The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
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Natalie Czech, A Poem by Repetition by Emmett Williams II , 2013
Are images trumping the written word? Even in the age of instant visual communication via Instagram and Snapchat, this isn’t a new question. Photography critic and curator Nancy Newhall wrote in 1952, in the first issue of this magazine, of which she was a founder: “Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records [will] be kept in images and sounds.” Penned more than sixty years ago, Newhall’s words sound remarkably prescient now that photographs have come to be described as “chatter” and the culture of books and reading is shifting. A New Yorker blog post earlier this year detailed how smartphone pictures had superseded note taking in one writer’s process; a recent New York Times article proclaimed that “The Emoji have Won the Battle of Words,” referring to the popular pictograph lexicon used in text messages.
We hope (and are fairly certain) that the latter isn’t true, but this issue is set against a backdrop where images are, arguably, placing significant pressure on the written word, whether or not this is a new or old problem. The prolific French writer Hervé Guibert, an accomplished photographer in his own right, prophetically feared that photography could “quickly turn to madness, because everything is photographable.” He is joined in this issue by William S. Burroughs and Kobo Abe, novelists who moonlighted as photographers. Writers Geoff Dyer and Janet Malcolm never developed a practice as photographers, but both have thought deeply and written extensively about images, navigating the tricky business of translating the visual into the verbal. A group of contemporary fiction writers offer varying takes on the pressure images place on what they do—Lynne Tillman smartly reminds us that “fiction is another form of image making,” and Teju Cole makes a case for poetry and lyricism in the age of automated images. Gus Powell, Moyra Davey, Sarah Dobai, and Eamonn Doyle have all looked to works of literature to inform their work as image makers, whether by adopting a formal constraint, borrowing snippets of language, or riffing on a theme. Taking a cue from Burroughs, creator of the “cut-up,” Natalie Czech and Erica Baum reanimate found language— from tactile, printed book pages to unlikely commercial objects (like the effects pedal above)—prompting viewers to reflect on how language can be both read and seen.
Words as inspiration for image making, words as images, images as open-ended fictions, documentary under the influence of fiction—as in the case of Walker Evans and his interest in writing and French literature, explored here by David Campany—are just some of the ways in which image and language brush up against each other in these pages. Perhaps novelist Tom McCarthy gets it right when he says, “in the end the difference between image and word isn’t relevant because ultimately it’s all scriptural…photography is a branch of writing.”
In celebration of Aperture‘s Fall 2014 “Fashion” issue, we present a legendary interview from the magazine’s archive. The following was originally published in Aperture’s Issue #122, Winter 1991. Aperture’s complete digital archive is coming soon.
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As the designer for Chanel for the last eight years and the creator of his own label, KL, Karl Lagerfeld has played a major role in the design community for the last three decades. His designs have helped revive Paris haute couture, specifically, the House of Chanel, where Lagerfeld has expressed both a reverence for Coco Chanel’s brilliance and an irreverence for her clichés. Lagerfeld began taking his own photographs in 1987. These two relations to the fashion world place him in a unique position to comment on fashion photography.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1938, Lagerfeld today resides in Paris, Rome, and Monte Carlo. Each of his homes is decorated in a particular style: in Paris, eighteenth-century French; in Rome, neoclassic; and in Monte Carlo, Memphis.
At age sixteen, Lagerfeld entered and won a design contest for amateurs juried by, among others, Pierre Balmain and Pierre Cardin. He spent the next three and a half years working in Balmain’s studio, where he began his career in fashion design. In 1958, at age twenty, he joined Patau and created two collections of haute couture each year. It was not long before his creative goals required that he move on to a new challenge; in 1963, he joined Chloé. It was at Chloé, during the years from 1963 to 1983, that he began to design daring and controversial collections that became “events.” For these collections he imposed the Chloé style-elegant lines running close to the body in supple, unconstructed fabrics. At Chloé, Lagerfeld mastered the forward-thinking style that combined the elegance of haute couture with the convenience of ready-to-wear. In 1966, Lagerfeld began designing fur collections for the Fendi sisters in Rome.
It was in 1983 that he took over as artistic director of Chanel, designing first its couture and later its ready-to-wear. In addition, Lagerfeld frequently creates original costumes for theater, cinema, opera, and ballet. Recent projects have included Berlioz’s Les Troyens at La Scala and Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann in Florence; next he will tackle Puccini ‘s La rondine for L’Opera de Monte Carlo. This interview was conducted in June 1990 in Mr. Lagerfeld’s Chanel office on the rue Cambon in Paris.
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KARL LAGERFELD: How I got started in photos is, in a way, the key to my whole approach to fashion. I think the photographer can do anything. You are not the best photographer or a lousy and poor creature only because you do press kits. One of the reasons I started off was press kits-no famous photographer wanted to do them. One season we had three different photographers do the press kits. All three times the work went to the garbage can, and I said, ‘That’s enough.’ That’s how I got started. Press kits are not fun, because they have to be black-and-white and handled in such a way that they can be used for daily papers. Press kits have to be made a week to ten days before the collection is finished. Very often I photograph unfinished dresses, so I have to know how to fake them, how to make them look finished. That was four and a half years ago, but I was already prepared for it. I am of a graphic attitude. I sketch very well. I have drawn portraits all my life. When I was a child I wanted to be a portrait painter. Anna Piaggi, the Italian fashion editor, has published a book of many of these drawings that I have done. Sketching and laying things out is, for me, what I have always wanted.
ANDREW WILKES: Tell me about your photography.
KL: I do a lot of society portraits and portraits for royalty. These friends use the photographs for themselves-for their houses, for their friends. They order about a hundred prints. I do my portrait work with a 8 x 10 Sinar. I often employ very strange backdrops. I will show twenty portraits at my next exhibition. This is something very special. There is only one print from each negative and it belongs to the subject. At these exhibitions, nothing is for sale. On the other hand, for a charity exhibition at London’s Hamilton Gallery, fifty-nine photos were for sale, and all of them sold the day of the opening.
AW: Do you collect photography?
KL: Yes. I collect late nineteenth and early twentieth century work. Steichen, Stieglitz, a little Baron de Meyer-I have a beautiful one. Also, Käsebier, Demachy, Paul Citroen, Kertész, Coburn, Kühn, Munkácsi and early Lartigue. The Lartigues were given to me as gifts. In fact, much of my photo collection is made up of gifts, it is never-ending. I love Paul Strand and Minor White. I also collect Helmut Newtons, tons of them. Very beautiful and huge ones. The last thing I received from him was a beautiful photo of David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini where Lynch had Isabella’s hand in his hand-a marvelous photo. Today I think I prefer to collect photography rather than to collect paintings. The new artists such as Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, and Steven Meisel-they are my favorites for the moment.
AW: Do you see fashion photography becoming as valuable as fine photography?
KL: For me old fashion photos are pieces of art. Steichen, for example. What is as beautiful as a Steichen? It may have become a lower commercial product because there were too many prints available.
AW: Do you think photography is art? Can a photograph compare with a Monet or Hopper?
KL: For me, modern photographs touch me personally because they are from my time. Monet feels far away from me now. Early twentieth century photographers are as good as Monet and other painters in a certain way-but one should never compare- it’s like [comparing] sculpture and painting- it’s something else.
AW: What is a Lagerfeld shoot like? Do you prefer the control of a studio or the spontaneity of location work?
KL: I have very bad working habits. Sometimes I start at ten in the evening, and at ten in the morning I am still working. I can be slow, well, not slow, but it takes a lot of time. I don’t believe in those thirty-five minute jobs. I have a big team. Often we are between fifteen and twenty people; makeup artists, stylists, models, lighting people. I work with nearly all the people I started working with from the beginning. You can’t spend nights and days with people you don’t like or don’t know. I don’t want to. I don’t have to. It’s fun to be in a studio, and I think it’s fun to be outdoors. In fact, I like very much to be outdoors, but there are some photos that require a backdrop. You know, these backdrops are paintings that a Parisian stage painter makes for me. A backdrop like this costs between $5,000 and $10,000. He was once very famous and had trouble because he made copies of real paintings. He’s unbelievable.
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AW: Do you like restrictions on your work when you shoot for Chanel or KL, and do you put restrictions on yourself?
KL: Yes. I am the photographer but also the client, and I am in the marvelous position of being at the center of my own life. For Chanel, Fendi, and KL, I can do what I want. Many photographers cannot decide even with big budgets what they want. My restrictions are my own restrictions. I know what goes into the garbage can and what doesn’t. After all, we’re in business, and the better things are, the more money I get to do other things with. So I can afford to play around more and experiment with less commercial projects.
AW: Alexander Liberman has commented on the delight of “accident” in photography. The “controlled or unplanned accident” is the area in photography that he feels permits discovery. What are your thoughts on this kind of excitement or spontaneity?
KL: Yes, I love the idea, but you can never say it will happen. Obviously you cannot prepare for it. I think it is even more interesting when you have, on your film, a strange occurrence that you haven’t seen yourself. It can be an accident with light or whatever. Often, you get something you never thought of before. Most of my photos begin as a sketch, though. I don’t go in too much for surprises. Mostly I want exactly what I planned for.
AW: Do you conceptualize your fashion photography?
KL: Yes. I look at the product. I know what the photograph must look like to be right. I am my own client, and for Chanel, they like what I am doing. In fact, Chanel wants to show the dresses, but I am careful to be different, much more subtle, because I want the image to be different. For example, my work for Fendi is very different. It is based on German and Russian fairy tales or a mood like that found in De Chirico paintings.
AW: Fashion photography, as well as clothing design, borrows so directly from fine art and popular culture. Do you pay attention to pop music, videos, film, and street culture as sources for mood and inspiration?
KL: Everything gives me inspiration. I think Madonna is divine. I think she is it. I’m not sure I’m the right photographer for her; but I think she’s great. All of these areas of popular culture helped to make up the 1980s. I don’t believe in closed eyes. I am like an antenna on a building, I receive all those images.
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AW: American fashion photography seems to deal with graphic depiction of clothing, while European more often deals with mood or fantasy. Do you know the source of this difference? Does “seeing” the clothes ever stop mattering?
KL: There is a very simple explanation. America is more market-oriented than Europe. European executives whose companies have interesting clothes and who commission great photographers do not have the budget to do big ad campaigns. If you only have one or two pages, you better create an atmosphere. On the other hand, if you have hundreds of pages, as with Chanel, then you can show the dresses. KL is less commercial in that way, but you can still see the dress. I do atmospheric work more with my personal photography.
AW: Let’s talk about the commissioned/commercial photograph . Usually a fashion photograph has commercial boundaries. Many critics feel this is what separates commercial work from fine photography. What is your opinion, and what limitations do you find when photographing?
KL: You know, a commission is not something that makes the photo less attractive. The photographer who is very honest, even with a commission, will make a special effort. Work is work- and commissioned work is valid work. Sometimes with a commission you have to put walls up; this I think is very healthy. If everything is open, the choice is too unlimited. Helmut Newton always says that he likes restrictions. Lots of Helmut’s advertising jobs are as good as his personal work for exhibitions, books, or portraiture. But Newton sometimes doesn’t care and he doesn’t like fashion anymore. And the drama in fashion is that if you don’t like fashion anymore, it doesn’t like you. One can even get out of touch with the fashion “feeling” because one may think one has more vision of the woman than of the clothes, but people’s taste in women changes. It’s my feeling that the professional who does not like fashion or thinks fashion is no longer interesting should get out of it. That doesn’t mean he or she is not a good photographer, but rather no longer a good fashion photographer. Often fashion photographers who become well known create a mold whereby they think they are too good for the job. They must remember that they will be remembered not for what they do later in a different genre, but for what they did at the height of their fame as fashion photographers.
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AW: A special relationship often exists between a photographer and a designer.Who have you worked with on this level?
KL: Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber, Peter Lindbergh .
AW: Do you prefer black-and-white or color photography?
KL: I prefer black-and-white, but what I also like is to hand-paint photos.
AW: You do your own tinting?
KL: Yes, I do it mostly with my social portraits and with gifts to friends. I did a print for Princess Caroline of Monaco and it took ten hours. It takes such a long time I don’t even own one myself.
AW: What cameras do you currently work with?
KL: For me, a camera is the toy of all grown-up men today. Everybody has a camera, it is one of the few toys grown-ups are allowed to have. I have an 8 x 10 Sinar, which is my newest one. But I have done nearly all my work with a Hasselblad. I love the Leica 6. I like the physical touch and noise. I think a camera is something very physical.
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AW: Do you shoot a lot of film on a job?
KL: Very little. My assistants push me sometimes to do more. I have one vision of the thing, and not two. I’m not a photographer who shoots three hundred rolls of film.
AW: Is your printer in Paris?
KL: I have two printers for my color and one for black-and-white. I have my photographs printed on Canson Mi-Teintes sketching paper. A special printer does my color prints for exhibitions; sometimes the photos are two meters high.
AW: What role do you believe fashion photography will play in coming years?
KL: You know, I do not separate fashion photographs from fine photography. They’re part of the same thing. Without a doubt there will be some great new photographers.
AW: Can commercial work be important after the moment of its initial impact? Will this work remain important and continue to have lasting value ?
KL: If it’s good, it can, and when people forget that it was originally advertising or editorial. Look, many photographs collected today were commissioned for magazines. Simply, whatever is good will survive; the rest has to go to the garbage can. Every good photographer can do bad photography because of a mood, because of bad climate, atmosphere, or the product. But the good photographs endure.
The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
Introduction by Nat Trotman
Erica Baum is fascinated by the printed word. Whether scavenging newspaper clippings, vintage paperbacks, or half- cleaned chalkboards, she reveals unexpected poetry in the language that permeates everyday life. She approaches these materials almost scientifically, creating discrete but concurrent series of images that straightforwardly document their sources. Conjuring her objects of study through fragmentary details, shot in close-up and with shallow depth of field, Baum evokes an intimate space in which viewers can decipher the images according to their own associations and memories. Her works accentuate this character by highlighting manifestations of language marked by obsolescence, such as lyrics appearing on player–piano rolls. The Card Catalogue series pictures its eponymous subject in extreme detail, focusing on just a few subject markers amid rows of index cards bearing information related to those topics. In Baum’s hands these headings seem to hover against an abstract visual field, like ghostly relics of a pre-digital era— a point made all the more succinctly in her topic selection for Untitled (Apparitions) (1997).
An admirer of concrete poetry, Baum takes up Brion Gysin’s exhortation that “words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody can make them gush into action.” Photography provides a means for her to combine the chance effects of Gysin’s cut-up method with her own reverence for the materiality of the printed page. In the Dog Ear series she ingeniously fuses these verbal and visual qualities by photographing the folded corners of book pages. Works like Differently (2009) and Enfold (2013) draw attention to the physical layout of margins, page numbers, line spacing, and font design while transforming their found texts into syncopated blocks of signification in potentia. The regular folds that cut diagonals across each square frame recall the formal rigor of Minimalism even as they reference the more subjective act of marking significant passages in old books. Baum draws out the luscious physicality of these common objects: the various textures of woven paper, the yellowing tones of age, the hint of ink bleeding through thin pages.
In the Naked Eye series, Baum photographs old softcovers from the side, choosing to show their pages rather than the spines, and fanning the pages out to create mysterious chance juxtapositions. Words appear sliced or foreshortened, giving way to flattened strips of images—film starlets, clouds, fragments of buildings—that, as in Amnesia (2009), are sandwiched between the rippling and vividly dyed edges of surrounding pages. Bereft of caption and context, these illustrations take over the role of displaced signifier previously held by catalog keywords like daggers and cloaks. Digging through old books on cinema for works like Flint (2009) and Clara (2013), Baum selects anonymous figures who either cast oblique glances off the frame of the page or seem poised for the gaze. Leaving their narratives necessarily unresolved, she spins a web of longing that resonates with her own attraction to the source material. Through these open-ended investigations Baum honors the tradition of print—that textured, tangible objectification of language that inexorably fades with each passing year.
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Erica Baum, Untitled (Apparitions), 1997, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Untitled (Daggers Cloaks), 1998, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Word Intention, 2014, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Enfold, 2013, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Differently, 2009, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Clara, 2013, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Amnesia, 2009, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Erica Baum, Flint, 2009, courtesy Bureau, New York
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Nat Trotman is an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
What kind of pressure does photography place on the written word today? Aperture recently spoke with contemporary fiction writersTeju Cole, Mary Gaitskill, Rivka Galchen, Tom McCarthy, and Lynne Tillman about photography and the role of the image in their writing process.
I’ve become very interested recently in the idea of the negative and how this photographic concept is relevant to fiction. Almost the very first image in my next novel, Satin Island, is of a picture looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, like some kind of fish approaching through murky water; I use it as a metaphor for thinking or remembering. So the mechanism of photography stands for me as a kind of analogue for what it is to bring data, memories, or whatever into a coherent image— and ultimately, for what it is to write.
In my novel Remainder, which is all about trying to reproduce an ideal, if mundane, scenario (walking down a staircase, exchanging words with a neighbor, etc.), the hero is, in a sense, making a print of a negative of something that was never based on reality. The negative really is a negative. It’s a memory of something that never existed. So, like a photographer, he’s trying to bring this reality of the image out of the darkroom. He’s trying to actualize this picture, or world, from the darkroom of his mind—and it never quite goes right.
Like many writers, I take lots of photographs and work from them. When I was writing Remainder, I walked around Brixton in South London (this was back in 2000) with a camera and a Dictaphone. I photographed the texture of the sidewalk, the reflections in puddles, the letters from the gas and electricity holes, and other markings in the street. But I was also recording running commentary, because ultimately, as a writer, you’re dealing with words. Even if those words carry or generate images, words are still your currency. So I was using the Dictaphone to say, “Here in the street is this, and you can see the a and r of airports reversed in this puddle.” I typed it all up, word for word, even the “umms” and “ahs” and repetitions, and pinned it all to my wall—the photographs as well. More recently, with C, my last novel, which is set a hundred years ago, I looked at lots of old photographs—of Alexandria, Egypt, and London in the 1920s—and again transcribed them, turned them into words. I was reading Flaubert’s accounts of going up the river in Egypt with the photographer Maxime du Camp, an amazing piece of writing. Flaubert says, “this is all fake; we’re just in some panorama.” There’s one passage detailing the bright sunlight falling on the black skin of their servants against this silvery rock. It’s an incredibly photographic description.
Perhaps in the end the difference between image and word isn’t relevant. Because ultimately it’s all scriptural: things such as light or ink mark and are recorded on surfaces, and that’s an event of writing. I also don’t think there’s a massive categorical distinction between digital and analog photography, or digital writing on a laptop and writing on a typewriter or by hand. We live in what Michel de Certeau calls the “scriptorium.” Everything is written. We’re within a set of networks of archiving, recording, transmitting, and making visible, or hiding and eavesdropping. This is totally anticipated in Greek literature and Hamlet. The advent of the NSA or of the Internet doesn’t change that. It just builds on a situation that’s already there. I recognize this is a very writerly vision, because everything else ultimately becomes inscription. So yes, maybe for me, photography is a branch of writing.
Tom McCarthy’s novels include Remainder (2006), Men in Space (2007), and C (2010), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. His next novel, Satin Island, is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2015. McCarthy writes on literature and art for the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and Artforum, among other publications.
Mary Gaitskill
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John Stezaker, She (Film Portrait Collage) II, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York
I take pictures with my phone if it’s something beautiful and I want to remember it, or if it’s something interesting. Recently I was having a very emotionally fraught conversation with someone—we were quarreling, actually—and then the quarrel sort of ended and I went for a walk down the road to clear my mind while he took a shower. We were staying at someone’s house in the country and there were these incredibly beautiful animals, which I thought were cows. One of them was staring at me and when I stared back it trotted up to the fence. It was a bull, a very young bull. There were two of them. They were beautiful, bulls with the eyes of Bambi, blue eyes. And there was also a little miniature donkey in the field, which came up to check me out too, and I was so excited by this. I went back to the house, and I said, “You’ve got to come out; there’s these beautiful animals.” So we completely forgot about the quarrel, and I took pictures of the animals, which were sweet but also primal. Something like that I like to keep on my phone.
I have some books of photography, mostly books that people gave to me. One of them is a book of photographs of Nabokov and his family that I like very much. I get pleasure out of looking at pictures of him and of his wife and relatives. I like looking at pictures of women, actually. What I like to do most with photographs of people is to cover one half of the face with my hand and look at it, and then do the same with the other half. Most of the time one side of the face wears a different expression than the other. The face is usually bifurcated. It’s rare that you have somebody who looks the same on both sides of their face— I think Hitler actually does look the same, or maybe it was Stalin; it was some psychopathic leader. In some people the difference is really extreme; it looks like two different personalities. If I look at photographs of myself, there is some version of this going on. One side of my face looks quite young, wholesome, like a cheerleader, and then the other half looks positively lunar, like someone who is not part of the world. Many people are like that. They have a strong personality show up in one half of their face and another personality show up in the other half. It’s weird. But it’s weirder or at least more unusual when there is no difference— at least in my casual explorations of photographs.
For my novel Veronica, I made a puzzling underuse of photographs. I don’t know why. Considering the narrator is a model, I don’t think there are any descriptions of what she looks like in pictures. I think there’s one instance in which she describes herself in a picture with another woman, but she mostly describes the other woman. It seems like she might have a picture of herself, framed and up on a wall, and I kept thinking I should put that in there, but it just intuitively never interested me. It’s kind of odd. For research on being photographed, I went on stories I heard from women who had been models, but the better stories were from stylists and assistants who would describe things more bluntly. I also had the experience of being photographed by a fashion photographer; it was a book-jacket photograph taken by a former fashion photographer—he was the most bullying person I’ve ever had my picture taken by, just incredibly aggressive. He wanted to constantly keep me off balance. It’s a very good picture, though, so it works. He did a good job. Maybe he was looking for tension and drama in the picture, and I do look frightened and horrified—what’s funny is that people who don’t know what happened think I look frightening or intimidating! I guess fear can be frightening. But I would never work with him again.
I don’t especially feel pressured as a writer by the presence of images. I guess this is because I’m a very visual person and tend to express ideas and feelings with images, sometimes kooky images. The thing I dislike about a lot of images, say, online or otherwise present in culture, is that they tend to be flat and unimaginative, yet they have a strong visceral impact— and because they’re so omnipresent, people expect to be “talked to” in that language and it seems like they aren’t as open to a more individual vision. It even seems scary and weird to them maybe. But maybe that’s always been true. I don’t know.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) and Veronica (2005), which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior (1988); Because They Wanted To (1997), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998; and Don’t Cry (2009).
Teju Cole
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Mishka Henner, Noordeinde Palace, The Hague, South Holland, 2011. Courtesy the artist
In a response to a recent article on “seeing machines” by a contemporary photographer I really like (Trevor Paglen), another contemporary photographer I really like (Mishka Henner) wrote something intriguing. Paglen’s piece was about the expanded reality of photography in the present time. So much of this photography, Paglen argued, was about a given machine following a certain script to do a particular kind of seeing. In his thoughtful response, which agreed with and tried to think through the implications of Paglen’s arguments, Henner described the result as follows: “a world with no auteurs, one where style and the single viewpoint are irrelevant, and where poetry and lyricism are mere follies.”
This caught my attention. I am ready to let the auteurs go, and in the age of Instagram and drone photography, the single viewpoint has indeed been taken off its pedestal. But: are “poetry and lyricism” truly “mere follies”? I hope I’m not misreading Henner here. I do feel that his work with Google Maps, like Paglen’s on secret sites and the American security apparatus, are part of the great work being done that help us visualize the New World Order. My question, then, is: what about the old world order? This still lives on in quite a powerful way inside all of us. It’s not all motherboards and circuits and optical recognition software. We may be on our way to becoming androids, but we are not there yet: we still have a hunger for poetry and lyricism, an intense hunger that is difficult to satisfy. I think this, in part, is why Paglen and Henner and other photographers don’t limit their works to the theoretical. Yes, they have great ideas. But they turn these ideas into prints, editions, shows, books. Many of them still center their work on the tactile elements of paper, ink, and binding. The stuff could be really far out conceptually, but much of it still ends up in a frame on the wall of a gallery. And I think that’s great.
So that’s what I think of when I take or look at photographs: I want images that address the predicaments of the present moment, in a political sense, but that also allow for poetry and lyricism. In any case, those things may not be necessarily divorced from each other: paper has to come from somewhere; the equipment used to make a camera is made from materials that are traded on the world market, including materials that come from conflict zones. Machines have lyricism (once we learn to see it) and poetry comes at a cost (if we are willing to admit it). The connection this has to my writing? I try to apply those same goals (of politics and poetry) to the written word, too. So, we may be awash in images and words these days, but poetry still matters. It is still as elusive as it ever was, and, just as ever, it is still worth chasing down.
Paglen’s text and Henner’s response can be read here: blog.fotomuseum.ch/2014/03/ii-seeing-machines/
Teju Cole is a photographer and the author of two works of fiction, Every Day Is for the Thief (2014) and Open City (2011), for which he won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Cole wrote the introductory essays for On Street Photography and the Poetic Image, by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, and Touching Strangers, by Richard Renaldi, both published by Aperture.
Lynne Tillman
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Found photographs. Courtesy Lynne Tillman
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Found photographs. Courtesy Lynne Tillman
I started writing my new novel, Men and Apparitions, because it’s said we live in “a glut of images” and also because of the belief that there’s a crisis in art photography, with cellphones and everyone taking pictures all the time. I began to think: What does that mean? How would you narrate that story? How do you make characters who are based in images, in some sense, or whose lives seem to be based on images?
My protagonist in the novel, Zeke, is a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer, not a photographer himself. His field is photography, family photography in particular. As a child I was very interested in our family photographs. My father shot a lot of 8mm films, too, before I was born, and I would take out the projector when I was eight or nine, very young, and all by myself watch these home movies, which, as I think about it now, seems funny. In part it was because I was the baby of the family and quite a bit younger than my sisters, so there was an already established family I’d entered. Seeing these films, I guess, gave me some sense of family history. I am not using these for the book, but I’ve found some family albums at flea markets and borrowed friends’ found photographs. In the novel, I do want to do some analyses of photographs.
Zeke, my character, goes off theoretically in some wild directions—the novel form allows me to do everything I can think of. It allows me to be unaccountable, also—unaccountable to so-called “facts.” Some of what Zeke thinks about photography and cultural anthropology is credible, and, I think, there’s some interesting theory about images, but some of what he comes up with is wack. If I were writing a straight essay, I couldn’t do that, and it wouldn’t be as much fun to write.
I don’t usually take photographs for what I’m writing. But if I go to an art exhibition and I think that I’ll want to remember something, I’ll take a picture of the work if I can, or of the way the work has been installed, if the security guards let me (though never with a flash), as an aide-memoire. But I don’t do that for writing. I still might write notes, use words to remember, because I’m working with words. They’re my medium. Mostly I rely on my memory—it’s a memory game I play with myself, and sometimes lose.
To photograph is to step out of the moment. When we photograph, we are objectifying. We look at something, shoot, and it becomes a kind of object. It may be a picture of an event, a tree, a person. But in the end you have a representation, just that. It is an abstraction. I think photography, like writing, is a translation, from the impossible Real to the page. I think of translation and representation as being close kin. Taking a photograph, like a selfie, is a way to record a moment, and to proclaim Being, which writing also does, in a sense. People think writing, especially fiction, has been subsumed, even vanquished, by picture making. But fiction is another form of image making. Words are images too. I’m hoping to finish the novel at the end of this fall. If not, I’ll shoot myself. I will use a camera.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short-story writer, and critic, whose most recent book, her second collection of essays, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, was published last spring. She is currently working on a novel titled Men and Apparitions.
I don’t particularly think of photography as an inspiration or as a constraint. And yet photography is so enormously powerful and pervasive, to think it has no effect would be like thinking the shape of a guitar doesn’t affect the sounds made with it. Even though I love both personal and professional photographs, I don’t use them as part of my writing process. It’s as if they obliterate something for me. I did once take some video footage for a piece that I was writing about an annual festival in Germany around the work of Karl May, who wrote many adventure tales in the late nineteenth century about a German among Native Americans in the American West, even though he had lied about having ever visited America. But I didn’t use the video footage, or the snapshots. My notes had done the essential culling, a kind of thinking, and the images just flooded that thinking away.
Photographs, though, are better at communicating some things that I once would have tried to put into words. When I want to communicate with my family, say, in a postcard kind of I’m-thinking-of-you way, I just send a smartphone photo of, probably, my daughter. Words now gravitate to where they’re most ideal, in a certain way, and this has pushed language toward two different, not very related places: the contract and the joke. There are no pictogram contracts. Of course words are still good at ordinary communication, but they are irreplaceably good, at least for now, in the contract and, well, maybe joke is not quite the right label, but in a very particular kind of entertainment. For example, think of how often headlines in the Onion rely on a kind of half-rhyme with some clichéd phrase, like, “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle with Cancer”—the effect here can only be produced by the way we process language.
Where does all this leave the novel? The novel must remain ideal for something, right? Though I don’t think we know what, yet. It seems best to keep our noses down and let the abstractions reveal themselves in time. Prognostications can be fun, but are best understood as fictions. If I were going to guess where the novel will go, and what it will become uniquely capable of, it seems to me that it may drift toward more genuinely private spaces and, at the same time, more political spaces. Private in the sense of inner dialogue; political in the sense of legal language, or nation naming… it’s telling how a bill on, say, small dairy farms, requires four hundred pages not just of pork but also fine specification. Novels can play with the way language has moved into these realms, or they can rebel, but, either way, language is their medium, and where the medium has moved matters. The form will surely continue to document the external world, as it always has, but that aspect may become less essential. Though maybe the pressure the image has placed on literature, compressing the field into a smaller country, will paradoxically allow for an opening up into something unforeseen, an unexpected vastness. It’ll feel like those dreams of terraforming Mars.
Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), and a collection of short stories, American Innovations (2014).
Throughout his 60-year career, Chris Marker combined words and images like no one else: in sci-fi photo-films (La Jetée), epistolary cine-travelogues (Letter from Siberia), essay films (A Grin Without a Cat), photobooks (Coréennes, Les Dépays, Staring Back), a CDrom (“Immemory”), a virtual world (“Second Life”), a television series (The Owl’s Legacy) and multi-screen installations (Zapping Zone, Silent Movie). Into his 90s, he was ever abreast with the latest technology, even creating YouTube shorts (such as his voyage through film history, “Kino,” posted under the pseudonym Kosinski). Rewind to the start of his career though, and in parallel to his nascent experiments with moving images, he also used montage for a more commercial endeavor: a series of travel books.
Little has been written about the “Petite Planète” guides Marker initiated and directed from 1954-58 while working at the Paris-based publisher Éditions du Seuil. Exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery’s recent Marker retrospective in London, the collection of 19 books, each dedicated to a different country, are normally referenced and then passed over in favor of his early films—1956’s Sunday in Peking, 1958’s Letter from Siberia, or Statues Also Die, Marker’s collaboration with Alain Resnais, a blistering 1952 tirade against colonialism.
In the green Michelin Guides of the 1950s, travellers were enticed to visit holiday locations, from the Cote d’Azur to Italy, by picturesque pencil landscapes on the covers and detailed descriptions on everything from ancient sites to restaurants within. In contrast, the “Petite Planète” books featured a close-up of a woman’s face on the cover (each a native of the country) and would finish with an exuberantly colored– but hardly accurate or practical– illustrated map on its back spread.
“Not a guidebook, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveller’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us” was Marker’s interpretation. Nearly a decade after World War II, foreign locales seemed tantalizingly within reach, Éditions du Seuil introduced the books rather charmingly as “the world for everyone”. The series cemented Marker’s interest in the essay format and in collaboration—he commissioned a different writer for each book and gathered photography from a variety of sources. While Marker didn’t author any of the essays himself, one can see his influence on their unusual subjects from the violence of history (Spain) to the melancholy of the Atlantic (Portugal). The books on Japan and Greece—countries that would feature into his later work—are two of the most idiosyncratic. As the focus began to include more far-flung destinations (Greece, Tunisia), the layouts become more adventurous, with imagery integrated into the text in exciting and radical ways. Each spread differs from its predecessor. Illustrations creep over the essays, which are broken up with quotes, poems, and song lyrics. Above all, the books demonstrate Marker’s sophisticated pairings of words and pictures, with photographs used at varying sizes throughout: taking over spreads, jostling against blocks of text or color, and arranged in lively sequences of small images. Marker, in a rare instance when the media-shy artist discussed his work, called the “Petite Planète” books “ersatz cinema.”
The photography is often startling, particularly as Marker leaves tourist agencies behind and starts to incorporate his own photographs as well as those of contemporary figures: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath, Robert Capa, David Seymour, Elliot Erwitt, his friend the filmmaker Agnes Varda (who started out as a photographer), and William Klein. Unusual street photography features heavily: shop windows made abstract with multiple reflections (one courtesy of Brassai); lonely nighttime city squares, busy restaurants, and pavements with people bursting into the frame from William Klein; unaware and entirely ordinary passers-by caught mid-gesture by Cartier-Bresson; and haphazard snapshots of architectural snippets scavenged from photo agencies such as Roger-Viollet.
Often the selections show Marker’s whimsical side: a man in a crowded Irish street with a white rabbit on his head, another later on with a monkey perched on his shoulders, signs in the Greek mountains pointing to nowhere, people napping on benches. And then there are the faces, an obsession he never grew out of. The most beautiful film in the world, according to Marker, was Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc with its torrent of close-ups of Maria Falconetti’s face. The ghostly women that stare out from the Petite Planète book covers no doubt sowed the seeds for his later photobook and exhibition Staring Back.
Marker still contributed photographs to the “Petite Planète” books into the early 60s, even after he stopped directing them (the series continued until 1981, but the confrontational female cover stars were replaced with bland travel photography in the 1970s ). The female subject of Marker’s 1964 film, The Koumiko Mystery, fronts the first edition on Japan. Looking through the various books, one can often guess which photographs he authored: overlooked statues were a perennial favorite subject, as were melancholy-looking passersby absorbed by something beyond the frame. Later, similar divorced onlookers would populate Staring Back. Amid the cornucopia of high and low culture, fragments of paintings, films, and advertisements, a familiar motif in “Petite Planète” is that of people with their backs to the camera starring at paintings, transfixed like the onlookers gazing at African artworks in Statues Also Die or like Madeleine with Carlotta’s portrait in another of Marker’s favorite films, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
Despite the fact that Marker later dismissed all his pre-1962 work as rudimentary, the series provided a vital playground for Marker, and not just one that funded his filmic travelogues. References to the books turn up in surprising places in the artist’s biography. Look closely at Alain Resnais’s 1956 portrait of Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale Toute la mémoire du monde and the book being admitted into this labyrinthine archive of words and images is a fake “Petite Planète.” The country? Mars. When William Klein couldn’t find a U.S. publisher for Life is Good for you and New York, he came to Éditions du Seuil after being impressed by the “Petite Planète” series. Three pages into the photobook, published by Éditions in 1956 after Marker threatened to quit if they refused, just before the title page, you’ll see the sub-heading “Album Petite Planète 1.”
Isabel Stevens works at Sight & Sound and writes on film and photography. She thanks Chris Darke, Tamsin Clark, Richard Bevan and Richard Hollis for all their help with the article.
Of all the various practices of photography—advertising, industrial imaging, family albums, and the rest—it is perhaps photojournalism that brings together word and image most often and most necessarily. Usually it involves two people—a photographer and a writer—collaborating, ideally. Sometimes the photographer writes, but this is less common than the writer who photographs. In an economic climate that is challenging for photojournalism (to put it mildly) it seems easier to get a writer to photograph than it is to get a photographer to write. But there have been a handful of individuals who wanted and were able to do both. One of the most remarkable was Walker Evans.
Evans’s first calling was the written word. At college he studied French literature and was an avid reader of the cutting- edge literary journals of the 1920s, when fussy Victorian prose was giving way to the lucid and fragmentary language of modern life, and James Joyce and T.S. Eliot were idolized. During a year in Paris (1926–27) Evans also read Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, and others. He attempted to write, in the form of short and intense prose pieces, but the ambition was crushing: “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word,” he recalled at the end of his career. Returning to New York in 1927, he sensed the camera might offer the descriptive and expressive power that had eluded him in words, but he never lost the desire to write.
In August 1929, at the age of twenty-five, Evans was first published. A new magazine titled Alhambra carried two unrelated contributions: a typically modernist photograph of soaring cranes constructing the Lincoln Building on Manhattan’s East 42nd Street, and an accomplished translation from the French of an extract of Moravagine (1926), Blaise Cendrars’s delirious novel about a psychotic killer. Evans’s image was too deferential to
the city’s spectacle but Cendrars’s language came close to the frank but equivocal description that would come to define Evans’s photography.
While perfecting what he came to call “documentary-style” photography, Evans produced sequences of images to sit along- side texts by other writers: Carleton Beals’s political exposé The Crime of Cuba (1933), the experimental journalism of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941), and Karl Bickel’s documentary travel book The Mangrove Coast: The Story of the West Coast of Florida (1942). Rather than being smoothly integrated in the manner of populist books and mainstream magazines, in each case Evans’s images sat apart from the text, obliging the reader–viewers to actively negotiate their own response.
Evans did take commissions from magazines, and sometimes this led to interesting work. In 1937 Fortune magazine published “Six Days at Sea,” Evans and James Agee’s sly observation of a tourist cruise to Havana (an assignment conducted entirely incognito). Evans worked with the journalist Katherine Hamill to produce a report on slum clearance and social housing in 1939 for Harper’s Bazaar. In 1943 he landed a job as a writer at Time, reviewing films, books, and exhibitions. Agee was on the staff, as were James Stern and Saul Bellow. With a little help from Agee, Evans soon mastered Time’s concise, urbane, and witty house style. He drew readers’ attention to gems of popular culture and obscure treasures: the Krazy Kat cartoon strip, children’s art, the little-known sculptures of Edgar Degas, Winston Churchill’s paintings, anatomical drawings, and self-portraits.
Two years later Evans became the only staff photographer at Fortune. This offered the chance to get more involved in the form his work might take on the page. But the real breakthrough came in 1948 when he was made Fortune’s special photographic editor. Part of his task was to advise on the magazine’s visual style, but in answering directly to the managing editor rather than the art director, Evans was able to set his own assignments. With a degree of autonomy unheard of in magazines before or since, he would shoot, edit, write, and design his pages.
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Opening page from “The Pitch Direct,” Fortune, October 1958
To accompany his photographs Evans cultivated a style of writing that was rich in rhetorical flourish, vernacular expressions, literary quotations, obscure historical references, pithy facts, and adjectives of baroque splendor. There were also moments of high polemic. Although these texts were rarely longer than a few hundred words, he crafted them tirelessly. He also kept a close eye on the typesetting, with a poet’s sensitivity to the placement of line breaks. In a 1971 interview, he recalled: “The writing wasn’t easy for me to master. But I was determined to be my own editor, so I worked hard on it. Any test met is part of one’s development.” He understood the deep connections between photography and literature. “Photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts,” he reflected in his chapter written for Louis Kronenberger’s anthology Quality: Its Image in the Arts (1969). “It will have—on occasion, and in effect— qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy; style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox, play and oxymoron.” Indeed, the cool sobriety of his great literary heroes had far less effect on his prose than on his photography:
I wasn’t very conscious of it then, but I know that Flaubert’s esthetic is absolutely mine. Flaubert’s method I think I incorporated almost unconsciously, but anyway used in two ways: his realism and naturalism both, and his objectivity of treatment; the non-appearance of author, the non-subjectivity. That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do. But spiritually, however, it is Baudelaire who is the influence on me.
Evans’s lifelong interest in the commonplace things that modern progress deems trivial or forgettable was thoroughly Baudelairean. In society’s rejects and refuse we may find its truth. Fortune’s ethos was to champion the new, but Evans looked to the outmoded or the enduring. Fortune celebrated the world of work; Evans reflected on unemployment or idle pleasures such as wandering. Fortune heralded steel-and-glass construction; Evans cherished endangered vernacular buildings of wood and stone that improved with age and patina. While Fortune announced the new modular office, Evans looked at reliable establishments, such as local insurance firms, run by “men who cannot possibly put in a honest day’s work while clad in a razor-sharp two hundred dollar suit of clothes.” (“Vintage Office Furniture,” Fortune, August 1953). Fortune celebrated department stores; Evans looked to the sidewalk displays of small shops.
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Pages from “Imperial Washington,” Fortune, February 1952
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Pages from “Imperial Washington,” Fortune, February 1952
His images of everyday objects and life in the slower lane anticipated by decades the American color photographers of the 1970s (William Eggleston, Stephen Shore), while his words were ironic but affectionate. Take, for example, this from “The Pitch Direct” (Fortune, October 1958):
The stay-at-home tourist, if his eye is properly and purely to be served, should approach the street fair without any reasonable intention, such as that of actually buying something […] Does this nation overproduce? If so, one can get a lot of pleasure and rich sensual enjoyment out of contemplating great bins of slightly defective tap wrenches, coils upon coils of glinty wire, and parabolas of hemp line honest and fragrant. A man of perfectly good sense may decide after due meditation that a well-placed eggplant (2 for 27 cents) is pigmented with the most voluptuous and assuredly wicked color in the world.
At times Evans’s captions would deliberately change the meaning of, or undermine, his pictures. His article “Imperial Washington” (Fortune, February 1952) resembles a simple tourist’s survey of the capital’s stately architecture—which is really showbiz:
The last, large burst of classicism struck Washington as a direct result of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. So successful was the midwestern creation in plaster that its chief architects and planners moved on to the capital almost to a man and forever froze the face of the city into its Roman Renaissance expression.
Across the 1950s and ’60s Evans’s photography grew increasingly Flaubertian—simple, direct, and incisive, while his words grew poetic and arch. To do it the other way around, with plain text introducing florid images, would risk pretention, like a gallery of grandstanding pictures. The last thing Evans wanted for his magazine pages was Art. He was making resistant journalism, countering the values and conventions of the mainstream. He produced more than forty photo-essays for Fortune and several for other titles. “Color Accidents” (Architectural Forum, January 1958) was a suite of square compositions picked out from weathered walls of a New York street. The writing compares but distances them from abstract painting, then at its popular height:
The pocks and scrawls of abandoned walls recall the style of certain contemporary paintings, with, of course, the fathomless difference that the former are accidents untouched by the hand of consciousness. Paul Klee would have jumped out of his shoes had he come upon the green door below.
Evans’s photographs of these colors and marks are consummate formal exercises. However, the text suggests that what’s important are the walls themselves and that his photographs are, in the first instance, documents of things worth noticing in the world. These were not pictures for exhibition: they were elegant reports fashioned for the page.
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Pages from “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” Vogue, October 1948
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Opening pages from William Faulkner’s “Sepulture South: Gaslight,” Harper’s Bazaar, December 1954
At times Evans’s love of literature became explicit. In 1948 he was commissioned by Vogue to photograph the Southern landscape depicted in the novels of William Faulkner. He admired the writer, who was about to break six years’ silence with the publication of Intruder in the Dust. Faulkner’s novels were set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, so, strictly speaking, it could not be photographed. Evans’s languid and haunting six-page response is almost devoid of people. A cemetery, rail tracks, wood-frame houses, shacks, and fading mansions—these are spaces where something has or could happen, as if each photograph might preface a chapter.
Evans does something similar with “The U.S. Depot” (Fortune, February 1953), in which a survey of single-building railroad stations seems more like a set of locales for short stories once we read the introductory paragraph. “And what is on that green-paper note handed up on its looped stick to the engineer as the 3:52 brakes to a stop? Does it say ‘Train five Engine eight four nine six delayed at Millerton hot journal box,’ or does it say ‘Tell Jeanie I’ll get pork chops’?”
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Pages from “Along the right-of-Way,” Fortune, September 1950 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The following year, 1954, Faulkner saw a photograph by Evans of a cemetery plot (Woodbridge Family Monument, Mansfield, Kentucky, 1945), inspiring him to write the short story “Sepulture South: Gaslight.” It was published in Harper’s Bazaar alongside the imposing image. It’s a Proustian remembrance, part fact, part fiction, of the funeral of Faulkner’s grandfather. The narrator returns to the gravestones, “stained now, a little darkened by time and weather and endurance, but still serene, impervious, remote, gazing at nothing, not like sentinels, not defending the living from the dead by means of their vast ton-measured weight and mass, but rather the dead from the living ….” Seen from the rear, Evans’s stone family now appears to be turning away from time itself.
Evans’s enduring reputation, endorsed by museums world- wide, is that of an artist operating in the guise of a documentarian. His magazine work complicates this casting. It is clear he was interested in making independent and resistant photojournalism that really only worked when image, text, and design came together on the page. A photojournalist can, of course, be informed by art and literature. Such influences certainly made Evans’s work better. The finest illustration is perhaps “Along the Right-of-Way,” an eight-page piece from 1950 on the simple pleasures of gazing from train windows. The opening photograph is as good as any painting by Edward Hopper or Charles Sheeler. And his text is a minor miracle of reported fact, remembrance, suggestion, allusion, flight of fancy, and even physics. All in three short, sublime paragraphs.
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David Campany is a writer and curator. He teaches at the university of Westminster, London, and recently published Walker Evans: The Magazine Work with Steidl. Campany’s The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip was published by Aperture this fall.
Writer and curator Kevin Moore on Aperture founding editor Minor White’s convoluted relationship with photography and sexuality. This essay is an online-only feature accompanying Aperture magazine’s Spring 2015 issue, “Queer”.
“A banquet of frustration”: Minor White penned the phrase in 1939, after reading T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. “I perceived that if one could put out the energy to produce a banquet of frustration, then frustration had power,” White commented.“It was worth pursuing.”(1) White had arrived in Portland, Oregon, two years earlier, having completed a degree in English literature at the University of Minnesota, where he had had “a taste of poetry.”(2) Portland is where White’s determination to “put out energy” for ideas took the form of what would become a lifelong obsession with photography. The medium would bring continuity to a life of soul-searching and spiritual promiscuity.
The “frustration” to which White refers need not be reduced to his homosexuality, which had troubled him since his teen years. White consistently sought to universalize his suffering, drawing on literature, psychoanalysis, and myriad spiritual texts to cope with his particular perspective on the human condition.(3) But his sexuality remained a thorn in his side. Moreover, it was something he felt compelled to express, despite fears of persecution and rejection. In one of the artist’s most commonly repeated injunctions, to “look at things to see what else they are,” White hit upon a metaphor for both evading and revealing his personal circumstances.(4) White’s “banquet of frustration” was thus both an ongoing torment of forbidden desire—with stolen moments of ecstasy, both physical and emotional, by all accounts—as well as an expression of mundane struggle informed by Eliot’s sweeping characterization of the modern world.
In addition to navigating the postwar period’s harsh treatment of homosexuals, White found himself in an artistic predicament that was related to his sexuality. Embracing the role of an inheritor of the American modernist photography tradition—defined by such titans as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston as a “straight photography” ideal—White found that his instincts ran aground. To emulate Stieglitz and Weston was to adopt not only an aesthetic of sharp focus and monumental form but a sensibility of optical candor and forthrightness. In the work of White’s mentors, this attitude often played across the contours of the female form (or objects resembling the female form), asserting with force man’s desire for woman, and establishing that desire as a locus of modernist creativity.(5) Thus from the start White was driven down a path of artistic evasion.
In that sense, White’s banquet was something more: it proposed a way through his predicament via an acceptance of frustration but also, in a tremendous lurch of positive thinking, transformed that frustration into an engine of creativity. If for Stieglitz and Weston heterosexual desire lay close to the mysterious centers of creativity, for White it was the frustration caused by his own “aberrance” that ascended to metaphor. Sexual desire became frustrated sexual desire and, for all White’s efforts at emulation, his photography could not sustain the optical machismo of his forebears; it could not continue in the prescribed modernist tradition. Indeed, despite his own best efforts, White’s “perversion” converted that tradition into something else, retuning the self-assurance of American modernism to a register of ambivalence and ambiguity, countered by proclamations of spiritual bravado.
The duplicity one senses in White’s career, in both his writing and his images, stems certainly from this frustration about sexuality (as Peter Bunnell has written,“White’s sexuality underlies the whole of the autobiographical statement contained in his work”),(6) but it also mirrors a much larger countertradition found within modernism itself, a romantic tradition that draws from Romanticism, Symbolism, Dada, and Surrealism. More specifically, White’s frustration coincides with the collapse of modernist ideals during the postwar era. This passage in the history of photography, if examined at all, is normally pinned to the arid vision of Robert Frank.(7) Aesthetically, White’s vision was less dark than Frank’s, and in no sense nihilistic. Yet White’s work embodies a critical shift in consciousness, from the heroic modernist notion of “truth in appearances” toward the acknowledgment—and even the cultivation—of illusion, deception, and buried meanings. White’s banquet of frustration would look like a tea setting compared to the theoretical abattoirs of generations of later artists; nevertheless, the historical narrative of photographic modernism’s dissolution owes an early chapter to White and his longing for transcendence, which he seems not to have attained.
In 1939 White was living at the Portland YMCA, where he had organized a camera club and had built a darkroom and modest gallery for exhibiting pictures. White’s photographs from this period concentrate on the environs of Portland, particularly the area of the commercial waterfront, which was undergoing demolition for redevelopment. Hired by the Oregon Art Project, an arm of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), White trawled the city’s Front Avenue neighborhood, documenting the nineteenth-century buildings with cast-iron façades that were about to be torn down.(8) White’s photographs are anything but clinical. His street views, many taken at night, have a ghostlike quality, with the occasional lone figure haunting the wet pavement; boarded-up doorways are cast in deep shadow; and mercantile objects, heaped onto the sidewalk before emptied warehouses, take on a forlorn anthropological character.(9)
Among these pictures is a group of five depicting a handsome young man leaning in a doorway on Front Avenue. He is dressed like a laborer in jeans, work shirt, and boots, but there is something of the dandy in the raffish positioning of the man’s newsie cap, the tight cut of his trousers, pulled high and cinched at the waist, and the studied nonchalance of his pose. In one image, his hand is shoved into a pocket, leaving the index finger exposed and pointing downward toward a prominent bulge. Most importantly, he gazes—not at the photographer but down the street— intently and expectantly, as if anticipating something that has not yet come into view. A second photograph shows the man from behind, revealing the nape of his neck, a pair of rounded buttocks, and white stains splashed down the right thigh of his trousers. The pose suggests that he is urinating in this abject doorway with its peeling paint and debris underfoot; he could be taken for a plasterer relieving himself during a break. Another image, taken in a different boarded-up doorway, shows the man leaning with one arm raised and smiling coyly (again, not at the photographer), with his thumbs slipped under his belt and his fingers cupped, calling attention once again to his bulge. An “Air Circus” poster behind him advertises “Tex Rankin and other famous flyers” as well as “stunts” and “thrills.”
The scene is both explicit and coded, even to contemporary eyes. This handsome loitering man might have been taken by certain passersby for an ordinary laborer, on break or looking for work. Others might have recognized him as a man looking for sex (or for another kind of work) with other men. White’s sexual interest in men and his approach to looking at things “for what else they are” stratify the two narratives, establishing layers of meaning on parallel planes. This man is both a laborer and a cruising homosexual. He is, then, just what the photographic image in general would come to signify for White: a common trace from the visible world, transformed into another set of charged meanings.(10)
Throughout his life, White was an intellectual grafter, transposing, with various degrees of success, methods and ideas from art history, literature, religion, psychology, and other photographers to his own work. For example, he named his diary “Memorable Fancies,” after a phrase in William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and, sometime later, structured his essay “Fundamentals of Style in Photography” after Heinrich Wöfflin’s classic study Principles of Art History (1915).(11) By 1939,White had read not only Eliot but also Walt Whitman, whose life and work had long served as a beacon to homosexual men in search of validation and social cohesion across geography and time. Whitman’s 1855 epic Leaves of Grass, a highly democratic and modern exaltation of the body and the material world, became White’s inspiration for another urban documentary project, this one begun in San Francisco in 1949, titled City of Surf. In that series, comprising six thousand negatives—ostensibly a catalogue of everything in the city, from Chinatown to the financial district to new suburban housing—White maintained a democratic eye. Architecture is shot head-on and in full sun; people (including women) appear on the street, going about their business in routine fashion; children play on the sidewalks. Indeed, the photographs in this series are the most uncharacteristic in White’s entire œuvre, conveying a detachment and spontaneity associated with documentary photography in its purest form.(12)
White’s earlier Portland series, by contrast, is the darker product of a romantic turn of mind and conveys not the affirmative, civic-minded Whitman of poems such as “A Broadway Pageant” but the melancholy, searching Whitman of the “Calamus” poems.(13) In Portland, we see White engaging Front Avenue for its sense of mystery and possibility, an investigation among darkened doorways and in the silhouettes of passing strangers for moments of revelation. More than simply a celebration of the manifold aspects of the city, the desired charge might be specified as the possibility of an erotic connection, however ephemeral, as proposed by Whitman in “City of Orgies”:
City of orgies, walks and joys, City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make you illustrious, Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus, your spectacles, repay me, Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships at the wharves, Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with goods in them, Nor to converse with learn’d persons, or bear my share in the soiree or feast; Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love, Offering response to my own—these repay me, Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.(14)
In his 2003 book Backward Glances, Mark Turner compares the cruising homosexual, as conjured in Whitman’s poem, to the flâneur, a common figure in the literature on modernism, established in the writings of Charles Baudelaire. (White owned a copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil [1857] and a print of Nadar’s portrait of the French poet [ca. 1854], which is now in Princeton’s Minor White Archive) For Baudelaire, walking in the modern city was a fragmentary and ephemeral experience that allowed the poet to conjure what Turner calls “a dreamworld of the imagination.”(15) Like the cruiser, the flâneur’s activity was fundamentally visual, and Baudelaire talks, too, about making a form of contact through the eyes of passing strangers.(16) But for Baudelaire, the glance is not reciprocated. He looks for information that will activate the mind. In that sense, the flâneur’s activity is one of observation; he searches, but for something unspecified, unanticipated, and he keeps a certain distance. In Robert Herbert’s phrase, he is an “ambulatory naturalist,” “sizing up persons and events with a clinical detachment as though natural events could tell him their own stories, without his interference.”(17)
The cruising homosexual, by contrast, seeks connection, exploiting the ambiguities of the modern city by reading the visible signs for other levels of meaning. In an important sense, he passes for the flâneur, participating as a kind of player on the stage of the urban theater—a loafing, loitering man, looking around—yet he, like others capable of reading his intent, acknowledges sex as the motivating force under-lying his actions, regardless of whether sex is part of the outcome. (As Turner notes, “Sex may be the point of cruising for some, but sex and cruising are separate interactions.”)(18) Aware of the sexual basis for his actions, reading the modern city on various levels at once, the cruising homosexual presents an evolved modern persona, one engaged in the simultaneous adoption and blurring of social categories. He is two very different things at once: the detached, respectable flâneur and, just below the surface, the engaged, suspect cruiser. Behaviors embedded within behaviors, meanings layered upon meanings, visible to all yet decipherable to only a few—one might be describing the disruption of straight photography more generally. Presented with such a system of oblique actions, promises of revelation, and the possibility of social recognition and engagement, White was naturally enthralled.
Depending on the circumstances, Whitman could assume dual roles. He plays the flâneur in poems such as “A Broadway Pageant,” observing and recording all the sights of the city with an observer’s eye; and he plays the cruiser in poems such as “City of Orgies,” walking with a more overt and specific purpose. White similarly plays two parts. In City of Surf, he creates a cumulative portrait of San Francisco based on random, chanced-upon observations, whereas in the Portland series his purpose is much more personal, searching, and erotically charged.
This ability to oscillate between two roles, sometimes playing both at once, might be seen as fundamental to White’s approach, distinguishing him from other photographers working within the modernist idiom during this period. Particularly as a disciple of the American modernist tradition, White might be credited with having “queered” documentary photography. His pronounced and duplicitous alteration of the “straight-photography” tradition—framed here as flânerie lapsing into cruising—is emblematic of the larger fate of modernist photography to a degree that White himself may not have intended or recognized.(19) White’s images stage the breakdown of a heroic modernist tradition that pursued photographic “truth” in the form of a clear image: the “straight photograph.” His work leads us inexorably to an understanding of the photograph as embodying an array of meanings, some evident and put there purposefully by the artist, some only tentatively suggested or actively veiled, and many not intended by the artist at all but projected by the viewer. In other words, White, who subscribed officially to the orthodoxies of straight photography yet consistently challenged and undermined that philosophy’s claims of veracity, helped bring modernist photography to the doorstep of post-Structuralism.(20) White was a hero flirting with tragedy.
Aesthetically, White’s Front Avenue photographs bear much resemblance to those of Brassaï, whose night pictures of Paris, many of them published as Paris de nuit in 1933, depict abandoned streets and mirrored interiors, suggesting danger and sex as portals to another reality. Brassaï’s photographs, which explicitly featured prostitutes and homo-sexuals, were swiftly appropriated by the related rhetorics of Surrealism and “Old Paris,” the former proposing violence against bourgeois proprieties, the latter nostalgically depicting Paris as a place of social decadence. In both these contexts, night views of the city and the furtive activities occurring there under cover of dark conveyed a sense of the social subconscious, revealing—after Freud—the animalistic impulses lying just below the surface of daylight respectability. Although some considered their content shocking, Brassaï’s photographs function on a primary level as straightforward documents of nightlife in Paris.(21) His photograph of a potential john eyeing a prostitute in a doorway, a print of which White owned (probably acquired in the 1960s; now in the Minor White Archive), tenders a clear glimpse of an illicit exchange. The narrative is so self-explanatory that speculation is unnecessary.
For comparison, White’s 1939 photograph of a Portland bridge shows a night view, animated by the streaking headlights of cars and a trolley. Though mood predominates, a vague narrative is suggested by a light appearing in the window of a lonely tower at right and a man (or group of men) in a doorway at left. The atmosphere is certainly reminiscent of Brassaï but the narrative intent is less clearly stated. In an important sense, White’s picture is closer in spirit to Brassaï’s less anecdotal photographs, such as the purely atmospheric, unpeopled images from Paris de nuit and his photographs reproduced in various Surrealist publications. Brassaï’s ca. 1932–33 photograph of the Tour Saint-Jacques, for example, which appeared in André Breton’s 1937 novel L’Amour fou, presents a deadpan view of the tower against a dark sky. Understood within the context of the book’s narrative, the photograph suggests the site of an amorous nocturnal encounter between Breton and a woman; their “crazy love” is ultimately transformative.(22)
White’s photograph, conveying the same mood of hopeless longing, hinges on a similar note of banality and ambiguity, darkened and enlivened through atmosphere and a sense of strained human relations. In the context of Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations—White’s ostensibly revealing monograph of 1969, sequenced and edited by White himself and containing numerous excerpts from his diaries—the photograph of the Portland bridge is understood to be as much a snapshot of White’s state of mind on that evening in 1939 as it is a document of Portland’s architectural history. “What we see is a mirror of ourselves,” he would later write, affirming his allegiance to Freud and a psychoanalytical approach to the comprehension of photographs.(23) For both White and the Surrealists, the night street, seemingly abandoned, was alive with promise and possibility. The photograph’s documentary character, delineating with emotionless clarity the contours of the empty street, served paradoxically to both shield and suggest a wealth of personal feeling not actually depicted in the photograph.
Behind closed doors, White took pictures with more explicit homoerotic content. In 1940, he made a series of art nudes of model Gino Cipolla in the shadowy style of contemporaneous male nudes by George Platt Lynes. White also made “beefcake” portraits, the classic fare of physique magazines, which served as thinly veiled newsstand erotica for homosexuals.(24) Both contexts encouraged de-emphasizing the male genitals. In this instance, White squared his art nudes with the standards of the female nude, treating the contoured (and hairless) body as a sculptural object, while in the beefcake portraits he made use of bodybuilders’ poses—these having been borrowed in turn from classical sculpture—often to kitsch effect.(25)
Although White would continue to photograph the male nude in private throughout his life, his most concentrated effort in this subject area occurred during his early years in Portland and San Francisco, from 1937 to 1953. Abundant and explicit, White’s male nudes from this time coincide with a period of pronounced sexual activity for the artist.(26) More importantly, the nudes proclaim his adherence to the widespread modernist belief in sex as the wellspring of creativity, which White could only obliquely acknowledge. In a 1947 letter to Ansel Adams, White postulated that “the basis of man’s art [is] his soul, his heart, or his genitals . . . once they were all the same thing.”(27) Cipolla, in White’s rendering, might be seen to resemble a Weston pepper, desexualized in equal measure to the vegetable’s eroticization.
To both hide and reveal “the sex generator,” as he referred to his creative core, White maintained a semantic distinction between private and public imagery—between pictures that were merely “expressive” and those that were “creative.”(28) This distinction is spelled out in an often-reprinted passage from his letter to an unidentified photographer, written in 1962: “Your photographs are still mirrors of yourself. In other words your images are raw, the emotions naked. These are private images not public ones. They are ‘expressive’ meaning a direct mirror of yourself rather than ‘creative.’” White goes on to recommend Richard Boleslavsky’s 1933 book Acting: The First Six Lessons, which discusses what White called the “clothing of the naked emotions that is necessary to art.”(29) Rarely is White so lucid in his prose and so concrete in his advice. Reading the entire letter, one realizes that, in addition to offering aesthetic criticism, White was moved to protect a fellow soul struggling with homosexuality as White had struggled, and continued to struggle. The complications that White describes can only be read as his own: “These prints outline for me a rather tragic story of a man’s life. . . .The story is familiar to many people in our society: childhood home, for some reason the sex wires get crossed, confusion, self pity, anger, guilt all arise in various combinations. . . . Thereafter come the twistings caused by psychological blocks, the anger and the disintegration . . . seen as fear, self pity, vanity and a host of posturings. And there is no end to it, the inner conflict is neither resolved by solution nor by death.” White concludes with what might be considered a succinct summary of his own career path, working through shame toward creative release:“[I] further suggest with a welling heart that you try to universalize your private images and make them for the love of other people.”(30) Sadly, love of self is not acknowledged as an option.
White’s own attempts to universalize such volatile private images took many forms. As discussed,the pictures of Cipolla reference an art tradition of the nude. Yet even with the artistic lighting, sculptural pose, obscured sex organs, and averted eyes, the subject matter remains too hot to handle; not surprisingly, none of the male nudes were published in White’s lifetime.(31) In other instances, as in a clothed version of the “beefcake” model mentioned earlier, White exploits the ambiguity of pose to create an image that might be taken for an actor’s portrait. (Indeed, he was working as a photographer of actors and theater during this period; White was fascinated with actors’ ability to shift personae,“to be at once the real and the imagined, one person and another,” as Bunnell puts it.)(32) The context created by the more provocative depiction of this model, made during the same session, particularizes the picture’s meaning. Though the model’s attitude may be read as that of the classic Hollywood rebel (Marlon Brando, James Dean), the gaze also suggests cruising. And here again, the model is cruising someone else, not the photographer.
White fell in love with this averted pensive gaze, and imported it to the landscape around San Francisco, where he took up a teaching post in 1946. Moved to a natural context, the gaze starts to seem “purified,” its sexual charge grounded in a discourse of aesthetic reverie, following a Symbolist tradition of ethereal beings as rendered by Clarence H.White, George H. Seeley, and F. Holland Day.(33) White’s 1948 photograph of Rudolph Espinoza, taken in the sun-splashed doorway of an abandoned rural building, is in many respects the same picture White took on Front Avenue in Portland in 1939. Here, though, the image of the cruising homosexual is subsumed in a symbolic program White had been developing and cementing for some time: doors and windows represent thresholds to alternative states of being and the handsome gazing man is a stand-in for the artist, focused on channeling a higher form of consciousness. A photograph taken on the same day as that of Espinoza, quite possibly of the same building, shows the interior of a “bawdy house,” where the discovery of graphic homosexual graffiti renders a similar sense of revelation, though in baser form.
Despite its evident expressive power, the graffiti photograph was exactly the sort of image White felt needed to be kept private, to be altered and universalized “for the love of other people.” Through Freud and poetry, as well as his own guarded experience,White understood meaning as a layered and shifting process, yet he seems not to have grasped the full potential of such ambiguity in relation to the literal-minded medium of photography. Photographs, after all, were ostensibly documents of a given subject matter, some subjects being more acceptable for public viewing than others. If initially White thought of photography as something to draw him out of his introspection and into the world (as he had attempted in City of Surf ), meeting Alfred Stieglitz had the effect of activating, affirming, and intensifying White’s innate metaphorical disposition.(34)
White first encountered Stieglitz at An American Place, Stieglitz’s New York gallery, in February 1946. Their meeting was apparently strained at first, with White, just back from military service in the South Pacific, attempting to follow the great master as he elucidated his transcendentalist notion of Equivalence. White later recalled, “His talk itself was a kind of equivalent; that is, his words were not related to the sense he was making.” Finally Stieglitz said something that hit a nerve: “Have you ever been in love? . . .Then you can photograph.”(35) Equivalence, as articulated by Stieglitz—a subordination of the photograph’s literal subject matter in favor of a metaphorical reading—captured White’s imagination, allowing him to channel feelings into an established language of photography that was at once widely understood and ripe for multiple entendre. Equivalence, White later wrote, granted him “freedom from the tyranny of ecstasy.”(36) It allowed him to reveal the full strength and tenor of his emotions under the guise of a formalist tradition as set forth by Stieglitz, Weston, and Ansel Adams.
White borrowed a second concept from Stieglitz: the Sequence. But he added a crucial twist. While Stieglitz had conceived of sequenced photographs as an ordering of abstract elements, as in music, White’s sequences offered faintly limned, evocative narratives, similar in structure to free-verse poetry. Although most critics, both then and now, never really warmed to the idea,White considered his approach to this form one of his most important innovations.(37) The sequence seems to have gratified an important psychological need for White, especially after his 1953 move to the colder, more repressed climes of Rochester, where mysticism began to fill the void left after his youthful West Coast dalliances. Already in 1952, White states that “the camera must report a revitalization. It must revitalize an experience.”(38) Here White is invoking photography’s capacity to stop and preserve time, but he is also referring to a specific set of experiences he has left behind and has little hope of repeating. In that sense, the sequences are both souvenir albums and narrative evocations.
For example, White’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors of 1948, compiled as a hand-bound volume with images paired on facing pages—“mirrors” to both one another and the artist—is a personal account as well as a meditation on the sins of the flesh.
Temptation (which was never published or exhibited) begins with a sort of prologue, comprising a single full-length nude of Tom Murphy, White’s student and the model most commonly associated with his work. The pose is similar to those found in the beefcake pictures White was producing at this time: Murphy adopts a classical contrapposto stance and is entirely nude, his pale, wiry body positioned against a dark backdrop. A piece of driftwood at the model’s feet proposes a theme of innocence—man in his natural state. The sequence then moves to pairings of images describing man in his civilized state, featuring several loving close-ups of Murphy’s gesturing hands,a shot of his bare feet, and a single shoulder-length portrait, in which he wears a buttoned shirt and looks intently off to the side. Next, there is an interlude suggesting growing dissolution: an image of Murphy’s feet and a petrified stone is paired with a shot of Murphy in full dress slouched on a mass of rocks and staring vacantly off into the distance. The next pairing accelerates the descent into temptation. Here, the pose in a second picture of Murphy’s feet suggests agitation, while a three-quarter-length portrait of Murphy, crouched in the bushes and looking back over his shoulder, is as emblematic an image of cruising as White ever produced. The photographs that follow descend further into lust and self-recrimination, conveyed through photographs in which Murphy’s naked body alternates between expressions of pain and pleasure.(39) The sequence ends with a series of beatific nudes, which express redemption through nonsexual treatments of the body and in the body’s juxtaposition with natural forms—a return to nature.
White may have thought at first that the sequence format would help him transcend the limits of personal biography, that he could use the breadth and fluidity of the sequence to emphasize a universal narrative while exercising control over the potentially explosive and revealing content of individual images.(40) This proved to be overly optimistic, at least in his earliest uses of the form. White’s colleagues, for example, immediately understood Temptation for what it really was: an agonized portrayal of White’s love for his male student.
This response drove White toward abstraction. The Fourth Sequence, completed in 1950, was White’s most abstract sequence to date, yet it was abstract in the same way that Stieglitz’s Equivalents were abstract, comprising isolated elements of recognizable natural phenomena. Many of the pictures used in this work were taken around the same time that White was photographing Murphy, and the resemblance between the contours of the stone, punctuated by dimple-like depressions, and Murphy’s body, particularly his distinctive navel, was hardly coincidental. Not surprisingly, this sequence, too, was recognized by White’s colleagues as being highly erotic and revealing of the photographer’s tormented personal life.(41) Another sequence from this period, Amputations (completed in 1947), which was slated for exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, proved to be problematic as well. The show was canceled, purportedly due to a squabble over the quality of White’s poetry (which he insisted on including), but it may have been more a question of the content of the poetry, which sentimentalized the deaths of White’s army buddies, one of whom is pictured shirtless. The series also included several nudes of Tom Murphy.(42)
In 1953, on the eve of White’s move to Rochester and full conversion to mysticism, the photographer wrote a lengthy, self-consciously philosophical letter to the photo-historian Helmut Gernsheim. In it, White spoke presciently of transformation: “The thin red line of uniqueness for me is concerned with metamorphosis. With change, with the transitory, the plurality of meanings—I am enraptured with transformations.”(43) White’s most recent photographs had taken him beyond the specific erotic fixations glimpsed in Temptation, Fourth Sequence, and Amputations, delivering him to higher artistic ground. In 1951, as turmoil over those series abated, White met a dancer named William Smith. Smith, who became the subject of Sequence 11/The Young Man as Mystic (completed in 1955), was graceful and shared White’s rarefied feelings for aesthetic order.(44) He also introduced White to Christian mysticism.
It is fascinating to observe White’s handling of Smith in this group of negatives. White directs his model through a variety of scenarios, from loitering in urban dockyards to dreaming in nature, culminating in pictures of Smith nude, wandering among rock formations on the beach. In other words, Sequence 11 posits in perfect linear fashion the displacement of cruising by a universalized mystical searching—sexual longing setting in motion a heroic search. And while the ostensible point of this search was transcendence, glimpsed perhaps in fleeting moments of aesthetic reverie, for White the search itself seems to have become the acknowledged purpose of his actions. Banqueting on frustration had accustomed him to an acceptance of uncertainty and open-endedness—a state of constant, unresolved longing—which his readings in various religions affirmed. In that sense, White’s quest for transformation remained just that: a quest, extended through series of photographs, unresolved until the end.
Whatever solace White found in universalizing his personal experience through photography, the end result seems to have been more compensatory than redemptive. Already in 1951, White acknowledged the failure of photography as a path toward salvation, writing that the “camera is both a way of life and not enough to live by.”(45) To this disappointment, one might add that the mystic’s approach was no model for photography’s future. White’s plight had motivated an aesthetic theory, which in turn stumbled across concepts germane to photographic thought after modernism—namely, the plurality of meaning and its dependence upon context. But these notions, in their future manifestations, would jump the fence of internalized experience. Pop art and the glossy fabrications of the “Pictures Generation” artists dispensed with the obsessive yearnings of the individual, focusing instead on the individual’s place in the larger, media-saturated culture. Irony, playing off the notion of photography’s apparent promise of certainty, would fare much better as a theoretical disposition.
“The photograph as dream”: not White’s most precise pronouncement on photography but possibly the most salient to his own work, given the breadth of his concerns.(46) White wanted too much from photography; he wanted it to work as a guidebook, a therapy, a lover, a religion. Most of all, he wanted connection through photography, an affirmation that he and others could communicate clearly and freely about all that mattered. He wanted to be a realist—but he was not. He was a romantic, compelled to create images such as Untitled (Man and vertical surf ) (1951), in which meanings are obscured, not clarified; signs are effaced, not illuminated; beauty is closeted, not set out for all to see. White was attracted to the ambiguity of the dream because it offered cover and protection but also freedom to maneuver. The dream supported the irrational, maintained a sense of mystery, and beautified frustration. Most importantly, the dream conformed to the needs of the dreamer. For only in the dream could a world be conjured in which earth is sky, water is flame, and the eyes of an ideal lover look directly into one’s own.
***
Kevin Moore is an independent curator and writer based in New York. He is the author of Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection (de Young Museum, San Francisco, 2012); and Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980 (Cincinnati Art Museum, 2010).
This essay is reproduced with permission from the author as well as the Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. It originally appeared in More Than One: Photographs in Sequence, ed. Joel Smith (Princeton/New Haven: Princeton University Art Museum/Yale University Press, 2008).
NOTES
1. Minor White, “Memorable Fancies,” 1932–37; quoted in Peter C. Bunnell, Minor White: The Eye That Shapes (Princeton and Boston: The Art Museum, Princeton University; Bulfinch/Little, Brown, 1989), 19. 2. Minor White, Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations (New York: Aperture, 1969), 15. 3. White described his feelings regarding his sexuality in a private diary entry dated March 30, 1960: “I have often said that for anyone who likes self pity—homosexuality is a grand source—and my response to it has been weeks of longing, recriminations for a few moments of pleasure. The rising intensity was enjoyable—and wrecked by intercourse, followed by weeks of name crying in the wind.” Quoted in Bunnell, Minor White, 37. 4. See, for example, Michael E. Hoffman’s “Preface to the Second Edition” of White, Mirrors (2d ed., New York: Aperture, 1982), n.p. 5. William V. Ganis offers an intriguing interpretation of “straight photography” in relation to Andy Warhol’s work, relating certain “straight” subjects to photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston (the American landscape, the female nude) and arguing that straight photography implies “a visual truth paradigm,” showing things “for what they are” and not, as in White’s phrase, “for what else they are.” Ganis, Andy Warhol’s Serial Photography (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 101–2. 6. Bunnell, Minor White, 20. 7. See the chapter on Frank in Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 8. See the Chronology in Bunnell, Minor White, 2–3. 9. In the Image Chronology section of Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations, White writes that he was instructed by the WPA “to document by nostalgia, to try to evoke the sense of pride Portlanders sixty years ago must have felt in their new city.” To achieve this, White photographed on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, “when the cars and trolleys with their 1938 and 1939 license plates were off the streets”; nonetheless, many of the pictures from this series include people and vehicles. White, Mirrors, 225. 10. White was also making publicity photographs for the Portland Civic Theater at this time. The fact that his subject is posed in two different doorways suggests the possibility that this is an actor and the scenario was contrived. Rather than changing my reading of the images, this possibility only adds another stratum of coded meaning: actor as laborer as cruising homosexual. Joel Eisinger derives the title of his book on modernist photographic criticism from White’s framing of the “paradox of trace and transformation.” See Eisinger on White, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 143–67. 11. White’s manuscript for this essay was completed in 1953 but never published. Bunnell, Minor White, 16–17. 12. Peter Bunnell characterizes White’s San Francisco period (1946–53) as a time of “observation,” during which he produced photographs that were, generally speaking, more spontaneous, less directed, and less personal. Ibid., 51–52. 13. The “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass is considered the most overtly homosexual passage of the collection. See Francis Murphy’s introduction in Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2004), xxxii–xxxiii. 14. Ibid., 158. 15. Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion, 2003), 18. 16. In “The Crowds,” Baudelaire tells us that he simply entered at will into the character of individuals encountered on the street. “For [the poet] alone,” he continues, “everything is vacant; and if certain places appear to be closed to him, that is because in his eyes they are not worth the bother of visiting. The solitary and pensive stroller finds this universal communion extraordinarily intoxicating.” Quoted in ibid., 18. 17. Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 33. 18. Turner, Backward Glances, 60. 19. In Turner’s summation, to “queer history” is to present counterdiscourses that disrupt the literature on modernism. “Disruption is the key to understanding the queer critical term.” Turner, Backward Glances, 43. Bunnell characterizes White as the inheritor of the Stieglitz-Weston legacy, carrying their formalism to the level of metaphor. See Bunnell, Minor White, 15. 20. In “Varieties of Responses to Photographs,” published in Aperture in 1962, White admits that a viewer’s response to a given photograph “is true of himself, but not necessarily true of the picture in spite of the fact that it was the photograph in question that aroused his reaction.” Quoted in Eisinger, Trace and Transformation, 160. On White’s critical thought and his flirtation with post-Structuralism in particular, see ibid., 158–61. 21. Many of these pictures remained unseen until the publication of Brassaï’s The Secret Paris of the ’30s (New York: Pantheon, 1976). 22. See Anne Wilkes Tucker, Brassaï: The Eye of Paris (Houston and New York: Museum of Fine Arts; Abrams, 1998), 78. 23. Quoted in Bunnell, Minor White, 18. 24. See F. Valentine Hooven III, Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America, 1950–1970 (Cologne: Taschen, 1995). 25. The best general study of this subject is Emmanuel Cooper, Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). For a recent French perspective, see Pierre Borhan, Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography (New York: Abrams, 2007). 26. Peter Bunnell says that White was sexually voracious during this period of his life—he was in his thirties—but that when he moved to Rochester in 1953 he decided that it was time to “shut it down.” Conversation with Bunnell, spring 2008. 27. Later in the same letter, White refers to Weston’s “sex symbols” and takes this observation one step further, elevating Weston’s acknowledgment of sex as a source of regeneration and creativity to an acknowledgment of “He who is the creator of sex.” White, letter to Adams, March 8, 1947, in Bunnell, Minor White, 25. 28. “Memorable Fancies,” March 22, 1960, in ibid., 38. 29. Bunnell reproduces the entire letter in the Unpublished Writings section of his Minor White. “Letter to a photographer,” November 1, 1962, in ibid., 39–40. 30. Ibid. 31. Peter Bunnell notes that, although White did not publish these photographs or certain passages from his private papers dealing with his homosexuality, neither did he destroy these materials; on the contrary, he included them in his donation to Princeton, presumably with the understanding that they would be useful to scholars after his death. Ibid., 21. 32. Ibid., 17–18. 33. For Day, who photographed nude and semi-nude young men in an earlier era, the challenge was of course more complex. On that artist’s navigation of the sexual mores and aesthetic conventions of his period, see James Crump, F. Holland Day: Suffering the Ideal (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 1995). 34. White wrote in 1947, “Camera will lead my constant introspection back into the world.” White, Mirrors, 190. 35. Ibid., 41. 36. White, “Memorable Fancies,” 1966, in ibid. 37. John Szarkowski, for example, ignored White’s interest in metaphor, his use of the sequence, and the whole of his photographic criticism, instead aligning White’s pictures with his own vision of photography; he called White’s best pictures “frank and open records of discovery.” Quoted in Eisinger, Trace and Transformation, 218. 38. White, “Memorable Fancies,” December 31, 1952; quoted in Bunnell, Minor White, 29. 39. Peter Bunnell notes, in reference to a picture of Murphy gripping his torso, an image suggesting both masturbation and torment, that it “reflects simultaneously extremes of emotion that are almost opposite in character.” Bunnell, Minor White, 50. 40. Jonathan Weinberg makes a similar point in his study of works by Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley. Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 32. 41. Bunnell, Minor White, 6. 42. White included Amputations in his monograph Mirrors, 32–39. 43. White, letter to Helmut Gernsheim, September 4, 1953; reproduced in Bunnell, Minor White, 29–30. 44. White described Smith as “a lad who had a near direct line to spirit.” Ibid., 33. 45. White, Mirrors, 190. 46. White, “Memorable Fancies,” March 10, 1957; quoted in Bunnell, Minor White, 34. Joel Eisinger notes that White’s critical confusion made him “invulnerable to disagreement.” Eisinger, Trace and Transformation, 167.
The following conversation first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it in full, in print or online.
Of the influential British art critic and novelist John Berger, writer Geoff Dyer deems most striking Berger’s “ability to keep looking, staring at a picture until it yields its secrets.” Dyer’s comment appears during the following exchange with critic Janet Malcolm. Dyer and Malcolm, two distinguished writers on photography, were drawn to the medium for different reasons. Although Malcolm suggests that they may even reside within different rooms in photography’s many mansions, both agree that good writing on images begins with an urge to “keep looking.
Malcolm is a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker and a force in American writing and journalism. She is the author of more than ten books, which include Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography (1980); The Journalist and the Murderer (1990); The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994); Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007); and Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011). Her recent collection Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (2013) includes, among other pieces, writings on Diane Arbus and Thomas Struth and a brilliant 1986 portrait of Artforum then-editor Ingrid Sischy, and demonstrates that, no matter the subject, Malcolm’s approach is analytical and precise, almost photographically so.
Geoff Dyer is equally catholic in his selection of topics, usually approached in a pleasurably digressive style entirely his own. His book about photography, The Ongoing Moment (2005), is organized around various photographers’ handling of subjects, from blind individuals to hats to benches. Dyer warns his readers in the book’s introduction: “I suspect that this book will be a source of irritation to many people, especially those who know more about photography than I do.” Surely even the most informed readers benefited from his unique approach. Dyer’s other books include Out of Sheer Rage (1997), an achingly funny book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence; an essay collection titled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism); Zona (2012), about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker; and most recently, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush (2014).
When Aperture asked Dyer and Malcolm this past summer to correspond about their respective practices as writers who share an abiding interest in photography, the ensuing email exchange took place over a number of weeks, with Dyer corresponding from his temporary residence in Venice, California, and Malcolm from her summer home in rural Massachusetts. The conversation is fittingly interrupted at one point by a summer storm; an impasse is overcome, improbably, by a surprisingly relevant discussion of aircraft carriers. Dyer and Malcolm may not reveal any secrets as to how they both so precisely bring their subjects into sharp focus. Indeed, there may be none to reveal— aside from a preternatural talent for translating close looking into shrewd writing.
- The Editors
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Tamara Shopsin & Jason Fulford, photo-illustration (after Kenneth Josephson), 2014
Geoff Dyer: How did you first become interested in photography? Did this interest precede your writing about it or did the two things occur more or less simultaneously? At the risk of preempting your answer, at what point did an interest in photographs or photographers become an interest in photography?
Janet Malcolm: Like Julia Margaret Cameron, I became interested in photography when a relative gave me a camera. Unlike Mrs. Cameron, I did not become a great photographer, or even a good one. I learned no technique. Most of the pictures I took were either under- or overexposed. Chance dictated that some images emerged clearly. But I loved taking pictures and would take the camera—a Leica M3—on all trips.
I had read that Cartier-Bresson thought of his Leica as an extension of his eye, considering it a great improvement over the large, heavy cameras that were its predecessors. It permitted him to run around Paris having his decisive moments. It has taken me years to realize that (1) traveling with a camera and seeing everything through its eye rather than through one’s own may not be the best way to see the world, and (2) the Leica is not a lightweight object but a heavy, cumbersome thing when compared to the deliciously lightweight point-and-shoot and cellphone cameras of today.
I began writing about photography with the spurious authority of the young. I probably thought that my experience as an amateur photographer was some sort of qualification. Above all, I was inspired by John Szarkowski’s brilliant directorship of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department and by his book Looking at Pictures. What about you? How did you come to write about photography? What drew you to it?
GD: Almost entirely it was reading about it (rather than actually looking at pictures). The big three: you know, two Bs and an S—Barthes, Berger, and Sontag—and a bit of a third B: Benjamin. I wrote a few small things on photographers for British papers and then I became very interested in photographs of jazz musicians when I was writing But Beautiful in 1989, particularly in the question of whether, or how, to convey sound visually. But I was using the pictures mainly as a source for fiction so was far more concerned with the people in the pictures than I was with the people who took them, something I became interested in only later. (That happened when I realized that a picture of D.H. Lawrence was also a picture by Edward Weston.) I still think jazz is an art form that’s been very well served by photography. Do you know Roy DeCarava’s amazing picture of Ben Webster and John Coltrane?
JM: No, I don’t.
GD: I didn’t know it at the time I was writing But Beautiful but wish I had, especially since DeCarava, in The Sound I Saw, had very consciously explored the question that interested me. Webster is cuddling him—Coltrane!—with such rough tenderness. There it is: tradition in jazz condensed into a single picture. I still love it—it’s so intimate and telling—even though DeCarava turned out to be impossible about having his pictures reproduced in The Ongoing Moment. That’s a subject—the right to reproduce images—I’m sure we’ll want to come back to. Anyway, my knowledge of photography was still very scanty in the early 1990s. I remember going to dinner at John Berger’s place in the Paris suburbs in 1991. Cartier- Bresson was there. The name rang some kind of bell but I wasn’t sure if he was a film director or a maker of watches. In 1997 I was invited to the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, North Carolina, to help work on a book of photographs by William Gedney that Margaret Sartor was putting together. That’s when I became aware of how incredibly ignorant I was about the history of photography and began to study it in a far more thorough way. Perhaps appropriately that’s when and where I first read your book Diana & Nikon. I only read Szarkowski much later, by which time I had a sense of what a huge figure he was. I read and reviewed his Atget book—the one with a picture on one page and a few paragraphs of text on the facing page—which I think is one of the great books about photography and a beautiful work of art. (Incidentally, I hope I won’t go to my grave without having done a similar kind of book—picture on verso page, text on recto or vice versa—myself.) He saw the review and sent me a signed copy of his book Mr. Bristol’s Barn. Obviously that’s something I treasure. Anyway, going back to what I said at the beginning, I’d be very interested to hear what Berger, Barthes, and Sontag—each of them— meant to you.
JM: I had to smile when I read your reply to my question. Aperture could not have brought together two people who are more apart in their relationship to photography than we are. Berger’s, Barthes’s, and Sontag’s writings on photography have meant almost nothing to me. I struggled and failed to grasp Barthes’s and Berger’s thought, and while I could understand Sontag’s, with a few exceptions (the Leni Riefenstahl piece, for example), I found her interests remote from mine.
The house of photography has many mansions, and you and I live in different parts of the building. You are on a high floor with a large view while I am in the garden apartment. The first publisher of Diana & Nikon gave the collection the rather clumsy subtitle “Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography.” But what he had in mind was to distinguish my approach from Sontag’s. These are conceptual writers, while I am—I don’t know—someone who is better equipped to look at pictures than to think about what photography is.
So what are we going to talk about—aircraft carriers perhaps? I read your piece in the New Yorker about your experiences aboard one of those amazing vessels with the most enormous pleasure and admiration. I have been interested in aircraft carriers ever since I read a book called We Captured a U-Boat by Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, in which an aircraft carrier called the Guadalcanal subdues a German submarine and tows it 1,700 miles back to America. The submarine is now in a museum in Chicago. Did you read this book in preparation for your project? I’m not sure why, but I think aircraft carriers will help get us over our impasse re: photography.
The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
Literary and personal histories coalesce in Moyra Davey’s elegant works in photography and video. For her ongoing “mailer” projects, begun in 2006 and included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Davey folds photographs made with a point-and-shoot camera and printed on durable paper and mails them to various recipients, including family and colleagues; when unfolded and displayed in grid formation on gallery walls, the images, photo-letters marked with sections of colorful tape and postage stamps, bear the traces of transit. Her video works invoke writers, from the transgressive Jean Genet to the nineteenth-century proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as in Les Goddesses (2011), a piece Davey describes as “a love letter to my family,” and at other moments depict readers’ reactions to passages of writing. In the following conversation, loosely structured as a play, the artist speaks with Matthew S. Witkovsky, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, about her practice of interlacing photography with literary touchstones, the Norwegian literary phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard, with whom Davey shares an affinity for the quotidian, and her work as a writer, which ranges from reflections on photography to personal essays.
—The Editors
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Moyra Davey, The End, 2010 (detail) courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
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Moyra Davey, The End, 2010 (detail) courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
An eleventh-floor apartment on Riverside Drive in northern Manhattan. Stately multistory buildings, sloping streets, longtime tenants. “How the Upper West Side used to be.” Sunny rooms, improbably bare in feel despite the jumble of books and framed artworks coating the simple plaster walls: posters by Sister Corita Kent, photographs by Bruce Davidson, Zoe Leonard, Danny Lyon. Furniture has a spartan or improvised quality (which is it? Moyra says both). In the kitchen at rear, a lovingly restored midcentury stove with a griddle and four small ovens sits in an elongated space that evokes rusticity. None of her own photographs, but of course plenty of what appears in them, such as shelves of records topped by old stereo equipment. A sense of being on set, even, for viewers of Moyra Davey’s Les Goddesses, particularly strong when one sees in the back bedroom two bikes and a low mattress, on which Davey leafed through her early photographs in that book-length video.
MW: While it is true that artists in every domain make books, there is a long history of the photobook in particular as a main form of expression, rather than a side project or a record of other works of art. As a photographer, did you come to writing through an interest in making books? What was your first book of writings?
MD:Long Life Cool White (2008). But what got me hooked on writing as part of my working method was editing Mother Reader (2001). I spent a couple of years reading all those texts, shaping the book, and then wrote an introduction. After that, reading and writing became so much more central to what I do.
MW: Were you not reading as much before putting that book together?
MD: I was reading while studying for my MFA, so, targeted theoretical stuff, and then in the Whitney program, also targeted reading. After that I stopped that kind of reading and started
to read literature.
MW: Funny: I stopped reading literature, which had given me all my ideas, once I was through with my undergraduate major in literary theory and had shifted fully into art history. The malformation of the art historian, no doubt: you get impatient with plot and drop the book once you think you’ve understood its underlying structure.
MD: I don’t read so much fiction, but like everyone lately I have been reading Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle, 2012 [English translation]). It took me a hundred pages to get into it, and I frankly didn’t think I would continue—but then halfway through there’s a major dramatic event and I was hooked. He’s like candy now.
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Moyra Davey, Ornament and Reproach, 2012–13 (installation view) courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
MW: What’s his style?
MD: Endless description. You have to imagine that the guy has a photographic memory. Run-on pages of mundane but fascinating details of his life, conversations recorded, and, here and there, digressions on figures like the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, or jabs
at post-Structuralist theory. It’s amazing.
MW: Is it the sort of thing where he tries to keep an impersonal voice, so that meaning comes out of an endless accumulation of facts?
MD: He has a slightly caustic voice, a bit misanthropic, ever so slightly, and maybe that’s what keeps it impersonal. Although he does express a lot of emotion, a lot of grief. I want to think more about how he does it, because it interests me.
MW: You’re building your craft as a writer …
MD: I am, yeah, slowly. I’ve never taken a writing class, though, in my entire life. I’ve always been a very reluctant student, in photography as well. Impatient. Always thought of myself as a bad student. If Eileen Myles were teaching a poetry class, though, I would jump on that. I know she has done that, back in the day.
Getting back to structure: I know it’s important. For someone to want to read something, there has to be some glue, a raison d’être, but yet I resist it. To read any piece of writing or see a movie that does the full circle thing is very satisfying—the closure, the return—but for some perverse, stubborn reason, I avoid it.
MW: And yet your video Les Goddesses is beautiful, like a nineteenth-century novel. Expansive yet incredibly tightly composed. It does have closure of a sort, and it employs many novelistic attributes: lengthy narration, the introduction and development of characters. It also has the symmetry
of a return at the end to what comes in the beginning.
MD: I guess it does. It starts and ends with still photographs.
But I did that almost unconsciously.
MW: Yes, we begin the film by looking at your photograph
of your sisters in the early 1980s, standing, as you say, like caryatids, and then at another that shows two of them, Jane and Kate, lying on the grass—but in voice-over you are talking about the Wollstonecraft family. Literature and photography are held up for comparison and further analogized to the relation of still and moving images.
MD: And to mise-en-scène versus documentary photography.
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Moyra Davey, Seven, 2014 courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
MW: These comparisons are not parallels, not sets of lines
that never touch. Instead, you’ve polluted relations, crossed the lines. Nor is the content exactly pure: sex, drugs, debauchery!
MD: Yeah, I think I’m going to do a part two. Things have happened in my family since I made that video. Jane’s youngest daughter, Hannah, overdosed on fentanyl, a synthetic opiate. Very potent. She was nineteen. She’s in the last video I made, My Saints (2014).
MW responds with surprise and momentary upset at the revelation. MD’s voice remains steady.
Hannah hid it so well. When you see her in My Saints, she’s chatting, ebullient; you would never suspect she was on downers. There were signs, but a lot of people missed the signs. That and other things make me want to—[emphatic] Matt, I could revisit that entire video and remake it totally differently.
MW: A rewrite then. Habits of writing give you certain license, I think, that for better or worse you don’t get in the visual arts. Published revisions are a normal part of the writing process. A fictional story—or an art history essay—
can start its public life at a reading, then become a magazine article, a contribution to a multi-author anthology, and after, a chapter in a book. What would you revisit if you did remake the video?
MD:Les Goddesses was kind of a love letter to my family. I think I idealized them. Everything in it is true, of course. But a lot is left out, which is one reason I term those videos “auto-fiction.” Remaking the work, I could do something much grittier. I didn’t show the family as they are now, for instance—
MW: Would you then be putting people back in the work?
In Les Goddesses you treat the living human figure literarily, but not pictorially. The video shows photographs of your family only from your earliest years—pictures that you showed no more than one or two times before “giving up” taking photographs of people around 1985.
MD: I actually videotaped my sister Jane walking, talking, smoking cigarettes in the park. But I don’t know if I’d have the guts to pursue that kind of thing. The remove and control you have working with still photographs is pretty great. Although, My Saints is made up of interviews with friends and family. So maybe I’m a step closer to filming my siblings in the flesh.
MW: You do have remarkable formal means to bridge the gap between photography and writing. The mailers, for example: these are recent photographic grids of yours, the prints for which you have printed on heavier, coated paper, then folded and sent by post to friends and colleagues. The individual images (ranging from a handful to several dozen) are gathered together for display as a composite wall work. Their address and your own are plain to see, covering the images, along with adhesive tabs that were used to hold the folded photograph flat in the mail. They, too, are love letters, sent only to those you know.
MD: Here is one I made showing my sisters, derived from a group photo taken around 1971. We all have that hippie look. It’s called Seven (2014), based on a J.D. Salinger character who is one of seven siblings. It’s funny because, other than Catcher in the Rye I don’t really like Salinger…. After I made the photo piece, I dug up this clever, sniping letter from one of my sisters, sent to me when I was in Paris in 1977, describing all the shenanigans going down with my siblings in my absence. And it was exactly seven pages long, a perfect match. I photographed each page separately and concealed her name to protect her privacy, though I doubt she’d care.
MW: Fragments of writing, on the one hand, and fragments of a picture on the other hand. It should be pointed out that the pictorial fragments don’t divide neatly—we see parts of one or more sisters in each of the (nine) parts of the family photo mailer—whereas your mailer of the one sister’s letter does appear as a single sheet per picture.
MD: Except that parts of the writing are covered with stamps and labels and tape, so you can’t read everything. You can read passages but not all of the writing.
MW: It’s another way of revising: covering over. Hiding and revealing simultaneously seems to be your way of coming to terms with a sort of confessional self-expression.
MD: It is confessional, but I’ve found distance through a certain dispassionate, dissociative stance. I feel simultaneously that it’s me and not me writing and performing this material. It would be a good challenge now to make a video where the faces are no longer pretty.
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Moyra Davey, Video still from Les Goddesses, 2011 courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
MW: You’ve quoted a line from Jean Genet, saying I’m fifty and I look like sixty, and I think that’s fabulous …
MD: He says, I’m not ashamed.
MW: Right, and he’s writing to this young man, Java.
MD: His former lover. And he adds, “I even find it rather restful.”
MW: Yes, I’m amazed I forgot that bit of the quote, because it is beautiful. Restful: what a perfect word. A whole lot of youthful energy is expended in making oneself presentable.
MD: And middle-age energy too. In a section of My Saints titled “Vanity,” I start with a line about the “bleaching white light of vanity,” and then enter the frame, my face sun-bleached out. Later I go to “Vanitas,” a view of one of my nieces, who has a tattoo of her skeleton on her back—all the bones—wait, I have to get you the picture to show you…
Walks away. A half-minute of silence while she searches.
MW: This is an incredible picture, your niece, her skeletal structure imprinted on her skin. Like wearing your own X-ray—more questions of how to articulate structure and content. I was about to ask how you structure the making of your videos, whether you follow conventions of scripting or storyboarding.
MD: I don’t storyboard, but I always write something. I wrote this text (Burn the Diaries) and thought it was going to be the video (My Saints). Then I started to perform it and realized that I need to get others in front of the camera to make this work.
I do appear in the one scene, and I’m heard off-camera pretty regularly. There’s a lot of talking but also text—rolling and static. That was a device I set out to use from the onset as a way to modulate the spoken word.
MW: You ask viewers to look at language and read it as well. Unlike many career writers but like a lot of visual artists interested in language, you seem fascinated by the material objects and paraphernalia of writing.
MD: I love paper, and I have fountain pens, and I love soft pencils; but the only way I can seriously compose anything is on the computer. Actually, I really began writing only when I met Jason [Simon, a filmmaker], in 1986, and he had a little Mac. It was so much more accessible to me to type on that.
MW: When I read your books now, I hear your voice, not my own. You read more slowly aloud than I do when reading to myself, so I slow down to accommodate what I remember as your cadences and pauses. It’s an odd feeling, having another voice in my head.
MD: When I sit down to write something, my instinct is “start with the most pressing thing.” Then I go to the notebooks, read through them systematically and pull out anything of interest. And then build on those extracts. You know what I would like to do: write without intertitles. That would be a good challenge, because using intertitles is a very easy way for me to write, in short fragments. Having the intertitles gives my writing a de facto structure.
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Moyra Davey, Video still from My Saints, 2014 courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
MW: I just assumed you used intertitles out of a persistent love for Walter Benjamin.
MD: Yes, and Roland Barthes. But it is a bit of a crutch.
MD and MW each get up to fetch something for the other. MW returns with a small book of pictures and quotations from Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu.
MW: There were just a few copies printed of this book after
a show that we did last fall, which in its concept was intended as a book on a wall. The installation had writings interspersed with photographs, in quotations printed at the size of a standard 11-by-14-inch photograph; text as image and also
as the equal of images. He was a brilliant writer, I think. It was an especially meaningful show for me, largely because of the importance of his dual practice as writer and photographer.
MD: Thank you for this! Speaks as she leafs slowly through the book.
I have his book [Chewing Gum and Chocolate, Aperture, 2014] and have just started reading it. You can tell right away he had the knack, a natural scribe. It’s so unpretentious, so unassuming, but so observant of what is going on around him, and of himself, his own position in that postwar world. Writing that’s a little bit elliptical, running on a parallel track to the photographs yet intersecting at points with them.
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Moyra Davey, Video still from My Saints, 2014 courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
MW: When you think about it, for all the emphasis on book- making in photography—and that is where we started this afternoon—there seem to be relatively few photographers who give themselves seriously to writing. Tomatsu is unusual in that sense. Maybe it’s a further sign of his promiscuity,
a word you’ve used lately as well. Tomatsu moves in and out of straight documentary photography, but he also likes montage, he likes abstraction, he likes mixing color and black and white … and he likes to write, and even to test different voices, from the statistical to the emotional, the novelistic
to the epistolary. His great midcareer retrospective book I Am a King (1972) has at its center a section on the height of the student protests, in 1969–70, and in this section he pairs photographs with a month’s worth of diary entries. In short, Tomatsu does not mind being literary. That’s true right from his start in magazines at the tail end of the 1950s and early 1960s. This is very unlike his near-contemporary Robert Frank, whose book The Americans (1958–59) depended for its words on Jack Kerouac. It’s even further from the classic photobooks of the 1920s and ’30s, in which photographers’ efforts were often framed with essays or statements by hired critics. Although there are many more examples of photographer–writers in recent decades, an extensive literary commitment such as yours remains unusual.
Of course there is still the question of whether anyone reads.
MD: Living with a seventeen-year-old boy who only wants to leave the house with his phone (permanently outlined on his thigh) and his wallet—won’t carry a book—it’s a question we ask here every day. He listens to music, and he reads challenging stuff for school, but he stopped reading for pleasure once electronics entered his life. I, on the other hand, should devote more time to listening to music.
[Conversation continues.]
_____
Matthew S. Witkovsky is Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, department of photography, the Art Institute of Chicago. photography is now celebrating its fortieth anniversary as a curatorial department with a series of presentations from the permanent collection, including a room devoted to work by Moyra Davey.
Why an issue on queer photography? The going narrative states that, after the culture wars of the early 1990s, we moved into an era in which sexual difference mattered progressively less, when the fight against AIDS no longer defined the gay community, and when same-sex marriage had been approved in many parts of the United States and in a handful of countries around the world. But considering the volume of recent photography we’ve encountered that is pointedly engaged with questions of queer identity and experiences—as well as work by curators and writers who are revisiting past figures and projects—it seems that queer is back on the agenda, or rather, that it never left. The public conversation about what it means to be queer (which arguably began with Stonewall in 1969) has evolved and remains not only relevant but also necessary to continue. As photographer Catherine Opie notes, “Queer photographers these days are not necessarily identifying in singular identity terms; they are interested in being part of a political discourse about how radically life has changed over the past three decades.”
One radical difference is globalization. Thirty years ago, in an effort to make her own community visible, American photographer Joan E. Biren traveled the United States and Canada presenting a slide-show history of photography foregrounding lesbians as both artist and subject. Today, Zanele Muholi cites Biren’s groundbreaking project as a key influence on her ongoing work to create a visual record of South Africa’s lesbian community, many of whom have suffered discrimination and violence. Such cross-generational dialogue threads this issue as younger photographers probe the past to engage queer archives and histories. Dean Sameshima appropriates old physique and cruising imagery from a time of secret codes and clandestine existence, a period the artist himself never experienced. This time was one that San Francisco–based photographer Hal Fischer codified in his 1977 project Gay Semiotics, revisited in these pages.
Kevin Moore introduces David Benjamin Sherry’s brashly colored landscapes, which invoke iconic American photographers, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, and Minor White, Aperture’s founding editor. The subject of White’s sexuality was explored in last year’s Getty Museum exhibition that featured the little-known 1948 handmade book, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, an early homoerotic series of White’s student-model. Two images from this project appear above, and on the occasion of this issue, we have republished Moore’s 2008 essay, “Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White,” on our website (aperture.org/minorwhite218).
Queer perspectives continue to offer essential counterpoints to the dominant heteronormative (and patriarchal) paradigm. Vince Aletti sums this idea up best in his contribution when he writes: “Queer doesn’t have a look, a size, a sex. Queer resists boundaries and refuses to be narrowly defined.” This idea is evident in A.L. Steiner’s anarchic collages, which playfully grapple with our moment of economic and environmental crisis, in K8 Hardy’s series of self-portraits that confound gendered tropes and play with conventions of fashion photography, and in Shannon Michael Cane’s survey of queer independent publishing. And working in a very different sociopolitical and cultural context, Ren Hang, a young Chinese photographer whose work appears on our cover, has garnered a following in his country while stirring controversy. In his raw, playful images, nudity is the norm, and sexual preference and gender begin to feel irrelevant. While Hang doesn’t identify as part of a specific queer scene or movement in China (and the term queer doesn’t entirely translate there), his provocative and weirdly beautiful images seem to be emblematic of the contemporary idea that gender and sexuality are fluid—pointing toward a future (and, for some, a present) in which traditional dichotomies of gender and sexuality no longer apply.
In 1977, San Francisco photographer Hal Fischer produced his photo-text project Gay Semiotics, a seminal examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of cruising gay men in the Castro district of San Francisco. Fischer’s pictures dissected the significance of colored bandanas worn in jeans pockets, as well as how the placement of keys and earrings might telegraph passive or active roles. He also photographed a series of “gay looks”—from hippie to leather to cowboy to jock—with text that pointed out key elements of queer street-style. For Aperture magazine #218, Spring 2015, “Queer,” art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson spoke with Fischer about the origins of Gay Semiotics and how it has aged, excerpted below. This article also appears in Issue 2 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the free app.
Julia Bryan-Wilson: You initially trained as a photographer at the University of Illinois. What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work?
Hal Fischer: I came here for graduate school in photography at San Francisco State in 1975. I really wanted to study with Jack Fulton, but I didn’t want to pay the money to go to the Art Institute. I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. After I moved to the Bay Area, two pivotal things happened. One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak. The second pivotal thing was meeting Lew Thomas [cofounder of NFS Press]. That was incredibly critical.
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JBW: What strikes me now about Gay Semiotics is how conceptual it is, how important the photo-text relationship is.
HF: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, gelatin-silver prints mainly of the landscape. Then I got out here, and the first thing I started doing was crazy alternative work, predominantly 20-by-24-inch bleached prints with inked-on text and diagrammatic drawings. But I met Lew through my writing, because I reviewed a show of his, and he was at the center of a movement focused on connecting photography and language.
JBW: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late 1970s?
HF: There was a huge discourse here. You’d have an opening, and there would be two hundred people there. People talked about photography. They were really interested, and it was passionate.
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JBW: Gay Semiotics is an attempt to map some of the discourse of structuralism onto the visual codes of male queer life in the Castro. How did you come to structuralism?
HF: Thanks to Lew Thomas, in graduate school I began reading things like Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art. Those were two key texts. Of course, structuralism came late to photography, when you consider that Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation came out in 1966. Reading Burnham, going on to read Claude Lévi-Strauss, all that was crucial. I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me.
JBW: In your bibliography for Gay Semiotics, you cite Walter Benjamin, but not Roland Barthes. Who else were you influenced by?
HF: I did read some Roland Barthes, but it’s almost like I read just enough. The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. It was like, Oh my God, these handkerchiefs . . . this is exactly what they are writing about. Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something out from there.
JBW: You’re doing several things in Gay Semiotics. On the one hand, you’re parsing a signification system that arose out of a nonverbal, erotic exchange, and you’re also deconstructing gay male self-fashioning and photographing “archetypes.” It is thus a photo-project about the history of photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing.
HF: I can’t say I was conscious of it at the time, but one of the first photographers who influenced me was August Sander. I mean, I LOVED Sander. I still do. I probably was a fascist in an earlier life, because I’m definitely into types, and I’m definitely into archetyping. I don’t really think it’s that awful a thing to do; it can be very informative. I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition.
JBW: So the work is also about genre.
HF: Yes. It’s also about personal desire; it’s a lexicon of attraction.
Untitled (Pier, David Wojnarowicz project), 2001–07
For the “Queer” issue, Aperture magazine asked Vince Aletti, Richard Meyer, and Catherine Opie to reflect on the term queer and its relationship with photography. Here, we run an excerpt from Meyer’s response, in which the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University discusses Emily Roysdon’s restaging of David Wojnarowicz’s photographs as well as German aristocrat Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s carefully crafted scenes of classical homoeroticism. Tonight, Meyer will moderate Aperture’s panel discussion “Queer Genealogies” at the New School, with writer and critic Vince Aletti, associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario Sophie Hackett, and artist K8 Hardy. The panel will explore how contemporary photographers have cast their attention backward to draw upon and engage the visual record of gay, lesbian, trans, and nonnormative sexualities. This article first appeared in Issue 3 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.
Although it may seem hopelessly “nineties” to some, the word queer continues to provide a crucial means of opposition. In the recent book Art and Queer Culture, written by Catherine Lord and myself [Richard Meyer], we wrote, “We have chosen the term “queer” in the knowledge that no single word can accommodate the sheer expanse of cultural practices that oppose normative heterosexuality. In its shifting connotation from everyday parlance to phobic epithet to defiant self-identification, “queer” offers more generous rewards than any simple inventory of sexual practices or erotic object choices. It makes more sumptuous the space between best fantasy and worst fear.” The last line of this passage was a reference to an early 1970s gay liberation slogan proclaiming “I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.” By citing this slogan within a book on queer art published in 2013, Lord and I suggest that recursive power and expansive history of queer culture.
For many years the work of queer photographers has been necessarily—if sometimes unwittingly—indebted to the sexual and subcultural imagery long preceding it. In some of the most exciting examples of such work, the photographer’s debt to queer history is openly, at times even extravagantly, acknowledged. For example, in 1991, Canadian photographer Nina Levitt partially erased a reprint of an 1891 picture by Staten Island–based amateur photographer Alice Austen of two female couples embracing, one of which includes Austen herself. The title of Austen’s original picture, That Darned Club, parrots the voice of an exasperated man excluded from the women’s intimacy while alluding, however lightheartedly, to the damnation of late nineteenth-century women who rejected the company and authority of men. Retrieving the photograph a century later, Levitt asks us to consider the visual record of lesbian life: what has been submerged that might yet be excavated or allowed to emerge. Like Levitt’s image, titled Submerged (for Alice Austen), the history of lesbian culture hovers between visibility and erasure, resolution and apparition.
Artist Emily Roysdon has initiated an equally vivid dialogue with the photographic work of a queer predecessor, in this case the late David Wojnarowicz. Across a series of twelve photographs, Roysdon both reimagines and restages Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series (1978–79) in which a man wearing a face mask of fin-de-siècle poet Arthur Rimbaud surfaces at different locations in 1970s New York City—riding the subway, shooting up at the piers, outside an X-rated movie theater in Times Square. Although many assume the project to be self-portraiture, in fact Wojnarowicz asked a friend to wear the Rimbaud mask and then followed him to different sites throughout the city. Wearing a paper mask bearing the likeness of Wojnarowicz, Roysdon produces a touchingly inexact restaging of Rimbaud in New York. Where, for example, the original series featured “Rimbaud” masturbating on a hotel bed, we now see Roysdon pleasuring herself with a dildo. Untitled (David Wojnarowicz), 2001–2007, bespeaks both an embodied lesbian difference and a desire to create queer art across the divides of both gender and generation. Central to the logic of Roysdon’s “surrogacy” of the earlier series is the double displacement Wojnarowicz performed in the late 1970s—asking a friend, masked as a queer poet from the previous century, to stand in for the photographer’s own journey through the urban landscape.
Throughout the history of photography, queers have sought out real or fictive archives on which to base—and from which to stage—their own sexual imaginings. Living in Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century, German aristocrat Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, for example, choreographed scenes of classical homoeroticism by photographing toga-clad (and unclad) adolescent boys and young men among fluted columns and other faux-antique props. Von Gloeden’s photographs— collected by the writer Oscar Wilde, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, and later, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe—reveal as much about the homoerotic imagination of the late nineteenth century as about the sexual culture or customs of Greco-Roman antiquity.
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Emily Roysdon, Untitled (Three Girls, David Wojnarowicz project), 2001–07. Courtesy the artist
Von Gloeden’s photographs are now hawked on the Internet as representing a lost “golden age of pornography.” Mapplethorpe’s interest in Von Gloeden was part of the former’s broader embrace of the history of pornography. Before Mapplethorpe took up photography exclusively, he was over-painting pages from gay (and occasionally straight) porn magazines. In some cases, Mapplethorpe would impose a bull’s-eye over the figure’s genitals or a black rectangular bar over the eyes, thereby referencing the criminalization and censorship of homoerotic desire as well as its persistence in the face of such threats. In other cases, such as the heretofore unpublished collage . . . the over-painting functions to focus the viewer more insistently on points of sexual exchange and homo-affection. Although Mapplethorpe’s early collages remain little known, they reflect the queer archival imagination that helped launch his photographic career.
Queer photographers working today are likewise mining the long history of gay, lesbian, trans, and otherwise nonnormative sexualities. That history reaches back to the practice of photography from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century and further still, to premodern histories of art and sexuality. As contemporary photographers continue to experiment with new forms of affiliation and technologies of representation, they simultaneously return to and reimagine the visual archives of the queer past.
Three decades ago Joan E. Biren, an American photographer, crisscrossed the country presenting a continually changing slide show that told an alternative history of photography, one with lesbians as central protagonists, called Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present (also known as the “Dyke Show.”) Sophie Hackett, associate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, wrote about Biren’s groundbreaking, if under-the-radar, project for Aperture magazine #218, Spring, “Queer.” This excerpt first appeared in Issue 4 of the Aperture Photography App: click here to read more and download the app.
From 1979 to 1985, American photographer and activist Joan E. Biren (JEB) traveled across the United States and Canada delivering an ever-evolving slide show, Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850–the present, more affectionately known as the “Dyke Show.” Over the course of two and a half hours, JEB narrated and presented more than three hundred images to women who gathered in church basements, community centers, women’s bookstores, and coffeehouses, eager for, as Carol Seajay, cofounder of San Francisco’s Old Wives Tales feminist bookstore and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, put it in an early review, “Images I had never seen before, images I had seen and not perceived. Images on which to build a future.” The slide show was designed to grow over the years, as JEB added new pictures by contemporary photographers and participants in the photography workshops that she led wherever she appeared with the show. It eventually included 420 images. What began as a way to distribute and give context to JEB’s self-published monograph, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979), became a vocation. She ultimately presented the slide show at least eighty times in more than sixty places.
JEB structured the Dyke Show in six sections that presented historical photographs by figures such as Lady Clementina Hawarden, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Alice Austen, and Berenice Abbott, alongside a range of contemporary portraits, erotica, and documentary photographs of the early gay liberation movement, her own work, and that of her peers, including Cathy Cade, Tee Corinne, Diana Davies, and Kay Tobin. She laid out for her audiences a new visual history, one with lesbians at its center. In line with lesbian and feminist consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s and 1970s, JEB used the slide shows as a collective exercise in reading photographs to highlight the paucity of the visual record for lesbians and to impart a new way of looking, a queer way of looking.
She did this in two ways. First, she identified historical photographers who, in her view, rebelled against social norms and narrow expectations for women and, in their work and in their lives, embodied a sense of strength, freedom, autonomy. Hawarden, Johnston, Austen, and Abbott formed the focus here. In a recent email, JEB wrote, “Because relatives and others destroyed the evidence of lesbian lives, and because many photographers had to stay closeted in order to survive or make a living in prior times, there wasn’t a lot of overt evidence. That’s why I felt it was necessary to ‘read between the lines’ of the existing biographies to interpret the images myself given my own experience and instincts.” JEB suggested that there is something in the photographs by these women that can be “read” against biographies that may have suppressed or omitted details about their relationships and sexuality. The photographs supplied a different kind of evidence, discernible perhaps only to those who knew what they were looking for.
Frances Benjamin Johnston’s 1896 cigarette-smoking, beer stein–toting, ankle-revealing self-portrait is a strong case in point: Johnston’s playful self-presentation in this photograph defied the more demure, ladylike norms of her time. Offering information about Johnston’s life as a successful photographer—she is described in the 1974 monograph A Talent for Detail as an “eccentric,” “bohemian” woman who never married—JEB hinted during her slide show that Johnston may have been a lesbian. Though not able to offer clear evidence of Johnston’s sexuality, JEB nonetheless felt that assuming Johnston was heterosexual was equally tenuous.
Second, JEB sought to forge what she now describes as a “lesbian semiotics” (though she admits she learned the term much later and was not aware of Hal Fischer’s 1977 book Gay Semiotics). She detailed what she calls the “triangle” of interactions between the photographer, the muse (subject), and the viewer. (She elaborates on this further in her article “Lesbian Photography—Seeing Through Our Own Eyes,” published in Studies in Visual Communication in 1982.) She contrasted photographs made by straight photographers and those made by lesbians. And, in a section called “The Look, the Stance, the Clothes,” JEB attempted to identify more concretely the visual elements that might characterize a lesbian photograph.
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Frances Benjamin Johnston, Self Portrait, 1896 Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
For example, she identified a direct look as the product of a certain rapport between photographer and subject, as in Berenice Abbott’s portraits of Eugene Murat, Jane Heap, or Janet Flanner. “There’s a look here that’s passing between a lesbian muse . . . and a lesbian photographer, something direct about it, without being confrontative [sic], it’s open in a certain kind of way, there’s a presence there behind the eyes,” she stated during a 1982 slide show at the Women’s Building in San Francisco. JEB found this directness lacking in other portraits of these women, indicating that they didn’t “look as powerful.” Or she characterized certain postures (slouchy) or clothing (pants, creatively fashionable garb) as more lesbian than others.
Such a project may feel quaintly essentialist today when queer images are so much easier to find. Audience comment cards reveal that not everyone embraced JEB’s approach even then—some felt she was replacing one set of stereotypes with another. Queer looking was just evolving. However, it is important to note how radical it was to even publicly contemplate a question like Is there a lesbian aesthetic? at the time, as that generation of queers fought for basic civil rights, built communities, and embraced their distinctiveness. JEB proposed a new relationship to photography to her audiences, one that would empower them as creators and interpreters of their own image. “Understanding you have a place in history and in the present day with others like yourself is what gave people the courage to take the risks that coming out in those years demanded,” she explained in a recent email.
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Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, In the Life, 1995 (cover) Courtesy the artists and Special Collections, E.P. Taylor Library & Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
JEB’s grassroots campaign is best understood as one of the projects that developed alongside the LGBTQ rights movement from the 1960s on, whose larger aim was greater visibility as a path to greater acceptance: the production of a visual record. In a 2004 interview as part of Smith College’s Voices of Feminism Oral History project, she declared, “I dredged up all these images, which may or may not have been lesbian images. I decided to talk about why I thought they were lesbian images from history. Because this void, this emptiness, this blank of history drove me crazy.”
Sophie Hackett isassociate curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Eva Mofokeng, Somizy Sincwala, and Katiso Kgope, Parktown, 2014
For more than a decade, South African photographer Zanele Muholi created a visual record of black lesbians in her home country. Although South Africa legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, discrimination and violence against queer women remain widespread. In 2006, Muholi began her Faces and Phases project, an ambitious series of bold, undeniably powerful portraits of lesbians made against plain or patterned backgrounds—now numbering around three hundred—and often exhibited in tightly arranged grids. Faces and Phases is the subject of an extensive book, published by Steidl last fall, that forms a monumental chapter in Muholi’s mission to remedy black queer invisibility. Muholi’s work has been exhibited globally and she will have her first large-scale museum exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence, on May 1. Last November, Deborah Willis—author, curator, and prominent historian of photography—spoke via Skype with Muholi, who is based in Johannesburg, about photography and activism, her latest series Black Beauties, and her influences. This interview appeared in Issue 5 of the Aperture Photography App:click here to read more and download the app.
Deborah Willis: Let’s begin with Faces and Phases. When and where did this project begin?
Zanele Muholi: It started in 2006 and I dedicated it to a good friend of mine who died from HIV complications in 2007, at the age of twenty-five. I just realized that as black South Africans, especially lesbians, we don’t have much visual history that speaks to pressing issues, both current and also in the past. South Africa has the best constitution on the African continent and, dare I say, world—when it comes to recognizing LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex) persons and other sexual minorities. It is the only country on the continent that legalized same-sex marriage in 2006. I thought to myself that if you have remarkable women in America and around the globe, you equally have remarkable lesbian women in South Africa.
We should be counted and certainly counted on to write our own history and validate our existence. We should not feel that somebody owes us these liberties. So, it’s another way in which I personally claim my full citizenship as a South African photographer, as a South African female in this space, as a South African who identifies as black, and also as a lesbian. I’m basically saying we deserve recognition, respect, validation, and to have publications that mark and trace our existence.
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Lesedi Modise, Mafikeng, North West, 2010
DW: That’s a beautiful introduction to the project, which offers a wonderful way of reading bodies and faces and new identities. When’s the first time you remember seeing a photograph, or knowing a photograph, of a black lesbian in South Africa?
ZM: The early images I remember are black-and-white images of apartheid-era South Africa. Most were captured by male photographers like Ernest Cole or Alf Kumalo. Early images I saw depicted black women crying, images of pain, of struggle. Before black lesbian imagery clouded my mind, the first images I remember are of domestic workers, which were captured mainly by men. I looked at the work of David Goldblatt, who I regard as one of the forefathers of photography in South Africa, and the work of Jürgen Schadeberg. Those are some of the male photographers who captured apartheid South Africa.
I was born at the height of apartheid. I learned about South African women photographers very, very late. A friend gave me a book called Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers (1993), which was produced in America. I liked that book very much.
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Tumi Nkopane, KwaThema, Springs, Johannesburg, 2010
DW: Viewfinders was written by the photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.
ZM: Yes, her book changed my life in so many ways. I just thought to myself that photography has to become a lifetime thing in which I deal with my own issues, my own personal issues. I quoted Joan E. Biren (JEB), an American photographer, in my thesis. Her work related to what I wanted to achieve, and it still means so much to me in ways that you won’t believe. You look at Biren’s images and you think that someone has done what I’m trying to capture now, except I’m doing it from a South African point of view.
I understood the South African struggle of being forcefully removed from your own space, a space you thought belonged to you, where women were regarded as working machines. My mom was a domestic worker and the images of domestic workers, and the images of women crying, struggling, with children on their backs, those became my daily consumption.
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Teekay Khumalo, BB Section, Umlazi, Durban, 2012
DW: Did you start off by photographing your mother, early on?
ZM: I photographed my mom very, very late, around the time she started getting ill. It’s often very difficult for us to confront our own issues. I mention in my film Difficult Love (2010) that it’s a pity we don’t tend to look at ourselves and our immediate spaces and how the outside world becomes familiar and easier for us to deal with than our own personal issues. She had cancer of the liver, and she passed on in 2009. But I do have images that I took of her.
ZM: She was always quite supportive of what I was trying to achieve, and I was out to my mom. I delayed the whole process of photographing her and missed her as a beautiful young woman. Looking at our family album, of images that were either dated, without the photographer’s name, or that had some strange names at the back, you think, Who has taken those images? What was their intention? Why are they not captured in this and that way?
The photograph that I eventually took later was of her wearing a church uniform. She was sick but allowed me to take that particular photograph. But I regret very much not having photographed her in her coffin. She looked so beautiful. But that meant negotiating with my family members, who didn’t understand the importance of documentation, so I let go of that photograph. In my imagination, I have this beautiful woman who did not look sick in her coffin.
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Zukiswa Gaca, Grand Parade, Cape Town, 2011, Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
DW: Your photography has been described as work that “mourns and celebrates.” What do you think about such labeling?
ZM: It depends on the context. I’m reclaiming photography as a black female being. I’m calling myself a visual activist, whether I am included in a show or not, whether I am published or not. That’s my stance as a person, before anything else, before my sexuality and gender, because photography doesn’t have a gender.
Ernest Cole, for instance, captured the men in the mines. The mineworkers were humiliated to nothing, captured naked, discounted to nothing, nameless. He showed an unjust system that dehumanized workers. All we see, all we remember, are those black men and their bodies facing the wall. That was visual activism, but at that time people did not regard it as anything of that sort, even if people at that time were killed and forcibly removed. Today, lesbians in South Africa are brutally murdered. “Curative rape” is used on us. That forces me to redefine what visual activism is. If I were to reduce myself to the label “visual artist,” it would mean that what I’m doing is just for play, that our identities, as black female beings who are queer or are lesbian, is just art. Art needs to be political—or let me say that my art is political. It’s not for show. It’s not for play.
A mythical figure in the story of Japanese photography, Takuma Nakahira is a founder of Provoke (Purovoku), the short-lived experimental magazine that featured photographers like Daido Moriyama working in the are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) style of the late 1960s. His extensive writings explore photography’s capacity to probe the shape-shifting contours of postwar Japanese society. Nakahira destroyed his own negatives in 1973, and he suffered a traumatic loss of memory in 1977, events that have contributed to his relative obscurity outside of Japan. In the Summer 2015 issue of Aperture magazine, “Tokyo,” which will be available next month, we offer two perspectives on this vital figure: scholar Franz Prichard introduces Nakahira as a photographer and writer; and curator Matthew S. Witkovksy, who is currently planning a major exhibition on Provoke-era photography, unpacks Nakahira’s landmark photo-installation Circulation, staged at the 1971 Paris Biennale. Here, we feature an excerpt from Witkovsky’s article.
On the afternoon of September 28, 1971, when Japanese critic and photographer Takuma Nakahira set foot (several days late) in the seventh Paris Biennale, he felt nothing so much as “hollowness” and “despair.” Reporting these sensations for the Japanese weekly Asahi Journal that December, Nakahira explained his dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary art and, indeed, with his own activities as a creator and commentator on art. The laudable artworks on view mostly attacked a social system from which their makers pretended to keep some distance; Nakahira observed that, in fact, this art could only be the very face of such a system, which created a sort of play area for artists to vent futile opposition to the forces of capital flow and authoritarian control. Those forces had a vested interest in shoring up authorial ego when, in fact, it was the art goods and their exchange value that really mattered: individuality was a commodity construct. Yet his own contribution to the Paris Biennale, which he described at length for Asahi Journal and again for the photography magazine Asahi Camera the following February, allowed him guarded hope that art and art criticism could still have a purpose in the world. What was it about Circulation: Date, Place, Events, Nakahira’s piece for the 1971 Biennale, that gave grounds for optimism?
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Takuma Nakahira, who got his start in photography and criticism only around 1965, had by the end of that decade already become one of the most influential figures in contemporary culture in Japan. Nakahira’s incisive writing cut apart standing views in literature, film, politics, and especially photography, and he published both articles and photographs at a feverish rate. He wanted a relation between these two activities that could come closer than complementarity— a joint force of action, perhaps. The intended effect of that joint action might be “illumination,” to quote a word favored by prewar German critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, whose essays were first anthologized in English as well as in Japanese in the late 1960s: searing, flashbulb-like insights afforded by a photograph or fragmentary phrases. Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought—the short-lived photography journal that Nakahira helped to found, which blazed its trail across the Tokyo cultural scene in those years—took its name from such intertwined desires. Writing and photography should illuminate the world, explosively, and they should set each other ablaze as well. Nakahira’s epochal photobook, For a Language to Come (1970), pushed even more insistently at an overhaul of word-image relations. Yet Nakahira remained dissatisfied and, worse, fatigued by his efforts to develop a productive analysis of contemporary culture.
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“Has Photography Been Able to Provoke Language?” Nakahira asked in March 1970, around eight months before his book appeared. “Only through human use can a language be given life,” he asserted, for without a subjective viewpoint, language exists as mere symbols and generalities. But to shake a language awake, to deploy it, is also to risk damaging one’s psyche: “This kind of ‘exploding language’ is a language that has been fiercely lived here and now by a single person.” Just such “fiercely lived” insights were what Nakahira sought to produce and circulate, operating calculatedly on the verge of madness. (Prichard has translated that essay and others in the recent reprint of For a Language to Come, as well as in Circulation: Date, Place, Events; issued by the Tokyo house Osiris, both books also have keenly written afterwords by cultural critic Akihito Yasumi.)
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In the view of many who have encountered it then or since, For a Language to Come eminently fulfilled Nakahira’s hope for pictures that would give concrete meaning to words while threatening language overall as a system of convention and control. The word tree is general, but a photograph of any tree will be specific, Nakahira argued, with catlike stealth, before pouncing on the surprise conclusion: that close comparison of a single tree in image and word “causes the concept and meaning of tree to disintegrate.” How? Through sentences that leap and dart, and pictures that careen between heavy grays and blinding whites; through sequences of haunting images that overtake the reader, as if the setting for Nakahira’s photographs—the city of Tokyo—were a mental space in which one staggered from desire to trauma, a solitary ego shattered by passion and rage.
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The effort of making For a Language to Come left Nakahira spent and temporarily uninterested in further photographic projects. One year later, the commissioner for Japanese entries in the Paris Biennale, fellow Provoke veteran Takahiko Okada, convinced him to travel there only after much debate, “at least to do some sightseeing,” as Nakahira disarmingly recalled upon his return. Yet the very fact of Nakahira’s repeated and extensive commentary on his Paris piece suggests the sense of renewal it brought him. Circulation was not only the title of this piece but also its ambition and modus operandi. More literally than did For a Language to Come, the fleeting work raced with an illuminating flash of brilliance through the early 1970s art scene.
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Circulation was, in essence, a performance piece in which photographs were the engine of the performance rather than a record of it. This quality is the greatest guarantor of the work’s uniqueness in photographic terms, but there are other reasons to reassess its meanings today. (New prints from the original negatives were shown in New York in 2012 and feature currently in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.) Rather than send existing pictures to Paris, Nakahira wished to create something “live” during the run of the exhibition. He would hang only pictures taken and printed that very day, making a photo-diary of his Parisian experiences that would cover his Biennale wall in stages. By circulation Nakahira meant his own movements around Paris, the movement of his pictures from darkroom to display, and the perambulation past his evolving piece by visitors to the Biennale, whom Nakahira photographed for this installation as well.
The prints themselves would be “mere remnants” of these circulatory patterns. Nakahira’s description of his procedure, from the February 1972 article in Asahi Camera, suggests a determined resistance to fixity: “To put it concretely, I set myself to photograph, develop, and exhibit nothing but the Paris that I was living and experiencing. My project … was born from this motivation. Every day I would go out into the streets of Paris from my hotel. I would watch television, read newspapers and magazines, watch the people passing by, look at other artists’ works at the Biennale venue, and watch the people there looking at these works. I would capture all of these things on film, develop them the same day, make enlargements, and put them up for display that evening, often with the photographic prints still wet from the washing process.”
Growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier saw firsthand the economic and environmental decline and racism that affected her industrial hometown, subjects she explores through a personal documentary approach. For twelve years, she photographed her mother, grandmother, and herself in the series of deeply evocative images contained in her book The Notion of Family, published by Aperture in 2014. Also a lecturer and professor, Frazier is among the most compelling new voices working within and expanding the tradition of documentary photography today. For Aperture‘s Summer 2015 issue, the editors asked Frazier to contribute to the magazine’s regular Curriculum column, where photographers discuss readings and works of art that have informed their thinking. On May 14, Aperture’s gallery in New York City will open an exhibition of Frazier’s, culled from The Notion of Family, which just received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. This article also appears in Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.
Gordon Parks’s memoir taught me the best reason to pick up a camera: “My deepest instincts told me that I would not perish. Poverty and bigotry would still be around, but at last I could fight them on even terms.” It is a story of strength, courage, honor—a will to survive and make a mark on history. His ability to express his disdain for poverty, racism, and discrimination in America through eloquent, beautiful, and dignified photographs is timeless. Any student struggling to understand why some photographers document humanity will gain insight from this autobiography.
I’ve been fascinated by literature’s freedom to render the complexities of dark childhood memories and abject realities. Kincaid’s fictions, semiautobiographies, and multiple points of view are intensely rich and unapologetically evocative. Her ability to take on themes of patriarchal oppression, colonialism, race, gender, loss, adolescence, and ambivalence between mothers and daughters inspires me. Any reader who wants descriptions of familial relationships or a sense of human relationships to homeland, economy, and education could certainly glean universal themes from Kincaid.
My understanding of how to create atmosphere, mood, and narrative largely comes from my love of film and cinema—from Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Charles Burnett to Wong Kar-wai. I love showing my students the relationship between these filmmakers’ visual language and that of classic photographers, like Eugène Atget, August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Parks. With its soundtrack and lyrical visual language, Killer of Sheep is the ultimate masterpiece. Set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, a portrait of American life is rendered as the protagonist Stan struggles with social class and disillusionment while working long hours at a slaughterhouse; the stress to generate financial stability strains relationships with his wife and close friends. The film is an incredible depiction of how we negotiate intimacy and how we are restricted by landscapes and labor.
Jason Moran, “Artists Ought to Be Writing,” from the album Artist in Residence, 2006
Sometimes when I’m editing in the studio, I play music by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. I was brought deeper into his music when I heard artist Adrian Piper’s voice in his song “Artists Ought to Be Writing.” While writing the text to accompany my photographs in my first book, I followed Piper’s instructions: “Artists ought to be writing about what they do and what kinds of procedures they go through to realize a work. . . . If artists’ intentions and ideas were more accessible to the general public, I think it might break down some of the barriers of misunderstanding between the art world and artists and the general public.”
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Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955
DeCarava and Hughes’s collaboration is a perfect example of how history can be reclaimed and redirected through storytelling and imagination. Hughes’s words take us through the eyes of a fictitious grandmother to reveal a representation and memory of Harlem that is at odds with the unloved depictions reported by mainstream media in the 1950s. Hughes’s last book, Black Misery (1969), is seldom discussed or quoted, but this line resonates with my work: “Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.”
New Museum survey, Emory Douglas: Black Panther, 2009
Though I speak primarily through photography, I am not limited to it. Occasionally, I work in video and performance. When I look at the artwork, illustrations, prints, and roles of Emory Douglas as a revolutionary artist and minister of culture for his community, I am reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s The Popular and the Realistic (1938): “There is only one ally against growing barbarism—the people, who suffer so greatly from it. It is only from them that one can expect anything. . . . .Anyone who is not a victim of formalistic prejudices knows that the truth can be suppressed in many ways and must be expressed in many ways.”
August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, 1990
I watch this play to understand the great migration from the South, self-worth, and how to put my cultural legacy to use creatively.
This is the film that helped guide me into my collaborations with my mother. Full of compassion and without judgment, this brilliant documentary takes cinema verité and psychological space to another dimension. Shot over a six-week period of time, the Maysles brothers’ encounters with Edie and Edith Beale are not shown in chronological order. This destabilizes the viewer’s sense of time and heightens the complexity of the Beales’ relationship. The passage of time is indicated through a gradual collapse of a dilapidated wall; at the beginning it’s a hole in the plaster, toward the middle the hole expands, and by the end it falls completely as a raccoon crawls out. This is a great example of how time can be used as metaphor and to build tension in a set of relationships.
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1844. Courtesy Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York
To what degree is photography dependent on chance? If photography is a chance operation, are the intentions of the photographer undermined? Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard, and a regular contributor to Aperture magazine, tackles these and other questions in his new book, Photography and the Art of Chance (Harvard, 2015). Here he speaks with Samuel Ewing, a graduate student in art history at Harvard, about chance in relation to the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, John Baldessari, and others, as well as on how chance itself led him to write a book on the subject. This article also appears in Issue 7 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.
Samuel Ewing: You raise the point in the introduction that chance and its history have remained neglected issues within most photographic scholarship. I understand that a desire to fill in and understand these blind spots drives research, but it so often happens that chance, luck, or serendipity play a major role in even locating the blind spots to begin with. How did you initially “chance upon” this subject?
Robin Kelsey: Back in 2000, I was finishing up my dissertation on the survey photography of Timothy O’Sullivan and wrestling with how the photographs related to other survey modes of grasping the American West graphically—topographic sketching or cartography or verbal description. I thought Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844) might help, because Talbot had to locate his newly invented photographic process in relationship to other modes of representing things. As often happens with great texts or works of art, however, I went looking for one thing and found another. As I read Talbot, it occurred to me that he was struggling brilliantly with an issue to which I had never given much thought, namely, the role of chance in making photographs. Is stumbling on a pleasing arrangement in the world the same as composing one from the imagination? Do the unintended details of a photograph speak on their own behalf? These questions troubled Talbot and, as I later discovered, some other great practitioners as well. So even before I had finished my first book-length project, the second had begun.
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William Henry Fox Talbot, Loch Katrine, 1844. Courtesy Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York
SE: The principal photographers in the book—William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari—all have a rather substantial amount of scholarship already dedicated to them. Do you think your argument that chance plays a constitutive and often ambivalent role in photography would change had you focused on lesser-known subjects?
RK: What binds the figures featured in the book is their self-conscious grappling with the relationship of photography to art. For each of them, this grappling required addressing the troublesome role of chance in photography, and each addressed this role in terms responsive to his or her day and circumstances. When Cameron practiced, Victorians were very concerned that modern markets were making investment akin to gambling, and she treated photography as a kind of aesthetic speculation. Stieglitz was more interested in the spontaneous accidental forms of vapors and clouds and scenes on the urban street.
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Anthony Weston Dimock, “I Took My Camera Shot from a Distance of Forty Feet,” 1887, from Wall Street and the Wilds. Courtesy Widener Library, Harvard University
SE:Since you mentioned Stieglitz, maybe we can talk about his image taken during the winter of 1892–93, Impression, which I assume to be one you consider really good since you write about it at length. The scene it depicts seems resolutely foreign today—a boy feeding wood into an asphalt paver’s stove—and yet you make the case that the image is redolent with “the alchemy of modern life.”
RK: It’s a great photograph, at least in my view. With Winter, Fifth Avenue (1893) and The Terminal (1893) receiving so much attention over the years, it puzzles me that Stieglitz’s grittier street photographs from that same winter have received so little. To understand the modernism of these pictures you have to remember that rustic labor was a favorite subject of pictorialists at the time. Haying, washing by the stream, that sort of thing. Often taken in a misty setting to give the picture a poetic feeling. Stieglitz knew that such rustic scenes just couldn’t be done in America the way they were done in Europe. So he turned his camera on urban labor, substituting the smoke and steam of machines for the vapors of brooks and fens. Asphalt paving was a perfect subject, because the bicycle craze was underway, and smoother roads were all the rage. With Stieglitz using a new hand-held camera, the picture was all about mobility and change. The result was a radically new pictorialism, one more open to spontaneity and chance.
Experiencing these modern dimensions of the picture today requires bringing all this to mind. It also requires remembering that Impression was primarily shown in the 1890s as a projected lantern slide. Although I have looked long and avidly at the slide of Impression in the George Eastman House on a light table, where it looks much more radiant and atmospheric than it does when reproduced on a page, I have never seen it projected. So, like everyone else, I must use my imagination!
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Julia Margaret Cameron, Vivien and Merlin (from Idylls of the King), 1874. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University
SE: You use the word glitch to describe the imperfections found in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs. I associate glitch more often with computers and digital images—corrupted jpg files, for example—than with the wet photographic chemistry used by Cameron. Were you thinking at all about contemporary digital chance while writing about these earlier figures?
RK: In a sense, yes. Glitch is, as you say, associated with electronics and seems to date from the 1960s. Using it in the context of Cameron was a conscious anachronism. I wanted a word that could grab the diverse and unpredictable process-based irregularities in her work—irregularities of focus, of emulsion application, of printing. What I liked about glitch was its suggestion of a systemic irregularity with a mysterious or autonomous origin. Words such as error or defect or mistake just didn’t do the trick. The ambiguity about origin—that is, whether Cameron was simply technically deficient or whether she cultivated the spontaneous flaw—is crucial to the power of her work. Her photography aims for ideals, while insisting that they will never be reached. A quintessential Victorian contradiction! Because what Cameron was fighting was a notion that photography was too mechanical to be an art, a word associated with mechanical breakdown seemed appropriate.
SE: It seems that mechanical breakdowns, though, pose less of a problem when camera technologies become more commercialized, regularized, and refined, especially when your story progresses into the twentieth century.
RK: That’s right. Cameron portrayed herself as an experimentalist, reinventing the medium in a messy, makeshift fashion. By the end of the nineteenth century, after Kodak has arrived, the game changes. Much of the role of chance migrates from the processing phase to the moment of exposure. That moment was always prone to chance—in the long exposures of early photography, a dog might wander in a street scene, or a young portrait subject might sneeze and blur the image. But with fast shutters and films, the so-called instantaneous photograph arrives, and chance takes on a new prominence in composition—to the point that even the word composition seems questionable. In the book, I spend some time discussing a remarkable example of that: Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, the beautiful appearance of which came as a complete surprise to him. Most every snap-shooter has experienced something similar. What happens when chance plays a key role in determining the specifics of pictures? Have we honestly dealt with the implications? Or do we like to imagine some kind of mysterious intentions or meaning behind the accidents of everyday form?
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Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance, (Harvard, 2015). The cover features an image by John Baldessari
SE: The final figure in your book, John Baldessari, seems to build chance directly into the production of his pictures, often in the form of a game—a new photographic gambit. In the book, you write: “Just as Talbot, Cameron, Stieglitz, and Sommer had done before him, Baldessari found aesthetic possibility in a new historical meaning of chance.” What kinds of historical meanings are found at the intersection of chance, games, and photography in the 1970s?
RK: The changing meaning of chance over the past two centuries is crucial to the book. During the Cold War, chance became a tool of research. Specialists in the military-industrial complex used randomization to grapple with systems too complex to reduce to precise calculation. Games and simulations enabled designers of hydrogen bombs and conflict analysts of the RAND Corporation to grapple with an increasingly complex world. Many schoolchildren of the period, including me, spent many hours playing educational games modeling urban development, global diplomacy, or what have you. This surge of interest in gaming and simulation around 1970 is a largely forgotten chapter of history.
What does this have to do with photography? In the case of Baldessari, lots. He was interested in photography as a system, and he used games and randomization (e.g., throwing balls up in the air) to model it. In doing so, he was evidently taking on not only the everyday practice of photography but what we might call the Cold War “knowledge system.” The more time I spend with his work from that period, the more brilliant I think it is.
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Nicholas Hughes, Untitled #16 (2012), from the series Aspects of Cosmological Indifferrence. Courtesy the Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York, and the Photographers’ Gallery, London
SE:What do you think are some of the contemporary meanings we ascribe to chance and photography?
RK: We are in a different era now. In some ways, the computational power of the digital age has fostered a return to determinism and a retreat of chance. Chaos theory, which is oddly named, posits that many things that seem random are actually determined by causal chains that are sensitive to initial conditions. In photography, we now have such a profusion of images that chance no longer seems to offer much of a pathway to the new. We have so many easy ways to digitally alter our images that chance seems to have given way almost wholly to the “chance effect.” But I wouldn’t dig the grave of chance and photography just yet. As I note in the conclusion, there are today still practitioners, such as Nicholas Hughes, doing interesting work that combines them.
The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #219, Summer 2015. Subscribe here to read it first, in print or online.
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Takashi Homma, Tokyo, 2015
Tokyo conjures a distinctive, if familiar, image: hyper-modern and kaleidoscopic, a mutating urbanscape that is more Blade Runner than picturesque capital. Like any iconic city, Tokyo also exists in our mind’s eye as an idea. But Noi Sawaragi, one of Japan’s most influential art critics, speaking of the capital in these pages, punctures the idea that this ever-changing place can be neatly encapsulated. “Is Tokyo even a city at all?” he challenges, before reflecting on its diverse culture of image making. “There is very likely a connection between this lack of substance in Tokyo as a city and the scarcity of any single overarching theme or style that might define its photographic expression.”
That diversity of expression is felt across this issue, Aperture’s second to focus on photography through the lens of a global city. While interest in Japanese photography is always strong, a number of major exhibitions on the subject are now being staged internationally (or will be in the near future). Once again, it is a photo-zeitgeist. To create this issue we spent three weeks last December working in Tokyo with editor and publisher Ivan Vartanian, our consultant and guide. We met with photographers, curators, editors, booksellers, and historians to glean a sense of what people in Tokyo’s photography community were talking and thinking about, and what kinds of research and curatorial work were under way. The geography of the city is not simply depicted in these pages but is present as a central character in narratives of photography. As Vartanian commented in a conversation while we finalized the issue, “You might say that Tokyo infuses every body of work coming out of Japan.”
We have tried to characterize the photographic enterprise of the city by reflecting a range of work—some is explicitly connected to the city itself, other projects take us further afield, and a significant offering takes us into the past. We take a deep look at the work of Takuma Nakahira, the Provoke-era photographer and writer who is key to grasping Japanese postwar photography; we consider the role of the medium in Tokyo’s avant-garde scene that emerged amid the social turbulence of the 1960s; we revisit the mass-market, and at times lowbrow, glossy magazines that for decades were the platform for serious photographers. And then we turn to younger generations of image makers, such as newcomers Daisuke Yokota and Mayumi Hosokura, as well as midcareer figures like Rinko Kawauchi and Takashi Homma, both of whom display their evolving curiosity with their most recent projects—published here for the first time—which, for each of them, mark a departure from earlier series. Homma, featured on our cover, now makes foreboding images of Tokyo’s urbanscape using a camera obscura.
Like the city itself, the photography world in Tokyo is a vast and shifting landscape. A single issue can only hope to scratch the surface. Our concurrent edition of The PhotoBook Review, also dedicated to photography from Japan, helps us expand the conversation, and addresses the key role that books play in Japanese photographic culture—including a look at the crop of publications made in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster. Additional articles will appear on Aperture.org and on the Aperture Photography App—among them an introduction to the thriving scene of alternative spaces that are helping to shape photography in Tokyo today, as well as other related stories and images from our archive. As writer Hideo Furukawa observes of Tokyo in this issue: “the city [is] formed…from an accumulation of tiny, fascinating details.”
Kikuji Kawada is one of Japan’s most celebrated postwar photographers. In 1959, Kawada—along with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno—founded the influential VIVO cooperative, which championed an expressive approach to documentary photography. He is perhaps best known for his now-iconic 1965 book The Map (or Chizu in Japanese), a disquieting exploration of the trauma of World War II. The book, designed by Kohei Sugiura, features images of stains burnt into the walls of Hiroshima’s A-Bomb Dome (now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial), as well as images related to the iconography of the American occupation. Kawada’s subsequent projects continued his interest in connecting the present with historical touchstones, and shift between realism and abstraction. Kawada, now eighty-two, continues to attract a wide international audience. His photographs were featured in the 2014 exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography, curated by Simon Baker, for London’s Tate Modern, and MACK Books has recently released a volume of The Last Cosmology, Kawada’s project on astrological phenomena. This past January, at Aperture’s request, Kawada met with Ryuichi Kaneko, an influential historian and a major collector of Japanese photography books, at Tokyo’s Photo Gallery International. They discussed the arc of Kawada’s six-decade-long engagement with photography for the Summer 2015 “Tokyo” issue of Aperture magazine. The following is an excerpt of their conversation that focuses on Kawada’s early career and the making of The Map. This excerpt also appears in Issue 8 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.
Ryuichi Kaneko: I’d like to start by asking what made you become a photographer. What inspired your first forays into photography as an art?
Kikuji Kawada: People ask me all the time what made me decide to be a photographer, but I have to say, I’ve always found it hard to put my finger on it. It was more like one thing led to another, really. I got my first camera in high school. The first time I used it, I got on my bike and rode way out into the mountains, out where no one was around, and ended up taking pictures of some dry grass I found out there. Thinking back now, I have no idea why I did that. I was born in a little town called Tsuchiura—really rural. You could get on your bike and end up in the mountains right away or wander around amid the rice fields.
RK: Most people think of a camera, first and foremost, as a tool for taking pictures of those closest to them. But your first instinct was to go out where there weren’t any people at all.
KK: I liked doing things in secret—maybe not the healthiest predilection, now that I think about it [laughs]. I was interested in playing with mechanical things in secret; it felt like I was accessing the heart of the mechanism that way, its essence. Discovering its secrets.
RK: In the 1950s and ’60s you published frequently in photography magazines; Shincho Weekly, Nippon Camera, and Photo Art—those magazines were your mainstay. Looking back at the photographs you published early on—Yaizu and Fishing Port at Yaizu (1957–59), or The Bar Abandoned by the Boom (1957), or even, to a certain extent, the Base photographs (1953)—did these first run in Shincho Weekly?
KK: Many photographs were taken for magazines but didn’t end up published. They were too strange. Shincho Weekly wanted less edgy themes for the spreads—though some were things I shot on my own time, when inspiration struck. I would stop to shoot something on the way back from an assignment, for example.
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Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965) showing the A-Bomb Dome.
RK: [By the late 1950s] you’d become a member of the postwar generation of photographers, and your work was getting a fair amount of attention. But there’s one series I really must ask you about from this time: when you went to Hiroshima. That was with Domon, right? [Ken Domon, the influential documentary photographer of this period.]
KK: It was. I’ve talked about this ad nauseam over the years, but long story short: I proposed a trip to Hiroshima to the editorial board of Shincho Weekly, a documentary shoot, and it was approved. I was excited at the prospect of going, but it was decided that it would have to be a special issue, and in that case it should be Domon who went. That was an order from the top. So, my hopes were dashed in an instant. The people who ended up going were Domon and [freelance journalist] Daizo Kusayanagi. They were charged with gathering evidence under the auspices of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. It became a huge special issue. And Domon ended up going back and forth to Hiroshima many times during the process of shooting what would become the book Hiroshima (1958). The editor at Shincho was paying for these trips out of his own pocket, and at one point he said to me that he knew I’d been the one to propose the project but that I’d never gotten a chance to go, so he was going to send me along as an assistant. So, it was as Domon’s assistant that I ended up going. That was my first trip to Hiroshima.
RK: How many times did you end up going with him?
KK: Just once. Domon liked the finer things. He wanted to stay at the very best place in town, so we ended up in a new hotel and would walk to the Peace Park and the A-Bomb Dome, which were nearby. We would go together, but then I’d slip away and walk around on my own. And that’s when I found them: the stains on the walls of the rooms beneath the dome that became the subject of the Stain series. I would just slip away, secretly, without a word to Domon.
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Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965) showing the Stain series .
RK: So, there were rooms underground, beneath the dome?
KK: When the place was destroyed, there were about thirty people—I think it was around eight in the morning or so, but at any rate, in the morning—these people had arrived for work and ended up vaporized. The place had a horrible atmosphere. Just looking at it was overwhelming. And you couldn’t see very well; there were no lights, no electricity. So, I left and gathered up a big camera and some bulbs and headed back.
RK: So, that’s how you first discovered that place?
KK: Yes. This was going to be my Hiroshima. I could take so many kinds of pictures there. This was no longer assistant’s work; I was preparing my own project. I wasn’t thinking about anything else.
RK: You said you brought back a big camera. Do you mean a 4 by 5? And lights to illuminate the rooms?
KK: It was a 4 by 5, yes. But I didn’t use lights; I shot in natural light. Back then, we could go in and out of the dome as we liked. In the Tate Modern book [Conflict, Time, Photography, 2014], there’s that famous photograph of Kiyoshi Kikkawa, who was called genbaku ichi-go [bomb victim number one]. He ran a souvenir stand right next to the dome.
RK: I’ve heard you talk before about discovering those “stains” beneath the dome, and when I think about how they may be all that was left of people who were vaporized in an instant, all the hair on my body stands on end. You hear about things like that: people explain what happened as carefully as they can—this happened, that happened, like that. But there’s no comparison to seeing it as one image. It has so much power.
KK: The hard part becomes how to organize that kind of material, how to convey its enormity.
RK: You published some of those photographs in Nippon Camera under the title The Map: Stain. That was August 1962. Was that their debut?
KK: I think so. After the Eyes of Ten exhibition (1957), there was another show, NON, at the Matsuya Ginza Gallery (1962). I showed many of the Stain pictures there—about ten pieces in all, I think. That was the first time I’d put together a fair amount of them as one exhibition. Eikoh Hosoe debuted the first of his Ordeal by Roses photographs there, too. We had a lot of people coming to that show including Yukio Mishima, of course, since he was Hosoe’s model. I overheard him asking, “What kind of ‘stains’ are these? Stains left by what?” I was a bit contrary back then, you know. I said, “That’s for you to imagine, sir” [laughs]. Though I did think you should be able to tell just by looking.
RK: When looking through The Map, the first thing that makes an impression is of course the A-Bomb Dome photographs—the Stain photos—and then the other images of what you might call “scars of war.” But there are other images, too, like the spiral lathe left for scrap in a factory or a wanted poster related to a heinous crime, or a bank of television screens—all sorts of images. So, history is brought into direct contact with the present.
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Pages from the maquette for The Map (1965)
KK: An image taken of the “present,” whenever that is, is so strong—vivid in hue, aspect, substance—because it’s a document. I seek even now to explore new forms for documentary to take. When you layer things in the way we’ve been discussing, the layers produce meaning, metaphors emerge as you go deeper into the juxtapositions that arise, and the ways of seeing the image multiply. Not because it’s a collage, because you have layers, like this [indicates the accordion shape of a camera bellows].
RK: I understand that when it came time to actually make the book, there were a lot of complications on the road from the dummy version to its final form. You were unable to put it out as you first envisioned it, in two volumes, and instead everything had to be layered physically into one volume.
KK: That was the plan proposed by our fantastic designer, Kohei Sugiura—to split The Map in two. On the one hand, there were the Stain photographs; they added up to a good proportion of the whole. Then there were the other photographs, the Hinomaru flag photograph, the monuments, the more symbolic stuff. We split these photographs into two volumes—half in one, half in the other—and we’d put them in one case. So, the viewer would have to take them out and look at one volume, then open the other. So, it was only in their heads that the whole “map” ever existed. It was so creative, this idea. But I thought it was too hard to understand. Someone buying the thing would have to realize that he has to look at one volume and then another just to figure out what’s going on. It’s too much trouble.
Anyway, to skip to the end of the story, it was decided that the thing was too big—it would be too expensive—so we had to make it smaller. To make it smaller, we decided it should fold out on every page—Kannon-style [referring to the Buddhist goddess of mercy], they call it, with the hinged doors. Sugiura asked how many pages we should make that way. I thought, if we go that way, we should go all the way. With a triptych, when you fold the sides over a central image, what’s hidden becomes a sacred icon. That’s the meaning of that design—exactly what the Japanese term means, like opening an altar to view an image of Kannon. So, we redesigned every page that way, and it took about a year or so to do it.
RK: The Map came out in 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, and it was talked about quite a bit. Though, I gather it didn’t sell that well?
KK: I was afraid it might be passed over entirely, so I took a copy to each publication that ran real criticism. I took the book physically to their offices, right to the writers. I remember one guy, Hiroshi Iwada, the poet. He wrote something in the newspaper Nihon Dokusho Shimbun. And then there was Tatsuhiko Shibusawa [a novelist and critic]; I got him to write something somewhere, too. So, word trickled out like that, and as far as critical opinion was concerned, people thought it was a pretty great thing.
RK: You called the work you did before The Map “symbolic documentary,” Ikko Narahara’s Human Land photographs were eventually called a “personal document,” and Eikoh Hosoe called Kamaitachi a “memory document.” Shomei Tomatsu never used the term, but in the end, it seemed to me that this generation of photographers considered all photography to be “documentary.”
KK: We had no strong consciousness of it. I mean, we never debated things in those terms, but I know what you’re saying. Now that I hear you say it, I can’t help but think, Yes, that’s exactly it!
Is the history of Japanese photography also a history of magazine publishing? In the new issue of Aperture magazine, Tokyo-based curator Ivan Vartanian offers a look through the pages of the popular technical and erotically minded magazines of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, revealing some the most significant photography produced during those decades. He writes, “In 1950, in the midst of Japan’s postwar economic recovery, the Ricohflex III premiered on the market. The world’s first mass-produced twin-lens reflex camera was met with phenomenal sales and catalyzed what would become a prolonged boom market for cameras. Magazines like Asahi Camera (1949–present) and Camera Mainichi (1954–85) emerged to educate this new demographic of photo-enthusiasts. While the bulk of content consisted of articles on technique, equipment reviews, and pictures submitted by amateur snappers, these magazines also published some of the most important photography of postwar Japan. Editorial stories by Shomei Tomatsu, Kishin Shinoyama, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, and Issei Suda may not have driven sales, but these photographers effectively challenged established ideas about the nature of the medium. Through their work, they argued that photography had the power to provoke thought and possibly exceed written language in its capacity to communicate.” Here we feature a selection of images from Asahi Camera , Camera Mainichi, and Shashin Jidai (1981-87), which is also discussed in the article. This article also appears in Issue 9 of the Aperture Photography App, a new biweekly publication from Aperture: click here to download the free app.
