magazine (Spring 2012).

 
Stop and go: always on some journey. My bounty is a photograph or two. I remember what pulled me, an instant of clarity, a moment of perfection, but where was I? Beyond the edge it often fades to darkness: I don’t always remember the season or the place.
 
But with Gus and Ida, I do remember. It was 1988. They were new residents of the renovated Central Park Zoo, which finally saw the end of those cramped little nineteenth-century cages. Gus was brought from Toledo and Ida from Buffalo. They were both rambunctious and about three years old—preteens, in polar bear terms. I saw them through the glass wall of the pool gliding and frolicking in their white buoyant bulks. What joy! I saw them again in 1992 resting on a rock, quietly locked in an embrace.
 
Almost twenty years passed and then last summer, I read in the paper that Ida had died and Gus was now alone. The morning I went to see him, he was nowhere to be found. I asked a woman standing next to me if she knew where Gus was? “I think he is in mourning,” she said, as though mourning were a place—some dark cave— rather than a state of being.
 

 
When I came back that afternoon, I knew from the commotion and the way the children were squealing that Gus was present. And there he was, a glorious thousand pounds, with eyes half-shut swimming back and forth, as if pacing. Each time he reached the outer edge of the pool, and before he threw himself back again into the water, he pushed himself up, raised his bushy head, shook off the water and took deep whiffs of the air—looking for Ida, I thought. Poor Gus.
 
I tried to find someone who might have known Gus over the years. The zoo officials didn’t know, didn’t care, said they’d call me. The zookeepers were busy and too young. All channels were blocked. I turned to the chatter on the Internet. Through the noise and PR jargon and giddy superficiality, I gleaned that Gus had been depressed before; some called him “the bipolar polar bear.” He had had expensive psychiatric therapy, and occasional relief with toys and distractions. Ida joined him in 1987 and Lily, another female bear from Germany, came a few years later and shared the “enclosure.” Lily is gone, too; she died seven years ago.
 
Time stands still in photographs. Like the guys in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the bears remain forever suspended in motion. Gus and Ida’s idyllic underwater dance, my illusion that all was well in some small corner of the world, was the truth only of that one second, a break in hours of tedium. Though there must have been many good moments and many visitors have been cheered, a zoo is a zoo: an enclosure is a prison. Outside, on the other hand, fear and hunger are frequent companions: Nature is not all it’s cracked up to be. Life anywhere is good only in spurts.
 
Now in this new portrait of Gus, he is alone. He is too old, I hear, to get used to yet another bear, his toys are really just plastic buckets, and as he continues his joyless swim at the dark side of the pendulum, he yearns for something—he doesn’t know what— perhaps not just his lost Ida.
 
As I leave the zoo, I read a sign on the fence: “Treat each bear as the last bear.” There is no source, no explanation. I am left with another riddle.
 
All photographs © Sylvia Plachy, 2012

Night Climbing

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By Ian Jeffrey

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The Ivy Arch, St. John's College, St. John's Street. All photographs © Noël Howard Symington, The Night Climbers of Cambridge/Collection Thomas Mailaender.

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Lion chimney (narrow climbing passage), Fitzwilliam Museum.

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Note on the verso of the photograph, "The Face of [Gonville and] Caius [College]."

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Trinity College, Fourth Court climb.

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Back up Garrett Hostel Lane to Trinity Lane.

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King's College Chapel (shown: Noël Howard Symington).

Why should Thomas Mailaender, a contemporary artist known for his impudent provocations, want to present us with photographs of students climbing on the roofs and walls of colleges at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1930s?

The Night Climbers of Cambridge was first published in 1937, by Chatto & Windus, a respectable publishing house in London. (The book, illustrated with photographs, was recently reissued by Oleander Press.) Mailaender, attracted by this peculiar venture, bought the original pictures and assembled them as a traveling exhibition. An odd choice, at first sight, but Mailaender has always been attracted by makeshift spoofs and charades. Nothing attracts him more than a tacky stunt where all the seams show. He is at home in the soft underbelly of the Internet, where self-satisfied egotists hog the limelight as they compete for delusional awards. In one noteworthy presentation he features as a beaming prize-winner holding on to outsize checks. He has a fondness for shaky facsimiles and rackety cover versions. His pictures of Algerian vehicles, piled high with possessions and discards, taken at the port of Marseille, look like nothing so much as a Joseph Beuys exhibition chanced upon in transit.

Mailaender is a saboteur. Bathos is his mode. His targets are credulity and complacency. He finds contemporary life, which includes contemporary art, ridiculous, pathetic, and entertaining. Long ago, before the night climbers plied their saucy trade on the walls of Cambridge, he would have been at one with Austrian writer Karl Kraus, who also appropriated pictures. Kraus’s leitmotif, you will remember, was the hanged body of the separatist Cesare Battisti displayed on a board in the moat of the Castello del Buonconsiglio in 1916 as part of a group portrait of executioners and accomplices all happy to be involved. Kraus saw it as a conclusive indictment of the Austrian Empire.

Note on verso of photograph, “Tottering Tower.”

The Cambridge adventurers fit Mailaender’s bill precisely. Maybe they meant no real harm. All the same they were climbing, which was a man’s business carried out regularly and hazardously on rock faces in the Lake District and in Wales—and sometimes in the Alps and on Everest where George Mallory and Andrew Irvine came stylishly to grief in 1924. In this context fooling around on the buttresses of King’s College or St. John’s couldn’t be taken seriously. The night climbers, headed by Noël Edward Symington, were, one might think, asking to be held in contempt.

They weren’t even doing anything very unusual, for any amount of famous names had amused themselves on those famous walls—Geoffrey Winthrop Young, for example, a famous alpinist and author of The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity in 1899. What set the new generation apart was its interest in publicity. They photographed themselves in action, using flash—which drew the attention of passing policemen. They were, that is to say, interested in staged events, and at the time such events were popular in the British press: studio pictures, for instance, of films in the making and of early TV shoots at London’s Alexandra Palace.

“Tottering Tower,” Old Schools, Trinity Lane.

Meanwhile, in the real world the Spanish Civil War was in full swing—Guernica was bombed in 1937. In depressed Britain the government was at its wits’ end and the unemployed were up in arms—the famous Jarrow marches protesting unemployment and poverty also took place in 1937. The night climbers, cheeking the authorities and policemen, played their studiedly inconsequential part in this ghastly montage, and it is on this state of affairs that Mailaender has put his finger.

Ian Jeffrey is an art historian. Among many other projects, he was a major contributor to Thirties, a comprehensive survey of British art and design before the war, presented in 1979 at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Thomas Mailaender will exhibit The Night Climbers of Cambridge this September at Roman Road Project Space, London.

Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama

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Balazs Gardi, Afghan detainee at Patrol Base Talibjan, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, November 7, 2010

In 2010, after many years of covering the war in Afghanistan, freelance photojournalist Teru Kuwayama received an invitation to embed with the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment in Helmand Province. Although it was only the start of the counterinsurgency campaign, it was the tenth year of a long and costly war that carried on at a far remove of the daily lives of Americans in the United States. Along with four other photographers, Balazs Gardi, Tivadar Domaniczky, Omar Mullick, and Rita Leistner, Kuwayama decided to approach the embed differently, and started Basetrack, a social-media reporting project conceived to connect Marines and their families and to target the social network—friends, family, and online presence—surrounding the battalion. Most of the pictures were taken with mobile phones or inexpensive consumer-grade cameras and distributed through Basetrack’s WordPress website, Flickr, and Facebook, the main Basetrack channel.

Last November, Kuwayama corresponded with Aperture about the experience of building Basetrack, the advantages of social media, and the misconceptions surrounding the early termination of their embed with the battalion.

—The Editors


Aperture: What was the nature of the partnership among contributing photographers?

Teru Kuwayama: It was a network operation. Photographers who had never worked in Afghanistan or who had never embedded with Marines were partnered up with the experienced operators. Two-person teams rotated in and out, to maintain a constant presence with the battalion.

The forward operators—the photographers on the ground—had extremely limited Internet access, so rear operators were tasked with maintaining the conversation online.

Aperture: Did you have any ideas, prior to the embed, of what you wanted to show or photograph?

TK: I avoid expectations or preconceived notions, but at the time we launched the project, counterinsurgency (or “COIN,” its military abbreviation) had been introduced as the new strategy in Afghanistan. One of the goals of Basetrack was to show the public what that counterinsurgency actually meant and looked like in practice. Ultimately it wasn’t about photography; it was about opening lines of communication. Photographs weren’t the product; they were the tactic.

Aperture: The project’s homepage featured a Google Maps interface. Why was a mapping component important?

TK: Basetrack was designed for a desktop user experience, focused on a mobile team traveling from outpost to outpost in southern Afghanistan. Map-based navigation was an intuitive approach. A core piece of the mission of the project was to tackle the abstraction of “over there” and to speak to the distance and the separation between the Marines and their families. Another piece was to provide some basic training in geography for those who might not have found Afghanistan on a map. Markers on the map were scrambled, so they reflected approximate but imprecise locations so as not to provide geolocation coordinates that could be used for targeting. The locations of the bases weren’t secret in any case.

Faces of vulnerable individuals, like Afghan interpreters working for the military, were blacked out. We did those redactions ourselves, at our own initiative, unlike a lot of major news organizations that don’t always demonstrate much concern for the fate of fixers and translators—but we also created custom software that allowed a designated military officer to black out any imagery or text that concerned them for any reason. The caveat was that the system also required them to articulate a justification for the redaction in a pop-up text window. Any redacted images or text were published, showing the blacked-out areas, making the redaction completely obvious. Unlike the hidden self-censorship typical in the mainstream media, we put the power and responsibility for withholding images or information squarely in the court of the military. Effectively, we facilitated unlimited censorship as long as it was done openly. In principle, it was very similar to the “transparent censorship” system that Twitter rolled out a year or two later.

Tattooed U.S. Marines, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010–11. First row: photographs by Balazs Gardi; second row: photographs by Teru Kuwayama; third row, from left to right: two photographs by Teru Kuwayama, last photograph by Monica Campbell.

Aperture: What were the images, or kinds of images, that engendered the most active conversations?

TK: Portraits of the Marines, but any kind of glimpse into the deployment triggered intense reactions. Our core audience was made up of family members who desperately wanted a glimpse of their Marines—any evidence that they were alive and well, any insight into the world they were living in.

Aperture: Was there any content that was controversial or produced a reaction that was unexpected?

TK: What was interesting was the banality of the controversies. For civilians, it can be hard to fathom that in some quarters of the military there’s a remarkable level of fastidiousness about seemingly trivial rules and regulations, down to the “authorized color” of socks or the length of sideburns or mustaches. The greatest scorn is reserved for “uniform Nazis,” referring to the kind of cultural bureaucracy where troops are punished for infractions such as not shaving properly, rolling their sleeves up, or not “blousing” their trousers according to regulation.

One Marine told me about being punished because a superior officer had found a photograph, posted on Facebook by his sister, where he appeared with minor infractions of the uniform standards. We found ourselves in a curious position when we sometimes had to withhold photographs that had no real “operational security” issues, effectively to protect Marines from their own officers. We approached this with the same transparency as we did with image and text redaction.

When families asked for photographs of their Marines and learned that some were being withheld for such seemingly absurd reasons, it generated a lot of debate on our Facebook page, and on some level, probably undermined the faith that family members might have had in the judgment of “command,” and along with it, the underlying logic of the “operational security” mantra that they were so familiar with.

First row, from left to right: 1st Lt. Robert Rain, age 26, from Dallas, Texas; LCpl. Richard Giligen, age 19, from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania; Sgt. Derek Charles Schwartz, age 28, from Tyler, Texas. Second row: LCpl. Sam Coley, age 21, from Campobello, South Carolina; Sgt. Justin M. Schuh, age 29, from Milford, Ohio; LCpl. Christopher Crowley, age 19, from Henderson, Kentucky. Third row: LCpl. Justin Syvinski, age 19, from Middleton, Connecticut; Cpl. Tristan Rorie, age 28, from Charlotte, North Carolina; LCpl. Chad Hughes, age 19, from West Virginia. Fourth row: Corpsman Zack Penner, age 19, from Sacramento, California; LCpl. Joe Titus, age unknown, from East Windsor, Connecticut; Cpl. Jonathan D. Sappington, age 23, from Blue Mountain, Mississippi. All photographs by Balazs Gardi, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, October 30, 2010.

Balazs Gardi, Cpl. Gretchn, IED detector dog with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment Bravo Company, First Platoon, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, October 30, 2010

Aperture: Why was the website shut down?

TK: It wasn’t shut down. The project was funded [by the Knight Foundation] to chronicle a seven-month deployment, and we kept the website running for more than two years. Like any complex website, it was built on the shifting ground of hosting platforms that are constantly being updated. We didn’t have experienced developers or the resources to maintain the patchwork of code indefinitely, so the site would periodically crash, and eventually we rebuilt it.

At one point, six months into the deployment, I received an email from U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) public affairs noting claims that the Google Maps interface posed an “operational security” risk to the battalion. There was never a request to shut down the website, though, or alter the maps in any way. When I suggested working together to mitigate security issues, there was no response. In face-to-face discussions with Marine officers, it became clear that the Basetrack.org website and Google Maps weren’t the real concern. It was the Basetrack Facebook page—and the unfiltered conversations between family members—that were rattling some nerves. I was given an ultimatum to shut down the Facebook page or have the plug pulled on the embed—but no one was willing or able to articulate a rationale for doing so. The page stayed live, and the last team of embeds had their travel orders canceled. As I predicted to the battalion commanders, turning off the embeds didn’t turn off the community or the conversation. It had quite the opposite effect. There was an explosion of debate within the military community about the ejection of the embeds and a huge spike in media attention to the project.

Aperture: Was the platform used in the way you had originally intended? If not, how did Marines and family members use the site differently than you expected?

TK: The project dovetailed with a stated change in the U.S. Marine Corps that allowed deployed Marines to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but as it turned out, the Marines had very limited Internet access and weren’t encouraged to express themselves online by their commanding officers. The conversation wasn’t driven by twenty-year-old Marines in Afghanistan; it was driven by their wives and mothers in the United States.

Aperture: If you were to do it over, what would you do differently?

TK: To [paraphrase] Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” It would have been nice to have more funding, more time, and more experienced coders, but as the Marines say, “Improvise, adapt, overcome.” We maneuvered pretty well out there.

Tivadar Domaniczky, Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010

Tivadar Domaniczky, Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010

Balazs Gardi, Afghan National Army soldier shelters his face with a plastic bag against a dust storm at Combat Outpost 7171, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, October 28, 2010

All photographs of U.S. Marine First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010–11. Photographers, from left to right, first row: Balazs Gardi, Teru Kuwayama, Teru Kuwayama; second row: Teru Kuwayama, Teru Kuwayama, Omar Mullick; third row: Teru Kuwayama, Rita Leistner, Rita Leistner; fourth row: Teru Kuwayama, Balazs Gardi, Monica Campbell. All photographs © and courtesy the photographers.

The post Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

The Collectors: Matt Wolf

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On the occasion of Matt Wolf’s newest documentary Teenage we are republishing this brief musing by Wolf on his favorite photograph, originally printed in The Collectors column from Aperture magazine, #212 (Fall 2013).

Sommertag auf einer Berliner Dachwiese—das Radio sorgt für Unterhaltung (Summer day on a rooftop lawn, with a radio for entertainment), Berlin, 1926. Photographer unknown © 2005 bpk—Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin

I’ve always been obsessed with images of women listening to records. My favorites are scenes from Fassbinder films. At the conclusion of his first feature, Love Is Colder Than Death (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod, 1969), a female gangster lies on the floor in a stark white bedroom in front of a turntable. The motif repeats in his 1975 television movie Fear of Fear (Angst vor der Angst). A housewife named Margot suffers from inconsolable postpartum depression. In the film’s climax, she locks her oldest daughter out of the apartment, lies on the floor, and blares a pop record.

I recently finished making a film called Teenage about the birth of youth culture. In that process, I saw thousands of archival images, including this remarkable photograph of 1920s German teenagers listening to the radio on a green roof. The photographer is unknown, but I found the image in an incredible book called Wir wollen eine andere Welt (We want another world) by Fred Grimm. When Fred learned about my film last year, he sent me his book, and it hugely inspired me.

In the early twentieth century, young people endured incredible oppression from their parents, governments, and the police. Pop culture and friends were their refuge, and teenagers struggled to create their own private world. This image is like a dream, and it conveys the transporting, hypnotic power of music.


Matt Wolf is the director of Wild Combination (2008), about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, and Teenage, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. He is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.

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Songs Left Out of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency

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To mark the third printing of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency we are featuring this piece by Greil Marcus on the soundtrack to Goldin’s original slideshow presentation of the work. Originally printed in Aperture #197 Winter 2009.

We have also assembled a YouTube playlist based on the soundtrack for Goldin’s slideshow, listen here.


Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Multi-part slide projection with soundtrack, Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock, photographer

I’ve always been seduced by the title of Nan Goldin’s slide show about her life and that of her friends from the mid-seventies through the mid-eighties, in and around Boston, Berlin, the Lower East Side. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”—it comes from The Threepenny Opera, but I didn’t know that when I first encountered Goldin’s work: more than seven hundred color photographs, running in sequences, each image present for three or four seconds, replaced seamlessly by another, with songs from opera, Top 40, downtown New Wave dance clubs, and obscure blues records playing alongside, most often in excerpts of a minute or more—pictures, as they move through the 40 minutes or so of the piece, in which the primary image can seem to be that of a single person lying on a bed—or two people on a bed, neither acknowledging the other.

But to me “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” was a pop title. I imagined hearing it announced on the radio as the latest hit, and I was seduced by its unlikeliness. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” “The Ballad of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.” “The Ballad of Stratigraphic Geology”—I’d listen to anything with a title like that.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953; two central events I her life, as she tells it, took place in 1965, when she was 11. Her eighteen year old sister lay down on the tracks of a commuter train; in Goldin’s words, “In the week of mourning that followed, I was seduced by an older man. During this period of greatest pain and loss, I was simultaneously awakened to intense sexual excitement.” Goldin began taking pictures when she was 18; sold only through a gallery as an art work, in the collection of museums, never available to the public except at film festivals or when a museum chooses to present it, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is, Goldin says, “the history of a re-created family”—and the mission of her new family was to give itself over to “that part of your brain that is only satisfied by love, heroin, or chocolate”; to embrace what she called “a disbelief in the future”; to pursue an escape from the dependencies of ordinary life—on convenience, stability, and predictability—and to seek instead dependency on each other.

What’s most uncanny—uncanny and sometimes disturbing, displacing, confusing—about Goldin’s pictures, about the whole work, is its intimacy. Not necessarily sexual intimacy, though in all versions of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” there is repeated nudity and in some there are sequences of sex pictures that are convincing in a way that sex rarely is in photos. What’s uncanny is the way Goldin and the people in her pictures seem to have no borders of privacy, the way their rooms seem to have no walls.

Like anyone in front of a camera, they pose happily for moments of ease or friendship or let’s-remember-this-day, but in moments of sex, misery, estrangement, or despair they don’t seem to be posing at all. There’s no sense of voyeurism. You’re pulled in. Everyone is a witness to everyone else.

Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Multi-part slide projection with soundtrack, Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock, photographer

The images don’t flash by; they float. And from Charlotte Rae singing the title song to Petula Clark and “Downtown,” from Maria Callas’s “Casta Diva” to the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” from Dionne Warwick and “Don’t Make Me Over” to “You Don’t Own Me,” which in Klaus Nomi’s version sounds just like “Don’t Make Me Over,” in those songs and all or parts of 28 more, the music makes the sequence of photos of people alone, together, having sex, dressing for parties, shooting up, embracing, separating, into a drama that moves from isolation to friendship to romance to a repeated isolation greater than the isolation with which the story began.

The images and the music are often attached to each other with a literalism that in other hands might be killing. As you see women who’ve been beaten up, women with black eyes, bruised breasts, a slashed wrist opened up like a flower—and all this almost at the start, before you’ve seen anyone who might have left most of these marks—that is, men—you hear the Creatures’ “Miss the Girl.” You hear Siouxsie Sioux singing “You didn’t miss the girl, you hit the girl, you hit her with the force of steel.” Then comes Yoko Ono’s “She Hits Back” and pictures of women with guns, a female body builder, all proud, strong, empowered.

The approach is corny in description but not as you watch. The brief time on the screen for each image, long enough for each to register, not long enough for any one image to claim the territory of another, the music slipping from one selection to the other, make it all into a movie. It’s a movie made entirely of stills, but the music creates the illusion of a dramatic inevitability—with every cut, you feel as if you’re part of a 40-minute tracking shot. The literalism of the pairings of songs and images dissolves—because it’s not a matter of the way, in a song, the music allows the words the singer is singing to transcend their banality. Here the images are the music, and the songs are the words.

That’s most true at the very end. You’ve heard Ennio Morricone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and seen a man on a horse, one with a snake, one with a huge blade. You’ve heard James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and seen body builders, boxers, men covered with hair, a guy masturbating in a car who looks as if he has his hands around a knife. You’ve watched women getting dressed up to the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” then seen them alone and half-naked as it fades, as if all tomorrow’s parties have already happened, and life is nothing more than going to the same party over and over and over again— and then, finally, all the pictures yield to death.

You see an older man in a coffin, and a blonde woman, who you’ve come to know from the start, pass in front of it; then you see her in her own coffin. AIDS isn’t depicted, drug overdoses aren’t shown—what’s at stake is a rhythm, the rhythm of connection, isolation, and memory. So Goldin shows a painting on a wall; a heart-shaped frame holding a portrait of a couple; a framed picture of hearts and before it a vase of flowers and a medicine bottle; an empty bed with tangled sheets; a bedroom wall spattered with blood; and then tombstones, a whole forest of mausoleums, then the coffins, and, the very last image, a crude painting on a door of two skeletons fucking standing up.

And all the while, from the first image of this final sequence to the last, you are swept up in lightness, in the syncopation of “Memories Are Made of This,” Dean Martin’s number one hit from 1955. “Sweet, sweet, the memories you gave to me/ You can’t beat, the memories you gave to me,” murmurs the chorus. The simplest chord changes on an acoustic guitar, the bass counting off the last notes with a cadence that spells “That’s all she wrote” more clearly than the actual words ever could—there’s room for the listener, for anyone the song might speak for. And it endows everyone you’ve seen with dignity.

The filmmaker Dennis Potter, with his movies of people bursting into miming performances of great pop songs from all across the 20th century—in “Pennies from Heaven,” “The Singing Detective,” in “Lipstick on Your Collar”—caught how this worked in 1975, talking to Michael Sragow, then the film critic for the San Francisco Examiner.

“I think we all have this little theatre on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inexorably mixed. What makes each one of us unique is the potency of the individual mix.

“We can make our lives only when we know what our lives have been. And drama is about how you make the next moment. It’s like when you’re watching a sporting event, like a soccer game here; when it’s going on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But all the rules are laid down.

“I don’t make the mistake that high culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too. When people say, ‘Oh listen, they’re playing our song,’ they don’t mean, ‘Our song, this little cheap tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish is what we felt when we met.’ What they saying is ‘That song reminds us of the tremendous feeling we had when we met.’ Some of the songs I use are great anyway but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David’s Psalms. They’re saying, ‘Listen, the world isn’t quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,’ ‘There’s you and me in it’ or ‘The sun is shining in it.’

“So called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound a depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. And anyone who says different is a fascist.”

That is precisely what “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” says.

Nan Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Multi-part slide projection with soundtrack, Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Thomas R. DuBrock, photographer

I was inspired by Goldin’s soundtrack—I wanted to play her game. So I thought I’d construct my own version, “The songs left out of “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.’” The Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent,” say. Mott the Hoople “I Wish I Was Your Mother,” which to me caught the will to connect that is Goldin’s true subject more painfully than anything she used herself. The threat in Elvis Costello’s “I Want You,” for the sequence of pictures of men alone, brooding, the posture of each suggesting he’s trying to decide whether or not to kill someone. The Supremes’ “Stop! In the Name of Love,” The Miracles “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.” Bobby Bland’s “Lead Me On.”

But that was from memory. Watching the work again, I realized that of course it is what it is. Coming in fragments that fade almost as soon as they appear, can it really be said that anything was left out, that anything’s missing? It’s an obnoxious conceit. The soundtrack is a collection of Goldin’s friends, just as the photos are. The songs are characters as much as the people we see.

But when I remembered the piece, when watched it in my head, and then when I watched it again for real—there was still one song that did, for me, cry to be included—or maybe it was that that one song itself cried out to be included, to be given a home in Goldin’s world.

Because there’s a certain hipster cool that “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” never surrenders. Because something is missing— some sense of tragedy, something that no song Goldin choses can account for—and what that is can be found in a single note of Lonnie Mack’s “Why.” That’s the song that got me started thinking about the songs that were left out—as if there were more than one.

It’s 1963: Lonnie Mack is 22, he’s pudgy, dorking-looking, really, but he’s had two big instrumental guitar hits, “Memphis” and “Wham!”, so he gets to make an album: “The Wham! of that Memphis Man.” Tucked inside is—along with Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and the Five Keys’ “Dream On”—the greatest deep soul record ever made: Mack’s own “Why.”

The song is a staircase. After each verse, where he tells us about the woman who left him, it’s the climb of the chorus to the roof, where the singer throws himself off. It’s the surge of intensity, of terror—the singer terrorizing the listener, but more than that the singer terrorizing himself. It’s almost inhuman, how much pain he’s discovered—and the way he’s discovered that he can make it real, something he can all but hold in his hands.

The first chorus comes. “Why,” he sings. And then he screams the word, and it’s nearly unbearable, how far he goes with the single syllable. As James Agee said of the last shots of Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights,” it’s enough to shrivel the heart. Mack cuts back with the next line, softly: “Why did you leave me this way.” But the echo is there.

The second verse. “Now I’m standing”—and the last word is drawn out, shuddering—“By my window/ I decided”—again drawn out so far—“What I would do”—and you’re sure he’s going to kill himelf—“I would never/ Tell anybody/ How much/ I loved/ You.”

And then the second chorus, the spoken “Why,” then again the same word screamed, then the quiet “Why did you leave me this way”—and then something really terrible: the looming possibility that the singer might go all the way. What if he did? Would he still be standing? Would you? There is a guitar solo. It’s magnificent, but it’s a pause, because what you’re really hearing hasn’t happened yet. It’s what you’re wishing for, what you’re afraid of, the final chorus.

Do it! No, don’t! Please, please, do it! No, no, no!

He brings you back into his drama, and you relax. He tells you he’s writing a letter; it’s stained with tears from his eyes. You can almost savor the coming repetition in the next verse: you can experience again something that you have already gotten through, stood up to, not broken under.

And then the levees break.

Again there is the first “Why,” almost crooned. Then the second, exploding as before. Then the next line, and you can feel the ground shaking beneath the singer’s feet, beneath yours. And then, even out of this maelstrom, the shock of a long, wordless scream, a cry of anguish so extreme you have to close your eyes in shame over witnessing it, because this man is now before you, begging you to save him. And then more, farther, deeper, the now long and tangled line “You know you left me—alone and so empty” twisted into a knot that can never be untangled, that is left behind in the wreckage of the singer’s future. And then, finally, it’s over. Or rather the track ends, and “The Wham! Of That Memphis Man” goes back to another bouncy guitar instrumental.

No, of course it wasn’t left out. It doesn’t belong in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” But there is a need, an absence—a cover- up that art enacts that only art can expose, a criticism of art that only art can make.


Greil Marcus is a music journalist, cultural critic, and author of the upcoming The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (Yale University Press, 2014).

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Aperture #215—Editors’ Note

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The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

View of São Paulo and Copan building, 2013. Photograph by Tuca Vieira

Was photography invented in Brazil? Possibly, according to the story of Hercule Florence, a tireless inventor and adventurer who pioneered an early form of photography in the 1830s. More likely, photography was invented simultaneously in many places, but Florence’s Herzogian story of entrepreneurial tenacity and Amazonian exploration gone awry is largely absent from the more familiar narratives of European figures attempting to fix light and shadow.

This São Paulo Issue is based on two extended visits to Brazil last autumn and winter. We wanted to expand our purview to find stories like Florence’s, told here by Natalia Brizuela. Working with guest editor Thyago Nogueira, editor of Zum magazine and curator of contemporary photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles, one of Brazil’s leading photography institutions, we visited dozens of photographers, writers, and curators. We came to better understand a history of photography largely untold in the United States—one mostly new to us—and were introduced to a vibrant contemporary scene supported by a growing network of museums, galleries, and emerging alternative spaces.

“Within cities like São Paulo there exist countless worlds that can be peeled away, layer by layer, to reveal hidden lives,” Cassiano Elek Machado writes in these pages. With a population pushing twenty million, São Paulo extends vertiginously in all directions. A single magazine issue can only hope to peel back a few layers of curatorial and research activity, but in these pages you’ll find a cross section of ideas and projects, an almost even split between historical and contemporary.

Waves of immigration shaped São Paulo, and its transnational story is evident in Sérgio Burgi’s panoramic overview of the city’s artistic activity across the twentieth century, and in Claudia Andujar’s extraordinary story of fleeing Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Russian émigré Gregori Warchavchik’s Casa Modernista appears on our cover in Caio Reisewitz’s lush image. Modernism’s enduring legacy and a fluid intersection of photography and design thread the issue—from Geraldo de Barros’s diverse practice (from photography to furniture design) to Mauro Restiffe’s tribute to legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer. With the exception of Bárbara Wagner and Jonathas de Andrade, each artist featured in the issue has roots in São Paulo. These two figures (whose work we discovered on view in São Paulo) may be more associated with the northern city of Recife, but their work taps into important areas of Brazilian culture and history—performance groups embodying Afro-Brazilian traditions and the years of military dictatorship, respectively.

Last year’s social unrest, born out of debates about inequality in Brazil’s fast-growing economy, played out dramatically as large-scale street demonstrations across the country. Politically engaged photography collectives, such as Mídia Ninja, were active in documenting the protests predicted to resume this summer when Brazil assumes the global spotlight as World Cup host. These forward-thinking collectives are redrawing the media landscape. Ronaldo Entler, in his overview of this phenomenon, notes how these groups “prove that it is possible to reinvent photography in times of crisis.” It seems as long as photography has been around, it has been invented and reinvented in Brazil. This is the first time Aperture has embedded in a city abroad to uncover narratives of photography from a different perspective; we hope it will be the first of many.

—The Editors

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Caio Reisewitz by Christopher Phillips

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The following first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

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Caio Reisewitz, Cubatão II, 2003. © Caio Reisewitz and courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

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Caio Reisewitz, Boituva, 2008. © Caio Reisewitz and courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

Since returning to São Paulo in 1997 after studies in Germany, Caio Reisewitz has won an international reputation as one of Brazil’s most significant photographers. His admiration for members of the Düsseldorf School such as Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Andreas Gursky is evident in the meticulous accuracy of his monumental color photographs, yet his concentration on the landscape and architecture of Brazil lends his work a distinctive and immediately recognizable character. Reisewitz’s images offer a sustained reflection on the struggle between primeval nature and the voracious human appetite to exploit it that has marked Brazil’s history since colonial times. The title he chose for his presentation in the Brazilian pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, “Threatened Utopia,” signals the key preoccupation of his work.

The dense rainforest settings of many of Reisewitz’s photographs have led some viewers to assume that he specializes in scenes from the Amazon region. In fact, most of his landscape photographs are made within a few hundred miles of São Paulo, a silver-white skyscraper city surrounded by an immense, verdant tropical forest. Reisewitz regards the still-extensive remnants of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Forest) that once filled Brazil’s east coast as a natural wonderland, and he marvels that it is virtually unknown to São Paulo’s twenty million urban dwellers. The relation of city and country-side in Brazil today could be described as one of close physical proximity and surprising psychological distance.

Often Reisewitz’s photographs recall the extraordinary abundance of Brazil’s natural environment and the history of its domestication for cropland, ranching, and mining. Boituva (2008) presents a close-up view of a patch of the famous red clay soil that eighteenth-century colonists discovered to be ideally suited for coffee cultivation. In Cubatão II (2003), we look down on a ribbonlike highway slicing through an otherwise pristine vista of mountain forests. Itaquaquecetuba (2004) shows a green hilltop set ablaze as part of a land-clearing operation. Such images register the current state of Brazil’s breakneck quest for economic development and pinpoint the global environmental dangers posed by the wholesale destruction of Brazil’s forests.

Caio Reisewitz, Itaquaquecetuba, 2004. © Caio Reisewitz and courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

 

Caio Reisewitz, Diadema, 2004. © Caio Reisewitz and courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo

Reisewitz’s work has recently moved in surprising new directions, notably in a series of small, handmade photo collages that extend his exploration of the tension between the city and the countryside. Visually more playful than his view-camera photographs, these works sometimes contain lyrically curving cutouts that echo the exuberant visual rhythms found in Brazilian modernist art and architecture of the 1960s. These collage experiments have led Reisewitz to new ways of conceiving his view-camera photographs. His latest large-format works often employ a dense visual layering, as in Santuário San Pedro Claver III, Cartagena de Índias (San Pedro Claver III monastery, Cartagena) (2007), in which elusive architectural details can be glimpsed through a tangled skein of tree branches and plant forms.

The city in the forest, and the forest in the city—this is the metaphor that currently drives much of Reisewitz’s work. It underlies his photographs of Brazil’s iconic modernist residences, such as that of the 1928 Casa Modernista by émigré Russian architect Gregori Warchavchik, Casa Rua Santa Cruz (House on Santa Cruz Street) (2013), and of the 1951 Glass House by Lina Bo Bardi, both located in São Paulo. It is probably most evident, however, in his photograph Casa Canoas (Canoas House) (2013), which provides a fresh look at the legendary minimalist-style house that Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in 1951 on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. As Reisewitz portrays it, the glass-walled house all but disappears amid the luxuriant vegetation that presses in on all sides. At the same time, the building’s elongated and sensuously curving white roof seems to reach out to embrace the forest. In images like this, Reisewitz holds onto the hope that nature and human culture may yet share common ground in Brazil.

Caio Reisewitz, Casa Canoas (Canoas House), 2013. © Caio Reisewitz and courtesy Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo


Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, organized the exhibition Caio Reisewitz, on view at ICP from May 16 to September 7, 2014.

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Groupshot by Ronaldo Entler

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The following feature first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
 

Photography collectives with diverse styles and philosophies are transforming São Paulo’s media landscape through their documentation of last year’s massive street protests and by exploring everyday life in the megalopolis.

Photograph by Rafael Mattar of Selva SP. © Rafael Mattar/SelvaSP

In June 2013, mass demonstrations rocked Brazil. Protests against bus fare hikes, organized by the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement), gained swift momentum, moving from one city to the next, absorbing other causes and attracting international attention. The demonstrations also triggered a media war. On one side, news reports highlighted scenes of protesters engaged in acts of vandalism. On the other, protesters captured excessive police violence. During this time, photography collectives played a key role, recording and supporting the protests. While the work of these groups, whose numbers have steadily grown over the past ten years, is hardly isolated to instances of political demonstrations, this particular moment of upheaval exemplified the collaborative impulse that fuels them.

Brazilian photography collectives are forging alternatives to image banks and news agencies. Even when their style veers toward photojournalism, or even commercial advertising, photography collectives’ projects assume the form of social or political engagement. Generally made up of young photographers, they embrace social media and online networks and have little interest in traditional models based on solitary authorship.

The phenomenon is hardly unique to Brazil. Marked by their own aesthetic decisions and approaches, many such groups have formed across the globe, often united by specific collaborative projects. Such is the case with Blank Paper and Pandora (Spain), Kameraphoto (Portugal), Luceo (United States), Mondaphoto (Mexico), and Supayfotos (Peru). There are, however, certain historical precedents specific to Brazil, such as the photo-clubs established in various cities in the mid-twentieth century, or the independent photography agencies that have sprung up since the 1970s—such as Fotocontexto, F4, and Ágil—and cultural initiatives such as Fotoativa, an important educational project founded in Belém do Pará in 1984.

Today’s new collectives encompass a wide range of approaches but share a proclivity toward political confrontation. Their political engagement is reflected in how the groups have sought alternative models for managing and disseminating images and information. By mining social networks, they explore new paths for financial survival and dialogue with curators, critics, and other cultural producers. By banding together, these collectives assert a clear ideological and aesthetic identity and produce projects of great depth while also constructing spaces for the distribution of works not absorbed by the mass media. In some cases, they gain access to the art circuit or publishing and advertising markets, which are attracted by the gritty glamour of a language forged outside the mainstream.

Mapping São Paulo’s collectives is no easy task. Many of these groups meet only sporadically and tend to be short-lived, but what follows is a selection of some of the most important ones recently working in the city. It would be difficult to conceive of these collectives as part of a broader, cohesive movement, or to suppose that the future of photography is necessarily headed in the direction of collective authorship. Many of the groups have been temporary, and others are still too new to assess their impact. Nevertheless, these collectives have demonstrated their power. Restlessness is one of the unique qualities of any group formed by diverse points of view and desires. They have proven that it is possible to reinvent photography during times of crisis.


Cia de Foto

Cia de Foto, from the project 911, 2006 (video still). Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

Cia de Foto, whose name means photo company, was the most influential of these collectives and served as a model and inspiration for other groups in Brazil, but in late 2013, it caused a commotion by posting a brief message on its Facebook page announcing its dissolution.

Cia de Foto emerged in 2003, spearheaded by photographers Pio Figueiroa, Rafael Jacinto, and João Kehl, and later incorporated image editor Carol Lopes. Eschewing photographic pamphleteering, the group’s presence within the framework of social debate was nonetheless apparent. One of its first projects, 911, focused on the occupation of a building in downtown São Paulo by a group of squatting homeless families. A newer project, Passe Livre, addressed the bus fare hikes of 2013. In recent years, the group began to direct its attention to a range of diverse subjects, sometimes assuming a more poetic approach (though the subject matter remained political in nature). One example is Marcha (2011/2013), which recorded the daily commute of workers through one of the city’s major train stations. By highlighting the dispersed yet unchanging nature of these commutes, the images suggest that masses of workers no longer represent a potent political force as they did in the past.

Cia de Foto was defined by its very structure as a collective and stirred some controversy by refusing ever to provide an individual’s signature on any of the works that it produced. As many important public and private collections acquired the group’s pieces, its structure grew to meet the demands of the market, and it led various art institutions to reformulate their own policies in order to acquire works of collective authorship. The group curated exhibitions, published books in experimental formats, and nurtured emerging artists. It also welcomed other collaborators. According to Pio Figueiroa, “It’s been more thought-provoking to share and encourage people to debate ideas than to simply sign off on a completed work.”

Several projects remain to be completed and the future of Cia de Foto’s immense image archive now seems uncertain. Despite the group’s breakup, Figueiroa has stated that he still sees collectives playing an important role in responding to the difficulties for professional development and to the lack of organization among Brazilian photographers.


Garapa

Garapa, Ex-moradores do edifício Mercúrio (Former residents of the Mercúrio building), from the project Morar, 2011 Courtesy Garapa

Garapa takes its name from the Portuguese word for the sugarcane juice used to make, among other things, the distilled spirit cachaça. Formed in 2008 by photographers Rodrigo Marcondes, Paulo Fehlauer, and Leo Caobelli, the collective occupies an important role in Brazil’s cultural scene and is devoted to experimenting with new narrative forms. While encouraging members to complete their own projects outside of the group, Garapa maintains a solid roster of jointly realized projects.

Morar (2009–11), the group’s first effort, centered on the emptying and demolition of two contiguous buildings, São Vito and Mercúrio, during a somewhat suspect program of urban revitalization for the city’s downtown. Some of the group’s research was financed by crowdfunding, and the project made use of a wide range of techniques, from daguerreotype to video, and took a variety of forms: several exhibitions that included photographs and a short documentary, a tabloid-format publication, and a site-specific installation featuring portraits of former residents on the land where the two buildings once stood. According to Rodrigo Marcondes, the group’s recent works have drawn on new partnerships, and while still maintaining a documentary approach, they also utilize certain fictional elements. In Calma (2013), a work that included the collaboration of artists Lana Mesic and Thomas Kuijpers, the collective followed the fictitious story of Rolf, a Dutchman who had come to São Paulo in search of his missing father.


FotoProtestoSP

Keiny Andrade, Demonstrators block traffic on 23 de Maio Avenue during a protest against raising public transportation fares, São Paulo, June 20, 2013. Courtesy FotoProtestoSP

One of the more stringent collectives to rise out of the unrest of 2013 is FotoProtestoSP. Its thirty members include several well-established veterans of Brazilian photojournalism, such as Maurício Lima, Marlene Bergamo, Fernando Costa Netto, Keiny Andrade, Ignácio Aronovich, and José Francisco Diório. Their manifesto radiates indignation with the country’s political structure and asserts a desire to explore the critical power of photography beyond private media platforms and art institutions. “We understand the urgency of not letting inertia take control of society and, in order to visually display our indignation, we will take over the public or empty spaces in São Paulo with our photographs,” their manifesto states.

Each member maintains his or her own working routine and no attempts are made to produce coverage specifically bearing a collective signature. According to Renato Stockler, one of the group’s members, its objective is to occupy the city’s leisure spaces and to remind residents of the power people have when they unite around a common cause. “It’s about giving back to the street what the street initially gave to photographers,” Stockler says. One of FotoProtestoSP’s most important actions involved wheatpasting two walls in downtown São Paulo with large-format photographs of the protests. Despite its relative newness, the important names attached to the group and the dramatic imagery produced have drawn much attention to their initiative.


SelvaSP

Drago, A hurt military police officer fends off attackers during the second protest against the bus-fare hikes in São Paulo, June 2013 © Drago/SelvaSP

SelvaSP, meaning São Paulo jungle, formed in 2012 with an entirely aesthetic objective: the revitalization of street photography. The group’s manifesto recalls the work of classical photographers and questions why critics have decided to view this genre as archaic. The collective, which still considers itself in a formative phase, currently has twelve members: Gabriel Cabral, Victor Dragonetti (Drago), Leo Eloy, Francisco Costa, Syã Fonseca, Gustavo Gomes, Paulo Marinuzzi, Rafael Mattar, Lucas Mello, Gustavo Morita, Padu Palmério, and Hudson Rodrigues.

Gustavo Gomes, from the series Plástico (Plastic), 2013 © Gustavo Gomes/SelvaSP

According to Gabriel Cabral, despite the group’s coverage of the 2013 protests, their photo essays are defined more by trying to capture everyday life in the city—neighborhood identities and the gestures and expressions of people on the street—than by urgent reporting on fast-breaking events. SelvaSP produces tightly edited photo essays, not the news.


Mídia Ninja

Mídia Ninja, Barricade protesting the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, 2013, part of the project Ruas de Junho (June Streets) Courtesy Mídia Ninja

During the 2013 protests, Mídia Ninja became one of the most instrumental collectives to provide on-the-scene coverage: Several videos posted on Twitcast reached as many as one hundred thousand viewers. With a huge portfolio documenting conflict situations, they were able to confront major news providers whose coverage had been critical of the protests, forcing some to adjust their content and provide a more nuanced portrayal that included not only scenes of vandalism on the part of protesters but also scenes of police violence.

Ninja (a Portuguese acronym for Independent Narratives, Journalism, and Action) was formed in 2011 as a sideline of Fora do Eixo, a collective network created in 2005 to organize independent music festivals in several Brazilian cities. Part of Mídia Ninja’s know-how and strategy is a result of its work with these festivals. While Bruno Torturra, Pablo Capilé, Filipe Peçanha, and Rafael Vilela are some of the members who most often appear in public to discuss their projects, the collective estimates that there are nearly one hundred regular members and a network of as many as two thousand collaborators who can be mobilized across the country. Although known for their use of camera phones, many collaborators have, in fact, had solid audiovisual training.

Though made under a banner of independent journalism and media activism, work by the collective members has often been featured by mainstream news outlets, where it has been the subject of debate: Critics question whether their informal coverage qualifies as legitimate journalism. According to Vilela, Ninja’s projects have been funded primarily by social organizations that support the same causes. “We’re not looking to be impartial,” Vilela asserts, “what distinguishes us from the major platforms is the transparency with which we present points of view.” The group’s images are available for free downloading on Creative Commons and have been published in newspapers around the world. Aside from the alternative channels that they explore, the works produced by Ninja have also begun to exert a presence within the art circuit and are often featured in photography exhibitions and collections.

Mídia Ninja is an evolving project. Its core membership recently relocated to Rio de Janeiro from São Paulo. With the World Cup approaching, Rio will be packed with tourists and journalists, as well as militants keeping an eye out for the social unrest that is often unleashed by such major events— and the collective will be well-positioned to witness, record, and disseminate.

Mídia Ninja, Monument occupied during popular protests, 23 de Maio Avenue, São Paulo, 2013, part of the project Ruas de Junho (June Streets) Courtesy Mídia Ninja


Ronaldo Entler, a researcher and photography critic, is a professor at the School of Communication of Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP), in São Paulo, where he is also the graduate coordinator of the school’s masters of photography program.


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Revisiting the Winogrand Archive: Philip Lorca diCorcia in Conversation with Leo Rubinfien

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Garry Winogrand, New York ca. 1960. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, Grand Central Terminal, New York, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, Point Mugu Naval Air Station, California, ca. 1979. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, New York ca. 1963. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, State Fair, Dallas, Texas, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, La Guardia Airport, New York, 1968. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1969. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, Wyoming, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, ca. 1980–83. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1960. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

 

For many years, an aura has surrounded the Garry Winogrand archive. The photographer, who died in 1984 at age fifty-six, left behind more than
 six thousand rolls of unedited film and numerous photographs that had been marked on his proof sheets but never printed. Over the past three years, photographer Leo Rubinfien has been working for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as guest curator of the first Winogrand retrospective since the mid-1980s, re-editing these materials—in collaboration with curator Erin O’Toole (SFMOMA) and Sarah Greenough (NGA)—and supervising the printing of many never-before-seen images, some of which appear in the accompanying pages. The exhibition Garry Winogrand—accompanied by a major publication—began in March last year at SFMOMA, subsequently traveled to the NGA, and recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (it will later travel to the Jeu De Paume, Paris, and the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid). Here, photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia (known as PL) speaks with Rubinfien about the complexities of Winogrand’s work, which has often been mischaracterized as “street photography,” the legacy of curator John Szarkowski, and the new meanings we may discover today by revisiting this influential photographer.
— The Editors

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: As someone who went to Yale in the late 1970s and had Tod Papageorge as a professor, I resisted Garry Winogrand. By ’78, he was a cult; there was an orthodoxy around him at that time.

Leo Rubinfien: There was certainly a circle of people associated with Winogrand—mainly photographers, but not exclusively. They had intense convictions about the value of his work—and other people’s work, too—and also about how photography should be thought about and discussed, but to say that a cult formed around him seems harsh to me. These were thoughtful, intelligent people, and each one had reasons for being present. Did an orthodoxy develop? Maybe so, but slowly. The photographers connected with Winogrand in the 1960s were drawn at least partly by the sense that there was more freedom in his approach to photography than they could find anywhere else. Later, they had to defend themselves and if there was some dogmatizing, that was only human.

PL: Of course, the arbiter of photographic quality at that time was the Museum of Modern Art. There was a pantheon there, and Winogrand was one of them. With that pantheon came certain attributes—for instance, black-and-white work. I remember going to MoMA and the only color photography that was up at that time was by Irving Penn.

LR: When MoMA showed the color work of Eggleston and Stephen Shore in the mid-1970s it was news, although I’m not sure that noncommercial photographers were doing a vast amount in color before that, anyway before C-printing made it affordable. As a matter of fact, though, one component of MoMA’s famous 1967 New Documents exhibition was a slide show, in color, by Winogrand. It’s true of course that Winogrand was openly supported by John Szarkowski and the Museum of Modern Art, and that Szarkowski had his own case to make, and didn’t compromise it. He dismissed a lot of work, and that made many people resentful. But if somebody asked: “What’s the simplest explanation you can give of what Szarkowski did?” I would say that it was to move photography out of the world of journalism and into the world of the fine arts. The old picture magazines were dying. They had dominated the practice and the dissemination of photography for three decades, and now their culture and their mode of thinking were fading away. Szarkowski didn’t just bring a gang of photographers across the street from the Time-Life building to the Museum of Modern Art; he replaced one set of values with another, one way of looking at photographs with another. Journalism had demanded pictures that explained the world “clearly,” in well-accepted ways, but Szarkowski said that photographs explain almost nothing, and that this was not a defect, but a virtue. And Winogrand’s work demonstrates that the ambiguity of photography can be one of its great strengths.

Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1960. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

PL: In terms of the legacy in museums, the Szarkowski world is disappearing. The Museum of Modern Art has a new director of photography, Quentin Bajac, who has nothing to do with that world. Is this major project about Winogrand— one of the core figures of that school—in some way marking the end of that era?

LR: I didn’t work on the Winogrand retrospective to make a statement about MoMA, but to better understand Winogrand. Although it’s true that since shortly before Szarkowski’s death, his prime protégés have been having retrospectives—Arbus, Friedlander, Eggleston, Robert Adams—and that these have inevitably re-evaluated Szarkowski’s work. The SFMOMA Winogrand project is the most recent one. Is it the end of something, or the beginning of something else? Maybe it’s both. Today, the debates of the Szarkowski years have mostly expired, or turned into other debates, so maybe an artist like Winogrand can now be set free of them. The SFMOMA book and show say: “Let’s go back and look again at what Winogrand did.” It’s particularly interesting to do this because he died young and until now his work has never been thoroughly explored. A lot of what’s in SFMOMA’s book and show has never been seen before, or has rarely been seen, and it presents a somewhat different Winogrand from the one we thought we knew.

PL: There was presumably a reason that so much work was left behind, unprocessed and unedited. Is there any sense that that was the way it should have been left?

LR: Well, I didn’t think the work should be left in the closet or I wouldn’t have undertaken SFMOMA’s project. The unfinished work was unfinished because Winogrand died not only young, but suddenly, and he had no time to prepare anything for posterity. In December 1983 he thought he had years to live. In March 1984 he was gone. There are many reasons why he didn’t edit and print more of his work, and they’re all interesting. But would those pictures be better left unseen? We’re speaking of one of the finest photographers there has been, and of work that changes the way we understand him. It’s work of great beauty and depth that will nourish anyone who lets it in. So no, I think it would be arbitrary, rigid, and shortsighted to hide it away.

PL: Every epigram that is attributed to Winogrand seems to be an evasion of a question. It’s hard to say, when someone’s work has an aspect of evasion and alienation in it, whether this is social commentary or an expression of an artist’s own feelings. But the man obviously was not comfortable with the world and with himself. Do you think his investigation of class was a manifestation of his own insecurities? In his pictures at the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum you can’t help but think that he’s being judged by the same people that he’s photographing. And there’s his own not-too-subtle criticism in most of those images.

LR: Winogrand was often combative and sometimes defensive, and his evasiveness sometimes expressed this. But more importantly, he understood how untranslatable a photograph is, how it says something that can’t be said in speech. I think that the main reason he resisted explaining himself was that he didn’t want to smother under a pile of words that special, poetic ambiguity that makes a photograph beautiful. I don’t believe that he felt himself an outsider in the way that The Americans suggests that Frank did. The world in Winogrand’s photographs is his own world. His pictures from the streets of Manhattan in the early ’60s—the beautiful women, the businessmen, and so on—to me they describe a world that Winogrand is contemplating joining, or that he is in the process of joining even if he’s horrified by many things he sees. Beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, are inextricable in Winogrand’s work.

Garry Winogrand, Wyoming, 1964. © Estate of Garry Winogrand and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

PL: Was he carpet-bombing the visual realm—shooting everything in sight? Why settle for one frame when you can have twenty?

LR: The idea that he was an extraordinarily prodigious shooter, a “carpet-bomber,” is actually a myth. I didn’t know that until I worked on SFMOMA’s project. From the time he started up until 1971 (twenty-one years—and most of his best pictures were from that period), he was shooting five hundred rolls of film a year on average, which is not very much: a roll-and-a-half a day. The large numbers came much later. In fact, when they did come, that’s when the quality of the work fell off sharply—almost as if Winogrand knew that he was weakening and was struggling furiously against it.

PL: Winogrand’s narratives are so elusive that they sometimes seem quite modern. But some of his work was almost corny, in the “tale told” way. I think as his picture structure started to fall apart, so did the conclusions to be drawn from the suggested narratives. And that’s where, for me, he becomes really interesting and surreal.

LR: He began in the world of magazine journalism, where pictures were functional and illustrative. But he resisted this from very early on, and by the ’60s he was working in an anti-narrative way and arrived at a kind of ambiguity that he found enlightening and beautiful. He would ultimately say: “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described,” as if the picture might stand in front of you like an apparition. It would be strange. It would be surprising. It would be disconnected from the rest of the world as you knew it, and from whatever story you expected it to tell. In the late work, in the 1970s and the early ’80s, there’s not only no narrative, there’s almost no event. The pictures are about the way faces look. They’re about space. And you could say that he learned how to find beauty in a picture in which you can’t tell what’s happening at a moment in time—the 1960s—when the entire American nation couldn’t tell what was happening in life itself. And so his way of picture making came to speak not just for him but for a vast collective experience.

PL: The street provides a constantly changing set of possibilities. The pushback that the world throws at you when you attempt to wrangle from it some sort of meaning with a camera is significant.

LR: In one way, Winogrand’s work is all about how the world coalesces, and then dissolves, about how chaos threatens to overtake order again and again. He often talked about himself and his work in relation to photography in general. He’d say: “I’m interested in the problem that a piece of material sets for the medium,” or “I’m interested in the contention between content and form.” Szarkowski, too, among others, argued that Winogrand was saying various things about photography itself with his work. But another aspect of his work is a ferocious attention that I associate with portrait making more than with most photography of the street, even though Winogrand brought it to the street, to crowds of people in motion. He looks at those people with a fierce grip, and he asks, What’s that hat you’re wearing? and Why does your foot turn the way it does? and Who are you? At one point he said: “You could say that I’m a student of photography, and I am, but really I’m a student of America.” At another time, he said to a close friend of his: “You know why your pictures are no fucking good? Because they don’t describe the chaos of life.” These two comments are the best guides I can think of to what Winogrand’s work is about. In the end, I think the street was just a site. The point was what he saw in the street—and what he saw there was a great many pieces of evidence that teach us serious things about the character of American people, about the evanescence of seeing, about the transience of life itself.

PL: There’s a reductiveness to photography, of course—in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It’s almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life. I think that, more than any other photographer, Winogrand expressed the fact that everything is held together by the thinnest of threads. Strangely, I doubt that anybody in a photo program right now thinks of Garry Winogrand as their prime motivation, although the current practice of photography does have a certain relationship to his work, which could now seem outmoded. I think part of what he did, which is today a process in contemporary photography and art, was to break assumptions.

LR: Well, maybe that’s one reason why people should look at him again now. The work is very free, and it remains fresh. It’s powerful but it refuses to make grand declarations—it’s powerful partly because it refuses to do that. It’s only outmoded if one thinks that art progresses in a linear way, and that this year’s art disqualifies last year’s. But I don’t believe that there is any such progression. That kind of thinking is a fiction of certain criticism and of the art market. If a work of art is alive, it is alive, no matter when it was made. There is something tremendously open-ended about Winogrand’s work. It’s there picture by picture, and in the overall body of work. It’s a quality of Winogrand’s, but it was a quality that artists often sought in the 1960s. Fellini once said: “To make a movie that has an ending is immoral.” It’s immoral. It’s to lie to the audience. Because life has no endings; life is all flux and discontinuity.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s work is the subject of many books, including Eleven (Damiani, 2011), Thousand (Steidl/Dangin, 2007), A Storybook Life (twin palms, 2003), Heads (Steidl, 2001), and Hustlers (Steidl/Dangin, 2013).

Leo Rubinfien is the author of A Map of the East (Godine/thames & Hudson, 1992) and Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008), and co-author of Shomei Tomatsu/Skin of the Nation (SFMOMA/Yale university press, 2004). The book accompanying his Winogrand exhibition was be co-published by SFMOMA and Yale university press.

 

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Bárbara Wagner: The Maracatu by Agnaldo Farias

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The following first appeared in Aperture magazine #215 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.

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Bárbara Wagner, Águia Dourada (Golden eagle), 2010. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner, Cambinda Brasileira (Brazilian cambinda), 2009. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner, Estrela Brilhante (Shining Star), 2008. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner, Cambinda Brasileira (Brazilian cambinda), 2009. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

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Bárbara Wagner. Courtesy Galleria Extraspazio, Rome

Since the early eighteenth century, Afro-Brazilian performance groups known as Maracatu have descended onto the streets of Recife and other cities in the interior of Brazil’s northeastern state
 of Pernambuco during Carnival and other festivals. There are two groups: the urban form, the Maracatu nação (nation), devote their dancing and singing—set to the mesmerizing rhythms of the musical style called batuque—to the coronation of the Rei do Congo (King of the Congo). Their rural counterparts, the Maracatu rural, have their origins in the sugarcane mills, an environment with a history of authoritarianism and oppression.

The name Maracatu derives from an amalgam of sources—maracas, the American Indian percussion instrument; catu, which means “beautiful” in the Tupi language; and marã, Tupi for “war” or “confusion.” Their complex background is also evident in the processional standard-bearer of the Maracatu nação, who dresses in the style of Portugal’s Louis XV and is followed by an entourage of ornately styled performers and representations of religious imagery, centering around a dead queen attended by various courtesans. The layered imagery of this ritual performance, which has metamorphosed over centuries, reflects a fusion of African, indigenous, and European elements.

Today, these groups have become seamlessly incorporated into the popular festivities of Pernambuco and involve the participation of all types of people, regardless of racial origin or socioeconomic background, in a nation that still suffers from discrimination and segregation. During Pernambuco’s Carnival, Maracatu groups are distinguished by a unique dance style characterized by formalized frolicking and a subtle choreography of mythic origin related to the dances of the syncretic religion known as Candomblé. Brazilian author Mário de Andrade described this unique dance as follows: “Intoxicated by the percussion, the dancers proceed almost lethargically, slightly reeling on each quarter note, with an almost undetectable trot, and without any visibly formal footwork.” The generally hypnotic nature of a Maracatu procession contrasts with the frenetic rhythm of other dance groups participating in Carnival, most notably the fiercely syncopated Frevo, whose musical style also originated in Pernambuco. The Frevo and the Maracatu reflect a sense of momentary collective elation. For a few days of the year, they don lavish costumes, spend their scant savings to enjoy themselves in the festivities, and parade proudly through the streets of the city. Official government tourist photography often turns to these festivities to highlight the “gold” of Brazilian racial democracy.

Bárbara Wagner became interested in what lies beneath this false gold veneer and began documenting the dancers’ rehearsals. Her series on the Maracatu offers a portrait of the people who make up the “joyful” faces of this northeastern Brazilian group as they practice their dance. The photographs delve into who the maracatuzeiros actually are when they are not involved in festival performances, and how their days are spent in the run-up to Carnival and afterward. The series looks beyond those brilliantly colored costumes and the atmosphere of celebration flowing almost anarchically through the darkened streets to reveal the dancers as they wait to share their tradition with others for a few moments.


Agnaldo Farias is a critic, curator, and professor of architecture and urbanism at the College of the University of São Paulo.

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by Agnaldo Farias
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Light Writing in the Tropics: The Story of Hercule Florence

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In the 1830s, an adventurer and inventor named Hercule Florence sought to score the Amazon’s abundant birdsong. When attempting to print his peculiar manuscript about nature’s sound archive, he also invented an early form of photography.

Portrait of Hercule Florence, ca. 1875. Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence (Arnaldo Machado Florence Archive), São Paulo

In a letter dated June 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote to a botanist living in Italy that his “photogenic” drawings, as he named his first proto-photographs made with the aid of a solar microscope, would be “a big help to botanists.” In a later letter Talbot insisted that his invention would be “useful especially to the naturalists, since one can copy the most difficult things with much ease, for example crystallizations, tiny parts of plants, etc. etc.” Little did Talbot, largely credited as one of photography’s inventors, know that six years earlier a twenty-nine-year-old man in Brazil, far removed from the conversations happening in Europe about how to fix light and shadow (including French scientist and politician François Arago’s presentation of the daguerreotype at the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, and British scientist Sir John Herschel’s supposed coining of the word photography the same year with his now-famous phrase “picture obtained by photography” at the Royal Society in London), had invented his own form of “photogenic” writing aimed to aid naturalists.

In 1833, Hercule Florence, a Frenchman who settled on the outskirts of São Paulo after surviving a four-year stint as a draftsman for a Russian Naturalist expedition up the Amazon River basin in the 1820s, invented a mode of reproduction that he called photographie (light writing)—the same words Fox Talbot used years later to describe his invention. Florence arrived at his form of light writing somewhat accidentally. In contrast to the narrative typically used to describe photography’s invention in Europe, it was not the joint achievement of nineteenth- century chemists and artists experimenting with light and silver compounds, nor that of Romantic poets desiring to apprehend that unruly living organism called nature. Instead it was the end result of a long search for a mode of printing. Specifically, Florence wanted to print and distribute a transcription method he had developed to organize and systematize the sounds of nature found in the Amazon region.

Florence was twenty when he arrived in the newly proclaimed Brazilian Empire in the early 1820s, living first in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked at a bookstore and printing press, before settling down some years later in the small village of São Carlos (Campinas), outside of São Paulo, for the remainder of his life. He hadn’t been living in his adopted country for long before he responded to an advertisement for an expedition led by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff and was hired to be the group’s second draftsman (along with the well-known German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas and a younger artist named Aimé Adrien Taunay, although Rugendas would be dismissed before the journey began, after falling out with Langsdorff ). The expedition’s aim was to reach Pará, in the Amazon basin, through a fluvial route, while engaging in botanical, astronomical, and cartographic observations typical of such ventures. Close reading of Florence’s sporadic diary entries from these years reveals that despite his penchant for travel and adventure—a trait that brought him to Brazil—he found the expedition tiresome, describing the journey as a “grueling, anguished, and unfortunate peregrination” and noting time and again that “to see one Brazilian village is to see almost all of them.” These observations are not surprising for a man who often commented on the lack of culture and excess of nature in his adopted homeland. The watercolor views and landscapes that Florence produced as a hired painter bored him. What was the purpose, he asked in his diary, of visually reproducing the natural world, of composing collections that could only imitate existing collections and inventories gathered and archived throughout Europe? Was there nothing uncharted and original left to continue expanding the inventory of the world? Had nature been turned, in this way, into nothing more than a dead still life—obvious and trivial, predictable, lifeless?

Hercule Florence, Photographic copy of pharmacy labels obtained through direct contact with photosensitive paper under the action of sunlight, ca. 1833. The lower left margin reads (in reverse): “Photography by H. Florence, inventor of photography.” © Instituto Moreira Salles

Craving a recording of the natural world that offered infinite uniqueness, singularity, and power, Florence fixated on the idea that while the naturalist expeditions of the first decades of the nineteenth century had created encyclopedic and cartographic knowledge, they never contemplated the possibility of a sonic inventory. “With great zeal we have tried to, and continue to try to, learn everything that is known about animals,” Florence wrote. “Even the most minimal details have not been ignored; for this reason expensive and arduous voyages have been made to almost every point on the globe; collections of animals were thus made at an enormous cost to the museums of the great cities; the descriptions and drawings allow them to become known throughout the world.” Ironically, Florence would have more opportunities to indulge his theories about sound as the expedition ran into grave problems, derailing hopes of becoming the most scientifically important journey of its kind in the region: Taunay would drown crossing a river; the group’s astronomer came down with beriberi, a tropical disease that afflicted many slaves in colonial Brazil; Langsdorff, as well as half of the team, was stricken with malaria and suffered high, debilitating fevers, resulting in his complete insanity and loss of memory. Amid this chaos, Florence sidelined his official work and turned his attentions to the universe of sounds enveloping him. He began a series of notations recording the calls of birds, the croaks of frogs, and noises made by other animals. Of a bird called araponga, Florence writes that “it is beautiful…it makes a sound that imitates well the banging of a hammer on an anvil,” and of the singing of the anhu-póca: “it is big, its voice strong and euphonious; repeats this sound every fourth of a minute.” Florence approximated the corresponding notations to the sounds he heard and then produced musical scores, a method he dubbed zoophonie. The outsized ambition of his desire to catalogue all the jungle’s birdsong was not lost on Florence: “when one considers how much animals’ voices vary to infinity, one tends to think that it is almost impossible to transcribe them without using an infinite number of signs … the method that I am here giving is only a first attempt … .”

In 1831, after returning home from his journeys, Florence attempted to print and circulate his notes and manuscript outlining his zoophonie. The cumbersomely titled text, Research on the Voice of Animals or Essay on a New Subject of Study Offered to the Friends of Nature, detailed his discovery of nature’s potential sound archive and proposed his novel method of capturing and recording the immaterial, enchanted animal sounds of the Brazilian tropical forests. Florence, however, ran into difficulties finding a printer for his manuscript—a struggle that reveals how his experimentation with photography belongs to the story of a fragile, emerging early-nineteenth-century print culture. Few printing presses then existed in Brazil because the Portuguese Crown sought to control the spread of anti-colonial propaganda. But Florence would not be deterred. This obstacle motivated him to find a more accessible and democratic mode of reproduction, one that utilized a resource available to all, sunlight. Unlike the European figures credited with the invention of the medium, Florence used photography to reproduce symbols and written artifacts, not the visible world. His first attempts with the process resulted in a print made around 1833 of pharmacy labels, likely produced for his friend and collaborator Joaquim Corrêa de Mello, a chemist who at the time lived in Campinas, the same village as Florence, and helped him learn the properties of silver nitrate. These six pharmacy labels on a single sheet of paper demonstrate how, for Florence, photography functioned as a mode of reproduction analogous to printing. His method worked much like a modern-day photocopy—and, significantly, these labels reveal how seriality was ingrained in his work, something that standard accounts of photography’s history attribute to the invention of the carte-de-visite decades later. His notebooks and diaries also reveal that he worked on other photographs: a photographic copy of a Masonic Diploma and one of his own hand-drawn designs for a camera obscura and other items needed for the photographic process. Ultimately, Florence did not use this method to print his manuscript, as he finally convinced a printing press in Rio de Janeiro to publish his findings, though there is no record of how his zoophonie was received.

“Equipment used for photography,” originally appeared in Florence’s manuscript, L’Ami des Arts…, 1837. Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence (Arnaldo Machado Florence Archive)

On May 1, 1839, the Rio de Janeiro–based newspaper Jornal do Commercio announced the invention of what would become known as the daguerreotype, calling the invention a “revolution in the arts of design,” in which “nature appears portraying itself, copying its works as well as works of art…. Light, light itself was the painter.” Six months later, in response to the announcement of Louis Daguerre’s method, Florence published a press release in the São Paulo–based newspaper A Phenix in which he stated that he had already been working on photographic printing methods for nine years and that these experiments led him first to the invention of polygraphy (a form of printing that used sunlight, stencils, and chemistry to reproduce texts or graphics) and then to the “discovery” of “fixing of images in the camera obscura through the action of light.” He continued, “I will not dispute anyone’s discoveries, because one same idea can come to two persons, and because I always considered my findings precarious.” When Florence’s press release was reprinted in Rio two months later, it was prefaced by a journalist’s note stating, “Let the readers compare the dates and decide if the world owes the discovery of Photography, or at the very least of Polygraphy, to Europe or to Brazil.”

Daguerre had received a life pension from the French government, and Florence hoped to obtain the same. He wrote letters and made his case to the French Academy of Sciences but never received any serious response, and his diary entries from this time convey his resentment at being overlooked. “Photography is the wonder of the century. I had also already established the grounds, foreseen this art in all its majesty. I did it [photography] before Daguerre’s process, but I worked in exile. I printed by means of sunlight seven years before photography was first talked about. I had already given it that name; however, all honors to Daguerre.” The French invention caught on and became popular in Brazil; in 1840, fourteen-year-old Pedro II, about to be crowned Second Emperor of Brazil, had the daguerreotype technique demonstrated to him. The young emperor became enamored with the invention, turning into the first promoter of official photography within a monarchy, introducing the title of “Crown Photographer” before Queen Victoria in England.

Hercule Florence, Anhu-póca, n.d. (polygraphic drawing). © Instituto Moreira Salles

A tireless inventor despite lack of fame, fortune, or even credit, Florence continued to experiment with reproduction. In the late 1830s, he purchased a typography machine, obtained the necessary license to operate it, and printed advertisements and the short-lived revolutionary newspaper O Paulista that became the “fuel of the liberal movement” until the anti- monarchical revolt had been squashed, forcing Florence to disappear his machine after printing only four editions. In the early 1840s, about a decade after his first experiments with photography, Florence invented unique and inimitable paper money. The move from photography to money might seem a stretch, but both share an inherent seriality. A banking crisis of 1864 that resulted in a reconfiguration of the banking and commerce system made it evident that money, both paper and coin, were difficult to authenticate. Florence seized on the economic tumult by introducing paper that, because of the “sharpness” it allowed in printing, the “microscopic traces,” and the “indelible” quality of the printed colors and patterns could, as his 1842 advertisement claimed, “guarantee … against forgeries.” But this, too, failed to catch on. Yet Florence never gave up: In 1859 he patented a reproduction technique he called “stereopainting” and, soon thereafter “solar painting,” though we don’t know much about what these intriguing projects entailed. His last known “invention” was what he called “The Sixth Order of Architecture, or Brazilian Order.” This order consisted of columns, pediments, and other architectural details inspired by Brazilian palm trees, already an icon of the country. Greece produced the three known orders of architectural style—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—that symbolized the roots of Western architecture. Florence seems to have wanted to put Brazil on the cultural map by inventing a style or order that reflected the country’s tropical environs.

Hercule Florence, Tête et pate de l’anhu-póca (Head and feet of anhu-póca bird, or Southern screamer), Paraguay river, 1826, from Expedição Langsdorff ao Brasil 1821–1829. Volume 3: Aquarelas e desenhos de Florence (Langsdorff expedition to Brazil 1821–1829. Volume 3: Watercolors and drawings). Courtesy Instituto Hercule Florence, Saõ Paulo, and Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg

Why didn’t any of Florence’s ideas and inventions flourish? Most likely his status as an outsider within the highly structured political and class system in nineteenth-century Brazil, with its strong monarchy and organized cultural centers clustered in Rio de Janeiro and the northern city of Recife, is to blame for his lack of recognition. Though his name would fall into obscurity rather than becoming canonized in photography histories, he seems to have passed his later years rather contentedly in the small town of Campinas, where he fathered twenty children and lived on a beautiful fazenda (ranch).

A century passed before Florence’s remarkable achievements were discovered. In the early 1970s, Boris Kossoy, a Brazilian photographer and photography historian who came across Florence’s “alleged” invention through mentions in specialized Brazilian publications, began his research on what he called the “isolated discovery of photography in Brazil.” To build his case Kossoy traveled to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, to test, with the aid of technicians, the notations made by Florence about his photographic experiments. His tests proved that Florence had indeed invented a photographic process in 1833. Around the same time his photographic discoveries were being at last acknowledged, his studies of Amazon sounds were also finding new supporters in the emerging field of bioacoustics, or animal communications. In 1978, the world-famous French ornithologist Jacques Vielliard was invited by the University of Campinas, on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo, in Florence’s hometown, to establish what would become the most important bioacoustics lab in the Americas. Vielliard amassed an enormous collection of tropical sounds, creating the “Neotropical Sound Archive,” and in 2005 set up a second archive called the “Amazonian Sound Archive,” housed at the Federal University of Pará.

Page from Hercule Florence’s manuscript Voyage fluvial du Tieté a l’Amazone (Fluvial voyage from the Tieté to the Amazon river), 1831, which included many examples of his zoophonie notations. Courtesy Archive of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, and Instituto Hercule Florence, São Paulo

More recently, contemporary artists have found Florence a source of inspiration. In the nineties, German sound artist Michael Fahres, working with a group of artists from Russia, Germany, and Brazil, retraced Florence’s journey with the Langsdorff expedition and reinterpreted his zoophonie. Italian photographer Linda Nagler is preparing a multimedia art exhibition around Florence’s many artistic and scientific explorations for the New National Museum of Monaco in 2015. An Argentine trio including writer Pola Oloixarac, photographer Luna Paiva, and composer Esteban Insinger wrote a contemporary opera called “Hercule Florence in Mato Grosso,” which will premiere in Buenos Aires this October. Perhaps Florence was neither a naturalist nor an inventor but rather a conceptual artist who was ahead of his time.

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Natalia Brizuela is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Fotografia e império: Paisagens de um Brasil moderno (Photography and Empire: Landscapes of a modern Brazil) (Companhia das Letras, 2012) and the forthcoming Uma literatura fora de si. Escrita e fotografia (A literature beside itself: Writing and photography) (Rocco, 2014).

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The Story of Hercule Florence
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The Other Life of Photographs

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by Charles Bowden

The pile of Aperture issues rests on the clean table as cool north light seeps into the old brownstones. I tell myself to think of the half century of issues, sequencings, arguments, and folios as nothing more than flash cards flaming past the eye. I let this blur burn my face and then, I start to understand a little bit.

I seem to die a little bit every time I look at photographs. The woman in the tight dress now can’t wear it, that war is over, we don’t sport hats these days, I don’t play baseball anymore, and wasn’t he famous once? The photos are always then, and I’m always now.

Paul Strand, The White Fence, Port Kent, New York, 1916

There are two other things: I always believe photographs, no matter what I might claim. And I am never intimidated by them. A painting, a poem can face me down as some kind of test. But snapshots have made the output of cameras safe for me. I suspect this feeling of comfort with photographs is common.

As a boy, I found an old photograph in my aunt’s attic and when I looked at it I inhaled a world: I smelled the zinnias, snap-dragons with coarse leaves, blue hydrangeas drooping on the lawn, insects thrumming, the early morning coolness. The dirt smells rich and rank. Morning still hangs in the shadows, and the world is cool like a stone milk-house. All those white chickens by those red wheelbarrows in the yard promising a hard, sure reality where everything is deliberate and nothing is a mystery. Paul Strand points his camera at a white picket fence in Port Kent, New York in 1915 and nails this same chord of visual music that I stumble on in my aunt’s attic, this insistence on the physical reality of the moment.

I can tell. Always, when I look at photographs, I know I can tell what is going on. There is something about photographs that makes us look.

Aperture begins by insisting on an actual world. Lisette Model orders a drink in the blue air of Sammy’s bar in Manhattan, Dorothea Lange captures a signpost at the crossroads, that first cover. Beaumont and Nancy Newhall help prop up this early Aperture, and Nancy lances the tissue of the early issues with essays that cut through artspeak like a scalpel. Barbara Morgan flings dance on the page. Minor White is the soul of the magazine for more than a decade.

The magazine is a tiny thing, and at first it offers a kind of editorial clearing of the throat with fragments of photojournalism—Lange’s embattled America, Lewis Hine with those immigrants shuffling up a staircase at Ellis Island, Ansel Adams’s West, Frida Kahlo, and there’s Marlene Dietrich looking just so in those portraits, early shots of the Pyramids, the waters rising to slaughter a farm valley in California. And then it shifts and amid the little essays in the fifties, the essays that said here is what a professional photographer must do and be, here is how to run that camera, amid these didactic teach-ins, White seeks a kind of deep imagery that signals a connection with an imagined eternal world. One issue has an offhand shot by Barbara Morgan of a girl sitting on a rock playing a recorder. The image is as ancient as a shepherd on a hillside in the Greece of Homer and as recent as the date in the caption: 1945.

I am sitting in Oregon almost a half-century after finding that old snapshot in the attic and I’m talking with my sister on the deck of her house against the mountain. She is taking a hundred pills a day because of the illness and all of her hair has fallen out. I guzzle a glass of wine she is forbidden. I mention the image I found as a child and she is suddenly alert. She goes into the kitchen and fetches an old snapshot taken on the farm: she is maybe seven, in a dress, blond hair, eyes squinting in the sun, I am four, hair cropped like a convict in the uniform style favored after the end of that war.

I tell her of the eerie quality of that old photo I once found, the one that has triggered our conversation. I tell her it had no aesthetic merit, and no explanation but that when I stumbled upon it as a child, I instantly knew what it was and could move beyond its borders and wander the world it came from. There was no date on it, nor handwriting explaining any circumstance. Almost fifty years ago, I climbed up into the attic of my aunt’s farmhouse in Minnesota. I was eight or nine or ten; it was late morning. Dust floated in the air and lay deep on every object, a menagerie of broken chairs, old chests, trunks suitcases, cheap novels. I remember I was looking for hard goods, maybe an old pistol or decommissioned shotgun.

I found the photograph.

A man and a woman sit on the grass. They are very close and stare at the camera. The man wears slacks, suspenders, a white shirt, and glasses with round frames. The woman has a print dress, her hair up in something like a bun. The man is my father, the woman I do not know. But instantly, in the dust and light and shadow of the attic, I know this is my father’s woman. I have never heard of her. Or of much else in his life. Nor will I ever hear much, he was not that kind of man. But at that age in that attic, I instantly knew what was going on in that photo, right down to the flowers blooming outside the frame and time of year and the sounds and smells that have just been in the air, and I knew the woman was no stranger to my father.

I think much of the history and frustration of photography is in that cheap, off-handed image. Photographs convince us.

Minor White explains that there are Seven Levels of Light. He gives out the task: “Illuminate the mind and cast shadows on the psyche.” Minor White cannot be escaped. He is the tortured man who survived World War II better than he did the iron peace of the Cold War. He infused the first decade or more of Aperture with both his faith and his inner turmoil.

“It was a one-man show,” he later noted, “an outlet for my own photographs . . . My own photographs, but other people did them.”

In the early sixties, Minor White decides to end Aperture. He listens to some internal clock in these matters. The thing he has nurtured has a circulation of about 450. And Aperture, an idea fomented by a handful of people in the early fifties and nursed into life and form by White, goes into a free fall, like a drying print that slips loose of the clothespins in a darkroom, flutters off the line and slowly floats to the floor. Michael Hoffman, a student and product of White in Rochester, bounced around the West for a spell, rode the rodeo, and most importantly, Hoffman had the kind of energy and focus required to make something work. It is as if a slumbering volcano suddenly erupted. Aperture becomes a foundation, prints, hundreds of books, and a menu for those curious about what to see and how to see and why to see. Paul Strand, at the end of his career, becomes part of the springboard for this new Aperture when he leaves his archive to the foundation. Aperture finds its way to the future by walking on the photographic bones of the past: Strand’s stark, loving studies of other places, White’s distillation of a lifetime of sequencing in his final testament of books.

I find this Aperture in a small bookstore in Arizona, when I pick up a small volume on Roger Fenton, part of some “Masters of Photography” series, the cover claims, and begin to teach myself how to see by looking at the world through the eyes of people who saw what I missed. A woman shrouded in the yards of requisite Victorian clothing walks the path at Windsor and this world looks so spacious and empty and lonely that I can hear the rustle of her long skirt against the gravel walk. I’d never heard of Aperture and pretty much thought photography was about picnics, weddings, newspapers, and magazines. Michael Hoffman’s Aperture opened up a new world to me. As it happens, the very world I’d always lived in but could not see.

As I write this, Michael Hoffman has just died at age fifty-nine in a New York hospital. I never met him or spoke with him and so I am in a position that most readers of this magazine share: I knew him by his works. He’s the guy who introduced me to Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and a long list of other wizards with cameras. He dragged the poor into my house in books by Sebastião Salgado and Eugene Richards, he made me look at the Chinese hand in Tibet, and the mafia slaughter of Sicily. The Aperture I stumbled upon in a bookstore in Arizona was the face and voice of the man I never met. I used to sit around at night browsing Aperture’s catalog like it was a candy store with open stock. Whatever Aperture now becomes is up to us. But what it is now is what Michael Hoffman created. A lens that could penetrate even my desert hut in Arizona.

You just can’t get to the life of photography without facing all the death in photography. The image is always about the past and this knell of the past is what keeps forcing us to listen to photographs, including those that only trace the evolution of our own faces. Fossils are created in the darkroom.

This is how it goes: I am driving across Nevada at eighty miles an hour, the miscellanies of Minor White flashing across my mind, when I succumb once again to the power of the dead.

I know the sea is down and they are writhing as the sun torches their sensitive skin. There are forty of them marooned in a small mud flat as the waters pull away and decline and this retreat is fatal for them, this retreat of the sea that will leave them dry-docked for two hundred million years. The jaws are powerful for ripping flesh, the body long and firm, running to sixty feet, the fins propel them at twenty-five miles an hour. They fit uneasily into categories, half-fish, half-reptile. They are on the path towards being fossils and the mud will catch every detail of their bodies, the minerals will slowly leach into their bones, gold and quartz filling them cell by cell, making them rock, and the imprint will be so exact that my kind will glance at this negative imprint of their lives and know that they gave live birth, know this fact two hundred million years after the collision of their sexual congress has ended.

In 1977 they are declared the official state fossil of Nevada. They now exist seven hundred thousand feet above sea level in the Shoshone Mountains of central Nevada. They are called Ichthyosaurus Shonisaurus popularis and scholars explain their doom by tectonic-plate movement and uplift and a scale of time that terrifies most people. They look up from stone and I blink and think, Christ, this half-fish-half-reptile has just made one of the first negatives.

I always seem to wind up driving along a lonely highway, storming north at eighty miles an hour toward that visit with my sister in Oregon and in my head I have this heavily plotted conversation I’m going to have with her about the image I glimpsed fifty years ago in my aunt’s attic. I sip stale coffee as the Shoshone Mountains huddle to the north, the sky is overcast, the desert rich in soil color under filtered light. There are few signs of people save the occasional whorehouse that pops up as a cluster of trailers. Fossils everywhere, including in that next frame to be shot.

I pull off at Goldfield, Nevada, a mining town that around 1906 was home to thirty thousand people. The major saloon then required eighty men to tend what was called “the world’s longest bar.” By 1910, this was ending; by 1920, the whole county of Esmeralda held only 2,148 and today it harbors a little over a thousand. Goldfield itself struggles on as a friendly ruin.

I was here once before, in 1959, at age fourteen on my way to Seattle with my father. I was driving so that he could sprawl on the bunk he’d build in a converted bread van and drink without worry. We pulled off in Goldfield because he knew Wyatt Earp had once frequented the area during the boom when he had a liquor and tobacco store. The old man was a fount of such details. We walked past the ancient hotel, a sturdy building, and when I looked in the tables were still set in the dining room, the silver right by the old china.

The old man was in his early sixties, beer-bellied, the stubble of a three-day beard on his face, a baseball cap on his gray head, tri-focals taking in the scene and he looked nothing like the yearning figure in that photo in my aunt’s attic who seemed attached to the woman beside him on the grass. He did not know that I knew of that image or of that woman. I would never bring it up. My father did not answer questions or care what anyone living or dead thought of him. Six years later, when my sister married, he told her that he had been married before and that the marriage did not work and he got a divorce. He told her this, and nothing more, in an effort to comfort her in his clumsy way, so that she would not worry should her marriage fail. And he revealed this just before the wedding. He never told my brother, who is nine years my senior. And of course, no one ever asked him anything about it.

So in 1959, we walked the empty streets of the dead town and came upon a saloon, Silver Dollar Kirby’s. The old man went in and the bar was a plank on two sawhorses, the stock one or two bottles and some shot glasses. He ordered a double and threw it down.

He asked the bearded ancient—Silver Dollar Kirby—“How is it going?”

The graybeard answered, “I get by,” and then paused in deep thought and added, “Well, I’m setting a little aside, too.”

Now I am back, a little over forty years later. The old man is dead, Silver Dollar Kirby long gone. And when I ask at the tiny Goldfield chamber of commerce for the local population figure, I’m told, “They say it is two hundred.”

The town, whatever its numbers, still hosts five saloons.

I can see my father walking down the empty street to a bar, I can see the photograph in the attic, I can hear the sounds of the dying Ichthyosaurus. If you want to talk about where photographs come from and where they go and what they are about you will, in the end, come to the Goldfield, Nevada of your life. And there you will find a sequencing that escapes the shackles of prose. You will look at the fossil of the dying fish/reptile and right before your eyes will appear the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who is busy killing himself as the sullen weight of Stalin’s Soviet Union fell on his shoulders in the 1930s. There, quite near the body, he has left a final note: “The love boat has crashed against the everyday. . . .”

The emotional response to a photograph is very close to feeling the breath of a prehistoric beast on your neck.

Photography has moved past the debate about whether or not it is an art. Photography has ceased to be a debate about what is and what is not a photograph.

But photographs cannot escape their fate as fossils, as moments of life frozen on paper. And viewers cannot escape their appetite for the content of photographs, an appetite so severe that it often overwhelms standards of aesthetics. O. Winston Link’s ancient steam locomotives look beautiful. But bad photographs of steam locomotives are also oddly compelling because the things within such prints have disappeared. Photography seems to hate borders and consumes just about everything with relish.

In the seventies, and more especially in the eighties and nineties, Aperture gave up on the tutorial and started ranging widely, a beast feeding off the past, then shredding that past with folios of images that had been written on, cut up, had things pasted on them, were held down to the floor while all these new computers had their way with them. Aperture became a place with all kinds of things claiming to be photographs and a lot of people, myself included, kind of get miffed at these antics from time to time. But mainly I think I got upset with such experiments because photographs have content, and in my hidebound way, I didn’t want this content tinkered with by the comments of the photographer—a strange position since the photographer has already scribbled a comment by picking up the camera and framing the shot.

Basically, photographs, cause debate because they incite belief. People want beauty and then, when they get something they’ve heard rumored on the front pages of newspapers, now made solid by images, they want to turn away from these visual reports. And what really upsets most of us, and this is the curse of photographs, is that it is so hard to turn away. Once I see a powerful photograph I cannot seem to erase it, try as I may. But after I’ve enjoyed my tantrum what I like is this: photography can now be damn near anything; the coal miner black as he comes out of the shaft, the spray of pigment in a landscape, a swirling form made with, say, a long exposure and blasts of colored lights. Photographs can be that beauty thing. And they can be that other thing, the thing that sent Kurtz reeling out of the Congo and into the imagination forever: the horror. There is still that tug of Ansel Adams and his shots of some Eden, but my mind cannot help placing them next to Richard Misrach and his nuclear cows dead on the Yucca Flats of our new West.

I have been staring at the work of Tina Modotti as I sit in the wet sun of Oregon. I have looked at the early shots of Talbot and Daguerre and Fenton and others. I believe in Atget’s streets, all 8,500 shots of his imaginary Paris freed from modern machines. I stare into the hard sharp surfaces of f.64, the early flowerings of Aperture as Minor White plunges like an Ichthyosaurus into deeper waters where he senses something eternal hides beneath the waves of life. I have taken to eating pears from the Oregon orchards.

My sister says she heard the woman in the photograph was crazy. Neither of us can remember her name now.

I say that she was a heroin addict, that I know this for a fact but I cannot remember if my aunt said this, or the old man once told me. I have other scraps: once, after our father remarried, our mother recalls the woman’s brother came by the farm. The woman was dead then, of course. And our father and the visitor went out in the farmyard and talked and then the brother left. That is all our mother knows. She could not hear what they said and she did not ask. She tells me the woman’s name was Lillian and I roll it around on my tongue like a jewel.

My sister has a cup full of pills before her on the table and as we talk she steadily takes them, one by one.

“There was something about breaking dishes,” she recalls, “how she would throw the dishes against the wall, or they would both throw them. I think our aunt told me this. I can’t remember. She was also put in an institution once or twice, I remember something about an institution.”

My sister looks at me and says with a smile, “I can deal with anything but the future. Now I have trouble with the future.”

I have seen a photograph of the fossil of the Ichthyosaurus—it looks exactly like a negative: the beast is flattened and yet every detail is there, the teeth, the long porpoiselike mouth, the big body and flippers and fins, the immediate sense that it is a voyager from another time but yet an actual thing, not imaginary, as real as Lillian breaking dishes or loading that syringe or sitting with my father on the grass that promises an endless summer under the sheltering trees with red zinnias nearby.

My mother once told me my father would not remarry until his first wife was dead. I don’t know, I just know about the red zinnias and the snapdragons that are not even physically present in the old photograph. And I know the trapped beasts on Shoshone Mountain writhed as the sun ate their dying skin.

A few days ago, a friend stopped by and I was lost in photographs, staring at vanished worlds and worlds that keep returning. He mentioned a time long ago when we’d both run amuck and stuffed ourselves with drugs and how this experience, now long past, had opened up his mind.

I said this had not happened to me, that I must be some kind of mutant, that when I was young and swam for a season in a sea of chemicals the experience simply confirmed my day-to-day world. I seem to have been born stoned, I mused. I always heard colors, walked through photographs and went around corners and up blind alleys; every window I saw in an image I could enter, like a burglar, and then prowl the inner domains. The nudes always had scent for me, the tumult of the photojournalist was home, the serene rocks and frost on glass panes of Minor White were surfaces I knew before I was born. I had lived a life of déjà vu, and drugs, like photography, seem to enforce this sensation. I have no theory for this, no beliefs, no secret bottle of Carl Jung I keep on the side and toss down under a full moon. Some things simply are.

Homo sapiens is a haunted species. I cannot imagine Ichthyosaurus, even when dying on what would become the Shoshone Mountains, wailing over its fate. But people do and they reach for the camera to capture this sense of their lives passing—passing even though they seem to have just arrived. People are love boats filming their collisions. When their time as lovers has ended, and Tina Modotti slept alone in the house she had shared with Edward Weston in Mexico City, she wrote him, “. . . I accept the tragic conflict between life which continually changes and form which fixes it immutable.”

Minor White once wrote a strange phrase, “Circumambulation of the Light.” And then he advised, “It’s but another step into the dark room.” Yes, I must go now to the dark room. I must go to the old snapshot in the attic and admit this image is not very good, not well exposed, indifferently framed and lacking attention to contrast. The Ichthyosaurus isn’t really art, isn’t really a photograph, isn’t really a negative outside of my clever claims, but like the snapshot it does capture my attention. I look and look hard. Lewis Hine’s immigrants shuffle up that stairway, and I feel some chord struck within me. Dietrich stares up in her pantsuit and top hat and my God I can’t take my eyes away. It’s her, I know it. Charis is naked and Weston captures all those curves, a storm is lifting off the Yosemite Valley and Adams waits for the right instant, Stieglitz hunts the clouds, Lange keeps insisting on stories within every single shot she makes, White is mesmerized by the steam forming frost on the winter windowpane in Rochester, then come all those wars and demonstrations and bluesy nights and someone on a mattress in the East Village is shooting up, Mary Ellen Mark is flinging a teen prostitute into my face and strange visual reports arrive from mysterious continents of the earth. There is an endless roll call of powerful image makers, Sebastião Salgado, Richard Misrach, Sally Mann, Eugene Richards, William Eggleston, Graciela Iturbide, Don McCullin, Cindy Sherman, Robert Frank, Imogen Cunningham, Eugene Smith—who the hell am I forgetting?—and so many themes to explore and rend apart and return to and try to understand again. And I believe it all.

I may like paintings but I seldom believe them—that’s why hotels hang paintings in the rooms and never dare hang a photograph over the bed. I always believe photographs, no matter how fake or inept they are. My father sitting on the grass, the woman is by his side, and they have to be lovers—don’t try to say different—and just outside the frame those red zinnias thrive, the cattle low, and morning coolness hides in the shadows.

I can tell.

And so can you.

______

“The Other Life of Photographs” was originally published in Aperture magazine, issue #167, Summer 2002.

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Aperture #216 – Editors’ Note

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The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #216 Summer 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online

Inez & Vinoodh, Waiting for Kate, 2001 © Inez & Vinoodh and courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York, and The Collective Shift

Though this issue’s title appears in quotation marks, the intention is not to be ironic, or to suggest skepticism. Rather, the quotes allude to image quotation and reference, which 
are part and parcel of any creative act but are essential to the world of fashion. “In today’s professional climate . . . you’re only as good as your references,” guest editors Inez & Vinoodh note in their introduction to a portfolio of images by fashion’s most iconic and imitated photographers. Referencing is delicate, requiring thoughtful handling to avoid crossing the line into copying. Curator Charlotte Cotton remarks in her contribution that fashion photography’s often transparent
 use of references may be one reason why the genre is criticized from other corners. But in the end what matters is how a reference is used: when adequately transformed, you may sense a quotation but won’t recognize its source.

Transformation, in a broader sense, is a hallmark of 
Inez & Vinoodh’s work. The husband-and-wife team has collaborated for more than twenty-five years, breaking ground in the 1990s with their early digital interventions into fashion photography. Their work is marked by restlessness and curiosity about photography, a tension between illusion and reality, the beautiful and the grotesque, and a desire to explore the medium’s generous flexibility. The protean nature of
 their output has earned them both commercial success 
and art-world kudos. In these pages, writer Donatien Grau describes their agnostic practice as a “collaboration embedded within collaborations,” noting their frequent partnerships with artists, graphic designers, even pop stars.

The “Pictures” section comprises key influences and references for Inez & Vinoodh. Some choices may be surprising, as not all emerge from the field of fashion but instead reference styles from various periods, as in the work, spanning the 1950s through the 1980s, of Ed van der Elsken, the influential Dutch documentary photographer. A selection of the wonderfully beguiling ads produced in decades past for the Shiseido cosmetics company are a reminder that commercial art often warrants serious consideration. A collage from Pop artist Richard Hamilton’s Fashion-plate series appears on our cover, an image that playfully underscores the artifice, construction, and illusion that is fashion image making.
 This 1969 collage is part of a portfolio that considers photographs that have served as references for painting. Hamilton sourced his material from fashion magazines, 
the medium through which the story of fashion photography is often told. A new generation of photographers has gleaned much by flipping through back issues of the pioneering magazines i-D, The Face, and Jill, all of which fostered the careers of many major photographers and stylists.
(The dog-eared and even cut-up copies of these publications in the Fashion Institute of Technology’s library attest to their consistent use as reference material.) Closing the “Pictures” section are two emerging photographers who reference photography’s recent past: the street tradition for Daniel Arnold and a casual diaristic touch in the work of Margaret Durow.

In “Words” we consider the growing area of fashion film, the complex relationship between documentary photography and fashion, and a conversation between two of fashion’s most influential magazine editors, Penny Martin of The Gentlewoman and Emmanuelle Alt of Vogue Paris, details the production 
of fashion photography and the sensitivities of using archival references when working with photographers. Alt notes that “your first music and visual influences stay with you forever. . . . You live with what was around when you first became curious.” Indeed, much of what forms this issue is culled from what was around when Inez & Vinoodh first became curious, as they note, echoing Alt’s observation, that fashion is nostalgic and based on a “string of memories.”

—The Editors

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Recap: Aperture “Fashion” Launch at Gagosian Shop

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On Tuesday, September 9, at the height of New York Fashion Week,  the Gagosian Shop hosted the launch of Aperture magazine’s Fall 2014 issue, #216, “Fashion”. Guest-editors Inez & Vinoodh joined Aperture staff and guests to discuss the issue, which is dedicated to fashion photography.

“Fashion” is available in print, and online. Click here to subscribe to Aperture magazine.

 

All images © Max Campbell.

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The Lives of the Saints by Charles Bowden

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David Wojnarowicz, Where I’ll Go After I’m Gone, 1988-89, courtesy the estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Hummingbirds appear before dawn, a whirring and darting at the feeders. Black silhouettes maneuver in the faint gray. The great blue heron alights on the power pole, the sun slips over the mountain.
Delphiniums begin to glow with faint lavender and intense blues. The zinnias come on cheap and crass.
I am just up the river, fifty miles from the killing ground of Ciudad Juárez.
The dead follow me. I sit at a table and put secret graveyards on a map, one I cannot publish because such an act would lead to the murder of my sources.
I listen to the birds, the dead slowly drown out the songs.
I hear stories.
Everything seems normal here with miles of pecan groves lining the river under a blue sky.
But I hear stories.

I read old things with fresh eyes. “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars,” says St. Augustine, “and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.”

The hummingbirds near Patagonia, Arizona, sip almost two gallons at the feeder, then, vanish at dusk. I have come here to erase Juárez from my mind.
I have failed.
The moon rises late in the night hunting through a veil of clouds. Music joins the purl of water wandering the creek and around eight p.m. four men in hoods line up eighteen people in a drug clinic in Ciudad Juárez and kill them. The authorities describe the scene as a river of blood coating the hallway. A chained dog was killed also. Visitors report there is a smell of death in the air.
To the east of me, a rancher is slaughtered.
To the west of me, a border-patrol agent is slaughtered.
And pretty much to the south of me, a seventeen-year-old Mexican guy is slaughtered on the line—the agents say he was throwing rocks.
I listen to songs of New Orleans and plan my exit to the bayous and the brown, sullen waters of the big river. I want to stop hearing the stories, I want to forget, or at the very least, I want to cease to learn.
The river and delta are drugs I need.
Upstream in Arkansas, I am talking to a man painting a wall in an elementary school on the delta. The June air burns. He went up to Detroit in the ’80s, after Nam, after his wars on native ground for civil rights, went up and got into the crack trade and after a while his organization was doing $50 million a year. He wants to write this down, get the killing in Nam down too.
I ask him if he is clean.
He says: “I won’t lie to you, no sir, I am not clean.”
I ask him what he is using.
He says: “Everything.”
I know the feeling. That is why I am on the delta, that is why Juárez seems to keep me on a leash. That is why I keep wanting to hit someone. That is why I just want some peace.
The man keeps painting the wall in the school.
Everything.
But just before dawn as I watch a mouse wander the patio, I realize there is really no way to leave. What I seek is where I am and where I will arrive after all the miles of highway.
One of the hummingbirds at the feeder, a blazing species called Rufous, migrates twelve thousand miles each year, and yet every place it alights finds what it just left behind—insects and nectar to devour. The bird lives in motion to stay where it begins and ends.
The waters of the sea evaporate and wander back to the headwaters as clouds and then the rain falls and the journey down the river renews.
In an hour, the gray light will seep into the sky and a roar will come as they return to the feeders.
Maybe I will wander past myself, full of wonder.
There is the matter of food and drink, also.

There has been a delay because a man sits in front of me and he says that people are sometimes hard to kill.
I feel the door closing behind me and I know it will not be easy to get out of this room.
Once, he explains, he took a contract to murder a very tall and fat man. So when that man entered the room, he hit him in the back of the head with a hammer.
But the man did not go down. He simply turned and said, “Is that any way to greet someone?”
It took a lot of blows to kill him.

The other day I cut catfish fillets, very thin, in the style of southern Louisiana. I washed them in a bath of egg and buttermilk, then dredged them through cornmeal and seasoning.
Another day I rolled out noodles, cut an inch wide with ragged edges. The sauce is made from crushed red pepper, oil, uncured bacon, garlic, tomatoes, cream, pecorino cheese shredded fine.
The need rises. I slice fresh ciabatta, douse with good olive oil, cover with diced tomatoes, anchovies, garlic, garlic, sea salt, and basil. An explosion on the tongue, I uncork the bottle and watch the moss draping down from the trees by the swamp slowly sway.
Such things are not details if you go down by the river.
You must learn to say yes before you can endure the people who say no.
The other day a man told me my problem was simple: I had never been tortured.

 

When I started out, I planned to farm and eventually die surrounded by the fields and fat cattle. The raw smell of red clover in the meadow has been the fragrance I wished to wash over my life.
In the third or fourth century A.D. an old man dies in North Africa and leaves this epitaph: “Here lies Dion, a pious man; he lived eighty years and planted four thousand trees.”
I wanted to be like that man. He almost certainly planted olive trees, a featured crop of the region. The early fathers of the African church had abundant light for their lamps and could write the mysteries of the faith all night long to the envy of their Italian colleagues.
But there was a chance in the air at the same moment when Dion left his summary of his life. St. Jerome, looking out at a small child, sketched this view of that world: “In such a world Pacatula has been born. Disasters surround her as she plays. She will know of weeping before laughter. . . . She forgets the past; she flees the present; she awaits with eagerness the life to come.”

I live between my Rome and my Jerusalem: my Ciudad Juárez and my New Orleans. Except that neither one is a holy city. And both cities are dying and both cities kill and both cities draw me toward them. And both cities have been written off and in both cities faces without names are writing the future with blood.
I have ignored God or the questions about God since I first walked into the forest and desert. The saints I spent time with in my twenties, when I inhaled drugs and for a spell thought the saints were the fellow outcasts and outlaws of their time. I swallowed whole St. Augustine and St. Jerome, also St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross. And the little flowers of St. Frances of Assisi, especially his time with the wolf. I paid no attention to Christ and Jehovah.
Now in the bright light of a new day as the killing comes down and the ground cracks underfoot, I return to these holy bones stored on dusty shelves in scorned libraries. I blow the cobwebs off, and St. Augustine tumbles down and rests in my hand again.

In an earlier time: The light falls golden, the air sags with moisture and the bayou is still, the waters green and placid. There is a war in Korea, and willing dead men leave this place to join that war. There is always a war during my time on earth, and always a ready supply of willing dead men. Bird cries shred the sky. Food floats from the kitchen: a gumbo with shrimp, andouille, celery, onion, bell pepper, filé, and a very dark roux. The blackened-iron kettle rests on the stove as my aunt stirs, a cotton wrapper clinging to her abundant body. Scents fill the air: her perfume, the gumbo, the swamp smells coming through the screen door.
The land here is flat and mainly underwater. The flatness, a land form I will later learn is called a delta, extends upriver almost to my birthplace in Illinois. Clay at the top, black mud at the bottom. Nasal speech in Illinois, and a mixture of Irish dock accents and rich southern vowels where the waters begin to break free and taste the salt of the sea.
I remember all the furniture in the house on the bayou is veneered with rounded corners and the mirrors are oval. The bedsteads are also veneer, the cigarettes have no filters, and the women leave the red imprint of their lips on the spent stubs. Salt, cayenne, garlic, and green scum on the water. I have always welcomed the night, that darkness rich and stuffed with hidden things. The dawn, also, and the early morning. The rest sometimes seems too bright for seeing things.
I never asked questions. My aunt in the swamps, I don’t know her maiden name. She had a twin sister who died. There was no money, and my earliest memory is of her doing piecework at a sewing machine in a sweatshop. She also held a soft-shelled crab up to my eyes and then later at home pan-fried it and I held it in my child’s hands and ate it like a large cookie.

There have been some questions. I will answer.
What possible link is there between the great delta of the Mississippi River and the poverty and violence of Ciudad Juárez?
Answer: The delta of the Mississippi River is the richest land on earth and for two centuries it has produced the poorest people in the United States. Ciudad Juárez was to be the model for American free-trade theories and for decades it has produced corruption, poverty, and violence.
If you ask what food and cooking has to do with all this, then you do not understand appetite and if you do not understand appetite you will be baffled by love, violence, and death.

I have always been interested in how things get done and so people tell me of their skills and trades and toils and the hazards of their work. The man I spoke of worked at killing people and burying them in Juárez. Sometimes, rotten bodies must be dug up and moved in order to preserve public order and respect for the state.
The skin blisters and the doctors try to understand. They wonder if it comes from work in the chemical industry or some other kind of intense contact. When asked, the patients pause. There is no way to discuss the matter. When a body has been underground a while, the rot advances, especially when lime accelerates decay. And then an order comes to move the bodies, sometimes without any reason. Sometimes because it is discovered that the house has been leased from a significant political figure. And for the owner to have his patio returned with corpses underneath the dirt as he sips his morning coffee and goes over the newspapers, that would be an insult. Despite the best efforts—deep holes, lime, layers of concrete—there is often a seepage of gases through sudden fissures in the soil. It might be evening, a beer cold in the hand, the patio inviting and suddenly there is a layer of odor floating and it is death. This cannot be allowed. Decorum must be observed. The owners, when they occupy their fine houses, should not have to smell death. Such an experience would upend the meaning of money and privilege.
So the bodies must be moved. There is not always time to round up the Hazmat suits. There are chemicals. And then, over time, an intolerance, maybe something called an allergy, that visit to the doctors, the question: Have you worked with chemicals?
This question can be awkward.
Last night, the creek rose and the water went brown with runoff from the hills. Drops fell softly from leaves, the clouds parted after the storm and a waning moon wandered among the stars. The bats hunted insects and came close to my face.
I was twenty miles from the border in Arizona at that exact moment. I felt I was going to where I belonged.
This afternoon, during a brief break in the storm, the sun streamed down on the sunflowers, some yellow, some red and bronze, and the dirt rose up like incense. Yellow, black, and blue butterflies fluttered around and did not fear me.
These are surely signs and I must learn to read them.
St. Augustine became a Christian when he heard a child’s voice singing as he sat in a garden on the edge of the Alps. He raced into the villa, opened St. Paul’s Epistles and saw the line “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ, spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.”
I would not wish his fate on a dog. I cannot imagine what it is like to spurn nature and nature’s appetites.
A young bobcat lives in the bamboo, kills doves in the yard and is willing to look into my face.
In the light rain, a javelina crosses the road in front of me.
Two buck deer emerge from the tall grass by the lane.
The great blue heron fishes the waters and pays me no mind.
Spiders now live over the stove and hang down when I make coffee.
I can sit in public cafés and not be noticed.
When I shop in the market, no one calls the police.
A black bear and cub scavenge the abandoned apple orchard in the bottomland.
There are fireflies after the night falls down.
All the saints seem to see the world as a barrier to their spiritual lives and personal salvation. They find personal salvation more important than the world itself. And they find women to be a menace to their souls.
This is clearly the best case that can be made for seeking damnation. Heaven and Hell do not concern me, nor does the state of my soul. Scorning the world is beyond my understanding. Why be here then?
A faint shower last evening brings up the raw scent of the grass come morning. The sun rises as a disk of gold, the hummingbirds descend with lust in their hearts, acorn woodpeckers pillage the feeders and a vulture sits high in the cottonwood across the wash and basks in the early light. A great blue heron flaps across the sky.
I am always puzzled when I am told life is meaningless.
I am always puzzled when I am told the meaning of life.

I have decided to take all the theories of violence, snap them across my knee and toss the fragments away. All this because my hands are rank with the strong scent of tomato leaves and the sunflowers have seared golden circles into my eyes. The hummingbirds let me stand two feet from the feeder and pay me no never mind.
I have decided to learn from appetites. I will slobber and drool and chew and inhale. I am done with dainty feeding. The quick and the dead share one thing: appetites. They both want to consume things. The theories assume there is a normal world where violence is absent. I see a world of appetites where the thing called violence answers yet one more hunger. Maybe it is the new fast food for those who do not have time for fine dining.
I have decided to drink cold water, eat black pepper, and listen to the stars on black nights.
I have decided.

I am not a camera.
I am not a theory.
I am a hunger.
St. Augustine says: “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the thing that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?”
The saints must keep up appearances.
I have decided.

_____

“The Lives of the Saints” was originally published in Aperture magazine issue #205, Winter 2011.

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by Charles Bowden
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Emmanuelle Alt: Conversation with Penny Martin

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Inez & Vinoodh, Emmanuelle Alt, 2014 © Inez & Vinoodh and courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York, and The Collective Shift

Fashion photography can be a nostalgic business, but Emmanuelle Alt’s appetite for the unexpected and glamorous keeps her in the vanguard of taste. A forty-seven-year-old stylist who learned her trade at French Elle, Alt is celebrated for reinvigorating the industry’s tired ’70s fashion clichés with surprising, sporty modernity since joining its most prestigious magazine, Vogue Paris, as fashion director in 2000.
Taking over from Carine Roitfeld as the publication’s editor-in-chief three years ago has demanded a more global view of making a magazine, shifting Alt’s focus away from styling and aesthetics alone. She may not now enjoy the luxury of being on set with Mario Testino, David Sims, 
and Inez & Vinoodh every week, but Alt still has the knack of intuiting exactly what a photographer needs to make a truly great picture. Penny Martin, editor of the women’s title The Gentlewoman, interviewed Alt at the Vogue Paris offices on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré this past May.

 

Penny Martin: Let’s start in the present. Emmanuelle, tell me about your most recent shoot—how did it come about?

Emmanuelle Alt: I was just in St. Barths with Inez & Vinoodh, shooting for our June/July issue. I’ve known them for about twelve years, so we’ve developed an easy way of working. We all love the same period of photography. And it’s not only the images; it’s the whole culture—a certain time of models, clothes, a certain time in music.

PM: I gather you started off in music videos?

EA: Yes, when I started styling, videos were very important. It was the era of Jean-Paul Goude and Jean-Baptiste Mondino, a totally new medium.

PM: Was this while you were at Elle?

EA: Yeah, I was working as a production assistant at the same time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a director; I was just fascinated by images, I think. I assisted on some Mondino videos; at that time he was fashion photography’s God. The stylist was Ray Petri. It was a brilliant team.

PM: So that was the golden age for you?

EA: Yes, for me, probably the beginning of the ’80s, the end of the ’70s . . . I think your first music and visual influences stay with you forever. My group all listens to Bowie; there’s nothing better. You live with what was around when you first became curious.

Vogue Paris, December 2013. Cover photograph by Inez & Vinoodh © Inez & Vinoodh/Vogue Paris

 

PM: When it comes to initiating a shoot, then, are those common influences even mentioned between collaborators of the same age?

EA: Well, this story began with Inez and me exchanging images by e-mail. Sometimes it comes from almost nothing; it might just be a color. When you’re shooting in the sun—you know that strong blue sky in St. Barths—you need a contrast. So I might say, “What do you think about red and white?” And Inez is like, “Oh, yeah, sure!” I’ll send a picture of a red shoe and a René Gruau illustration, which is full of red, and just a silhouette or a little sketch. It’s not always photographs—often it’s a painting or a frame-grab from a YouTube film. Very quickly, we’ll start to build up an image of a woman, and then we can discuss the casting. Some photographers will keep changing their casting or think they need a stronger idea. But Inez isn’t someone who hesitates. It’s like three phone calls and everything is booked.

PM: Do you ever have preproduction meetings with photographers in person?

EA: Unfortunately, everything is done over phone and e-mail since no one is in Paris. Of the bigger photographers we work with, I think Peter Lindbergh is the only one. Besides, at this time of year, we need to shoot overseas for the light. And unless photographers have made a career out of studio photography, like Penn or Avedon, I think most of them get bored if they’ve been stuck in there all year.

PM: The studio is all about control—leaving very little to chance so an idea can be executed exactly as imagined.

EA: Whereas outside you’re looking for accidents. I’m going on a trip with David Sims in a few weeks—once a year we take him on location. For a studio photographer like him, who controls the lighting, everything, he has to face a lot of unexpected things outside. Suddenly, rain makes a fantastic picture or there’s a dog in the street. The only thing is it costs a lot of money to fly photographers and their teams out there. We’re far from the days of Helmut Newton traveling with one assistant, one person doing hair and makeup, the model, and a fashion editor. Five people: it was nothing.

The following first appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Aperture magazine, “Fashion”Subscribe here to continue reading.

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i-D, Jill, and The Face: Fashion’s Maverick Magazines

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by Phil Bicker

This article originally appeared in Aperture 216, Fall 2014, “Fashion”

Pages from i-D no. 1, August 1980, “Straight-Up.” Photographs by Steven Johnston

 

The year 1980 saw the birth in London of The Face and i-D, two independently published and quintessentially British magazines. i-D was the invention of former British Vogue art director Terry Jones, and The Face was created by former NME (New Musical Express) editor Nick Logan. These new publications signaled a bold, catalytic moment in magazine publishing, offering an escape from the constraints of mainstream media for their founders and a platform for instinctive self-expression for their contributors. As the last vestiges of punk waned and transitioned to New Wave and then New Romantic, the first issue of The Face was produced and launched by Logan using his personal savings, and i-D’s early landscape-format issues (with silk-screened graphic covers) were designed and distributed in small runs in keeping with punk’s DIY mantra and post-punk aesthetic. Both magazines covered similar facets of youth culture; however, given the respective backgrounds of their founders, it was unsurprising that from the outset The Face was music focused, while i-D was more interested in fashion. The first issues of i-D introduced the “Straight-Up”—formal full-length street portraits photographed against blank urban walls—that documented the personal and individual style of British youth. While many of the photographers responsible for those early images remain as little known as the majority of the passing strangers they documented, the names of other early contributors would become more familiar. As i-D’s format rotated from landscape to portrait, Nick Knight made its first “photographic” cover, featuring Sade, and Marc Lebon made the second, featuring Madonna.

Both photographers would become i-D regulars, integral to the magazine’s evolution. Lebon’s work was raw and visceral, an experimental mash-up, fashion photography without boundaries. Knight’s tireless creative contribution—one of his stories, art-directed by Marc Ascoli, was aptly titled “In Pursuit of Excellence”—was as inspiring as it was pivotal. For the magazine’s fifth anniversary issue, Knight created a series of one hundred portraits, a styled topology of Britain’s rich history of tribal youth culture, signaling the photographer’s constant inventive hunger; he continued to produce dozens of fashion stories, more often than not made with his trusted collaborator, stylist Simon Foxton. Along with the contributions of stylists Judy Blame, Caroline Baker, and Ray Petri, these and other stories over the next halfdecade augmented and magnified street style, taking the magazine to another level.

Pages from The Face no. 26, November 1990, “Back to Life.” Photographs by David Sims, styling by Melanie Ward

Pages from i-D no. 83, August 1990, “Romania—Paradise Lost?” Photographs by Juergen Teller; styling by Venetia Scott

Pages from i-D no. 110, November 1992, “Like Brother Like Sister: A Fashion Story.” Photographs and styling by Wolfgang Tillmans

Pages from i-D no. 39, August 1986, “Pose!” Photographs by Nick Knight, styling by Simon Foxton

The early issues of The Face inherently touched on style in their portrayals of musicians, but the magazine’s fashion coverage was, at least in its formative issues, less overt. While the irreverent i-D embodied the spirit of its logo—a wink and a smile—The Face took a more classical approach to cool. As the publication found its audience and confidence, the experimental graphics and custom typography of designer Neville Brody defined the magazine’s identity, framed its content, and spread its influence. As the publication moved beyond its music roots, it took more risks. The Face chose “style” over “fashion,” and stylist Helen Roberts initiated the magazine’s evolution with photographer Jamie Morgan. Other stylists followed—Joe McKenna, Michael Roberts, Caroline Baker, and Debbie Mason among them—but none would have the impact or lasting influence of Ray Petri, or “Sting Ray,” as he first chose to be credited. Petri was the godfather and unquestionably the leader of the creative West London “Buffalo” collective, a group of photographers (including Jamie Morgan and Marc Lebon), stylists (including Mitzi Lorenz), musicians (Neneh Cherry, Nick Kamen), artists (Barry Kamen), and models (including a fourteenyear-old Naomi Campbell), who brashly defined the look of ’80s youth culture.

Petri made the MA-1 bomber jacket ubiquitous and mixed secondhand clothes and Army surplus, skiwear, sportswear, and accessories to create a brave new world of street style, urban cowboys, rude boys and ragamuffins, men in boxer shorts, collaged gangsters, and even men in skirts. He made the radical desirable and the outrageous believable, until his career was cut short when he died in August 1989 of AIDS. His legacy would include his later work with photographer Norman Watson for Arena, but it was his original vision and idiosyncratic styling, photographed by Jamie Morgan, that provided The Face with its first “style” cover—a photograph that publisher Nick Logan would later describe as a “fuck-off image from another planet”—and some of the magazine’s most memorable stories, iconic covers, and “Killer” images. “New,” “Hard,” “Bold,” the cover lines rang out; “Buffalo: The Harder They Come the Better,” one portfolio’s introductory text announced.

While Petri reimagined British style, the short-lived Jill magazine in Paris, under the direction of stylist Elisabeth “Babeth” Dijan, also embraced liberty, and the spirit of the new. As French as i-D and The Face were British, the independently published Jill was more fashion-centric but no less influential. The magazine was alternately at times a little softer and romantic, and at times a little darker and fantastic than its English counterparts. In its short run of eleven issues, published between 1983 and 1985, Dijan’s inspired vision and styling and the photography of her contributors, including Peter Lindbergh, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Jean-François Lepage, and a young Ellen von Unwerth, embraced the work of Jean Paul Gaultier and his generation of young French designers who turned the fashion world’s attention once more firmly back to Paris.

Pages from The Face no. 32, May 1991, “Slapheads.” Photographs by Corinne Day; styling by Melanie Ward

Pages from i-D no. 88, January 1991, “Teenage Precinct Shoppers.” Photographs by Nigel Shafran; styling by Melanie Ward

i-D no. 1, August 1980. Cover design by Terry Jones

A year after Jill folded, Dijan’s distinctive styling was featured in a special Paris issue of The Face. By the end of the ’80s Dijan had contributed a series of highly stylized fashion stories to the magazine, including the twenty-six-page comic-bookinspired opus, “Fashion Heroes,” with photographer Stephane Sednaoui. The story featured designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, Martine Sitbon, Vivienne Westwood, Azzedine Alaïa, and a fantastical, intricately collaged series of images that preempted the digital era.

As the decade turned, a new generation of photographers, including David Sims and Corinne Day, and stylists, including Melanie Ward, emerged. Both Knight as photo editor at i-D and I as art director at The Face, nurtured and published their work. Inspired by rave music and, later, “grunge,” the pared-down photographs related more to personal style and self expression than to manufactured fantasy for commercial ends.

The images that appeared in The Face and i-D at the time were an antidote to fashion’s high glamour and excess. In the summer of 1990, The Face ran an eight-page black-and-white story featuring a sixteen-yearold, then-unknown model, Kate Moss, and put her on the cover. The antithesis of the supermodel, the thin and refreshingly natural Moss stood just five-foot-seven. Photographed by Corinne Day and styled by Melanie Ward at England’s Camber Sands beach, in feather headdress, Birkenstocks, cheesecloth, and daisy chains, Moss challenged the prevalent concept of beauty and, in doing so, embodied a new attitude and spirit for the age.

Simultaneously, David Sims further challenged mainstream ideals and archetypes, photographing a story for The Face in 1990 that featured a lank-haired, unlikely “model” named Rev against a stark white studio background. Styled by Ward and choreographed by Sims, Rev looked like a gypsy, clad in his own ill-fitting secondhand pinstripes and knitwear, as he alternately floated, posed, and cut a graphic figure. In another key 1990 story that ran in i-D, stylist Venetia Scott and photographer Juergen Teller traveled across Romania, dressing and photographing real people of various ages they encountered to produce a wonderfully nuanced, understated, and ultimately unfashionable fashion story. And, recalling and refining the simple approach of i-D’s early “Straight-Ups,” Nigel Shafran in 1991 photographed the personal style of “Teenage Precinct Shoppers” unadorned.

Pages from The Face no. 22,
July 1990, “The Daisy Age.” Photographs by Corinne Day; styling by Melanie Ward

Pages from The Face no. 59, March 1985, “The Harder They Come.” Photographs by Jamie Morgan; styling by Ray Petri

Pages from Jill no. 8, February 1985, “ J’suis snob” (I’m a snob). Photographs by J.-J. Castres; art direction by Mitzi Lorenz

 

Jill no. 7, and Jill no. 10

These photographs, especially those by Day and Sims, made waves. A startled fashion world—unable to comprehend the casting, styling, or aesthetic—was at first caustic and dismissive. But the work could not be ignored. It was exciting, new, and challenging. Eventually the contagious individual visions of nonconformity made an impact on the mainstream and became a fashionable way of photographing fashion.

Both i-D and The Face continued their creative celebration of intuition, instinct, and individuality; Wolfgang Tillmans emerged through the pages of i-D in 1992 to blur and break down the boundaries between art and fashion photography, and The Face published pioneering stories by Inez & Vinoodh in 1994 and Elaine Constantine in 1997, before eventually folding in 2004. But despite both magazines’ years of commercial and cultural success, the spirit of originality and global influence that defined their work in the late ’80s and early ’90s would never be surpassed.

_____

Phil Bicker, a creative director, designer, and photography editor, was the art director of The Face from 1987 to 1991. 

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Fashion’s Maverick Magazines
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The Icons by Inez & Vinoodh

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This piece was originally published in Aperture Magazine issue 216, Fall 2014, Fashion

Every fashion designer is consistently delving into the past, basing a collection on a string of memories, like shoulder pads worn by clubbers in the ’80s or the platform shoes David Bowie put on when he performed as Ziggy Stardust. Our photography stems from a similar nostalgia. Fashion is a language made up of a visual code of status symbols. We play with this code, and sometimes subvert it; without this play on references the images become too abstract. Building a character based on myriad elements—paintings, movies, music videos, pictures of your mother—is what keeps the process exciting. You might feel the references but you can’t determine their source. What follows is a selection of images by some of fashion photography’s giants, whose work has influenced four decades of fashion, photography, and advertising and has been important to the development and motivation behind our own work. One might say that in today’s professional climate, in which clients want to see their campaign images before they are even shot, you’re only as good as your references.

 

Richard Avedon, Verushka, dress by Bill Blass, New York, January 4, 1967 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

 

 

Richard Avedon, Nadja Auermann, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer,
Cindy Crawford, and Stephanie Seymour, Versace Fall/Winter 1994–95 Campaign
, New York, April 14, 1994 © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Avedon

Avedon had a brilliant way of turning everyone he photographed into a hero. It was not necessarily about beautifying people, but about making them into iconic versions of themselves. He was attentive to proportion and body positioning, and able to find that one quality of someone’s physiognomy that is remarkable, whether grotesque or elegant, and bring it to the foreground. No photographer controlled body language better. Everyone is inspired by this series with Verushka, which is the epitome of movement in the studio. Almost every studio shoot today is orchestrated this way.

Avedon could translate the mood of a period but never lost his own voice. His collaboration with Versace over many years, similar to that of Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Newton, was one of the most incredible between a designer and a photographer in which both the people and the clothing look larger than life. This photograph of five of the most beautiful women in the world is so stylized and glamorous (down to their ankle socks), yet he manages to keep their exaggerated gestures feeling candid and humorous. Apart from, of course, having the best lighting in the world, you immediately know that it’s an Avedon because the people appear magnificent. He must have been truly interested in everyone he photographed.

 

 

Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, Spring, 1978 © Estate of Guy Bourdin; courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London; and Art + Commerce, New York

 

Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, Spring, 1979 © Estate of Guy Bourdin; courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London; and Art + Commerce, New York

Guy Bourdain

Growing up with a mother who went to Paris twice a year to see the runway shows and who brought back issues of Vogue Paris, I (Inez) flipped through the magazine at an early age and thought that the way Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin portrayed women was the way women were meant to be: bold, strong, wild, erotic, and independent. Bourdin definitely informed pretty much all of my early photography.

We’ve all heard the stories of how precise and demanding he was. You can tell that everything was preconceived, that it must have started with a sketch somewhere. This in-camera collage, in the picture opposite, shows how he merged abstraction with content like no one else. His consistent use of strong pink and red makeup, pale skin, and super curly hair (ideally red) has influenced many hair and makeup artists and is basically an industry standard.

Bourdin pushed his models to assume really wild expressions; sometimes he actually scared them. He must have been reacting to the ’50s, when everything had to be very perfect, proper, and clean, and then the ’60s, when everything was “peace and love.” In his work from the ’70s you feel something dubious is happening outside the frame. That dark side is inspiring, and his use of bodies, color (his painterly approach), lighting, and humor has been a big influence, especially this image, one of Bourdin’s most genius, in which a photograph of John Travolta is propped between the model’s legs. We love the use of color along with her body position. And, as in all his pictures, your eye immediately goes to the shoes.

Annie Leibovitz, Anjelica Huston, 1985 © Annie Leibovitz / CONTACT PRESS IMAGES

 

Annie Leibovitz, Brad Pitt, Las Vegas, 1994 © Annie Leibovitz / CONTACT PRESS IMAGES

 Annie Leibovitz

We saw this image of Brad Pitt for the first time at Annie’s exhibition in Stockholm, and were struck by the audacity of the leopard-print pants, the boots, the pajama shirt, the red blanket on the bed, and the nasty carpet—the sharp contrast between him and his surroundings. Annie pushes her subjects to become part of a scene or plot. Others might photograph Pitt, a male superstar, as heroic and strong, whereas here he’s passive but dressed so flamboyantly. On the other hand, Anjelica Huston wears a riding costume, looking very masculine, especially with her almost crotch-grabbing hand gesture. Anjelica has been hugely inspiring in our world, in fashion and fashion photography, for her work with Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, and Bob Richardson. These pictures are both portraits and fashion images. There is a simplicity to the images and their production, but the people are absolutely magnificent.

 

Bruce Weber, Talisa, Bellport, New York, 1982 © Bruce Weber

 

Bruce Weber, Gustav, Room 500, Copacabana Palace Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, 1986 © Bruce Weber

 

Bruce Weber

Bruce makes the most masculine men on earth look as elegant and beautiful as the most beautiful women, and he makes the most feminine women look like the strongest boys. It’s androgynous without being obviously androgynous. This image at right of Talisa, in her boxing stance, is the ultimate version of that. There is a generation that is absolutely inspired by Bruce and Herb Ritts for their interpretation of this sort of androgyny. You could say Bruce comes from the line of thought that Helmut Newton started with Yves Saint Laurent, when he set women free by using masculine codes, dressing them in tuxedos and pantsuits. We’re always trying to find a duality in a person: half male, half-female, a blurring of identity.

Bruce’s 1986 book O Rio de Janeiro has been a huge influence. His documentary approach is liberating and even stimulating. You’re in a place, you have an incredible subject, the light is the light that’s there. Now make that person incredible. That’s what we admire in Bruce’s work, that there’s no artifice. But we think that’s the bottom line for every photographer: when you’re really interested in the people you’re photographing, you get more than just the registration of someone.

David Bailey, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, 1969 © David Bailey

 

David Bailey, Jane Birkin, 1969 © David Bailey

 

 David Bailey

Bailey was a master of freezing a moment and registering energy. In this image of Jane Birkin, the lighting is harsh and unsubtle. Bailey went after people he really wanted
to meet, or he found models on the street if he couldn’t find the right one at an agency. Humor, bravado, and flamboyance all come through in his raw, unapologetic portraiture—you sense that his models made themselves vulnerable to him. This directness is the most honest way of working with a subject. For example, if we want to shoot someone naked, we will tell them immediately. You feel that kind of directness in his work. It’s like: “This is what it is. Are you going for it? Are you submitting yourself to it? Here we go.”

 

 

Deborah Turbeville, Parco, Paris, 1986. Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

 

Deborah Turbeville, Valentino, Vogue Paris, 1977. Courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery, New York

Deborah Turbeville

This image above has been in my scrapbooks ever since I (Inez) can remember looking at photography. The way the model’s head is wrapped. This decaying environment. The broken-doll position; the faded, uncanny romantic atmosphere that seems based on an old painting; the way Turbeville would lay out her books with pieces of tape stuck to her photographs—all of that influenced me. There’s a series that we did for The Face, with the model Maggie Rizer, based on this image; she had a headwrap like this girl’s.

Group shots, like the one above, are so difficult to do, at least successfully. Turbeville was a master at using negative space and catching everyone at the right moment. She must have been amazing at directing people in such a way that they would let go. Her models are often a little bit neurotic, a little on the verge of falling apart. They are unsure and unavailable, which we find attractive, but there is an incredible delicateness. We’re always amazed at how she manages to construct these group shots so beautifully, which is again a hard thing to do because you’re setting up a fashion photograph. You’re dealing with shoes and clothes. It’s incredible how she directed her subjects, and found a way to make things feel personal, as though there is complicity among the women.

 

Hans Feurer, Stern, 1978 Courtesy Hans Feurer / The Licensing Project

Hans Feurer

In the 1970s, Feurer opened up a studied, controlled idea of the fashion photograph while shooting for Kenzo. He worked with a long lens, at a distance, directing models with a megaphone in the early morning and at the end of the day when the light was the right temperature. Maybe using the long lens had to do with him not really wanting to engage with the women in the photographs but rather capturing them voyeuristically. The energy and the movement of the women in his photographs is sexy and creates a very unexpected body language. Women float in space in such an incredible way, showing the clothes so beautifully. When he worked with Kenzo it was a time in fashion that mixed utilitarian clothes and elegance. In this photograph at right, you’re not sure what’s going on: she’s wearing a very folkloric outfit with a military hood and gloves and mountain-climbing shoes. There are all these different messages.

This image above we honestly thought was by Guy Bourdin. But then we found out, along the way, that this was a Feurer. Let’s say there is his work with Kenzo, and then there is his work that has a sporty, fitness side to it. With this image, because of the contorted bodies and the strangeness of the composition, there is eroticism, but in his work it’s never obvious nor cheap.

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Inez & Vinoodh are a photography duo based in New York. They guest-edited Aperture‘s “Fashion” issue.

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by Inez & Vinoodh
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Fashion Film & the Photographic by Marketa Uhlirova

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Still from Inez & Vinoodh fashion film with Daria Werbowy for Vogue Paris, 2012

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Still from Jean-François Carly, I Feel for Raf Simons, 2005

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Still from John Maybury film for Alexander McQueen Autumn/Winter 2013 collection, 2013

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Still from Experiments in Advertising: The Films of Erwin Blumenfeld (1958–64), edited by filmmaker Adam Mufti and sound designer Olivier Alary, 2006

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Still from Pierre Debusschere, Holy Flowers, 2012

From Bob Richardson, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Deborah Turbeville to Steven Meisel, Glen Luchford, and others, fashion photographers in the past few decades have often emulated the aesthetics of cinema. They have pictured carefully constructed and dramatically lit scenes that brim with narrative potential or, more directly, quote mise-en-scène drawn from the vast reservoir of the movies. This type of photography is, not surprisingly, described as “cinematic.” But what if we flip this familiar concept of the “cinematic” fashion photograph to make a reverse claim: that some recent fashion film, a newly prominent type of fashion image, has curiously dwelled on the “photographic”? In fact, could it be that the fashion film has, more than any other form of the moving image, a proclivity to reside in, gravitate toward, or at least somehow hover around photography?

This may sound odd because, surely, the initial stimulus of its makers was the opposite—to escape the confines of the photographic medium. Take Erwin Blumenfeld, who, in the late 1950s, began to experiment with film chiefly to extend the scope of his work in fashion photography. His desire was to set into motion the traditionally static form—very much in an echo of the primary impulse of early cinema to “animate photographs”—and outline a new visual language for fashion by introducing movement and time. While the recent fashion filmmakers were spurred on by such motivations, it is worth stressing that, like Blumenfeld, they have also transposed onto film what were essentially photographic problems and conventions, by holding onto processes, structures, and concerns specific to fashion photography.

Although fashion film assimilates a number of diverse film genres and forms, for the most part it evokes short, intense, non-narrative spectacles dedicated to the display and promotion of fashion. It is perhaps best characterized as a rhythmic fusion of visual and aural effects, somewhat similar to the music video. As a form of moving image, it is certainly not new, for it had appeared in different mutations since the beginnings of cinema (consider fashion commercials, newsreel and cine-magazine pieces, or various hybrids of promotional and documentary films). Yet, it had until recently been a form strangely overlooked, even displaced: an unclaimed ground half-lost somewhere between fashion and cinema—two industries with different demands. So it makes sense that when it reemerged from within the fashion community during the aughts, it “arrived” with unprecedented vigor. This rejuvenation has evidently been enabled by the “digital revolution,” especially in the new millennium, which has seen an intensified encounter between new media and technologies on the one hand, and fashion image makers and clients keen to explore them on the other.

Dynamic Blooms from Tell No One on Vimeo.

Fashion film has shared photography’s clients, settings, budgets, and, progressively, imaging tools. And it has replicated—at least to a degree—its crews and cast. Many of today’s fashion filmmakers have backgrounds in photography but little or no formal knowledge of film or animation techniques and have generally continued with their previous practice of producing editorials and advertising for print magazines. This hybridization between photography and film has increasingly manifested itself through specific projects. Nick Knight and Tell No One’s Dynamic Blooms (AnOther magazine/SHOWstudio, 2011), Pierre Debusschere’s Holy Flowers (Dazed Digital, 2012), or Sølve Sundsbø’s The Ever Changing Face of Beauty (W, 2012), for example, all treat the material generated in a single “shoot” as the basis for a published fashion editorial and an online fashion film, simultaneously and with no obvious hierarchy between them. In the same vein, recent advertising campaigns such as Inez & Vinoodh for Yves Saint Laurent’s Autumn/Winter 2010–11 and Steven Meisel for Lanvin’s Spring/Summer 2013 present a seamless continuity between photography and film. This intermedial coexistence feels very real as it has also found its platforms in museum exhibitions, retail and public spaces, and, above all, online fashion magazines and websites. The most important of these has been Nick Knight and Peter Saville’s SHOWstudio, which has since its conception been very specific about the “studio” as a physical space that can amalgamate various creative practices (photography, filmmaking, and so on), while also being a broadcasting station.

Alongside these material and functional connections, there is another way to consider this close alliance between film and photography. It is through fashion’s vital preoccupation with the pose—something that has in fact been a recurrent source of fascination for the cinema. Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (USA, 1957), and Veˇra Chytilová’s Strop (Ceiling, Czechoslovakia, 1962) are two fiction films about fashion that in their portrayal of photo shoots use the freeze-frame or photographic still to provoke a tension between the models’ pose as a process, a choreography unraveling in time, and a final product—a privileged fashion image. By highlighting the moment of the holding of a pose, both expose its intrinsic paradox whereby one must become an immobilized image prior to the fact. (Both films did so with a different purpose: Funny Face elevates the frozen moment as the ideal image whereas Strop draws attention to its falsity.)

In a similar, if less ideological, manner, a distinct group of early fashion films associated with SHOWstudio explore the deceptive borderline between photographic stillness and filmic illusion of stillness. For example, Shelley Fox 14 (Shelley Fox and SHOWstudio, 2002) and Maison Martin Margiela A/W 2004–05 (Nigel Bennett, 2004) both arrange sets or sequences of still photographs into a temporal experience. Two other early SHOWstudio films, Jean-François Carly’s I Feel (2005) and Knight’s Sleep (2001) approximate photographs in the way their subjects are statically framed and portrayed as ostensibly inactive. Carly’s film shows a string of young male subjects standing in front of a white sheet, facing the camera in a way that is reminiscent of Warhol’s Screen Tests. The screen is split into two, with each pair of portraits showing the same boy, one dressed in his own clothes, the other in Raf Simons. The juxtapositions are accompanied by sparse comments in which the boys state how they feel as their newly fashioned selves, bringing into focus the transformative potential of clothes. In another nod to Warhol, Knight’s Sleep was first staged as a “live photo shoot” portraying nine models while they slept in their hotel rooms. Initially filmed by webcams and streamed via SHOWstudio, the footage of Sleep was subsequently turned into nine short films that speed up the non-action by applying a time-lapse effect. The edited films reintroduce movement, spotlighting the lyrically mutating draperies of the models’ flimsy dresses.

I Feel Pal by Jean-François Carly from Visual Art Services on Vimeo.

The attachment to the photographic seen in SHOWstudio’s early films also permeates a number of other, different strands of the fashion film: Inez & Vinoodh’s campaign for Yves Saint Laurent Autumn/Winter 2010–11 shows a simple event of a model descending a staircase and walking past the camera, very much in the style of early Lumière films. The model’s descent is not, however, captured as fluid motion but rather as a broken and disjointed sequence of slow-motion shots displaying an array of outfits. Yang Fudong’s campaign First Spring for Prada Spring/Summer 2010 inserts deliberately stilled or decelerated shots into otherwise dynamic street and interior scenes. Steven Klein’s Time Capsule series (2011) are pared-down filmic continuations (in black-and-white) of the very (color) images that make up the photographer’s editorial for W.

Why, then, this insistence on stillness and restricted expression in so many fashion films? Perhaps there is a sense (articulated by many, most famously Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) that photographs are ultimately more memorable and impactful than moving images. Or perhaps the prolonged static shots allow for a closer study of shapes, colors, textures, and detail, something that industry clients and consumers may like to see. What is certain, though, is that the growing entanglement of the two media has naturally pushed for a new level of aesthetic and conceptual dialogue between them. In this relation, film is not necessarily an extension of photography, but rather, each medium is an extension of the other.

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Marketa Uhlirova is director and curator of the Fashion in Film festival and a research fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She is the editor, most recently, of Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (Koenig Books, 2013). 

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