CELEBRATING TWENTY YEARS OF COLLABORATION R O S E G A L L E R Y. N E T 3 1 0 . 2 6 4 .

8 4 4 0 L O S A N G E L E S
MACK

J Carrier
Stan Douglas
Roe Ethridge
Cesare Fabbri
Luigi Ghirri
Anne Golaz
Paul Graham
Gregory Halpern
Anthony Hernandez
&UDLJLH+RUVƓHOG
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Alessandro Laita
+ Chiaralice Rizzi
Kevin Lear
Torbjørn Rødland
Mark Ruwedel
Allan Sekula
Guillaume Simoneau
Miki Soejima
Clare Strand
Larry Sultan

mackbooks.co.uk © Gregory Halpern

 ACCEPTING
CONSIGNMENTS

Auction Nov 22 NEW Y O R K

Doyle Specialists will evaluate your

19th and 20th century Photography and
Photobooks for upcoming auctions. We invite
you to schedule a private appointment.

Edward Ripley-Duggan & Peter Costanzo

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Ansel Adams, Aspens, Northern New

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212- 427- 2730 DOYLE.COM

Fall 2016 Words
26 Listening for Eggleston
A profile of the pioneering artist
and his passion for music
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
52 Photographs & Phonographs
Two inventions that define
the modern experience
by Sara Knelman
68 The Producer:
Stan Douglas in Conversation
with Kwami Coleman
In atmospheric videos,
the Vancouver-based artist
riffs on disco and jazz
84 Midnight in Bamako
Remembering the legendary
Malick Sidibé, who captured the
rhythm of postindependence Mali
by A. Chab Touré
124 Wild Sync: Lucy Raven in
Conversation with Drew Sawyer
Exploring sound effects, animation,
and the future of 3D movies
Pictures
40 Michael Schmelling: Your Blues
Introduction by Kelefa Sanneh
60 Katsumi Watanabe’s Discology
Introduction by Kyoichi Tsuzuki
78 Total Records
Introduction by Vince Aletti
94 Newsha Tavakolian: Listen
Introduction by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
100 Vinca Petersen: No System
Introduction by Sheryl Garratt
110 Santu Mofokeng: Pedi Dancers
Introduction by Joshua Chuang
116 Noisy Pictures: A Sonic Sequence
Contributions by Simon Baker,
Martin Barnes, Geoffrey Batchen,
David Campany, Jimena Canales,
Noam M. Elcott, Virginia Heckert,
Greil Marcus, Stephen Pinson,
Brian Sholis, Matthew Witkovsky,
and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska

Front
9 Editors’ Note
11 Collectors: The Activists
Contributions by Alicia Garza,
Laura Hanna, Peter Staley,
and Micah White
14 Curriculum
by Pieter Hugo
17 Redux
Hinde Haest on Ed van der
Elsken’s De Jong & Van Dam
NV 1912–1962
19 Dispatches
Ismail Fayed on the Cairo Bats
23 On Portraits
Geoff Dyer on Roy DeCarava Opposite:
Darin Mickey, Vic, Platter
World, Garfield, NJ, 2014
Courtesy the artist

Back Front cover:

Anne Collier, Album
(For Whom The Bell Tolls),
132 Object Lessons 2016 (detail)
© the artist and courtesy
Jonna Kina’s Foley Objects, Anton Kern Gallery,
2013 New York

AP E RTU RE FA L L 2 0 1 6
CO N TE N TS
 The Magazine of Photography and Ideas

Editor
Michael Famighetti
Managing Editor
Brendan Wattenberg
Editorial Assistant
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Copy Editors
Clare Fentress, Donna Ghelerter
Production Director
Nicole Moulaison
Production Managers
Thomas Bollier, Bryan Krueger
Work Scholars
Giada De Agostinis, Melissa Welikson

Art Direction, Design & Typefaces

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AP E RTU RE FA L L 2 0 1 6
William Eggleston Untitled c.1970–74 dye-transfer print 20 x 16 in 50.8 x 40.6 cm ©Eggleston Artistic Trust

Cheim & Read

William Eggleston,
Untitled, ca. 1972
© Eggleston Artistic Trust

AP E RTU RE FA L L 2 0 1 6
 Sounds
While William Eggleston’s off-kilter photographic compositions
and revolutionary use of color have been discussed for decades,
for many fans his piano compositions will be a revelation. In this
issue investigating photography and sound, writer John Jeremiah
Sullivan recounts a recent visit to Memphis to meet with the
photographer, during which Eggleston serenaded Sullivan and
spoke about his passion for classical music (Bach in particular)
and his interest in audio recording. Considering that Eggleston
is an audiophile, and a denizen of an American music capital,
it isn’t surprising that music plays a frequent cameo in his images,
many of which have graced album covers. Compulsively abstract
and addictive, an Eggleston plays like a good hook.
A photograph of Eggleston’s from 1985 featuring a Leica
resting near a reel-to-reel encapsulates two means for registering
our perception of the world. “Of our five senses, we’ve only
worked out how to record two: sight and sound,” Sara Knelman
observes in these pages, tracing how the camera has continuously
chronicled the phonograph, from a young Edison proudly posing
with his new invention in 1878 to contemporary artists who
make vinyl a subject of their work. With the advent of digital
audio, the analog endures and LP covers, at twelve inches tall,
continue to tell their own history of photography. As Vince
Aletti, a disco writer turned photography critic, notes, a cover is
“sometimes more memorable than the music it helps to deliver.”
E D I TO RS ’ N OTE 9
But when the music stays with you, it’s indelible. Before turning
to photography and video installation, Stan Douglas moonlighted
as a DJ, a past that shapes his films and photographs reprising jazz
history, New York disco, and the golden era of Columbia Records.
“The recording mechanism, just like a photograph, captures
what we don’t intend,” Douglas notes in a conversation with
the musician and historian Kwami Coleman. “We hear sounds
we didn’t realize were there.”
Recorded music moves a crowd, creates a culture, defines
and, much like a photograph, freezes a moment. The great
Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, who died as we were working
on this issue, captured the vivacious nightlife of 1960s and ’70s
Bamako, when the French were gone but Western influences,
including James Brown 45s, remained. Katsumi Watanabe
traversed late-night Tokyo in the early 1980s and witnessed a
youth culture of misfits and outsiders dancing all night in the
seedy Shinjuku district. A decade later, Vinca Petersen documented
Europe’s transient rave culture and roving communal “sound
systems,” perhaps the last moment when it was truly possible
to go off the grid. More recently, Michael Schmelling turned his
lens on Chicago’s rich music scenes, from gritty basement punk
shows to thumping hip-hop clubs. Photography might be a silent
medium, but in recording the experience of sound, these images
turn up the volume. —The Editors
 William Mortensen, Selected Quatrains from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with Camera Projections,
first edition, signed, California, 1925. Sold April 2016 for $17,500.

Accepting Quality Consignments of

Photographs & Photobooks
Contact Daile Kaplan with Consignment Inquiries • dkaplan@swanngalleries.com

104 East 25th Street New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
Collectors
The Activists
On Recent Acquisitions
Jean-Paul Goude, Grace in Cage, Roseland, New York, 1978 © the artist
Alicia Garza
This photograph was my profile picture
on Facebook for quite a few months, during
a period when I went through a strange
obsession with Grace Jones. I discovered
the picture while browsing her images
on the Internet, and it really spoke to me.
This was in 2010, a particularly challenging
time—I felt overwhelmed, unfairly branded,
exposed, and vulnerable. I’d just become
executive director of an organization
I’d been with for several years; there was
some turbulence in my relationship; and
everything around me seemed unsure
and unstable. The intensity of the image
appealed to me because it captured what
I was feeling and likely projecting into
the world—a caged and wounded animal,
ready to strike at any gesture of violence
or kindness. Grace Jones has always
been brilliant in giving us these sharp
projections—hard lines, bold and
dramatic colors, edgy and uncomfortable,
androgynous, gorgeous, stunning.
Alicia Garza, a cocreator of Black Lives
Matter, is an organizer and writer
based in Oakland, California.
CO L L ECTO RS 1 1
The sun as seen from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, September 17, 2011
Courtesy NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams
Micah White
This picture comes to my mind every time
I’m asked about the origins of the Occupy
Wall Street movement. Here’s why.
In 1922, Alexander Chizhevsky,
a maverick Russian scientist, argued that
revolutions and social movements are
influenced by the eleven-year solar sunspot
cycle. He claimed that for the last two
thousand years, mass upheavals have
tended to occur during periods of peak
sunspot activity. Chizhevsky’s heterodox
theory of revolution contradicted Marxist
historical materialism and landed him in
a Stalinist gulag.
Now fast-forward to September 17,
2011—the first day of Occupy Wall Street.
In the very early morning a coronal mass
ejection hits earth, triggering spectacular
auroras. And while Occupiers establish
their Zuccotti Park encampment in Lower
Manhattan, the sun is erupting in an
abnormally high number of sunspots.
Coincidence?
I discovered this picture of the sun,
visibly covered in sunspots during Occupy’s
inaugural protest, in the archives of NASA’s
Solar Dynamics Observatory. Now it is
my Twitter header, and I keep a copy above
my desk.
Micah White is the author of
The End of Protest: A New Playbook
for Revolution (2016) and the cocreator
of Occupy Wall Street.

Arty Pomerantz, Bruce Dancis with Abbie Hoffman after a stunt at the New York Stock Exchange, 1967
© the artist and courtesy the New York Post
Peter Staley
At first, we only had the oral history to
inspire us. In 1989, I was organizing some
ACT UP activists to disrupt trading on
the floor of the New York Stock Exchange
to protest the high price of AZT, the first
drug approved to treat AIDS. We knew
that activists had done this only once
before, in 1967. Abbie Hoffman had led
some Yippies in a counterculture prank,
throwing dollar bills from the visitors’
gallery onto the trading floor below. We
drowned out the opening bell with marine
foghorns and threw fake hundred-dollar bills
that read “FUCK YOUR PROFITEERING”
as our homage to Hoffman. Finding this
photograph online years later completed
the circle. I know that joy well when all
of your planning pays off and your activism
succeeds. I too smiled as I was led out of
the exchange, and I pumped my fists as the
price of AZT was lowered three days later.
Peter Staley is a long-term AIDS and
gay rights activist, first as a member of
ACT UP New York, then as the founding
director of Treatment Action Group
(TAG).
AP E RTU RE 1 2
Laura Hanna, Untitled (Tijuana), 2007 Courtesy Hanna Archive
Laura Hanna
I was filming on-site in Tijuana when I took
this picture. Now it’s part of my archive.
One man stares ahead while the
other reads a gossip magazine, possibly
avoiding my gaze. Resting under their
makeshift shelter, they tell me that many
here are orphans.
Outside the frame: a man squats
along the hillside, his face buried in a
scavenged Marie Callender’s fettuccini
alfredo; a Caterpillar tractor buries waste
from a massive mountain; people scurry
at its base, collecting copper pulled from
wire (it’s in high demand); seagulls swarm.
Some here describe journeys made to the
United States to work construction. They
slept in canyons outside construction sites.
When their jobs were done, they were
deported.
The heat makes the stench unbearable.
Dust catches in clothing and irritates
throats. The taste in my mouth lingers.
Plastic bags are used for improvised toilets
and creative waste removal. There is no
clean water. I recall my desperate drive
across the border to fill many containers,
drawing water from a hose on a nicely
manicured lawn in San Diego. The housing
crash arrived the following year.
A friend once described his hometown
of Tijuana as a future city. Now, I wonder
how many more people find themselves
here, on the front line.
Laura Hanna is a filmmaker, media
activist, and political organizer.
She is a founder of Rolling Jubilee
and codirector of the Debt Collective,
an economic justice organization.
 THE HERMÈS FOUNDATION SUPPORTS

CHARLES
FRÉGER
Yôkaïnoshima

EXHIBITION
© Charles Fréger

JULY 4 - SEPTEMBER 25
FRANCE

WWW.FONDATIONDENTREPRISEHERMES.ORG
 Curriculum
A List of Favorite Anythings
by Pieter Hugo
His subjects are judges, men who train hyenas, Liberian Boy Scouts,
Ghanaian trash collectors, denizens of San Francisco’s Tenderloin
neighborhood, and himself. With unsparing detail, Pieter Hugo—who was
born in Johannesburg and graduated from high school in 1994, the year of
South Africa’s first democratic presidential election—has pushed photo-
journalism into the realm of trenchant social critique. Known for Nollywood
(2009), a glossy send-up of Nigeria’s film industry, his recent series, Kin,
published by Aperture in 2015, turns to communities close to home with a
steady, psychologically curious gaze. “I think it comes out of living in such
a strange and peculiar place as South Africa,” Hugo has said. “So much of it
is about trying to figure out where to situate yourself in your environment.”

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999 Skull Claire Denis,

I read this J. M. Coetzee novel when it came
out—in one sitting, at a girlfriend’s house in
Johannesburg—which was around the time
I had decided to become a photographer. The
internal logic of Disgrace is the same as how I think
a photograph should work: it doesn’t perpetuate
a revolutionary argument or function as propaganda.
The play between art and document that’s
found in many of Coetzee’s works shows his
autobiographical self serving as a fictitious device.
It is a very powerful space to work in. Of course,
it is hard to divorce my experience of Disgrace
from what was happening in South Africa at the
time I first read it. We were being fed the cheery
narrative about the “rainbow nation” and South
Africa’s successful transition to a postapartheid
state. Disgrace portrays the invisible, emotional
complexities of what it meant to live in South
Africa after 1994.
Ring
In October 2014, I went on a hiking and photography
expedition in Dolpo, a remote area in northwest
Nepal. A week into the month-long trip, a freak
snowstorm blew in and ripped my tent apart.
This same snowstorm killed a group of hikers
on the Annapurna Circuit. It was the hardest trip
I have ever done. I lost thirty-three pounds. I also
got great pictures. But an hour after getting back
to Cape Town, all of my cameras and materials
were stolen. I had no backups. The only remnant
of that trip is this stone, a piece of quartz I picked
up during the loneliest period of my hike. Now
it’s set in a ring, which I wear. The theft of my
equipment was a severe financial setback. But,
I suppose, a good exercise in Buddhism. To live
in South Africa you either have to be a sociopath
or have a really good sense of humor—or both.
Arianna Arcara and
Luca Santese, Found Photos
in Detroit, 2012
You don’t get to see many international exhibitions
in South Africa, so my relationship with photography
is primarily through books. Chris McCall, from
Pier 24, in San Francisco, recently sent me a copy
of Found Photos in Detroit. Usually I’m not
particularly interested in work that addresses
“the archive,” but in this instance medium
and message come together perfectly. I’ve been
looking at it over and over. It feels like witnessing
a train smash in slow motion. Simply haunting
and extremely sad.
I bought this skull of a European person in an Beau travail, 1999
antique store in Amsterdam. He is affectionately Claire Denis’s feature, adapted, very loosely,
known as Yorick, after the dead court jester from Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, is set in
whose skull is exhumed in Hamlet. He traveled Djibouti. It centers around a group of foreign
back to Cape Town in my camera bag, through legion soldiers and is a tale of unrequited love
a bunch of X-ray machines, with no one seeming and jealousy, as well as a meditation on masculine
to mind. I like the idea of bringing a skull back identity in crisis. Denis’s cinematic rendering
to Africa because normally the trade route for is lustful and the elliptical narrative disrupts
these objects is the other way around. The skeleton time. The dialogue is sparse and much of the
of Sarah Baartman, the so-called Hottentot film’s design is conveyed through movement and
Venus, ended up on display in a Paris museum— gesture. The final scene of Denis Lavant dancing
a sore point for many South Africans. Her remains alone in a nightclub is superlative. It is for me
were only returned in 2002. Yorick serves as a prop the pinnacle of French cinema. I regularly return
in my studio. In my 2007 book Messina/Musina, to this film for inspiration.
you’ll see a skull in a still life I photographed,
although that isn’t Yorick. My recent book,
Kin (2015), also includes still lifes, but without
skulls. I especially like the Dutch and Flemish
still-life tradition of vanitas paintings—the idea
of finding the ecstatic or the religious in everyday
objects.
Swans
I have a portrait of Michael Gira, the front man of
Swans, in my studio, taken by British photographer
Tara Darby. Whenever I feel pressure to temper
my impulses it’s good to have Gira’s face around
to remind me that beauty can come from the
extremes of the human experience. The band’s
last album, To Be Kind (2014), requires a full day
for me to get through. I have to stop after every
song and take a break. Gira describes their live
shows as “soul-uplifting and body-destroying.”
So confrontational and complex. And completely
committed.
Mike Brodie, A Period
of Juvenile Prosperity,
2006–9
I own a print by photographer Mike Brodie. Opposite, clockwise
I have been told it is of his girlfriend. She is from top left: Tara Darby,
lying on her back reading Flannery O’Connor. Michael Gira, 2007;
With her right hand, she is lifting her skirt to cover of J. M. Coetzee,
Disgrace, 1999; Pieter
reveal her menstrual-stained panties. I love
Hugo, Skull, 2013; stills
this portrait. My wife won’t let me hang it in our
from Beau travail, 1999;
home. We have young children, and she doesn’t Pieter Hugo, Ring, 2016;
feel that they are quite ready for this picture. Arianna Arcara and Luca
Or perhaps she isn’t quite ready to explain it Santese, from the book
to them. Or to their friends who come to visit. Found Photos in Detroit,
Or to the parents of the visitors. I love how the 2012; Mike Brodie, #1064,
politics of the picture have stepped out of the from the series A Period
frame and provoked a dialogue about what is of Juvenile Prosperity,
appropriate and what is not. 2006–9

AP E RTURE 14
 Clockwise from top left: Michael Gira: © the artist and courtesy The Wire; Skull: Courtesy the artist; Beau travail: New Yorker Films/Photofest © New Yorker Films; Ring: Courtesy the artist; Found Photos in Detroit: Courtesy Cesura Publish; A Period of Juvenile Prosperity:
© the artist and courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

CURRICULUM 1 5
 Reem, Doha Lebanon, 2010

REPRESENTING

Rania Matar
Picturagallery.com/RaniaMatar
Pulse Miami Dec 1-4

Redux
Rediscovered Books
and Writings
Ed van der Elsken’s factory girls
Hinde Haest
Ed van der Elsken was a master of subtle
paradoxes. His debut photo-novel,
Love on the Left Bank (1956), about the
nightly escapades of Parisian bohemians,
earned him instant fame—and status as
an enfant terrible of Dutch photography.
A lesser-known fact is that Love on the Left
Bank also stars his first wife, Ata Kandó,
with whom he lived in Sèvres at the
time. Van der Elsken published reportage
of their family life—including endearing
photographs of Kandó’s daughters’
ballet lessons—in a special Christmas
1954 edition of the graphic journal
Drukkersweekblad.
If it seems hard to reconcile the
rogue photographer with the family
man, it may be even more surprising
to imagine the leftist free spirit as a
commercial photographer. Celebrated
for the photobooks Bagara (1958), Jazz
(1959), and Sweet Life (1966), Van der
Elsken also produced a small number
of exquisite corporate publications for
insurance companies, dairy processers,
and even Philips, the Dutch electronics
giant. One such book, De Jong & Van
Dam NV 1912–1962, was commissioned by
the Dutch lace and stocking manufacturer
De Jong & Van Dam on the occasion of
its fiftieth anniversary.
In De Jong & Van Dam, reportage-
style photographs of factory workers
operating knitting machines cleverly
alternate with staged scenes of models
wearing historic fashions sourced for
the occasion from the costume museum
in The Hague. The associative sequencing
by designer Jan Bons is reminiscent
of Jurriaan Schrofer’s pioneering book
design for Love on the Left Bank. The
fact that Van der Elsken’s trademark
stream-of-consciousness style appears
in a company brochure is remarkable,
and symptomatic of the artistic freedom
Dutch photographers enjoyed with
their commercial clients in the 1950s
and 1960s. This is particularly apparent in
Van der Elsken’s anniversary publication
for a dairy condensation factory, published
shortly after De Jong & Van Dam,
which featured his travel photographs
alongside the requisite images of cows
and milkmen.
RE D UX 1 7
The same year De Jong & Van Dam
rolled off the press, the Stedelijk Museum
devoted an exhibition to Steendrukkerij
de Jong & Co., the firm responsible
for its printing. Under the auspices of
Pieter Brattinga, son of the firm’s director
and a design lecturer at Pratt Institute
in New York between 1960 and 1964,
Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co. profiled
itself as a high-quality, experimental
printer and a platform for young designers,
writers, and photographers. Both Paul
Huf and Ed van der Elsken had their first-
ever solo shows in the company’s canteen-
cum-gallery in 1964 and 1956, respectively.
Van der Elsken also photographed for
their Kwadraat-Bladen, a series of square-
shaped goodwill publications that
appeared between 1955 and 1974. (The 1970
Van der Elsken issue featured the alphabet
formed by naked bodies.)
De Jong & Van Dam is one of many
company photobooks commissioned by a
thriving Dutch textile industry, including
Ata Kandó’s Doek bij Boekelo (Cloth by
Boekelo, 1960), produced for a textile
bleaching company. The book preceded
her now ex-husband’s by two years and
included models posing in the factory
while wearing the company’s products.
Kandó’s take on textiles was distinctly
prophetic; the women in her book are no
longer presented as zealous seamstresses,
but as style-conscious consumers.
While the models in De Jong & Van Dam
represent the latter, Van der Elsken
contrasted frivolous eroticism with
sooty, black spreads of workers’ weathered
hands inspecting infinitely more delicate
lace samples.
The alternating of ordinary factory
workers and elegant mannequins makes
for an attractive yet charged dynamic
between work and pleasure. This uneasy
paradox becomes particularly apparent in
a spectacular spread of factory girls at their
stations. It’s only upon close inspection
that we realize one of the women in the
picture is not actually a worker sewing
stockings, but a model in a magazine
clipping that decorates a sewing machine.
Van der Elsken foregrounds the physical
labor that lies at the basis of the beauty
industry, giving new meaning to the
common Dutch expression Wie mooi
wil zijn moet pijn lijden—“One must suffer
to be beautiful.”
Spread from De Jong & Hinde Haest is a curator
Van Dam NV 1912–1962 at Huis Marseille,
© Estate of Ed van der Museum for Photography,
Elsken and courtesy Hans Bol in Amsterdam.
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Dispatches
Cairo
On the rooftops of Egypt’s capital, photographers
reclaim the urban landscape
Setting: A rooftop that looks like a
spacecraft. A glowing staircase with
orange light. A repository of clutter. A
jungle of satellite dishes. Figures appear.
Women dressed in black pose within
scenes of their own creation.
They are the Cairo Bats, a collective
of female artists who gather to create
staged photographs. For Act 1: The
Roof (2015), their recent project at Cairo’s
Contemporary Image Collective (CIC),
the Cairo Bats presented a sequence of
performative interventions that tackled the
multifaceted potential of urban structures.
Ismail Fayed
It’s not the first time that artists working
in Cairo chose the city and its landscape
as points of departure. Since the early
2000s, with the rise of independent art
spaces such as Townhouse Gallery and
CIC, the complex relationships that
humans have with the city have been a
recurring exhibition theme. (Established
in 2004, CIC is one of the few independent
platforms in Egypt that is entirely
dedicated to image-based practices.)
In a city of twenty-two million
people, where up to 40 percent of the
population live in some kind of informal
D I S PATCH E S 1 9
Cairo Bats, Act 1: The Roof
(Downtown), 2015
© Cairo Bats
housing, residents sometimes face no
other choice but to move to the rooftops.
As a result, the roof has emerged as
one of Cairo’s many urban typologies.
Driven by the postindependence euphoria
of industrialization and centralization,
and coupled with a lack of basic housing
and parallel urban planning, the city
morphed into organic, urban forms
ranging from squatter settlements to
repurposed rooftops. And, in that parallel
urban landscape, we encounter a unique
experience of urban life—an experience
central to the work of the Cairo Bats.

In Act 1: The Roof, some of the
collective’s images are purely scenographic,
using the existing elements of a space
to show its many visual possibilities.
The intense contrasts between light and
shadow, and multiple degrees of darkness,
almost reach a baroque chiaroscuro in
one work where spotlights are used to
pick out the presence of three figures
against the dark rooftop. Other images
show more complex interventions and
appropriations, as in the juxtaposition
of satellite dishes with domestic interiors
and household objects.
The presence of But the unusual presence of
the artists—either in person or in the
women in public symbolic gesture of clothing left behind—
highlights the absence of women in the
spaces has been one urban landscape of Cairo. It’s a radical
of the most contested or even dangerous intervention. The
presence of women in public spaces has
social phenomena been one of the most contested social
in Egypt in the past phenomena in Egypt in the past three
decades. Since independence in 1952,
three decades. the increased involvement and visibility
of women has been accompanied by a
serious backlash from the conservative
guardianship of a patriarchal system that
dominates the country’s social fabric.
The roof, being a liminal space somewhere
between private and public, is a critical
stage on which to dramatize these
tensions, and to consider how and where
women should be visible and active.
The imaginative possibilities of what
a rooftop can hold reach further in the
group’s images of vegetation. Cairo is
AP E RTURE 20
Cairo Bats, Act 1: The Roof
(Zamalek), 2015
© Cairo Bats
not known for its many green spaces,
and the dire lack of greenery is part of the
ecological makeup of the city’s landscape.
With close-up photographs of flowers,
shrubs, and leafy greens, the Cairo Bats
divert our imagination to the fantastical.
Act 1: The Roof becomes a visual
exploration of places fraught with
disorder, informality, organic forms,
and the marginalized of society. The play
on darkness and light, the ambiguous
choreography, and the bodies that situate
themselves in relationship to the city
itself, as well as to its history both past and
present, make for an artistic vision that
confronts Cairo, investigating possibilities
of engagement beyond the limits of chaos.
Ismail Fayed, a writer
and editor based in Cairo,
is the associate editor of
Arab Art in the Twentieth
Century: Primary
Documents, forthcoming
from the Museum of
Modern Art in 2017.
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 PHOTO G RA PHY
www.mica.edu/aperture

Regina DeLuise, Hammock, Bridport, Vermont, 2015.

MICA Photography Department Chair. MICA faculty member since 2000.
©Regina DeLuise/Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery, NYC

THE MIT PRESS

edited by Thierry Gervais

foreword by Paul Roth

Do we understand a photograph
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a newspaper rather than a book?
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[VMYHTLKVUHT\ZL\T^HSS&
The “Public” Life of Photographs
L_WSVYLZOV^[OL]HYPV\Z^H`Z
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THKLH]HPSHISL[V[OLW\ISPJ
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45 color illus., 45 b&w illus.

Copublished with Ryerson Image Centre, Ryerson University, Toronto
mitpress.mit.edu
 There are two well-known photographs
On Portraits by Roy DeCarava featuring drummer
Geoff Dyer Elvin Jones. As in any duet or diptych
each is subtly altered and enhanced by the
other. The first, taken in 1960, is primarily a
picture of John Coltrane. The saxophonist’s
familiarly impassive face is in profile,
clearly focused but perhaps not fixed quite
as sharply as the harsh, metallic intricacies
In this regular column, Dyer considers how a range of figures of the horn. (That saxophone might
even be the most sharply observed detail
have been photographed. Here, he reflects on Roy DeCarava’s in the whole of DeCarava’s repertoire.)
photographs of the jazz musician Elvin Jones. The title explains that the blurry shape
in the background is Elvin Jones, but if
we had only the blob of a head and the
hazy outline of a white shirt to go by … ?
Well, it could be anybody. It could be
Roy Haynes (who occasionally deputized
for Jones). It could almost be McCoy Tyner
bent over the piano, but something
about the hunch of the shoulders suggests
the limitless reserves of strength and
power that will be forever identified
with Jones. More to the point, who
else could it be? In terms of the kind
of identification demanded by police
or a passport, the picture has no validity
at all. In terms of the visual rhythm
of the composition there can be no
doubt. Put it like this: there are thousands
of Joneses; there is only one Elvin.
Perhaps it’s worth adding as well that
while each member of the classic quartet
was crucial, the band came to be dominated,
in its final phase, by duets between
Jones and Coltrane—one of several
signs that the quartet was exhausting
its potential.
Our idea of Jones as a drummer is
often defined by those epic battles with
Coltrane. We think of his amazing drive,
his ferocity, the rhythmic onslaught
and battery. A young pianist likened the
experience of soloing with Jones to “trying
to light a match inside a hurricane”—and
that was when he was in his midseventies!
This aspect of his playing demands
emphasis. But listening to him now,
especially to recordings from the time
of these photographs, it’s another, and
underestimated, part of his art that I am
drawn to: the ability to set up a rhythmically
complex but relaxed, midtempo groove
and maintain it, so to speak, till the end
of time. Listening to the original version
of “My Favorite Things” (recorded in
1960) or Africa/Brass (1961) or “Out of
This World” (1962), I sometimes wish—
heretically—that I could edit Coltrane
out of the mix, that the rhythm section
would just keep rolling along. In other
words, I’ve been Jonesing to remove the
Roy DeCarava, sharply focused foreground—saxophone—
Coltrane and Elvin, 1960
© The Estate of Roy
and retain the blurred background
DeCarava of rhythm.

O N P O RTRAI TS 23
 DeCarava captures Jones in a trance
of his own making, a trance that has
to be constantly maintained, that can
be surrendered to only if actively and
painstakingly sustained. While the sax
in the Coltrane picture is glinting sharply,
the metallic cymbal here in the left of the
frame is like a vague throb: a suggestion
of the swirl of forces from which the
cosmos emerged. But, again, don’t forget
the jacket and tie. Soon after Coltrane
opted, in the words of trumpeter Charles
Tolliver, “to go cosmic,” Jones called it
a day, leaving it to Rashied Ali to follow
the saxophonist into Interstellar Space.
In a way, then, Jones remained as rooted
to the actual and the real—to the smallest
details of time—as the photographer
who preserved this moment of earthly
transcendence. Trane, Jones, and the
other band members played “My Favorite
Things” many, many times. DeCarava’s
description of his own work has been
quoted many times, but it’s worth listening
to him again: “My pictures are immediate
and yet at the same time, they’re forever.
They present a moment so profoundly
a moment that it becomes an eternity.…
It’s like the pole vaulter who begins his run,
shoots up, then comes down. At the peak
there is no movement. He’s neither going
up nor going down. It is that moment I
wait for, when he comes into an equilibrium
with all the other life forces.… The
moment when all the forces fuse, when
all is in equilibrium, that’s the eternal …
that’s jazz … and that’s life.”

Roy DeCarava,
Elvin Jones, 1961
That is what we have in the other
© The Estate of Roy picture of Jones. Taken in 1961, it’s still
DeCarava
blurry and very dark but here we have
not just the man’s features but also the
essence of his art. The only bits of white
are the shirt and the gleam of sweat
on his face. In later years, when he
DeCarava captures was leading his own bands, Jones would
play in a T-shirt. Here, in 1961, he is
Jones in a trance still in the jazzman’s formal attire of
of his own making, blazer, shirt, and tie. There seems to
be a symbolic aptness to this. Jones
a trance that has to be revolutionized drumming but never
constantly maintained sought to burn his way free of time in the
style of what has been termed “dashiki
and painstakingly jazz”—a style ushered in by Trane
Geoff Dyer is the author
himself. The drums were played with
sustained. unprecedented complexity and rhythmic
of But Beautiful: A Book
About Jazz (1991). His
most recent book is White
freedom but, in Jones’s hands, were always Sands: Experiences from
tied to time. the Outside World (2016).

AP E RTURE 24
 William Eggleston
November - December 2016

The artist is exclusively represented David Zwirner

by David Zwirner, New York/London

Untitled from The Democratic Forest, ca. 1983-1986

537 West 20th Street
© Eggleston Artistic Trust New York, NY 10011
William Eggleston
at his Bösendorfer
piano, Memphis, 2016.
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz

Listening for
Eggleston
John Jeremiah Sullivan

I remember the first William Eggleston photograph I ever saw,

or the first that I knew was his, that it had been made by someone
called “William Eggleston”—his images have percolated up
into the culture so thoroughly, I guess it’s no longer possible
to be an American without experiencing a few of them, if only
as album covers (Big Star’s 1974 Radio City, most notably,
but there are many), and certainly for anyone with the smallest
interest in American art, it’s hard to avoid the name of a
man whose work most credit with having legitimized color
photography as an art form. Before Eggleston, there had been
a sharp divide between black-and-white and color: artists used
the former, tourists used the latter. After Eggleston, or with
him, everything was altered.
In 1998, when I was twenty-three, I didn’t know anything
about William Eggleston. I was a few months into my first
magazine job, with the Oxford American (then in Mississippi,
now in Arkansas). A woman named Maude (pronounced
“Maw-dee”) Schuyler Clay was helping us as a photography
consultant. She’s an excellent Southern photographer herself
and happens to be Eggleston’s cousin. She also said a very
perceptive thing about his work, namely that he started shooting
the South just at the moment it began to look more like other
places. Its banality, in other words, and not its exoticism,
called to him first.

WORDS 27
AP E RTU RE 28
 Maude came into the office one day. The magazine was doing
a story on the great blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell,
and we wanted to run a memorable image of him, and probably
the most memorable ever taken is one that Eggleston shot.
It shows McDowell at his own funeral, in his coffin, wearing
his spotless white Mason’s apron. Maude had been able, through
family connections, to borrow an original print of this picture.
I can see her carrying it through the offices. That scene in
Pulp Fiction where the guy has the briefcase that glows like it’s
full of magic gold? This was close to it. Every person in the office
crowded around her as she pulled back the black cover of the
portfolio she’d brought. The picture did, I think, literally give
off light. Not gold, but pink, the pale pink of the satin around
McDowell’s pinched, embalmed face. The whole corner of
the art room glowed with that particular pink. I barely knew
the brilliantly slashing music of Mississippi Fred McDowell
at the time—I’d heard his signature “Shake ’Em On Down”
and maybe one other song—but I was convinced that this
photograph of his dead body was one of the most remarkable
pictures my eyes had ever come up against. You knew a master
had taken it, the same way that if you were to see a Caravaggio
in a pawn shop one day without knowing who that painter
was, you’d know it didn’t belong there, or that it belonged
anywhere.
“Could you tell me about Fred McDowell’s funeral?”
I asked Eggleston in Memphis this past April. He sat in the
small, light-drenched atelier of his apartment, in a building
where he had lived once before, fifty years ago, on first coming
to the city with his new wife, a childhood friend named Rosa
Kate Dossett, a petite, pretty, dark-haired woman. They were
two young, well-to-do kids from the delta. The money had given
them freedom, and they brought the freedom with them to town.
Not needing to make good, they set out to create themselves.
“Plantation aristocracy,” said Eggleston, making a face like the
phrase smelled bad.
Bourbon and cigarettes. An endless chain of the latter, only
a certain portion of the former—he’s rationed. He is seventy-six.
He is debonair and still has the excellent, sculpted nose I knew
from photographs. You do not want to leave him alone with your
wife or girlfriend for very long.
Rosa had died barely nine months before that visit. She
remained his wife all those years; they never divorced. Their
domestic arrangements were unorthodox. In a nutshell, he
neither hid nor apologized for his mistresses. She accepted it,
or, as I believe the old-world vocabulary had it, accommodated.
He performed a quick reenactment of one of their fights. She:
ragingly angry about a girlfriend. He: “What do you want me
to do? Do you want a divorce?” She: “How dare you mention
that word around me!” (This stuff is a matter of record. When
I say he didn’t hide it, I mean he really didn’t hide it. Otherwise vibrant and saturated than anything he had seen applied to
I’d never cross the line.)
It may no longer be good feminism to say so, but I’ve known
plenty of women who would put up with a lot to be married
to someone as not boring as William Eggleston.
He put his hands together as if in a feeble kind of prayer.
“I miss her,” he said. He sort of whimpered, playfully but not.
I managed something barely above pleasantry: “There must
have been something strong between you.”
“I can’t believe I don’t see her walking into this room right a review of an early group show he participated in, said that
this minute!” he said.
That was him. Not abstraction. The thing.
Now he was back, after all those decades, in the hotel-like
building they had shared, but alone this time. Well, without Rosa,
but not alone. Students from a nearby art school were cycling in
and out, mostly keeping him company, and tending to be bright,
WORDS 29
attractive young women. The one who was there when we arrived
said, “He’s my best friend.”
It was the very beginning of evening—you could slip up
and call it late afternoon if not thinking—and Eggleston played
the piano as he talked. A huge, gorgeous black Bösendorfer
(“Chopin’s favorite,” he said). It took up most of the room.
On the wall in the other room was a portrait of Bach, the artist
Eggleston mentions more than any other. It was not a poster but
an oil painting, a Chinese copy of the 1740s Haussmann portrait
from Leipzig.
Eggleston wore a beautiful midnight-blue cotton suit and
a red bow tie, which was untied, not sloppily but deliberately,
even pointedly. The silk was crisp, and one side was pulled
down lower than the other. I wondered, Was it an affectation
(i.e., an idiosyncrasy)? Or was there a tradition I’d never heard
of, or run into, of wearing one’s bow tie this way, not at the end
of the night, when any person might be photographed dishabille,
but in daylight hours, boldly? I called the people at GQ—I used
to work for them, I still have friends there. I asked about it.
Was this a thing, or was it just Eggleston? Just Eggleston, right?
No, it was a thing. Jim Nelson, the editor of the magazine,
emailed back at once, and did not dishonor his office. “There is
indeed a tradition,” he wrote, “mostly embraced by flamboyant
Italian tycoons with zero fucks to give. I think of the late,
great Fiat billionaire Gianni Agnelli, who routinely wore his
wristwatches outside his sleeve, the blades of his ties longer in
the back, or hiking boots or loafers with suits.” Nelson described
the style as “rebellion within a frame.” The magazine’s in-house
style guru, Mark Anthony Green, answered too, and made a
simple but deep observation: the bow tie wasn’t really untied.
“It’s tied,” he said. “Just not in a bow.” I looked at a picture.
He was right; the two lengths were crossed over and made into a
half knot. Possible translation: I know the rules, but am confident
enough to break them. Alternate translation: whimsy.
Southerners who have money won’t usually talk about
money, unless they only recently got hold of it, is my experience.
And when I said something to Eggleston along the lines of, “You
were lucky,” he was quick to stop me. “I want to be clear about
something,” he said. “The artist … if the thing is in that person
to do, it will find a way out. Doesn’t matter where you plant it.”
What mattered was (marvelous phrase) “inner wanting.”
True and not, I thought. True to an extent. Maybe true.
There is, however, a way quite apart from all that in which
his wealth—his means, let us say—played a role in the evolution
of his art, and not socially but technically. Simply put, he could
afford to have his pictures printed well enough that the colors
even mattered. The story is often told of how he discovered
the dye-transfer process in a print shop, glimpsing commercial
advertisements and noticing that their colors were much more
his own color photographs. He had the thought, Why not use
that process for my own stuff ? His genius helped him ask the
question, but so did the fact that he could afford to handle the
answer. The result involved pictures such as his famous Red
Ceiling (1973), where the blood color of the print has an almost
troubling purity, as if it were still wet. Eggleston had solved
a problem that was recognized by photography critics at the
time. A piece that ran in the Milwaukee Sentinel in the late 1970s,
“color photography has long been regarded as throwaway art,
since, at least until recently, no color prints could be counted
on to last more than a few years without serious deterioration.”
It may go without saying that any rich freak who’d been
dabbling in color photography could have paid for the dye-transfer.
It was Eggleston’s eye that made the pictures undeniable.
Page 28: Views of
William Eggleston’s
apartment, Memphis,
2016. Clockwise from
top left: Stereo equipment
(Dynaco and Marantz
amplifiers); Closet door
with a Chinese copy
of Haussmann’s portrait
of J. S. Bach; Rare JBL
Paragon speaker system
(detail and full view);
Shelf with radio; Nagra
reel-to-reel recorder;
Air conditioner and tube
amplifiers; Front door.
Photographs by Stefan Ruiz
AP E RTURE 3 0
The color helped him realize and fix his vision. Critics noticed
that part early on too, not the color, that is, but the vision.
In fact it’s interesting to go back and read through the early
reviews of that first, notorious show at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1976. The story goes that the show was hated. And those
nasty reviews do exist, you can read them. But they came almost
exclusively from New York City. In New York you had enough
people who’d been arguing long enough about art photography
to have developed a sensibility about it, but also sensibility’s evil
twin, snobbishness. Because they thought they knew what an
art photograph was, they knew it wasn’t like Eggleston’s pictures.
“Terrible,” said the syndicated Norman Nadel at the New York
World-Telegram. “Boring,” said Hilton Kramer in the New
York Times.
But in the provinces? Or out west? Or even in other parts
of the state of New York? The reaction to the show, and to
Eggleston’s work in those years, was very different. Not knowing
that all art pictures should be in black-and-white, critics there
were not distracted by the shock of the color. They looked at the
pictures, and the pictures were what they are. Haunting, austere,
extraordinary. The Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New
York, blared the headline, “Color photography as art—Eggleston
paves way.” The Los Angeles Times said that Eggleston’s work
“welds color and meaning,” the Milwaukee Sentinel that he
had earned a place “in the traditions of the Ashcan School
painters and the great photographer Walker Evans,” the Age
in Melbourne, Australia (!) that he was “the Atget of the 1970s,”
and the Washington Post (my favorite, the purest) that his work
was “funny and ugly, sly and beautiful,” with “perspectives that
are either weird or heroic.”
I had promised my brother, a disc jockey and pop historian,
that I would ask Eggleston about Big Star, the band. Eggleston
Opposite:
Untitled, ca. 1971
This page:
Untitled, ca. 1971
I barely knew the music of Fred
McDowell at the time, but I was
convinced that this photograph
was one of the most remarkable
pictures my eyes had ever come
up against.
WORDS 3 1
said he had listened to their music a couple of times but
thought it “mostly trash.” (A generational thing, I figured,
maybe self-soothingly.) He did, however, like that first song
of Alex Chilton’s, the one about the letter.
“You mean ‘The Letter’?”
“Yes,” he said, “that one was very good.”
Eggleston had known Alex Chilton since Chilton was
a boy, having been a friend of the singer’s parents, Sidney
and Mary. Sidney was a jazz pianist. Their friendship revolved
around music. “I was so sad when I heard Alex had died,”
he said. “In the middle of mowing the lawn!”
I asked again about Fred McDowell’s funeral, in Como,
Mississippi. What did he remember about it?
“The funeral meant nothing to me,” he said, “apart from
that Fred was dead.”
“How did you get to know him?”
“Through my old friend Vernon Richards. We knocked on
his front door in Como, Mississippi. We were gonna do some
film of him. In the daytime, he worked at Stuckey’s pumping
gas.” They had shot some film. “It was lost,” Eggleston said.
Footage of McDowell playing his guitar. “Wandering,” Eggleston
remembered, “then, surges of melody.”
And what about the picture itself, the one I had seen?
How was it made?
“I wandered into the room where they had the coffin,”
he answered. “The proprietors came up. I said, ‘I just want
a picture of Fred, my friend.’”
He had said that the funeral meant nothing, but there is
at least one other picture from that day. It shows him watching
the service from the back of the church. He looks over a young
woman’s shoulder, and she looks back over her shoulder at him,
wondering what he’s doing, for any number of reasons. At the
This page: Opposite: front of the church we see the men in white gloves who will
Big Star, Radio City Untitled, ca. 1972
(Ardent Records, bear McDowell’s body to the grave. There’s a triangular pinging
1974); Alex Chilton, around of gazes inside the frame, of life and death.
Like Flies On Sherbert
(Peabody, 1979)
Eggleston became very passionate on the subject of Southern
Photographs by Baptists. “If I were a Nazi,” he said, “and I’m not, I’d run them
William Eggleston out.”
“Horror, terror, evil,” he said. “The most full-of-shit
institution I’ve ever imagined.”
Had he grown up going to a Baptist church?
“Until I was about six,” he said.
It was more what it did to people, I gathered, the withering
of horizons.
He played several of his piano pieces. They were
deconstructions of well-known songs, but changed enough to
become original compositions, if he had wanted to call them that.
But he called out the tunes. “This is ‘Stella by Starlight’,” he said.
“One of my mama’s favorite songs.” He is self-taught but plays
beautifully, dramatically. It was genuinely interesting to follow
him through the songs. I suppose if you get that good at one
art form, you’re not going to mess with another unless you can
do it fairly well; there’d be no joy in it. Like Michael Jordan’s golf
career. There is a high dilettantism of those who have nothing
to prove. Reportedly, the Chicago record label Secretly Canadian
was working on putting out an album of his songs, but there
were technical difficulties, and the project has been canceled.
Many pieces exist only on old floppy discs—Eggleston was
playing one of those 1980s keyboards that took floppy discs—
and some were unreadable. The same question of preservation
format that had given his photography a leap forward had worked
to erase the songs. It was the kind of thought that, if I had said
it out loud, he would have ignored, refused to answer other
than gnomically, answered sideways.
He asked me to pull down the new boxed set of his Democratic
Forest (2015). Ten volumes. Paging through it, I stopped at certain
pictures. He leaned forward and, with his finger, traced lines of
composition. Boxes and Xs. Forcing me to pay attention to the
original paying of attention. “Either everything works, or nothing
works,” he said about one picture, a shot of an aquamarine bus
pulling into a silvery station. “In this picture, everything works.”
I made the comment that Memphis had been his muse
for many decades. Was it still? Did the city still call to him?
“It is always changing,” he said. “Always.”
When it got late, I left and went looking for food. My wife
had joined us by then. I did leave my wife with him. He behaved,
mainly. He pulled the “How did he end up with you?” move,
a line I’m used to—my wife is a tall Cuban American woman
and quite bodacious. I am increasingly lumpen and huge
foreheaded. But whatever. I own it. Anyway I would have been
insulted if he hadn’t tried. And it meant that Mariana got to
witness the most beautiful moment of the evening. I call it
that without having seen it. I loved just hearing about it. He’d
played “As Time Goes By” for her, “but,” she said, “full of
darkness.” Right before he played it, he put his fingertips on
the keys and looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes and
whispered, “Courage.”
When we were leaving, he said, “Thank you for remembering
the darkness.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing

writer for The New York Times Magazine
and the southern editor of The Paris Review.

AP E RTURE 3 2
This page: Opposite:
Untitled, ca. 1972 Untitled, ca. 1974

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Untitled, ca. 1972

AP E RTU RE 3 6
 This page: Overleaf:
Untitled, ca. 1984 Untitled, ca. 1985;
Untitled, ca. 1973
Unless otherwise noted,
all photographs by William
Eggleston and © Eggleston
Artistic Trust. Special
thanks to ROSEGALLERY,
Santa Monica, and Cheim
& Read, New York

WORDS 3 7
YOUR
Michael Schmelling

BLUES
Kelefa Sanneh

AP E RTURE 40
Untitled (Tink), 2013

P I CTURE S 41
Michael Schmelling grew up in River Forest, a near suburb of Schmelling is not at all opposed to overthinking things,
Chicago. But his first concert, in 1985, was across the state line but he is opposed to overdetermining things. He shot the city’s
in Merrillville, Indiana, at the Holiday Star Theatre. His older sister hip-hop scene, which at the time was enjoying more critical and
took him to see Corey Hart, the Canadian heartthrob known commercial attention than perhaps any in the country. But he
for “Sunglasses at Night.” He was ten years old, and he enjoyed also shot basement shows that captured the essential stuckness
the frenzy. “It was screaming girls, and this girl clawed my of punk, which looks much the way it did a decade ago, or two,
arm with her nails,” he says. “It was fun.” He went back to the or three. And he included some fugitive images bearing a curious
Holiday Star not long afterward, to see Violent Femmes, the credit line: they were taken in the early 1990s when Schmelling
barbed Milwaukee postpunk band, having had his musical tastes was a suburban high-school kid, first learning how to use
permanently altered by a hip friend at summer camp who shared a camera.
a cassette. “I’d never heard a song with the word fuck in it before, Instead of developing a singular idea about music in
so it blew my mind,” he says. As a teenager, Schmelling took Chicago, Schmelling was looking for unexpected echoes and
in shows at the big arena in Rosemont, near O’Hare Airport: repetitions, across neighborhoods and across the decades.
Iron Maiden, the Grateful Dead, Prince, Metallica. At the Aragon As he worked, he thought about who he was when he was
Ballroom in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, he earned his going to those metal shows, who he is now, and who he might
metalhead bona fides watching Anthrax and Exodus and Celtic have become if he had never left his hometown. When he
Frost. These were the kinds of concerts most local kids saw, but photographed people, he sometimes thought of them as
this wasn’t, for the most part, local music. The people onstage alternative versions of himself—the project as a whole became
were just passing through town. a self-portrait, although a characteristically oblique one.
And so when, in 2013, the Museum of Contemporary “In some ways I feel like I didn’t completely finish it,” he says.
Photography asked Schmelling to spend a couple of years “Part of me wants to keep working.”
photographing Chicago music, he got a chance to do some
of the close-up exploring he had always wanted to do. When
he came to town, he stayed not with his parents in the suburbs
but at an apartment in a Columbia College dorm, in the South
Loop, downtown.
The assignment came in part because Schmelling had
already spent time photographing music in another city: in 2010,
he published Atlanta: Hip-Hop and the South, documenting
an extraordinarily productive and inventive musical community.
I have known Schmelling for years, and I wrote a few words for
that book, which means I got to watch him as he lurked, welcome
but unnoticed, in the corners of a claustrophobic teen dance
party that seemed to have been organized with no input from
the fire department or any other municipal authority. That book
was, in part, Schmelling’s response to the challenge posed by the
place itself: How do you picture an inclusive, ever mutating scene
in a decentralized city like Atlanta?
For Chicago, Schmelling knew he wanted to do something
different. The city is known for the blues, a tradition he
acknowledged only obliquely, by calling the project Your Blues
(2013–14). (He borrowed the title from the Vancouver singer
and songwriter known as Destroyer.) And although the city has
produced stars like Kanye West, Schmelling was more interested
in the stubbornness of homegrown musicians who stay home,
no matter how small or big the crowds get. For an essay, he
commissioned Tim Kinsella, leader of a string of strange and
often revelatory Chicago bands (Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, Owls,
Make Believe), who described the joys and sorrows of life as
a Chicago stalwart. “This same community, that’s so inspiring
at twenty-five, can get to be pretty depressing,” Kinsella wrote.
But he made it clear that he had never seriously considered
dropping out or moving on.

Kelefa Sanneh is a staff

Untitled (Ben), 2014 writer for The New Yorker.

P I CTU RE S 43
This page: Overleaf:
Untitled (Shoe), 2013 Untitled (Jeff Tweedy),
2004; Untitled (Drum),
Opposite: 2014
Untitled (Owl Bar), 2013

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Untitled (Chicago Poster #2),
2014

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 Untitled (Chicago Poster #13),
2014

P I CTU RE S 49
Opposite: This page:
Untitled (Shorty Lo), Untitled (Nathan), 2013
2013 All photographs from the
series Your Blues, 2013–14
Courtesy the artist

P I CTURE S 5 1
From Thomas Edison to Christian Marclay, two modes
of hearing images and visualizing sound.

Photographs &
Phonographs
Sara Knelman

François Kollar, Advertising
study for “Magic Phono,”
a photomontage portrait
of Marie Bell, 1930
© CNAC/MNAM/Dist.
RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, New York
Of our five senses, we’ve only worked out how to record two:
sight and sound. In the span of half a century, a pair of inventions
generated the first durable, reproducible impressions of visible
and audible perceptions. The reverberations of their original
names—photograph, phonograph—remind us of their parallel
ambitions: to write with light, to write with sound. As physical
objects, they’ve each taken efficient and elegant forms, most
often as flattened surfaces embedded with traces of things
outside of themselves. Yet their fundamental operations are
by definition inaccessible to the other. Sound is invisible, still
images silent. They are, to use musical metaphors, harmonious
and discordant at the same time. The friction in this—their
obvious resonances and blunt boundaries—has sparked a
fascination in photography with making the objects and operations
of recorded sound visible. What might be revealed in picturing
the mechanisms of another sense?
Having come first, photography was there to chronicle
the invention of the phonograph. In 1878, a year after shouting
the first recorded words, “Mary had a little lamb,” down a
mouthpiece, Thomas Edison made a trip to Washington, D.C.,
to present his phonograph—a cylinder covered with tinfoil that
registered the vibrations from sound—at the National Academy
of Sciences. The next day, Edison stopped off at Mathew Brady’s
studio to pose for the first mechanical renderings of the newest

WORDS 5 3
Thomas Edison with mechanical recording machine. One of the resulting pictures
his tinfoil phonograph,
Mathew Brady Studio, shows Edison looking boyish (he was only thirty-one!), but
Washington, D.C., serious (long exposure times made a smile difficult to hold),
April 18, 1878
Courtesy Library of
two fingers poised gingerly on the crank of his “speaking
Congress Prints and phonograph.” Less out of place than out of time, his invention
Photographs Division sits on a table beside him, appearing self-consciously cutting
edge amidst the ornate patterns of Brady’s staid studio scenery
and Edison’s checked suit. Part comical prop, part futuristic
beacon, it is remarkably at ease on the smooth surface of the
image, and predicts something of photography’s increasing
interest in the machinery of the modern world.
With the invention of the phonograph record in 1889
(more commonly called the gramophone record in Europe),
tinfoil impressions became embedded grooves, and by the
1920s, flat discs had entirely usurped the cylinder format. Round,
reflective, mechanically impressed, potentially kinetic: they
made perfect objects for modern photography. László Moholy-
Nagy and other avant-garde figures in the 1920s and 1930s took
records, like photographs, as tools and symbols for the creative
Records become commodities aptitudes of technologically driven media. Moholy-Nagy urged
artists to use them to produce rather than reproduce, to make
twice over, both as objects new sounds and images rather than faithful renderings of the
for collecting and as subjects familiar. Acting on this imperative, he made the record strange
by looking at it the way only a camera could: uncomfortably
for images commissioned to close, tightly cropped, dramatically lit. In his 1925 book, Malerei,
stir our desire for them. Photographie, Film (Painting, photography, film), the record’s
circularity and dynamism are echoed by the luminous orbs of
street lamps and headlight trails on the page opposite. Deprived
of depth and scale, we are left with equivocal etchings of modern
and mechanized surfaces—of the world, of the record, and of
the photograph.
The 1920s and 1930s also saw the increasing popularity
of radio and offset lithography, when music and records were
as central to mass culture as picture magazines and avant-garde
journals. In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin famously addressed
the complexity and potential of art’s new capacity to reach us
in every corner, observing that “technical reproduction can put
the copy of the original into situations which would be out of
reach for the original itself.” Benjamin continues:

Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder

halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph
record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received
in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production,
performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds
in the drawing room.

But what does it take for a record to resound in the drawing room,
for an image to reach an art lover’s wall? As art, document, and
advertisement, photography might be the original, the copy,
or the purveyor of copies in this exchange. And records certainly
become commodities twice over, both as objects for collecting and
as subjects for images commissioned to stir our desire for them.
Yet the line between art and commerce was not so clear
for the persistent and experimental photographers who took
up paid work for the recording industry. Are François Kollar’s
commissions, such as Advertising study for “Magic Phono,”
a photomontage portrait of Marie Bell (1930), any less arresting
for their commercial motivations? Is Florence Henri’s visual
excitement not just as palpable in her mirrored records for
Columbia as it is in her self-portraits? Even an anonymous press
image from 1948, showing (seemingly) the inside of a jukebox—
or a “coin-operated phonograph,” as it was sometimes called—
has been subtly and lovingly retouched to emphasize the edges

AP E RTU RE 5 4
Clockwise from top:
Spread from László
Moholy-Nagy, Malerei,
Photographie, Film
(Painting, photography, © Artists Rights Society,
film) (Munich: Albert New York/VG
Langen Verlag, 1925); Bild-Kunst, Bonn, and
Florence Henri, Columbia, courtesy the Museum of
1931; photographer Modern Art/Art Resource,
unknown, Interior NY; © Gallery Martini &
mechanism of a jukebox, Ronchetti, Genoa; Courtesy
1948 the author

WORDS 5 5
and curves of all its moving parts. Labeled only “phonographs,”
it offers a rare glimpse of technological lucidity amidst the drive
to obscure the increasingly complex inner workings of things.
The spirit of such images reflects photographers who had begun
to revel in, rather than fear, the significance of the medium’s
mechanization, who sought to explore its limits and work out
ways to exceed them, and who understood, as Benjamin did, the
contradictory and overlapping functions photography might hold.
Sight and sound were, of course, united in the formation
of a third medium: film. (In 1960, Smell-O-Vision briefly added a
third sensory dimension to the cinematic experience, a novelty
that seems to be enjoying a resurgence as cinemas struggle to
draw audiences.) But there’s a different fascination, if a certain
loneliness, in sensory isolation. On its own, still photography
could deliberately bump up against realms it couldn’t quite
enter, like movement and sound. The machines for playing
records often served as photographic subjects for some of these
experiments. Marcel Duchamp, for one, delighted in the optical
possibilities of the record player’s repetitive, spinning motion.
Rather than recording on the surfaces of records, he literally
resurfaced them to make his Rotoreliefs (1935), covering the
discs with joyous, psychedelic swirls of color; when “played,”
his records recast the turntable as a machine for visual, rather
than audible, pleasure. More recent work dwells on the effects of
AP E RTU RE 5 6
this kind of visualization, now often lost, that was once embedded
in the experience of listening. Motes of dust glint in the sunlight
in Moyra Davey’s Shure (2003), for example, and we can just
about feel the rhythmic movement of the arm as the disc spins
beneath it. In Chad Gerth’s series Phono (1999), sound and
movement come together in long exposures of moving records.
Named for the song we might know but can’t hear—the Beatles’
“A Day in the Life” or Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot”—they allow
each melody to play out before the camera, drawing attention
not to what we can see, but to the way information amasses over
time, and to the collusion of memory in looking and listening.
As records became a mainstay in popular culture, the image
was no longer of the record but on it. A cover, yes, but for many
an integral part of the whole object, as important as the music it
played. Anne Collier and Jason Evans look back to record covers
not as art objects in themselves, but as images central to the
formation of identity—individually and culturally. For her recent
series Women Crying (2016), Collier surveyed vintage record
covers for pictures of tearful women. Cropped and enlarged to
isolate the drama of falling teardrops, they edge on sentimental
nostalgia, which seems partly the point, and they wonder, with
great vulnerability, about gender, emotions, and the cathartic
power of music. Evans’s Self-Portrait as Sound System (2015) is
its counterpart, an exploration of the projection of manliness in
 Opposite: This page:
music culture that impressed itself on Evans as a boy. The piece Christian Marclay, Anne Collier, Album
shows two grids on each side of a monolith. One side, looking like Broken Record in 5 pieces, (For Whom The Bell Tolls),
1990 2016
a row of outsized, vintage stereo speakers, displays photograms
Courtesy the artist, © the artist and courtesy
of sixteen records, made with the flash of a digital camera; the Paula Cooper Gallery, Anton Kern Gallery,
other side shows images of their covers. Among the selections: and White Cube New York

the Smiths’ “This Charming Man,” David Bowie’s Hunky Dory,

Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine. We might take it as an invitation
to substitute our own playlists.
Evans’s photograms, the exact size and shape of records,
appear as visual ghosts of objects now missing or disembodied.
In 1967, the musician, comedian, writer, artist, and photographer
(how often do you get that combination?) Mason Williams
played up this confusion of image and object that photography On its own, still photography
can summon. Taking a no less iconic but obviously more
cumbersome object, Williams set about creating full-scale, could deliberately bump up against
photographic replicas of a Greyhound bus. To do it, he enlarged
a photograph (made originally by Max Yavno), silkscreened it
realms it couldn’t quite enter,
onto billboard stock in sixteen sections, reassembled each copy like movement and sound.
“quietly on television soundstages on Saturday mornings,” and
finally folded up and repackaged the entirety in a box, perhaps
not coincidentally about the size and shape of a compact record
player. Voilà, an “actual-size” bus, weighing about ten pounds,
that can either cover a wall over ten by thirty-six feet or, boxed,
sit easily on a small shelf. You may well be wondering what this

WORDS 5 7
 The Mason Williams
Phonograph Record
(Warner Bros. Records,
1968)
Photograph by Jerry White
© Rhino Entertainment
Company, a Warner Music
Group Company, and
courtesy Mason Williams

Moyra Davey, Shure, 2003

Courtesy Murray Guy,
New York

AP E RTURE 5 8
has to do with records: less than a year later the image reappeared,
warped and obviously reduced, as the backdrop on the cover of
The Mason Williams Phonograph Record (1968). With characteristic
cleverness, he’d tried to mold the life-size photograph around the
shape of a record package, and only partly succeeded. The album
includes his best-known song, “Classical Gas,” as well as the less-
heard “Sunflower,” a sound track for a failed film of the world’s
biggest sunflower, drawn by skywriting.
We still need actual tires and motors, but records have been
displaced—first compressed, like a bus in a box, as tapes and
CDs, and ultimately dissolved into digital files. The anxious last
moments for visualizing music as a physical thing had parallel
effects for photography’s material forms, and the medium’s death
was similarly lamented and theorized. Over the course of these
shifts, the strangeness and excitement of vinyl discs, their sheen
and novelty, have, for most, worn off. The camera, for its part,
recorded their demise just as compellingly as it recorded their
invention. The obvious trope of the broken record can be seen
as early as 1984 in Helen Levitt’s Record, in which a disc rolls
along an empty street like a tumbleweed, chunks missing as
if it were eaten by a dog, foregrounding a shop window with
smartly dressed mannequins. A little later, Christian Marclay’s
Broken Record in 5 pieces (1990) takes up the fragments to make
of it an iconic puzzle. Both seem not to know quite what they are
worth now, these pieces of plastic, what their value or function
might be, except perhaps as images.
By the late 1990s, when Zoe Leonard began her project
Analogue (1998–2009), records and record stores had all but
disappeared, and the wave of retro interest hadn’t fully taken
hold. This was a strange moment when you might have looked
around and seen a cassette player and CDs, and also made your
first digital download from the new music-sharing website
Napster, launched in 1999. Still, it’s surprising to see that there
are virtually no images of records or record shops in Leonard’s
meticulous document of disappearing technologies and the
places that would resell and repair them—from the local mom-
and-pop shops on New York’s Lower East Side to more distant
street markets in Africa, Central America, or the Middle East.
This is partly because the presentation of the work—grids of
11-by-11-inch color enlargements—so clearly references the shape
and size of the record cover. Slowly, though, discarded records
have been amassed, reorganized, and even rebranded in “new”
used record shops. Darin Mickey’s Death Takes a Holiday (2016)
peruses these vinyl relics in precarious piles, overflowing boxes,
and thin-spined rows. As images, they evoke the attraction of
picking up and turning over, the compulsion of looking through,
the smell and taste of aging materials—and the promise of sound
you can watch. Covered in thick dust, thumbed through by
anonymous characters, they are neither quite alive nor dead,
just lounging around betwixt and between.
Darin Mickey,
If records are on holiday, what might this mean for Avalon, R&B Records,
photography? Is it just a gawking tourist? A fellow cruise goer Upper Darby, PA, 2014
Courtesy the artist
without anything urgent to report? Or perhaps the resonances
among photographs and phonographs have shifted again, into
something more distanced, as their technological operations
have grown apart? It may appear now as a metaphor for the
disappearance of, even a fetish for, physical analog media.
Yet the record has been a perfectly imperfect stand-in for
photography all along. As revolutionary invention, industrially
designed object, or vessel for mass culture, it’s served as the stunt
double for feats the photograph can’t undertake, a metonym for
the medium in moments of self-reflection, even a sound track
of definitive silence for still images. The visualization of recorded
sound—pictures of records—may just be as close as we can get Sara Knelman is a writer, curator,
to photographs of photography. and lecturer living in Toronto.

WORDS 5 9
 All photographs from
Discology (Tokyo:
Banseisha, 1982)
Courtesy the Estate
of Katsumi Watanabe

Katsumi Watanabe’s
Discology
Kyoichi Tsuzuki

In recent years, the reputation of Katsumi Watanabe as an

important Japanese street photographer who intimately
captured Tokyo’s seedy underground culture of yakuza and
prostitutes has been revived. Born in the city of Morioka,
in Iwate Prefecture, in 1941, Watanabe discovered photography
working by day at a local newspaper while finishing high school
by night. After graduation, he got a job at Japanese National
Railways but never stopped taking pictures, and ended up
moving to Tokyo. He honed his craft while employed at a
photography shop there until 1965, when he became a drifting
shooter, offering three exposures for two hundred yen, paid
the next day when he delivered the prints.
Watanabe’s beat was the area around Tokyo’s Shinjuku
Station, a district that rose from the darkness of the aftermath
of World War II to become a major business and entertainment
center. Today, the station is the world’s largest transportation
hub, where more than three million travelers pass through
each day. Kabukicho, in eastern Shinjuku, boasts over three
thousand bars, restaurants, cafes, sex joints, and love hotels;
its storied Golden Gai area preserves the anything-goes spirit
of the immediate postwar era, making it a top attraction for
tourists from around the world. The nearby Shinjuku Ni-chome
neighborhood, Japan’s largest gay district, has attained similar
international fame. The Shinjuku that Watanabe encountered

AP E RTURE 6 0
 in 1965, though, was poised on the eve of this transformation
into a major urban center: it was a place still defined by the
underworld. Watanabe speaks of wandering the dark streets of
Shinjuku from dusk to dawn, asking anyone he passed, “Would
you like me to take your picture?” Sometimes he got so drunk
that when he woke up the next day and developed the prints in his
tiny apartment, he’d look at an emerging image, scratch his head,
and ask himself, “Who was that again?” It was in this haphazard
yet attentive way that Watanabe inscribed the prostitutes
and gangsters, the “gay boys” and garbage-strewn alleys onto
his photographic paper with honesty and intimacy, capturing
the atmosphere of 1960s Shinjuku as it really was more directly
than anyone.
In the mid-1970s, cameras with built-in flashes became
the norm, making a drifting nocturnal photographer obsolete.
But Watanabe couldn’t bear to leave Shinjuku, so he got by
selling roasted sweet potatoes and at one point opened his
own photography shop; all the while, he continued shooting
the streets and their denizens. The photographs he produced
from the late 1970s to the early 1980s document the young people
gathering at the area’s many discos. During the time Watanabe
covered the area’s nightlife, huge discos were opening up all
over Kabukicho, some with dance floors more than nine hundred
meters square, while next door, in Ni-chome, tiny places the
size of studio apartments—known as five-hundred-yen discos—
were everywhere. These images were collected and published
in his 1982 photobook, Discology.
In the Kabukicho big-box discos, free food and drinks were
standard. Young people would get there early to fill up at the
buffet before dancing all night, drinking the disco’s mysterious
“fruit punch” when they got thirsty, or stepping out to frequent the
various late-night watering holes nearby. By morning, the routine
was to stumble into a bathroom to throw up and then sleep off
your stupor on a quiet street corner. It was a scene that cost very
little, and guaranteed that you would be surrounded by people
like yourself—a kind of instant heaven for young people who had
no place else they belonged. But, in 1982, a fourteen-year-old girl
attending a Kabukicho disco was kidnapped and killed, leading
the city to crack down on the scene. By 1984, these all-night
clubs and bars were virtually regulated out of business.
The following declarations dance across the cover of
Discology: “I don’t ever want to come down!” “I want to live
my whole life feeling exactly like this!” “See youth as they grab
a life’s worth of pleasure—right now!” Watanabe was forty years
old at the time. Without judgment, neither looking down at them
nor putting them on a pedestal, he captured these young people
grabbing a life’s worth of pleasure in the space of a dance beat,
while always dancing right there along with them.

Kyoichi Tsuzuki is a Tokyo-based

editor and writer on contemporary art,
architecture, photography, and design.

Translated from the Japanese by

Brian Bergstrom.

AP E RTURE 6 2
 Stan Douglas
The Producer
A Conversation with Kwami Coleman

For three decades, Stan Douglas has probed cultural and historical moments
with exceptional specificity and lush atmosphere. Working in large-scale
photography, video, and installation, the Vancouver-based artist wields a
strong directorial hand to reanimate and reimagine the past, while maintaining
remarkable fidelity through costuming, scene setting, and production design.
References to cultural scenes defined by music serve as touchstones in his
complex works. For Disco Angola (2012), Douglas adopted the role of a fictional
photojournalist covering both the downtown New York 1970s disco scene,
in an era of urban decline, and the fraught postcolonial moment in Angola,
after the Portuguese ceded control. Douglas describes this unlikely pairing
of subjects as a “highly subjective connection.”
A 1992 work, Hors-champs, took on jazz as its subject. Luanda-Kinshasa
(2013), a marathon, six-hour film, re-creates and fictionalizes events that might
have taken place at “The Church,” Columbia Records’s legendary Midtown
Manhattan studio, where Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and others
laid down historic tracks. Douglas’s most recent project, The Secret Agent (2015),
a six-channel video installation based on Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel of the same
name, about a terrorist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich,
England, is resonant with our modern-day anxieties. In the following pages,
musician and historian Kwami Coleman speaks with Douglas about the role
of sound in his work, his past as a DJ, and what drives Douglas to conjure and
riff on history through a contemporary lens.
AP E RTU RE 6 8
Kwami Coleman: I look at the photographs from your series
Disco Angola (2012) and the stills from your film Luanda-
Kinshasa (2013) for the same reason that I enjoy recordings.
They provide me with an insight into the past. Anyone
dealing with a medium that freezes a moment, an ideology,
a zeitgeist, becomes obsessed with the past. In your
work, there’s a notion of going back to some kind of
ideal world—a time before colonial interaction and
disturbance. How are you careful about not romanticizing
the past?
Stan Douglas: The past moments that I choose to depict are
usually pretty nasty. The only idealized instance would be that
of Luanda-Kinshasa, which is almost like speculative fiction.
I’m not depicting anything that really happened, but rather
something that might have happened. It could have been that
Miles Davis decided to pick up on Afrobeat and incorporate
that into what he was doing, his pancultural synthesis. But the
idea of all these cultures coming together and making something
new out of their differences is what I find quite appealing.
We’re always being asked to be our own individual tribe,
but not to think about the universal. I’m reading somebody
like Miles in that moment as trying to think about how he
can, in symbolic form, play out the possibilities of humans
being together in this way. That’s one of the best things music
can do. It can provide a model of how people can endure
time together.
KC: In Luanda-Kinshasa, we have living jazz musicians
representing fictional jazz musicians from the 1970s. So
you’re using present musicians to evoke but also inscribe,
both aurally and in a visual way, past works of Miles Davis’s
and Joe Henderson’s. What does jazz mean to you and
your work?
SD: Well, I love the music but I can’t play it. I wasn’t there when
Davis’s On the Corner (1972) was recorded, and I want to find
a way of experiencing it. The main reason that an artist makes
art is so they can see it. And I presume that a musician wants
to make music in order to hear it, or to be in it. That’s why I do
it. For example, I can’t play any of the instruments you hear in
Luanda-Kinshasa (although I played drums when I was in high
school), but I was able, through the process of editing, to arrange
that music, to be involved in musical creation.
KC: So you become kind of like Miles Davis and Columbia
Records producer Teo Macero in the control booth.
SD: That was the idea, exactly. This is the way they were making
that music in this period, by editing improvised takes. I thought
I could do that with the whole enchilada, with both picture and
sound. It was a bit of a puzzle to work out, but it was actually really
enjoyable to do because the music was so good.
Whenever you see music in an art gallery, it’s either
classical music or rock music. I wanted to hear something else.
That was my secret motivation for the piece. But sometimes it
backfires on you. There was an article in a magazine that called
the work “an epic love letter to 1970s rock ’n’ roll.” And I was
like, What?
KC: You know a lot about jazz. As a musician myself, it’s
wonderful when people take the craft that you’ve devoted
your life to very seriously. And you take it seriously in multiple
iterations, like disco or electro, Afrobeat, Angolan jazz.
So what does jazz mean to you?
AP E RTU RE 7 0
SD: All kinds of things. One key idea for me is the endlessness
of the music. That the songs aren’t just songs on paper. They’re
living things, which then get reinterpreted by people and
generations over time. The transformation of the jazz standard
by a bebop musician is wonderful. With the idea of variation,
you know what a piece is, but then, with that as a guide, you
realize how far it’s diverged from that original source. That
gesture is something I’ve used throughout my career, inspired
by the example of jazz music. Luanda-Kinshasa raises past
motifs in new contexts. We hear what we thought we knew
in a new way.
KC: The performance captured on some kind of medium,
like a record, is not the final say. So rather than just look at
the score and see the score as this sort of self-enclosed work,
now we’re dealing with a multiplicity of meaning by virtue
of something being recorded. Then, in the jazz tradition,
knowing that just because Miles plays Milestones this way
in April of 1958 does not mean he plays it the same way in
May of 1958, and so on.
SD: Or when he recorded something from Bitches Brew (1970),
and then took it to the studio and made his final edit of it, he
finished composing it. At that point, the template, the song,
was written. He finished writing it. Then he could elaborate
on it later. It’s just a different idea about how you form
that music, how you formulate that utterance. Is it through
conversation? Is it through text? Or is it through the ideas
you can get from hearing something that’s in a way random?
The recording mechanism, just like a photograph, captures
what we don’t intend. We hear sounds we didn’t realize
were there.
KC: Do you see any part of your process as being
improvisational?
SD: That is definitely part of the process. Not entirely knowing
what’s going to happen, and then setting things in motion,
and then deciding when to stop, when it’s done, when we get
to the place we need to be. Eventually, that becomes solidified
as a picture, I suppose.
KC: One of the distinctive qualities of improvisation (and
any musician would say this) is that unless you’re doing
a solo show, it doesn’t happen alone. It’s always done in
conversation, in dialogue with the other musicians you’re
working with, and with the audience. To what degree do
you see yourself as being one of the musicians?
SD: On Luanda-Kinshasa I talked to Jason Moran extensively.
The musicians had an idea of what I was looking for, what records
I was interested in.
KC: Which?
SD: On the Corner and Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” (1972).
KC: When did you discover jazz, if it was a discovery? Or was
it part of your family upbringing?
SD: I’m named after Stan Kenton, but I don’t like Stan Kenton.
I was kind of unaware of jazz. My parents divorced when I was
quite young, but there was a John Coltrane record, Impressions—
KC: Early 1961.
Page 69:
Still from Luanda-Kinshasa,
2013

This page:
Stills from Luanda-Kinshasa,
2013. Single-channel
video projection, 6 hours
1 minute (loop), color, sound

Overleaf: Club Versailles,

1974, 2012

WORDS 7 1
This page: Opposite:
Two Friends, 1975, 2012 Coat Check, 1974, 2012
SD: Yes, Impressions and [whistles opening motif of John Coltrane’s
A Love Supreme (1965)].

KC: A Love Supreme?

SD: Exactly. My father left those behind, and “Soul Makossa,”

and other things, too. Those were the ones I took with me when
I left home. The Coltrane I especially fell in love with. The song
“India” is one of the few songs that can make me cry.

The recording mechanism, just
like a photograph, captures what
we don’t intend. We hear sounds
we didn’t realize were there.
KC: It’s a beautiful tune. It’s interesting to me that your
ear goes to that moment, too, because that was exactly the
moment in which you had African American musicians
reestablishing ties to the African continent, to South Asia,
to these parts of the world that have basically been erased by
the West. As you were listening to this music in Canada, were
you forming your own connections to a much broader world?

SD: I tried to pay attention to them. I had a fascination with

Brazil as well, just for being the New World but not like the
one in the north—it had a different permutation of Africans and
Europeans and Indians in that situation. But I could never quite
identify with what was happening in the States, or identify with
Africa, without having been to Africa. Because Africans had
their own thing going on, which was very different. As a Canadian
kid, I was always being asked to represent the Afro-American
experience, but I had no idea what that was because I didn’t live
here in the U.S., so it was always this odd condition of alienation.

AP E RTURE 74
KC: It’s a type of alienation that occurred in this country,
too, where African Americans sometimes feel like they
have to acquiesce to this overarching notion of African
American–ness, when really, cultures can be so localized,
so specific. I know this because my father was one of
these people in the 1960s who had a deep interest in
Africa, wanting a way of reclaiming it because that
history, that connection to the continent, was violently
severed through slavery. That generation in particular—
John Coltrane and other musicians around that time—
was invested in finding those cultures, and also the beauty
of those cultures.
I found a review in Artforum of Disco Angola from
2012. There was a little phrase in there that caught my eye,
speaking about what kind of music was being played in these
pictures: “The barely plausible connections to American
disco.” This idea that somehow American disco probably
was not happening in a place like Angola—I don’t think
that’s the case at all.
SD: I thought of them as very separate. It was a highly subjective
connection I was making. It’s not that you had American
disco in Angola or Angolans in disco. It’s just that these
two things are happening simultaneously, and in two very
different ways a space of autonomy was carved out by people
for themselves that was interfered with by exterior forces,
inasmuch as the U.S. and the USSR turned what was local
in Angola at that time into a proxy Cold War conflict that would
become a civil war lasting for eighteen years. Thousands of people
died. Disco was a utopian space carved out by a counterculture
in the ruins of New York City that was then sanitized and
commercialized.
WORDS 7 5
KC: Don’t you find that even disco is something of a misnomer?
Because what we’re really talking about is dance music
that was played from records. We’re talking about DJ culture,
discotheques. Of course, all across the African continent
there were discotheques; you’d find musicians who had an
ear to what was happening in the States, maybe an ear to
what’s happening in Europe, but also to what was happening
around the continent. A figure like Fela Kuti, for instance,
was listening to Ghanaian music such as highlife, and also
listening to James Brown.
SD: It’s not that it’s being brought to Angola or it’s a separate
thing. The Angolan metaphor has got nothing to do with the
musical condition. It’s just got to do with political conditions.
Whatever it was that Angola could have been was disrupted
by exterior forces, just like whatever disco could have been
was disrupted by commercial forces. It’s a very weird, highly
subjective aesthetic identification between them that I’m making
in the photographs—they both feel to me like their potential
for autonomy was ruined by external forces. That’s all I’m
getting at.
But, the DJ culture is something that’s very close to my
heart, because my second job was as a DJ. My first job after high
school in Vancouver was at a coffee bar. Next door there was a
gay club that was not doing so well on Fridays, and I convinced
them if I played records my friends would come, and actually for
a couple of years I had a regular Friday night gig. I used to make
pause-button edits with my cassette deck, and when I came back
from a trip to New York, where I had seen Herbie Hancock play
with Grand Mixer D.ST at the Roxy, I learned how to play D.ST’s
mix of Hancock’s “Rockit” with Time Zone’s “The Wildstyle.”
The problem was that no one in Vancouver recognized that I was
This page and opposite:
Stills from The Secret
Agent, 2015. Six-channel
video installation,
eight audio channels,
53:35 minutes (loop)
with six musical variations,
color, sound
All works courtesy the artist
and David Zwirner, New York
Every historical fiction, like
every science fiction, is usually an
allegory of the present.
AP E RTU RE 76
manipulating this music, because they didn’t recognize the music
I was playing in the first place.
KC: That adds so much context to your work. Because
essentially you’re doing that, too, in the live performances
filmed for Luanda-Kinshasa.
SD: Yes, and I had very concrete experience, being a DJ,
of how that works and how you can build a situation. I felt
I was building a space when I was doing a set. A space created
over time: different kinds of spaces by manipulating existing
cultural artifacts. That experience definitely informs all of
my work.
KC: You mentioned Herbie Hancock, who is obsessed with
technology, and Grand Mixer D.ST, who is known for his use
of technology. And everything about your biography seems
to do with technology.
SD: Well, there are all these tools—tools to a new end. Some
technologies maybe have a patina of age, a certain timbre. For
Luanda-Kinshasa we found the guy who made the Mu-Tron III,
an effects pedal. Everything’s got a Mu-Tron on it. The bass
has got a Mu-Tron, the Rhodes has a Mu-Tron, the Wurlitzer,
the rhythm guitar.
KC: Sometimes it’s hard for us to really hear how the music
sounded then, because the technology didn’t allow for the
best kind of fidelity, whereas now we live in a world with
digital everything; fidelity is arguably at a higher point than
it’s ever been. I wish some of the old footage of people like
Miles Davis, or even Sun Ra, would have all the fidelity and
crispness that everything has today. When I saw Luanda-
Kinshasa, I thought, Ah, there it is. Except it’s not necessarily
Miles or any of the musicians we’ve been talking about.
These are new musicians who have been transported back
in time.
SD: People sometimes ask me, “Why doesn’t it look like the
past exactly?” I say, “Well, I’m not interested so much in using
older technology to represent these things, like having grainy
black-and-white film. I want to sort of time travel and see the
past in the best resolution possible, and that’s why it looks the
way it does.”
KC: Why, though? What does it do for you?
SD: To experience something I didn’t experience, and something
that I may experience in fragments, and put those together
just to try to get the whole gestalt, to know what it feels like
to be there—to not forget what that experience could have
been, and what a contemporary version of that experience
might be.
KC: You have a clear interest in revolutionary moments,
with your film The Secret Agent (2015) being perhaps the
most explicit. Can you speak about revolutions, maybe
your interest in historical revolutions, or inciting your
own revolution, if you like?
SD: I’ve always been interested in liminal moments, and there
are few things more liminal than a revolution. They are reminders
that the way we live today is not the only way possible and that
present conditions grew out of something else. The Secret Agent
is a six-channel video with eight channels of audio, so the
story surrounds you, sometimes overwhelmingly. It is set in
the aftermath of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, but it is
really a meditation on terrorism: in the late nineteenth century,
the setting of the eponymous Joseph Conrad novel upon which
the work is based; in the mid-1970s, during the “Hot Summer
of ’75,” when there were bombings and other terrorist acts
throughout Portugal; and, of course, today. Every historical
fiction, like every science fiction, is usually an allegory of the
present. During the “Hot Summer” there were extreme right-
and left-wing groups that used exactly the same means to try to
achieve completely different ends. The weirdness about terrorism
is that it is an emphatic gesture that is utterly ambiguous at the
same time.
One of many things I’m researching right now is 2011, and
particularly the riots in London after the Mark Duggan killing.
I feel it was a revolutionary expression that had no form and no
way of representing itself properly. In a sad way it will probably
be remembered as our 1848.

Kwami Coleman is a pianist, composer,

and musicologist specializing in improvised
music. He is Assistant Professor and
Faculty Fellow at the Gallatin School of
Individualized Study, New York University.

WORDS 7 7
Diana Ross, Silk Electric
TOTAL
(RCA, 1982)
Photograph by Andy Warhol

AP E RTURE 7 8
RECORDS
Vince Aletti Miles Davis, Tutu (Warner
Bros. Records, 1986)
Photograph by Irving Penn

P I CTURE S 7 9
When I moved west on Twelfth Street, from two rooms off
Avenue A to seven on Second Avenue, I had more vinyl records
than anything else. I brought two beds, a round pedestal table,
a few chairs, and a lot of pictures and books and magazines,
but records going back to my childhood were what took up most
of the space in the U-Haul a friend hired. A carpenter built floor-to-
ceiling shelving in one room, and it didn’t take long to fill that
record library with LPs, disco discs, and 45 rpm singles.
In the forty years since then, as I switched from writing
about music to photography, those shelves have been nearly emp-
tied of records and refilled with books, magazines, and
CDs. The vinyl that remains is what I couldn’t part with: Aretha,
Madonna, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the
Miracles, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Patti LaBelle, Joni Mitchell.
But I also kept a lot of records because of their sleeves. That large,
square format, perfect for high-impact photography and graphics,
is so tied up with my experience of the music that just seeing a
favorite cover can be a rush, a flashback. I thought I was too cool
for Frankie Avalon and Fabian when I was a kid, but I bought their
albums later, when their images took on the power of pop icons
and helped me remember the afternoons I spent watching
Philadelphia teenagers dancing on American Bandstand.
Other records, displayed in piles or hung on the wall,
were both fetish items and advertisements for myself—the
sort that Anne Collier recognizes in her photographs of albums
leaning against the wall. I wasn’t consciously collecting great
photographs, but knowing that Robert Frank, David Bailey,
Andy Warhol, and Hiro were responsible for the best Rolling
Stones covers made keeping those records all the more
important. Warhol sleeves were keepers even if I didn’t especially
care about the records themselves, so I held onto his classic
Diana Ross gatefold but also sought out (and never played)
This Is John Wallowitch!!! for Warhol’s faceless photo-booth-strip
cover. I bought Chet Baker Sings for the grainy, evocative
William Claxton photograph on its cover and the sound track to
Funny Face for the Richard Avedon portrait of Audrey Hepburn
that reproduces the star-is-born image we see come out of
the developer in the film. The collaborations of Patti Smith and
Robert Mapplethorpe and Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude
resulted in some brilliant covers, all of which I kept, but I didn’t
notice the Guy Bourdin credit on the terrific, wraparound sleeve
for Boz Scaggs’s Middle Man and now regret deaccessioning it.
That’s one of many things I discovered looking through
Total Records: Photography and the Art of the Album Cover,
an archive of album covers by important photographers
collected for an exhibition this year at Fotomuseum Winterthur,
Switzerland, and excerpted here from an upcoming Aperture
title of the same name. I have all the Everything But the Girl CDs,
yet missed Juergen Teller’s cover for the British pressing of their
single “Before Today.” I had no idea Jeff Wall did an Iggy Pop
cover, or that a Bernd and Hilla Becher picture of a power station
terminal was featured in the inside gatefold of a Kraftwerk album.
Lee Friedlander is famous for his portraits on Atlantic jazz sleeves,
and it will come as no surprise that Total Records devotes a
section to him, but covers by Luigi Ghirri, Saul Leiter, Todd Hido,
Roy DeCarava, Emmet Gowin, and Danny Lyon are far less well
known and worth ferreting out.
With the return of vinyl, both as a collectible and as the
audiophile alternative to much-reviled CDs, the format isn’t
just a pop culture artifact anymore, and photographers who have
been making memorable, but miniaturized, CD art can expect
their work to get bumped up to the scale it deserves. Here’s to
art that works and subverts; art that does a job but is sometimes
more memorable than the music it helps to deliver; art that’s
portable, accessible, democratic, and fine.
Vince Aletti reviews photography
exhibitions for The New Yorker and
photography books for Photograph,
Artforum, and W.
Opposite:
Boz Scaggs, Middle man
(Columbia, 1980)
Photograph by Guy Bourdin
© The Guy Bourdin Estate

This page, top:

Grace Jones, Living My
Life (Island Records, 1982)
Photograph by Jean-Paul
Goude

This page, bottom:

Björk, Possibly Maybe
(One Little Indian, 1996)
Photograph by Nobuyoshi
Araki
 Right top:
Harry Bertoia,
Left top: Left bottom: Sonambient: Space Right bottom:
John Wallowitch, Serge Gainsbourg, Voyage/Echoes of Other Ride, Leave Them
This Is John Wallowitch!!! Love on the Beat Times (Self-released, 1979) All Behind (Creation
(Serenus Records, 1964) (Philips, 1984) Photograph by Beverly Records, 1992)
Photographs by Andy Warhol Photograph by William Klein Twitchell Photograph by Jock Sturges

AP E RTU RE 8 2
Patti Smith, Horses
(Arista, 1975)
Photograph by Robert
Mapplethorpe

All photographs from

Total Records: Photography
and the Art of the Album
Cover (Aperture, 2016)

P I CTURE S 8 3
In search of the late Malick Sidibé and the rhythmic
roots of his legendary photographs.

Midnight
in Bamako
A. Chab Touré

I knew that Malick Sidibé was unwell. An interview seemed out

Taximan avec voiture, 1970
of the question; I couldn’t bear the idea of dragging the great
photographer on a long and exhausting journey down memory
lane through his work and life. Not now that the illness was
transforming his body and mind progressively every day.
But, hoping to get closer to Malick’s roots, I wanted to return
to Soloba, the village in southwest Mali where he was raised,
to look for testimonies or written accounts of his career that
could compensate for the silence imposed by his failing health.
I wondered what I might find: Traces of the colonial administrator
who was the first to discover the talents of the young Malick at
the very beginning of the 1950s, when the French still controlled
the region? Fragments of Malick’s life as a teenager in the streets
of this village? Jazzy sounding voices and riffs of the kamele ngoni,
a six-stringed harp?
We have a proverb in Bambara: “If you don’t know where
you are going, seek to find where you come from.”
I went to see Malick’s son Mody to ask for his advice.
Malick’s studio is in a house on the corner of a street like all the
others in Bagadadji, a working-class district of Bamako. A big sign
advertises the studio, and a group of young men (Malick’s sons
and their friends) drink tea and talk. Sometimes you encounter
a toubab, a white man, who has come to have his portrait taken
or to visit the studio. Amongst this activity, Mody explained his
father’s daily decline and confirmed that an interview would be
impossible. I sensed his reserve and a will to protect his father’s
privacy and old age from outsiders.

AP E RTU RE 8 4
Soirée familiale, 1964
When I asked Mody whom to contact to accompany me
to Soloba, he went toward the door of the studio and called
out, “Yacou! Yacou!” A young man came inside. He said hello
and listened to Mody, who asked in Bambara: “Can you take
Chab to Wassoulou?”
Mody said “to Wassoulou,” not “to Soloba.” The Wassoulou
are the inner lands of Mali; Mody’s choice of term indicated to
me how much the people of the Wassoulou love their land and
still have a sense of belonging—not to a village, but to a place,
a history. The great Wassoulou Empire once spanned from Bouré
(now Mali) to Siguiri (now Guinea). A nineteenth-century empire
whose towns have gone to dust. The walls of the palaces and
the walls of the slums were made of the same temporary earth
from the foundations up, so they disappeared brick after brick,
clod after clod. The still standing traces of these formerly glorious
cities are shea trees and a few scattered baobabs resisting the
harsh stories of mankind.

AP E RTU RE 8 6
 Malick was born at the heart of the Wassoulou, where the Soirée familiale, 1966

ancient music of the Mandé people is connected, due to the slave

trade, to the African American music of blues, soul, and funk.
Sober and percussive, Wassoulou music juxtaposes the vocals
of pentatonic female choruses with the equally pentatonic kamele
ngoni. It mixes traditional and modern sounds, and is epitomized
by the work of contemporary performers such as Coumba
Sidibé, Nahawa Doumbia, Oumou Sangaré, and many other
konos (birds). That generation sings about human suffering
and heartache; they sing about women’s rights and the difficult
realities of polygamy, which is commonplace in Mali. The warm
enveloping voices of Soloman Sidibé (“the prince,” as his fans
called him) and Aïchata Sidibé sang, “Chéri, viens plus près,
chéri, approche toi … O diarabi, sensation. O diarabi, passion”
(Sweet honey, be with me, honey, come closer).
As I drove, I listened to the Yanfolila FM radio station, called
Radio Wassoulou. This radio has a very local program—local
songs, advice to farmers about their crops, political information—
but it does occasionally broadcast hip-hop or rap for its young
listeners. At other times, the music program is retro, live from
the 1960s. That morning, the Mercedes rolled along to the
Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and Sam Cooke’s
“A Change Is Gonna Come,” until the radio waves slowly became
blurred, and another station, broadcasting a song in praise of
hunters, took over. But then the speaker was clear again, the
coarse voice of Coumba Sidibé and her chorus in the background.
The guitar notes mingled with those of the kamele ngoni,
expanding the lyrical content of the song and bringing it close
to the blues sound I heard just a bit ago in “A Change Is Gonna
Come.” Did a confluence of sounds like these predestine Malick
to become the photographer of Bamako’s 1960s soul nights?
Otherwise, how could we explain the permanence of music
and dance in the history and photographic work of the “eye
of Bamako”?
Compared with the sound waves, the village of Soloba,
which is static and smells of mimosa intermingled with shea
butter, offered few clues into Malick’s past. Bold plump cows
crossed in front of the car in no rush whatsoever. On one side
of the road, I counted six communal groups of houses, each with
a family courtyard, all belonging to the Sidibé family: Malick’s
uncles and their descendants and Malick’s paternal relations.
Diakaridja, one of Malick’s nephews, welcomed me and offered
to introduce me to the family. At least three generations live
as a family in the common area. The gray earth houses are
nestled one against the other. Young children ran around
or cried, holding onto their mothers’ dresses. The older boys
watched the match between Arsenal and Real Madrid on
television. Absolutely nothing evoked Malick’s life in this village.
Two people told me about the big party organized in 2003 in
the village to celebrate the photographer’s Hasselblad Award.
That’s all. As if nothing else was memorable.
As I was coming back from Soloba, a little troubled by
Malick’s absence there, I passed through Bougouni, the main Bamako dressed up to party.
city of the Sikasso administrative region, approximately fifty-five
miles from Soloba. It is here, in this boring and lazy town, that It was a young, stylish city, exuding
the young Malick took his first classes to learn to read and write
in French. I went around the administrative quarter, looking
energy. A stimulating city. A city
in vain for evidence of the colonial past, but everything has been with a broad horizon. A city that
renovated. All the traces have been erased. Malick didn’t stay
in school for long, but he developed a love for drawing early on.
promised otherwise impossible
“The commander of the district of Bougouni, Maurice Necker, adventures.
had noticed that I was good at drawing,” he remarked in 1998.
“He asked me to show three drawings to the new governor of
the colony of French Sudan, Mr. Emile Louveau.” These were
presented to the governor when he came to Bougouni.

WORDS 8 7
Pique-Nique à la Chaussée, Malick never explained how Commander Necker discovered
1972
his drawing skills. But the story of Malick and Maurice Necker
does not end there. Malick must have remembered this white
commander throughout his life as the person who put him
on the path of art. Since Malick hadn’t finished his secondary
schooling, Necker pulled some strings and enrolled Malick
in the School of Sudanese Craftsmen, known today as the
National Arts Institute in Bamako. There, he learned jewelry
making, not drawing. Who knows why that was! But then the
course of history changed again. In 1955, on the recommendation
of the director of the craft school, Malick became a decorator
in the studio of Gérard Guillat (known as Gégé), a French
photographer who left French Sudan in 1958. Malick then
worked as a cashier and an assistant, and finally, he learned
the photographic practice.

AP E RTU RE 8 8
Left: Le faux musicien Right: Le technician de
derrière sa voiture, 1971 Radio Mali, 1966
September 1960. Gaining independence from France, French
Sudan turned into Mali, and Bamako turned into the city for all
local modernity. White people were departing, but the accessories
of colonialism—cars, colonial buildings, the French language,
modern music and parties, the European fashions—remained.
Bamako dressed up to party. It was a young, stylish city, exuding
energy. A stimulating city. A city with a broad horizon. A city
that promised otherwise impossible adventures.
When the colonizers left, the young people of Bamako did
not return to traditional music, nor did they revert to cotton suits.
They continued to listen to Western music, which now spoke to
them. They pored over magazines like Salut les copains, Club des
When James Brown sang “Say It années 60, and Hit Parade. Posters and record covers decorated
the walls of their bedrooms. They took an interest in, and adhered
Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” to, the causes that concerned them—the African American
his pride resonated in the Bamako fight against segregation and the political struggle in favor of
the liberation of oppressed peoples—and freely dreamt up their
venues where boys and girls independence.
danced to rock and Afro-Cuban In those years, young Malians were full of hope and
considered life ahead of them. They could dream any dreams.
music. They hummed militant tunes. In Bamako, just like in Paris and
New York, Afro hairstyles and long hair affirmed an attitude and
proclaimed an opinion. Life everywhere promised to be ever
more beautiful. When James Brown, soul brother number one,
sang “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” his pride echoed
through the night and resonated in the Bamako venues where
boys and girls danced to rock and Afro-Cuban music that allowed
them, as Malick would say, to “dance together, touch one
another, and dance close.” The hopes of black America were

WORDS 8 9
This page: À côté de la
boîte à musiques, ca. 1969
Opposite: Soirée, ca. 1970 the same as those in the streets of Bamako. The pain and sorrow
of the child in Donny Hathaway’s “Little Ghetto Boy” could
equally be heard here. And yet, on Saturday nights, bursting
with “Saturday Night Fever,” with flowers behind their ears,
young people went up and down the lively rue Pachanga, where
it was summertime every day, where it was “In the Midnight
Hour” in “San Francisco” until dawn.
When they left their families for the evening, girls knotted
their skirts as low as possible in order to hide the short dresses
and tight pants they would later reveal at the surpat’—the
colloquial abbreviation for the impromptu “surprise parties”
organized by groups of friends with little means—as soon as
the photographer signaled his arrival by using his flash and the
atmosphere kicked in.
“I never danced because I’m shy,” Malick would say. And
yet, something tells me that Malick did dance, with an eye glued
to his viewfinder, around the couple in his 1963 photograph Nuit
de Noël (Happy-Club). Indeed, how could it have been otherwise,
if Malick were to capture the smooth dance movement in which
this young man and this young lady are locked so passionately?
With bare feet and a short flared dress, it seems the young
woman’s only care in the world is to take the twists and slow
dances of this festive night to the fullest degree. Surely Malick
was part of the dance that night in order to capture the young
man’s tie floating in the wind.
In 1962, Malick Sidibé opened his photography studio in
Bagadadji. Around him, the fashionable youth danced to the
rhythms of rock and the twist, the Beatles met the Beach Boys
and Les Chaussettes Noires, and the clubs were named after
the musical idols of the young generation. Contrary to the other
studio photographers, who waited in their studios for clients,
Malick set out in search of weddings, baptisms, and funerals,
as well as evenings full of dance. “I was the only young reporter
in Bamako taking photos at surprise parties,” he said. “I would
be in my studio until ten or eleven at night, because the nightlife
didn’t start early. Then I’d go off to the clubs with my bike,
until five in the morning!” He moved about, searching for the
best angles. “I was always on the lookout for a photo opportunity,
a lighthearted moment, an original attitude, or some guy who
was really funny.”
In Bamako’s festive nightclubs, Malick invented a unique
aesthetic composed of humor, movement, lighting, and
words. (Malick would tell his subjects funny stories to gain
their confidence and put them at ease in front of his lens.)
With this blend, as he said in an interview in 1998, he impressed
the boys and the girls, won their trust and even their complicity:
“When young people dance, they’re spellbound by the
music. In that atmosphere, people didn’t pay attention to
me anymore.… Some people asked me to photograph them
to have a souvenir, others would go off into the bushes and
call me to take them with my flash while they were kissing in
the dark.”
With or without flash, Malick knew how to seek out the
spark of this young generation: “With dynamism and fury, the
young took on all sorts of amusing and bizarre poses,” Malick
said in 2002. “I always told them not to look at me. I was able
to capture incredible images.” Absolutely incredible! Incredible
like the photograph with such a straightforward title: Dansez
le Twist (1965). In this image, there is a sort of invisible presence:
Firstly, that of the photographer, Malick, bending behind his
camera. Then there is the sound of Ray Charles’s voice singing
“What’d I Say.” It’s Ray’s instrumental “break” that encourages
the dancer to bend her chest forward, peering toward the
camera lens with a little smile, a smile that seems to invite the
photographer to enter the dance.
AP E RTURE 9 0
Dansez le Twist, 1965 Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Malick continued to
photograph the nightlife and beach weekends of the Bamako
yéyé youth. Malick left the studio portrait work to his assistants,
while he ran from a birthday party to a dance or to a picnic on
the beach. His friends were the musicians and the animators
of the surprise parties. He knew Boubacar Traoré, known as Kar
Kar (who is still a well-known Malian musician today). He hung
out with Panga Dembélé, the first saxophonist of the Bamako
Orchestra. Malick, the photographer of the parties in the clubs
of Bamako, was himself a star. A surprise party without him could
hardly be considered a party at all.
The advancement of color photography, however, the
popularization of cameras, and the arrival of mini Korean
processing labs in Africa were novelties that transformed the
photographic practice rapidly. Malick stopped his nighttime
reporting activity at the end of the ’70s. He continued to make
black-and-white ID photographs, and when he had nothing
to do, he repaired cameras, while talking with the friends who
lingered in front of his studio.

Whether it was close-up or at a distance, alluded to or loud

and clear, music was always there in Malick Sidibé’s pictures.
In 1992, when the French curator André Magnin landed in
Bamako, music was in the cards: he chose to stay at the Tennessee
Hôtel there, because, as he recalled in 1998, it reminded him of
“Memphis, Presley, Chuck Berry, Monument and Sun Records …
Rock ’n’ roll is part of my life.” Magnin, then curator for the
Pigozzi Collection, had traveled to Bamako in search of another
Malian photographer, Seydou Keïta, who had operated a popular
Bamako portrait studio in the 1950s. The first taxi driver Magnin
questioned had no idea who the photographer was, but he knew
someone who could help. Minutes later, Magnin was dropped
in front of Studio Malick. These events changed Malick’s
story forever.
Malick’s images of young Bamakois dancing to rock and
the twist delighted Magnin immediately. He took a selection
of Malick’s photographs from Bamako to Paris, and in 1993,
at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Seydou Keïta’s and Malick
Sidibé’s portraits were exhibited together for the first time.
I went to see that very exhibition, and when I returned to
Bamako at the end of that year, I met Malick and paid tribute
to the man and the artist. I spent time with him in Bamako.
I met him again in Paris. I exhibited his work in Marseille and
Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast.
When I traveled to the village where Malick was born earlier
this year, I was searching for something poetic in everyday life
and history, something in the voices, in the small domestic
sounds or even in the silence at night, that would enlighten me
in regard to his life.
Following his death in April 2016, Malick now rests in
Soloba, back in the land of the Wassoulou. The cries, complaints,
and pain of those who loved him, those he helped, merge with
the official tributes, lengthy witness accounts, and great honors
to accompany him in death. But in Mali, we live by paradox.
Malians are convinced that the dead are not dead, that they are
living amongst us, and once the extent of silent oblivion has
settled, Malick’s legend will be reaffirmed in the history books.
For countless anonymous admirers of his work, Malick Sidibé
leaves behind souvenirs of a forgotten era, of a version of Bamako
that hasn’t existed for a long time. With a certain nostalgia,
a former high-school classmate of mine told me, “These photos
of the Bamako clubs are like an entire world of old friends that
speak to me and dance for me every day.”

AP E RTURE 9 2
Nuit de Noël (Happy-Club),
1963
All photographs ©
Malick Sidibé and courtesy
Jack Shainman Gallery,
New York

A. Chab Touré, a professor of aesthetics,

is an art critic and director of the Malian
galleries Carpediem, in Segou, and AD,
in Bamako.

Translated from the French by Caroline

Hancock.

WORDS 9 3
AP E RTURE 9 4
 Listen

Newsha
Tavakolian
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

When the Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian opened her

first solo exhibition in her hometown of Tehran, she had a surprise
in store for the six women who are the subjects of her portrait
series Listen (2010). All of them are professional singers. One
studied opera for eight years in Armenia. Another is the lead
singer of an underground rock band. Two of them are classical
Persian vocalists. Tavakolian spent a year finding them, getting
to know them, listening to their music, and earning their trust.
They were initially reluctant to allow her to photograph them.
But eventually she did, asking them to think of the music they
really loved and then sing it to her, imagining that they were
performing before a huge audience, something which has been
structurally impossible for women to do in Iran, whether live
onstage, or on television, since the revolution that ushered in
the Islamic republic in 1979.
From those sessions, Tavakolian created six ethereal and
impassioned portraits, as well as a six-screen video installation
that is always on mute. There is never any sound. We as viewers
are left to imagine the style and tempo of their songs, the grain
and timbre of their voices, just as they are imagining some version
of us as they sing. And when Tavakolian first showed this work
for a very local, hypercritical public in Iran—she says Tehranis
will always be her closest and toughest crowd—she did some
imagining of her own, designing six fictional album covers, one
for each singer, complete with a title and an evocative tableau.

P I CTURE S 9 5
She produced eight thousand CD cases and gave them away
for free at the opening. They were all empty, but Tavakolian
encouraged people to add them to their music collections,
the missing discs standing in for absences of another kind.
The singers were so overwhelmed that they wept. Tavakolian was
so overwhelmed that she spent a week in the hospital, recovering
from exhaustion, after the opening was over.
Curiously, Tavakolian was in a completely different state of
mind when she first thought of the series. It was after the Iranian
elections (and opposition protests) in the summer of 2009, and
Tavakolian, a respected photojournalist, could no longer take
her gear around. “A camera became like spy equipment,” she
says. “For half a year it was forbidden to carry a camera in the
streets. I was a photojournalist at home. I couldn’t work. I was
frustrated.” She imagined she felt similar to women in Iran who
were prohibited from singing in public. And Tavakolian loved
to sing, albeit in semiprivate circumstances such as weddings
and family gatherings, where, as a kid, she had always managed
to fill her pockets with spare change from friends and relatives
charmed by her enthusiastic renditions of the inimitable Persian
pop star Googoosh.
As to the individual stories behind each of her subjects,
Tavakolian says: “To be honest, I don’t like to give all the answers.
I want to invite viewers into the work. If I make it too easy they
won’t engage.” That leaves an intriguing amount of space around
where narratives can be formed, which is perhaps space enough
to begin to hear each of the women singing.

Pages 94–95: Sayeh

Sodaifi; previous spread,
clockwise from top left:
dream CD covers for Azita
Akhavan, Sayeh Sodaifi,
Ghazal Shakeri, and Mahsa
Vahdat; this spread: Sahar
Lotfi. All photographs from Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer, critic,
the series Listen, 2010 and a contributing editor of the magazine
Courtesy the artist Bidoun.

AP E RTU RE 9 8
P I CTU RE S 9 9
 NO
Vinca Petersen

SYSTEM
Sheryl Garratt

AP E RTU RE 1 0 0
Vinca Petersen didn’t set out to be a photographer. Her pictures The resulting pictures are intimate, warm, but also
began as a visual diary, documenting her leaving home at the unflinching, celebrating the travelers without romanticizing
age of seventeen, moving into a London squat, and becoming them. Petersen shows the damage as well as the highs of drug
involved in the free party scene that blossomed across Europe in use, the litter and destruction the travelers left in their wake,
the 1990s. She has built up an impressive archive that records the as well as the euphoria of their parties. It’s a time and place that
techno-fueled raves and the lives of the travelers who organized already feels distant: a world without cellphones and distracting
them, but she started taking pictures primarily as a way of screens.
recording her own life, preserving her memories of the parties, Petersen’s fellow travelers often criticized her for hiding
memories which otherwise—as anyone who has danced all behind a lens, saying that it stopped her from being fully present
night will know—tend to become a bit blurry. in the moment. “A photograph, especially if it’s not a digital one,”
In the U.K., free parties grew out of the rave explosion of Petersen remarks, “is a recording of the moment for another
1989, when crowds of up to twenty-five thousand people would point in time. I used to struggle with that. But then over the years,
gather in the English countryside for illegal all-night events of course everyone started asking me for copies.”
fueled by MDMA and techno music. Although the primary Eventually she put together a book, No System (1999), going
impetus was hedonism, it developed into an exhilarating wave back on the road for another year in order to obtain permission
of mass civil disobedience in which Britain’s young briefly united from everyone featured before it was published. A second edition
and partied in defiance of the Conservative government, which is due out this fall, and Petersen hopes that a new generation
throughout the 1980s had thrived on divide and rule. When will see her pictures as a guide to an alternative way of life.
the authorities finally realized this was a battle they couldn’t win
and consequently relaxed restrictions on dancing and drinking,
most of these revelers returned to the cities and to newly legal,
all-night dance clubs. But a marginalized minority—with no
jobs to fund expensive nightclubs, and a liking for the vagabond
lifestyle—took to the road and continued putting on free techno
parties in the countryside. They organized themselves as sound
systems—a term taken from reggae music that encompasses
DJs, rappers, huge speakers, and all of the technology needed
to put on a party anywhere, indoors or outdoors.
Petersen had become involved in this scene while still
in her teens in London. She did some modeling and as a result
met the renowned fashion and documentary photographer
Corinne Day, whose work had reacted against the gloss and
artifice of the 1980s by exploring a different kind of beauty:
young and edgy, but also awkward and flawed. The raw, personal
style of Petersen’s photographs fit into this new aesthetic, and
Day encouraged her to make more, giving her protégée film and
even cameras. In 1994, when new, draconian laws were passed
to suppress free parties in the U.K., most of the sound systems
Petersen knew fled to mainland Europe. She followed soon after,
taking her camera with her, and remained on the road for nearly
a decade. Everyone in the free party scene had their own stories,
their own reasons for staying on the move, from ideology to a
simple lack of money to a yearning for freedom. Petersen enjoyed
the lifestyle: “I liked the earthiness of it all, and the traveling.
I loved the practicalities, like finding somewhere to park for
the night, finding water, going to a new supermarket to buy
food, and cooking together. For me it was about a desperate
need for community, I think.”
Life on the road wasn’t easy. They wandered through
France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany,
banding together with other sound systems to put on huge parties
in remote countryside locations in the summer, then separating
to seek out smaller, more urban venues, such as empty warehouses,
when the weather got colder. The travelers played what Petersen
describes as a constant game of cat and mouse with the police.
As a result, they were wary of outsiders, especially those
taking pictures. Cameras were routinely confiscated at parties,
or film was removed. Of the few pictures by other photographers
that exist of this scene, most were taken surreptitiously, and
seem distant. Petersen’s images, by contrast, have been taken
by an insider. Working with small, inconspicuous cameras,
she sometimes didn’t even look through the viewfinder before Sheryl Garratt has edited The Face and
clicking the shutter; other times she’d leave a camera on a The Observer Magazine, and documented All photographs from
the rise of rave culture in her book No System (Göttingen:
bar overnight and retrieve it in the morning to see what had Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade Steidl, 1999)
been recorded. of Club Culture (1998). Courtesy the artist

AP E RTURE 1 0 2
P I CTU RE S 1 0 7
 Santu Mofokeng
Pedi Dancers
Joshua Chuang

All photographs
Untitled, from the series
Pedi Dancers, ca. 1989
© the artist and courtesy Joshua Chuang, a curator, is coeditor
Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, of the forthcoming Steidl book series
Johannesburg Santu Mofokeng: Stories.

AP E RTURE 1 1 0
“Sometime around midday, a shrill whistle sounded,” the
anthropologist Deborah James writes of the rousing of a Pedi
dance performance in Songs of the Women Migrants (1999),
her study on this endangered yet continuously evolving South
African tradition. “Individual men dressed in everyday clothes,”
she continues, “dislodged themselves from groups of drinkers
sitting around in makeshift bars on tins under tattered plastic
shading, and grouped themselves on one side of the drummers
who began to play a set of hide-covered drums.” The men started
to blow vigorously on aluminum pipes hanging from their necks,
producing a rhythmical sequence of sounds, and, in coordinated
fashion, stamped one foot after another on the dusty ground.
Santu Mofokeng’s stirring photographs of this indigenous
phenomenon were taken around the time James conducted
her field research. Born in Soweto in 1956, Mofokeng is one
of South Africa’s most compelling chroniclers of township life
under apartheid and in the years following Nelson Mandela’s
election in 1994. After disengaging from Afrapix, the South
African agency and photographers’ collective whose mission
was to expose the injustices of apartheid, Mofokeng traded the
agenda-driven tendencies of photojournalism for a more oblique
and open-ended form of storytelling. His remarkable body of
work, which spans three decades, has grown in renown as a result
of an international touring retrospective that debuted at the Jeu
de Paume in 2011, as well as prominent group and solo exhibitions
organized by the Walther Collection in Germany and New York.
During the course of a recent exploration into his archive,
Mofokeng found much worth revisiting—including the contents
of several long-neglected folders of negatives marked “PD”
(for Pedi dancers), a selection of which appears in print for
the first time here.
P I CTURE S 1 1 1
Mofokeng first encountered Pedi dancers in 1988 while
conducting research in the township of Dukathole for the African
Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand; on
several occasions over the next few years, he embedded himself
with them to record their lives as well as their performances.
“I wanted to show how migrant laborers used the phenomenon
of Pedi dancing,” he has said, “to cope with the vagaries of
urban living and negotiating urban space.”
Pedi is a term that encompasses a diversity of Sotho-speaking
ethnic groups who were the dominant inhabitants of the former
Northern Transvaal region of South Africa in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. But in the twentieth century, the
name became fraught with political connotations, as apartheid’s
architects sought to keep ethnic groups divided and as Pedi
people scattered widely due to voluntary labor migration and
forced relocation. Among the traditions they brought with them
was kiba (northern Sotho for “to stamp or beat time”) music
and performance, a unique and dramatic form of precolonial
expression laced with social commentary and set to cross-
rhythms and call-and-response vocals.
Traditionally, women’s and men’s kiba differ, with
the female version featuring vocals and the male version
distinguished by the aforementioned blowing of aluminum pipes
(dinaka) that produce a richly harmonized sound resembling an
ecstatic chorus of alto recorders. Both versions rely on drummers,
who whip their hands and arms tirelessly to create a hypnotic
cadence that can go on for hours. Mofokeng’s atmospheric
photographs form an improbable, yet fitting, visual complement
to the kiba performances, for though they are still and mute,
they practically burst forth with a palpable and vigorous
sonic energy.
 N O I S Y
P I C T U R E S

What does a photograph sound like? In this

sonic sequence, a group of leading curators,
writers, and historians reflect on images that
won’t stay quiet.
AP E RTURE 1 1 6
 Wojciech Zamecznik,
Light drawing, study for the
design of an album cover, 1963
Light shining in black on a white ground; black
circles, which leave a white trace on paper—
transformations that Zamecznik developed to
create a visual equivalent of contemporary music.
Two great passions of this architect and graphic
designer meet: music and photography, which, in
dialogue with graphic design, became his trademark.
What can we see under half-closed eyes while
listening to Penderecki, Lutosławski, or Bacewicz?
A thing becomes its opposite, a single line
transforms into fog, a sequence of rhythms.
˛ ´
— Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska,
Curator of Photographs, Centre Pompidou

Courtesy the Archaeology of Photography Foundation

P I CTURE S 1 1 7
Harold E. Edgerton,
Antique Gun Firing, 1936
Science during wartime changes art during
peacetime. Such is the history of the electronic
strobe light in the hands of artist-engineer
Harold E. Edgerton, who made iconic photographs
of bullets caught in midflight, bursting balloons,
and exploding apples. The art and science of
depicting loud, noisy, and murderous booms
and bangs was Cold War business at its best—
and Antique Gun Firing was a quaint prelude
of what was to come. New cameras developed
by Edgerton’s defense-contract company EGG
would permit us to see some of the first hydrogen
bomb explosions, not as deafening and deadly
but as silent and cold. — Jimena Canales,
Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History
of Science, University of Illinois

Courtesy Palm Press

Eliot Porter, Spotted Towhee

in Flight, Tesuque, New
Mexico, March 1952
“The camera offers a way of sublimating the
indefinable longing that is aroused in me by close
association with birds,” Eliot Porter once said.
Sublimate: from the (medieval) Latin limare,
to polish or perfect. Perfection must have meant
stillness to Porter. That stillness mutes his scenes
of woodlands and water, invariably enveloped in a
deathly hush. Porter’s bird pictures convey instead
the thudding whisper of air currents beaten into
eddies by outspread wings. What Porter longed
to possess, I imagine, is avian alertness. I can
conjure that attentive state not by what I see—
too fully or easily—but by the whoosh I almost
picture myself hearing. — Matthew Witkovsky,
Curator and Chair, Department of Photography,
the Art Institute of Chicago

© Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth,

Texas, and courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

Robert W. Kelley, Teenagers

screaming and yelling during
Elvis Presley’s personal
appearance at the Florida
Theatre, Jacksonville, FL,
August 1956
They’re on their own Tilt-a-Whirl. The sound
coming out of their mouths is deafening.
There is so much spinning movement in the
picture that the fact that you actually can’t hear
anything, because you’re looking at a photograph,
can feel like proof that the sound they’re
making has overwhelmed your senses.
— Greil Marcus, music journalist and
cultural critic

© the artist/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

P I CTU RE S 1 19
Andreas Feininger,
The Light Trail of a Helicopter,
Anacostia Naval Air Station,
Washington, D.C., February
1949
Andreas Feininger sketches in the darkness using
the light-tipped wings of a U.S. Navy helicopter.
It’s a slinky tipped over the stairs by a three-year-old.
It’s a single note, holding steady, wavering down
to a flat, then ascending through the scale in
joyous uplift. It’s a drone whose timbre changes,
resonating first in your ear then in your chest.
Light becomes line becomes sound, all in the space
between eye and mind. — Brian Sholis, Curator
of Photography, Cincinnati Art Museum
© the artist/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Bruno Braquehais,
National Guards and
Communards at the Vendôme
Column, 1871
Chantons la liberté, / Défendons la cité! Deaf
photographer Bruno Braquehais did not hear
the special version of “La Marseillaise”—or the
gunfire—that punctuated preparations for the
destruction of the Vendôme Column in Paris on
May 16, 1871. His picture exudes a dreadful silence
that portends the suppression of the Commune
during the Bloody Week that commenced five
days later. — Stephen Pinson, Curator,
Photographs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Man Ray, The City, 1931
The City—one of ten photogravures that Man Ray
produced for a portfolio commissioned by La
Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité
to promote domestic uses of electricity—
pulses with energy. An illuminated Eiffel Tower
is overlaid with neon advertisements, creating
a visual cacophony of “voices” that compete for
our attention. — Virginia Heckert, Curator,
Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum

© Man Ray Trust/ARS, New York/ADAGP and

courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Charles David Winter,

Éclair électrique produit
par l’appareil de Ruhmkorff,
ca. 1865
Crackling with potential, capturing a discharge
equally capable of initiating life or dealing death,
this photograph from about 1865, by French
photographer Charles David Winter, records
a spark of electricity generated at high voltage.
An image much like this one was chosen by
André Breton as an example of automatic writing
to illustrate his essay “Beauty Will Be Convulsive,”
published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure
in 1934. Here, science and art join forces
in a cacophony of elemental visual static.
— Geoffrey Batchen, author, most recently,
of Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless
Photograph (2016)

Courtesy Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain

de Strasbourg
Jason Evans, There Is Love
in You, 2009
Color spectrums, flowers, and fine grids.
Digital labs use such images to test their printers.
Jason Evans gathered some, pinned them up,
photographed them on color film, hole-punched
the film, arranged the tiny disks on glass,
put the glass in a photographic enlarger, and
made a C-print. It’s the cover of Four Tet’s 2010
album There Is Love in You. A digital/analog
image for electronic/analog music.
— David Campany, author, most recently,
of Adventures in the Lea Valley (2016)

Courtesy the artist

Suzanne Dworsky,
Sea Breeze, Cape Cod, MA,
1978
While its title, Sea Breeze, conjures one specific
sound, this picture suggests many others. They are
faintly in the background, but just as vivid. There
might be waves breaking, seagulls crying, and
children’s voices. We are so close that there is also
her breath. And overall, the indescribable sound
of sunlight. — Martin Barnes, Senior Curator,
Photographs, the Victoria and Albert Museum

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Al Vandenberg, Untitled,
from the series On a Good Day,
ca. 1980
Al Vandenberg’s series On a Good Day was made
in Notting Hill in West London in the mid-1970s.
His pictures look super cool in retrospect, and none
cooler than this totally stylish girl with her portable
cassette player. Music lovers of this generation will
remember these things, how they sounded, and
how quickly the batteries ran out! — Simon Baker,
Senior Curator, International Art (Photography),
Tate, London

© Al Vandenberg and courtesy Tate

Christian Marclay, Untitled

(R.E.M. and Sonic Youth), 2008
Despite the title, the sounds that emanate from this
picture are not the wailing chords of the eponymous
rock bands. Whatever music was recorded on those
magnetic tapes left no trace in Marclay’s cameraless
cyanotype. Instead, it is the cracking of the plastic
cassettes, the yanking of the tape, and the rustling
of debris that still resonates. In a word: noise.
— Noam M. Elcott, Associate Professor,
Department of Art History and Archaeology,
Columbia University

Courtesy the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery,

and White Cube
Tales of Love and Fear,
2015. Stereoscopic
photograph, custom-built
projection rig, and sound.
Installation views, Curtis
R. Priem Experimental
Media and Performing
Arts Center, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute,
Troy, New York

Wild Sync
Lucy Raven in Conversation with Drew Sawyer

Lucy Raven wanted to get wired. Searching for the networks of power that
hold up global communications and commerce, she traveled from a pit
mine in Nevada to a smelter in China to trace the transformation of raw ore
into copper wire, the conduit for transmitting energy. China Town (2009),
the resulting photographic animation, combines thousands of still images
with on-location ambient sounds, locked together by wild sync—sounds
that correspond to an image, but are not actually synchronized. For Raven,
a New York–based artist whose practice incorporates photography, video,
installation, and performance, the research becomes the work itself. Following
China Town, Raven used test patterns for film and sound as both raw material
and subject matter, turning the spotlight on standards for picture and audio
quality developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Her experiments in 3D filmmaking yielded video installations that place
stereoscopic photographs within immersive surround-sound environments.
Connecting all of these disparate strands is the artist’s continuing exploration
into the effects of technology and labor in the production of movies, as well as
the poetic relationship between sound and image. In advance of the New York
debut of her major installation Tales of Love and Fear (2015) at the Park Avenue
Armory, in September 2016, Raven spoke with curator Drew Sawyer about
sonic journeys near and far.
AP E RTU RE 1 24
WORDS 1 25
This page: 29Hz, 2012. Opposite: RP31, 2012.
Randomized audio samples 35mm film. Installation
Drew Sawyer: Thinking about sound and its relationship
from optical and magnetic view, Hammer Museum, to images, let’s start with your work China Town, which
film sound track test Los Angeles consists of thousands of still photographs and a sound track,
material
and explores the production of copper from a pit in Nevada
to a smelter in China. It’s not a typical film. I’m curious about
your choice to use still images with a separate sound track
rather than working in a more traditional video format.

Lucy Raven: The choice to use stills came first. I’d been working
on stop-action animations and exploring ideas of work and
exhaustion. When I had the initial ideas that led to China Town,
I was still thinking about those questions. I had a residency with
the Center for Land Use Interpretation at their site in Wendover,
Utah, in the middle of the Great Basin. I became interested
in a copper mine called Bingham Pit, where Robert Smithson
I became interested in these had proposed, but never completed, a reclamation project.
charts as logging a history of The other impetus comes from Paul Valéry, who suggested
that just as we receive water and gas and electricity into the home
the standardization of perception from far off with a very minimal effort, one day we’ll be receiving
that was developed for optimal images and sounds into the home, appearing and disappearing
with barely a signal of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Now
viewing and listening standards. that Valéry’s idea has become commonplace, and wireless
technology has made images and sounds coming into the home
ubiquitous, the part of his construction that I found more abstract
was how water, gas, and, in this case, electricity get into the home.
So I had an idea from the beginning that the images and
sounds would “appear and disappear” using some form of
animation. As I began to work on the edit, with my editor Mike
Olenick, it started to become clear that the sound would need
to be continuous alongside the disjunctive imagery. It becomes
a means of orientation. Each recording was made at the same
location where I took the images.

DS: How did you go about recording? Obviously, when you

were going to these different locations, you were taking
the still photographs. Were you simultaneously recording
sound?

AP E RTU RE 1 26
LR: I couldn’t do both at the same time, because my camera
made an audible shutter sound, so I had to switch between the
two modes. Luckily, most every process I recorded in the film
happens twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, so even
though it sometimes required revisiting a site I hadn’t intended
to return to, I was able to rerecord when necessary. I became very
interested in experimenting with wild sync, which is when the
sound corresponds to the image, but is not actually synchronized.
Since I was taking still photographs and animating
them later, the process precluded the possibility of recording
synchronous sound. So sound, at the beginning, was unhinged
completely from the images. It could maintain a sort of loose
association with what you were watching, or could be attached
more precisely to actions depicted in images so the two
correspond, or seem to. When you see a sequence of photographs
of a truck dumping copper ore, you hear the sound of ore being
dumped, but it might be from a trip I made months later to
the same location. Of course, some places were more difficult
to access, like the wire factory in Shenzhen, or the furnace in
Tongling, both in China. At those times I was just trying my
best to do both in quick succession.
DS: In the tradition of documentary film, sound or text
usually provides some sort of narrative that frames what
one is seeing. It seems your use of sound doesn’t do that
in a typical way.
LR: My process involves figuring out how to strip down both
the visuals and the sounds to what’s essential. You bring up
the documentary tradition. As I assembled all the parts that
eventually became China Town, I came to think of both the
images and the sounds as records, or documents, of particular
places and processes. That’s one reason I decided to record sound
on location rather than use industrial sounds recorded elsewhere,
WORDS 1 27
or archival recordings. It was important to me to document
the very particular production line I was following, and that
neither the process nor the sites come to operate on the level
of metaphor. Rather than explaining, or even understanding,
this global commodity flow, I was more interested in how the
form of the movie could relate to the gaps, inequalities, and
intervals inherent in such a system. Nothing really comes
together in the movie—the many parts of the production remain
disjointed, as do the images. The sound becomes a through line.
DS: Which is why your term animation makes so much
sense, because in a way the sound is animating the images.
That film makes me think of this idea of the “disassembled
movie,” which Allan Sekula used to describe his piece
Aerospace Folktales, from 1973. The work consisted of
142 photographs installed in a gallery like a filmstrip, and
then four audio tracks played separately. This idea of the
disassembled movie also relates to your work in the 2012
Whitney Biennial, RP47 (2012), and projects you’ve done at
the Hammer Museum, like RP31 (2012), using test patterns,
as well as purely audio works that are related, like 29Hz
(2012). What led you in the direction of looking into cinema?
LR: Working on China Town prompted a number of questions
having to do with the relationship between still and moving
images, and, more basically, how movies are made today.
The works you’re referring to started with an interest in
motion capture that I saw as related to—in some ways the inverse
of—how I’d shot China Town. I had a research residency at the
Hammer, and I visited one of the motion capture studios used
for big Hollywood films. The day I showed up, everyone had just
found out that a huge amount of the work they were doing would
be outsourced to India, specifically the backdrops and landscapes
for the figures developed through motion capture. They would
This page and opposite:
Stills from China Town,
2009. Photographic
animation
All works courtesy the artist
AP E RTURE 1 28
also be sending over films shot in 2D to be converted into 3D
through a very elaborate process that involves the digital creation
of a synthetic second-eye view for every frame in the film. I found
myself confronted with what seemed like a twenty-first-century
version of China Town. Here, though, the raw materials being
exported from the American West to overseas were images—
literally raw files, one for every frame of film. In the case of 3D
conversion, what was being outsourced was actually the labor
to produce the illusion of spatial depth.
I began trying to understand how 3D film works, and how
it has developed technologically since its quite early invention.
I found myself looking at 3D calibration charts, used to align
dual 35mm projectors for 3D projection. The images were
beautiful—the first ones I saw were clearly photographed
from handmade paper maquettes that read “See with Left Eye”
and “See with Right Eye.” I searched out more of these charts,
and soon realized that there were charts used to calibrate and
test most every type and gauge of film projector. This then led
me to their sonic equivalent—test tones meant to play in an
empty theater before showtime to calibrate the theater’s sound.
While I was researching and beginning production on the
works having to do with Hollywood’s outsourcing of its images—
the pieces that later became Curtains (2014) and then Tales of
Love and Fear (2015)—I became interested in these charts as
logging a history of the standardization of perception that was
developed for optimal viewing and listening standards, yet born
of economic, cultural, and technological conditions as much
as for some notion of pristine image or sound.
DS: So 29Hz is the audio for test sounds.
LR: Yes. I used twenty-nine different test tones in the work,
and Hz is the abbreviation for hertz, which is the unit of
frequency for sound. The RP in the filmic work titles is borrowed
from the most common test pattern for 35mm film, RP40,
where RP stands for recommended practices. In RP47,
I included forty-seven different test patterns, and in RP31
there are thirty-one.
DS: Does RP31 also have a sound track?
LR: For RP31, you hear the sound of the 35mm projector that
is running constantly, in tandem with a film looper, in the room.
The presence and the sound of the projector is an important
part of the installation. For RP47, I asked two genius friends,
Jesse Stiles and Rob Ray, to design a software program for the
work that would also enable me to add more images and sounds
as I continued to find and archive them. The pairing of images
and sounds in that piece is randomized, and the image stays up
for as long as the duration of the sound file.
DS: But they wouldn’t be related otherwise?
LR: No, they are two different types of tests—one for sound,
one for images.
DS: So those projects led to Curtains, and then Tales of Love
and Fear the following year, which both involve 3D images
and surround sound.
LR: Curtains consists of ten different scenes, each of which
animates a stereoscopic photograph that I took in one of ten
different postproduction facilities around the globe—from cities
in Asia with very low labor costs to some of the most expensive
cities in the world, such as London and Vancouver, where local
governments offer studios massive tax breaks and incentives—
that convert Hollywood films from 2D to 3D. In the piece, the
stereoscopic image is split into left- and right-eye images using
old-school anaglyph red-cyan separations. The two images come
together from offscreen, briefly converge, then diverge again,
passing through some strange intermediate zones of overlap
that the eyes struggle, nearly involuntarily, to resolve. I recorded
the sound in much the same way I approached it in China Town.
The sound for each section is based on field recordings from
each facility. They’re all office spaces, but the subtle differences
between them register substantial differences in location,
culture, and activity.
Tales of Love and Fear is a piece I worked on through a
residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts
Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up
in Troy, New York. The idea was to make a cinema for a
stereoscopic photograph. In collaboration with EMPAC’s
amazing production team, we built a rig that enables 360-degree
rotation of two projectors over the forty-minute duration
of the work. The rig acts as both 3D film projection apparatus
and as a kinetic sculpture performing the architecture of
the space.
DS: How are the image and sound related?
LR: The image comes from a stereo photograph I took of bas-
relief carvings at a site in India. One of the first sounds you
hear in the piece is from a field recording I’d made while
seeing a Bollywood horror film with a few friends. One of them,
an actress, was translating to me in real time from Hindi to
English—the film’s sound was pulpy and totally overblown.
So my friend is doing different voices while whispering the
translations, people are screaming, and we’re eating popcorn
WORDS 1 29
and laughing. Paul Corley, a composer and sound engineer,
worked with me to shape a score, a sonic journey from the
Mumbai movie theater, into the film itself, and out the other
side into a very different, nearly meditative drone state.
DS: Your most recent project, Fatal Act (2016), involves,
in part, the history of one sound in particular.
LR: Yes, sound is an important aspect of Fatal Act, a new moving-
image work I’m currently at work on with my research and
production collective Thirteen Black Cats. The eventual film
centers on the difficulty of imaging and recording the atomic.
One scene includes the description of a CBS sound engineer
tasked with providing sound for a nuclear-bomb test detonation
in Frenchman Flat, Nevada, in 1951. Camera crews had been
invited to film the explosion for television broadcast, but to
escape fallout, they were necessarily positioned too far away to
record sound. Given three turntables, twenty minutes, and the
CBS sound library, the engineer improvised, using the slowed-
down roar of an African waterfall to make the now iconic sound
of an atomic chemical fireball.
Drew Sawyer is William J. and Sarah Ross
Soter Associate Curator of Photography
at the Columbus Museum of Art, where
he organized the exhibition Lucy Raven:
Low Relief (April 29–November 27, 2016).
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 Photography
Reinvented
The Robert E. Meyerhoff
and Rheda Becker
Collection
Sarah Greenough
With contributions
by Philip Brookman,
Andrea Nelson,
Leslie Ureña &
Diane Waggoner

Photography Reinvented brings together thirty-five works by eighteen

critically acclaimed artists who, through innovative experimentation
and visionary conceptual scope, have changed the course of
contemporary photography.

Cloth $49.50
Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington
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Photograph by John Lusis, MFA 2016

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FOTOFOCUS BIENNIAL 2016

OCTOBER 1–31, CINCINNATI, OHIO
FotoFocus Biennial Program: October 6–9

ABOUT THE BIENNIAL

The FotoFocus Biennial is a month-long celebration of lens-
based art held throughout the greater Cincinnati region.
The 2016 Biennial is anchored by eight major exhibitions
curated by FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator Kevin
Moore exploring the documentary nature of photography,
including solo exhibitions of Roe Ethridge, Zanele Muholi
and Jackie Nickerson. With 60 exhibitions and four days
of events, lectures and screenings, FotoFocus brings
together the community to celebrate October as the
Month of Photography.

Roe Ethridge, Me and Auggie, 2015. Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 45 x 30 inches.
Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Greengrassi, London #FOTOFOCUS2016 #UNDOCUMENT FOTOFOCUSBIENNIAL.ORG
 Object Lessons
Jonna Kina’s Foley Objects,
2013

Courtesy the artist

Pigeons

Strange things happen in the sound studio. A leather belt
makes the pop! of a champagne cork. A roll of tinfoil simulates a
crackling fire. The unspooled tape of a cassette creates the sound
of leaves shifting in the breeze. In Jonna Kina’s deadpan typology
Foley Objects (2013), twenty-eight otherwise secret tools of a
cinematic trade take center stage, activated by their own imagined
sound effects. The project is rooted in the legacy of Jack Foley,
a former stunt man and assistant director who worked on Show
Boat (1929), the first feature-length motion picture with partially
synchronized dialogue. Originally intended to be a silent feature,
Foley and his assistants, following along to the projected film,
performed sounds with a panoply of objects, perfectly calibrated
to the actions on-screen—clapping, walking, cheering,
applauding—and all recorded on one track. Foley went on to
craft motion picture sound effects for the next forty years. Today,
even with the most sophisticated contemporary audio equipment,
most sounds must still be recorded after a film is shot, which is
why Foley artists are integral to film production, and why “Foley”
is not only a man, but also a word. In the movies, reality is a
reconstruction. Realism is a performance. —The Editors

AP E RTU RE 1 3 2