"The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our

E D I T O R - I N - C H I E F Melissa Harris
own convenience," wrote Marcel Proust in Swann's Way. "They were only a thin slice, held between the ART DIRECTOR YolandaCuomo
contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time." Memory and history are endlessly changing S E N I O R E D I T O R Diana C . Stoll
and wayward entities. And photography plays a kind of conspiratorial role in relation to them: sometimes
D E S I G N E R K r i s t i Norgaard
attempting to hammer them into place, at other times eliciting from them previously unrecognized meanings.
M A N A G I N C i E D I T O R Michael l-amiyht-tri
In his essay in t h e s e pages, writer Michael Lesy speaks of "four rivers of time" that converge in
P R O D U C T I O N Matthew P i m m
snapshot photographs: those of the individual, of the family, of history, and of myth. This multiple
A S S I S T A N T E D I T O R N i m a Etcmadi
experience of time's "rivers" is a perfect trope for memory's shape-shifting.
W O R K S C H O L A R S Matthew Harvey,
Artist Robert Gober acknowledges the role of memories as catalysts to his own creativity. Here Gober Paula Kopfer, Alexa Natanson
shares his selection of nine rarely seen photographs by Diane Arbus, whose singularly brilliant work he
cites as also having an important impact on his art.
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
J o s e f Koudelka's recent panoramic images from Italy's Piemonte are elegiac in their evocation of Vine* Aletti. Roberi Atwan, Elizalx-th H . Berber,
a region at once vital in the present, yet through his eye almost as epic as Herculaneum. Here the Fernando Castro, Picranna Givak hini.
Raymond I-'oye, David Frankel, Alice Rose George,
everyday resonates with traces of that which has come before.
Vicki Goldberg, Nan G o l d i n .
Susan Morgan considers photographer and environmentalist Kelly Poe's project for the wild, which is as Mark Haworth-Booth, John Howell,
much about memory as it is about the survival of the planet. Inspired by letters from activists incarcerated Alfredo Jaar, Burton Joseph, Thomas Ketnan,
Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Mciselas,
for "eco-terrorism," Poe uses her camera to document the landscapes that have a particular potency for
Richard Misrach, Pablo O r t i z Mniiasterio.
them. Stephen Dupont, too, collaborates with nonphotographers, specifically members of the U.S. Marine
Martin Parr, Marianne Petit, Eugene Richards, Fred
Corps stationed in Afghanistan's volatile Helmand province. Dupont's Weapons Platoon project combines Ritchin. Clarissa Sligh. Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
his portraits of the soldiers with their handwritten answers to the question "Why are you a Marine?" Mark Sealy, Carol Squiers, David Levi Strauss.
Anne Wilkes Tucker, Roberta Valtorta,
British photographer Richard Learoyd, interviewed here by Peggy Roalf, creates portraits of a very
Deborah W i l l i s , Sylvia W o l f , G u Zheng
different kind: his starkly exquisite, large-format images have much in common with the traditions of
nineteenth-century portraiture. Learoyd creates these unique images with a camera obscura, working C O - P U B L I S H E R S , APERTURE MAGAZINE
Dana T r i w u s h and Michelle D u n n Marsh
within strictly bounded formal parameters. Paul Graham, by contrast, has assumed a more catholic magazine!? aperturc.org
purview in his long career—one that does not hold with the notion of the "decisive moment" (Proust's 212-729-3235

"thin slice"). As he notes here to writer Aaron Schuman, "it's about the moment before and the
moment after as much as it's about the 'perfect' moment." A PERT! IKEFOl I N D A T I O N
Mark Alice Durant considers some contemporary photographers who bring a performative inflection to EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
J u a n Garcfa <lc O t e y z a
their work, from the quasi-preposterous scenarios proposed by Lilly McElroy and Erwin Wurm to the more
Aperture Foundation, Inc.. a nonprofit organization
contemplative tableaux of William Lamson and Gabriel Orozco.
dedicated to promoting photography in all its forms,
David Frankel explores the confluence of light, movement, art, and cutting-edge technology as rendered publishes Aperture at 547 West 27th Street,
4tti Floor, New York, NY 10001. To subscribe,
through the poetic and innovative sensibility of the OpenEnded Group, featured on this issue's cover. The
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Finally, filmmaker John Waters riffs on the lives of c a r s — a s e x p o s e d , in Waters's world, by Lee Visit the Aperture website at www.aperture.org;
email letters to the editor at magazine@aperture.org
Friedlander. Warning: this diatribe may forever change the way you think about parking lots, road trips,
and your daily commute.
APERTURE FOUNDATION BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Officers: Chairman. Celso Gonzalez-Falla: Vice Chairman,
Mark Levine; Treasurer, Frederick M. R. Smith: Secretary,
As we close this issue in early February 2010, we are hearing from colleagues and friends who have been Barry H. Garfnkel. Esq.; Members: Robert Anthoine. Esq..
Chairman Emeritus: Joseph T, Baio; Annette Y. Friedland:
photographing in Haiti. By all accounts, the tragedy there is overwhelming—beyond the ability of words
John H. Gutlreund. Chairman Emeritus: Cathy M. Kaplan;
and photographs to adequately address. However, all those witnessing the devastation speak of the Todd Oldham; Antonia Paepcke DuBrul; Jorge Pinto;
Alan Siegel: Alan Stoga: Willard B. Taylor. Esq.;
Haitian people's strength and capacity to face adversity, and hold out hope that help will continue once
Matthew S. Tlerney; Susana Torruelia Leval; Diane Tuft:
the urgency of the rescue efforts is less critical and that the steps toward reconstruction will be quick, Rhett L. Turner Tommaso Zanzotto

nonpoliticized, and well documented. Our hearts and thoughts are with the Haitians and their families
worldwide, as well as with the committed rescue workers, N G O s , and other organizations and individuals
Michael E. Hoffman, Publisher and Executive
who are coming to their aid and telling their stories. Director (1964-2001)

— T h e Editors Minor W h i t e , Editor (1952-19 1) 7

6 / it inr.npftlitre.tny
CQNIEiBUIQES.
AARON 5 CHUM AN
DIANE A R B U S 's photographs are on view this
year at the National Museum of Scotland
[Edinburgh) and at the San Francisco M u s e u m of
Modern Art. A retrospective is being organized
by the J e u de Paume, Paris; it will open in the
autumn of 2011 and travel to other European
institutions.
S T E P H E N D U P O N T was the recipient of the
2007 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic
Photography for his ongoing project on
Afghanistan. His handmade photographic artist's
books are in such collections as the National
Gallery of Australia, the New York Public Library,
and Joy of Giving Something Inc.
M A R K A L I C E D U R A N T is an artist, writer, and
occasional curator. He has contributed e s s a y s
to monographs of Vik Muniz, McDermott and
McGough, Jimmie Durham, and Marco Breuer.
He is currently working on a book and exhibition
of the photographs of Maya Deren.
DAVID F R A N K E L is a contributing editor for
Aperture magazine.
ROBERT GOBER was c h o s e n to represent the
United States at the 2001 Venice Biennale,
and a retrospective of his work was organized
by the Schaulager in Basel in 2007. His
curatorial work includes The Meet Wagon at the
Menil Collection in Houston (2005). and Heat
Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles
Burchfield, which opens at the Whitney Museum
of American Art later this year.
PAUL GRAHAM'S exhibition a shimmer of
possibility is on view at FOAM, Amsterdam, until
June 16, 2010.
J O S E F KOUDELKA'S Piemonte was recently
republished by Contrasto; the English edition
is due out this spring. An expanded version of
his book Gypsies will be published in 2011.
Koudelka's exhibition Invasion 68 Prague is
currently touring internationally.
RICHARD LEAROYD'S portraits were featured
last year at Mew York's McKee Gallery:
s / trtnr. operiitre* org
the exhibition was accompanied by the
publication Richard Learoyd: Unique Photo­
graphs, 2007-09, which was cited on the
New York Times Style Magazine online as one
of 2 0 0 9 ' s Best Books.
M I C H A E L LESY is the author of more than a
dozen books, including Wisconsin Death Trip,
first published in 1973 and still in print, and
most recently Murder City (Norton. 2007).
He teaches literary journalism at Hampshire
College.
S U S A N M O R G A N has written extensively about
art and d e s i g n . Her newly edited anthology of
Los Angeles stories by Esther McCoy (1904¬
1989), the p r e e m i n e n t voice of West C o a s t
modernist architecture, will be published this fall.
THE O P E N E N D E D G R O U P (Marc Downie,
Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser) is currently
developing NEH-funded open-source software
for spatializing photographic archives: with
Aperture, the group is working on a collaboration
with Richard Misrach that applies this
technique to his photographs of the Salton
Sea. T h e OpenEnded Group has recently been
commissioned by SITE Santa Fe to remake
Ghostcatching. its 1999 collaborative project
with Bill T. Jones, as a stereoscopic work.
Los A n g e l e s - b a s e d artist KELLY P O E ' S
photographs have been exhibited widely, most
recently in International Geographic, a two-
person show with Raquel Ormella at New York's
Artist's Space,
PEGGY ROALF writes about art and culture.
A widely published author and editor, she
has also taught photography and design at
the International Center of Photography and
the Cooper Union, respectively. She lives in
Manhattan.
A A R O N S C H U M A N is an American photographer,
writer, editor, and curator. He is currently a
Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Arts
University College Bournemouth, a Lecturer
at the University of Brighton, the editor of
SeeSaw Magazine, and curator of Whatever Was
Splendid, one of the principal exhibitions at the
FotoFest 2010 Biennial.
JOHN W A T E R S is a filmmaker, actor, writer, and
visual artist. His upcoming book, Role Models,
a self-portrait told through intimate literary
profiles of the author's favorite personalities,
will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in May 2010.
1
ERRATUM: In TIM D M A i u;\if".: o New Topographies
exhibition in issue 198 (p. 16), the quotation ' T h e
world is infinitely more interesting than any of my
opinions concerning it" w a s misattributed to Joe Deal.
The words are actually Nicholas Nixon's.
Pr*,!£i((.*l*. r.1 Prffi, Rrt„ll .oir.',.,, John Ha..Jfch BuS*h
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Cheong m Hong Kong.
.REVIEWS.
THE PROVOKE ERA

• 0>
1960s and '70s, much of which was
characterized by high-contrast black-
r
^ B a n d - w h i t e images in a style known
Wl in Japan as are-bure-boke (rough.
•£J^bL blurred, out-of-focus). In the West, the
J yjSL B ^ M | style is perhaps best known through
r ^LMCH the work of Moriyama: his photographs

jjtgfafa-
The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography, a show drawn
from the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, offered a rare and welcome opportunity to examine
material that is key to understanding the history of twentieth-century
Japanese photography. Curated by Lisa Sutcliffe, the exhibition
featured a total of seventy-eight prints as well as fourteen photo-
books, comprising work by both Provoke photographers and others
related to the movement through precedent, context, or influence.
Provoke started out as a magazine, of which only three issues
were published: the first in 1968 and the second and third in
1969, each in an edition of a thousand copies. The publication
was instigated by a small group of photographers and critics: Koji
Taki, Takuma Nakahtra, Yutaka Takanashi, and Okada Takahiko,
later joined by Daido Moriyama. (The group also published a
book, Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai wo sutero [First, discard the
world of pseudo-certainty] in 1970.) The magazine presented a
tightly constructed manifesto, via a heady mixture of essays and
images, that offered a direct challenge to established modes of
photography. The full title of the magazine, Provoke shiso no tame
no chohatsuteki shiryo (Provoke: Provocative materials for thought),
was apt: the photographers proposed to move beyond mainstream
conventions of language and image, and to use the camera as a
means of expressing authentic, purely personal experiences rather
than producing didactic descriptions of events, people, and places.
Over the years, "Provoke" has come to be used as a catchall term
for the innovations that took place in Japanese photography of the
I^^^T^FPR w i t n
motion, grit, and tonal extremes.
SFMOMA (which presented a major
exhibition of Moriyama's work in 1999)
displayed a number of his signature
pieces in The Provoke Era, including
Stray Dog, Misawa. Aomori (1971),
and examples of his books, including
Shashin yo Sayonara (Bye-bye
photography; 1972).
More strikingly, the exhibition
included five photogravures by
Nakahira from La Nuit (Night), a series he produced for the 1968
Biennale in Paris. These poster-sized works were meant to be
hung haphazardly among vast numbers of other images, barraging
viewers in much the way the newly consumer-conscious citizens
were barraged by the bright lights and signage in Japan's growing
metropolitan centers at the time. Full of the expressive energy
that gave Provoke its subversive power, Nakahira's images, like
those of other photographers associated with the group, abjure
conventional subject: they operate instead by disorientation,
immersing the viewer in an indecipherable yet palpably
photographic surface of shadow and grain—an approach very
specifically aimed at upending the prevailing modes of humanistic
documentary photography.
This rare encounter with Nakahira's La Nuit underscores the
challenges of mounting a serious, in-depth exhibition about the
Provoke moment. This work was not intended to be experienced as
tidily framed objects, but rather jam-packed together in improvised
exhibition spaces, or—most critically—on the printed page. The
show's inclusion of books and of copies of Provoke magazine
provided an invaluable view of the photographs as they were meant
to be experienced. A neatly framed-and-matted Kikuji Kawada
Seikmi Ferry Boat, 1976. from the series The
THIS PAGE: Masahlsa Fukase,
tude of Ravens. 1976: OPPOSITE. TOP: Nobuyoshi Arakl, Untitled. 1980
the series Pseudo-Reportage: BOTTOM: Takuma Nakahira, La Afuif 3. ca. 19
Fukase C trie artist. San Franeisco Museum ot Madam Art SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund Pu.cnase.
Ar,il>, SFMOMA Accessions Committee Funo: Nakahira.: P/om,sed fth to SFM0M4 from a private collector

i( / trinr.<tf>t'i/ttn:or!r
 directly (such as Shomei Tomatsu and Hosoe) and others who
came after (such as Issei Suda) revealed a curatorial conflation of
two related—but separate—movements in late-1960s Japanese
photography; Kompura and Provoke.
The Kompura group of photographers placed emphasis on
personal vision, commonplace subjects, and a straightforward
photographic approach. Among the group's central inspirations
were the works featured in the George Eastman H o u s e ' s
1966 exhibition Contemporary Photographers: Toward a Social
Landscape—by Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander. Danny Lyon, and
others. Although Kompura photographers such as Suda, Hiromi
Tsuchida. and Masatoshi Naito were all included in the Provoke

gelatin-silver print, for example, is an entirely different—much show, the two movements were not totally aligned; both may have

tamer—animal than the gravure-printed, full-bleed incarnation that veered from strict realism and aimed to reconnect with earlier

appears in the gatefolds of his book Chizu (The map; 1965). traditions of the Japanese avant-garde, but Provoke went much

Provoke is frequently credited with representing the Japanese further than Kompura in its effort to reinvent the language of

psyche during a time of political upheaval, unprecedented photogra p h i c i m age- m a k i ng.

urbanization, and mind-boggling economic growth. But the Of course, all the artists in The Provoke Era were influenced

photographers were not alone; they frequently collaborated with by similar ideas and share a set of reference points related to

graphic designers, filmmakers, writers, and others who shared the societal upheavals taking place in Japan in the 1960s and

their iconoclastic impulses. While the exhibition was accompanied '70s—and certainly few U . S . institutions are better positioned

by an ancillary program of two short film- and video-pieces by than SFMOMA to take on this rich era in the history of Japanese

Eikoh Hosoe and Moriyama (and one stunning contemporary photography. But in the interest of encouraging a more nuanced

piece by Yasumasa Morimura reenacting Yukio Mishima's final understanding of contemporary Japanese photography, The Provoke

speech), viewers' understanding of the movement might have Era represents only a small step toward a larger critical history and

benefited more if these elements had been incorporated directly exhibition of this important movement, which are still due.©

into the show. The curators also passed up an opportunity to —Lesley A. Martin

include works by other artists who collaborated with the Provoke

photographers—notably printmaker and graphic designer Tadanori The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography was presented at the San
Yokoo (who is well represented in the SFMOMA collection). Francisco Museum of Modem Art. September 12-December 20. 2009.

In many ways, both the strengths and the weaknesses of Tfie Lesley A. Martin is the publisher of Aperture Foundation's books program.

Provoke Era stemmed from the same dilemma. Although S F M O M A ' s

collection of Provoke materials is impressive, given the complexity
of the issues being explored, working within the limitations of
any single institution's holdings would most likely have resulted
in a similarly fuzzy thesis. While the show was too narrow on one
end, it was overbroad on another; the era of the works presented
spanned rather too widely—from the 1950s (with early images by
Kansuke Yarnamoto) all the way into the 1990s (with selections of
Taiji Matsue's landscapes, and Hiroshi Sugimoto's Theater series).
Although all the works in the show could be deemed "context,"
many of them seemed at best tangential to the Provoke movement.
Even within the featured work that legitimately fell under the Provoke
Era-umbrella (i.e., from the 1960s and 7 0 s ) , the inclusion of
some artists against whom the Provoke photographers rebelled

in). i<.}<.) aperture / n

REVIEWS
JOE DEAL: NEW WORK
It is not hard to see how the Great Plains might have
driven early American pioneers to agoraphobic dis­
traction. Photographer Joe Deal hails from this empty
region, and after several d e c a d e s cataloging the
interaction of people and landscape, often in the farther
American West, he has returned here for his new series
West and West. At first glance these square-format
black-and-white photographs, twenty-three of which were
installed c l o s e together in o n e room of this exhibition,
appear relatively characterless, their uniform horizon
line encircling the s p a c e . But, like Hiroshi S u g i m o t o ' s
ostensibly simple photographs of open s e a s , upon
closer inspection D e a l ' s images reveal a landscape
full of incident. T h e land is threaded with s t r e a m s , or
is interrupted occasionally by a knotty rock formation.
Small hills calve and fold. A random tree punctuates one
scene like an exclamation mark.

Deal has compared the c a m e r a ' s imposition of

a frame on this environment to the mechanical act
performed by surveyors. Yet early rationalist grids—such
as T h o m a s J e f f e r s o n ' s p r o p o s e d division of the land
west of the Appalachians and the Kansas-Nebraska
A c t — c a u s e d speculators to disregard the l a n d s c a p e ' s
variety. Deal's camera, by contrast, lovingly catalogs its diversity. cave mouths, whether dusty and rocky or fringed with green, allow
The startling incongruity from picture to picture is highlighted by passage through the surface of the print, literalizing the cliche
a trio of images hung close to o n e another in the show: Wash, about representational pictures being a "window onto a world."
Red Hills (2007), in which a shallow natural depression reveals Even more striking is the sensation, felt when looking at the
stratified layers of rock; Horizon and Night Sky, High Plains (2005) images taken from within the caves' dark interiors, that one is
in which thin clouds hover just above a featureless black expanse; positioned inside a camera lens as it admits the light of day. In

and Flint Hills (2006). which is strewn with lunar-looking rocks. these two series, Deal, an integral part of the New Topographies

The tension Deal achieves between strict regularity and variety, cohort, subtracts the signs of humankind's incursion into the

between grid and ground, is in large measure the source of these "natural" landscape, which he is well known for recording. Yet

photographs' power. he does not sacrifice the complexity of his meditations upon that

On another level, the minimalist compositions of West and landscape—upon not only the land itself but also his particular

West—each print is perfectly bisected by the horizon line— means of representing it.©

comment on what constitutes "landscape" to the human eye. A — B r i a n Sholis

swipe of sky and a swipe of ground: it's a s simple a definition as
an artist can deploy. That Deal may have such abstract questions
of representation in mind is underscored by the pictures from
another recent series, Karst and Pseudokarst, installed in a
second room. In this project, which takes its name from the
two often indistinguishable types of caves it depicts. Deal has
chosen to shoot both from the inside and the outside of the
caves, resulting in two very different types of prints. When he
peers in, the allover compositions give the impression that the
Joe Deal: New Work was presented at the Rhode Island School of Design
Museum of Art, Providence. September A. 2009-January 3. 2010. The show is
on view at Robert Mann Gallery, New York, until May 8. and will then travel to
the Center for Creative Photography. Tucson. June 5-August 1, 2010.
Brian Sholis is Artforum.com Editor at Large for Artforum and a student of
American history at the Graduate Center. New York.
Cloud, Missouri Plateau, 2005.
PhfHDtrapl. O/colltnlittn or the jiMist 'touMe*. RnnoM Minn Gallery New Vorfc

i2 / www.aperture.org
REVIEWS
FELLINI: LA GRANDE PARADE
In 2003 when C N N squeezed the early days of the Iraq War onto
the little screen, it presented the conflict as the prototypical,
complex, contemporary viewing experience. Video footage, still
images, crawling text, and dramatic station logos were all
crammed into a single frame, an explicit acknowledgment that
attention itself had become a multitask.
The Jeu de Paume recently brought that kaleidoscopic
experience into the museum in a dizzying, champagne-bubbly-
shake-'em-up interchange among still and moving images and a
tangle of two-dimensional medi3. Fellini: La Grande Parade was
about an alchemist named Federico Fellini who transmuted reality
into illusion, dream into lasting impression, and popular media
into pungent commentary on society, religion, imagination, the
corrosive effects of modern imagery, and cinema itself. More
than four hundred photographs, cartoons, drawings, posters,
magazines, news clippings, film clips and cut s e q u e n c e s , including
many previously unseen items, presented a multiple Fellini, as
assembled by curator Sam Stourdze.
There was the young Fellini, who began as a cartoonist and
had a lifelong passion for comic strips. Fellini the director who
continued to sketch private cartoons for inspiration; as he
reported in the 1984 book Fellini by Fellini: "When I start my
films, I spend most of my time sitting at my desk, doodling tits
and bums." Fellini, at his analyst's suggestion, drawing and
writing down his dreams for thirty years, dreams as full of tits and
bums as were his doodles, his cartoons, his films; dreams calmly
14 / www. aperture, org
inserted into the fictive realities of his films, beginning in 1963
with 8 1/2, Fellini and actors at work, in photographs made on
and off sets. Fellini who preferred his actors to count rather than
memorize lines, and who often held auditions afterward for the
best voices to record the characters' lines.
There was Fellini's legacy, the films that changed filmmaking and
influenced filmmakers the world over: s c e n e s of Giulietta Masina
(his wife from 1943 to his death in 1993) in La Strada (1954);
Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain in
1960's La Dolce Vita; and more, seducing the eye and memory in
every room. Fellini the brilliant image-maker who loathed television
and skewered the immorality of a world governed by images,
as in the fake TV commercials he produced for Ginger and Fred
(1986)—in one, the mourners around a casket s o exaggeratedly
savor the funeral wine that the corpse sits up for a glass.
The volley of images in the show ricocheted between Fellini's
themes and obsessions—popular culture (including the circus,
carnivals, religion), the thin line between illusion and reality, women
as sex g o d d e s s e s . Especially telling was evidence of the way he
transformed news photographs into stunning fictional imagery:
the sequence that opens La Dolce Vita—a helicopter bearing a
statue of Jesus to St. Peter's above bikini clad sunbathers—was
prefigured by a Catholic newsreel of a copter carrying such a
statue; the striptease scene in the same movie was modeled on
scandalous photographs of an aristocrat's striptease in a nightclub.
Before each new shoot, Fellini told L'Arc magazine in 1971, "I
always send a small advertisement to the newspapers which says
more or less 'Federico Fellini is ready to meet all those people
who wish to s e e him' . . . every idiot in Rome turns up to s e e me,
including the police. 1 may see a thousand, in order to pick two. but I
assimilate them all." On the walls of the museum were some of the
photographs they brought him, many so grotesque they can only be
described as . . . Felliniesque. In the Jeu de Paume and in Fellini's
image world, the actual and the imagined slipped into one another,
each clamoring for precedence over the eye and the mind. Fellini: La
Grande Parade was less an exhibition than an experience.©
— V i c k i Goldberg
Fellini: La Grande Parade was presented at the Jeu de Paume. Paris.
October 20. 2009-January 17. 2010.
Vicki Goldberg is the author of Light Matters, a collection of her essays. Pholog
rapliy in Print: How Photographs Changed Our Lives, and many other books.
Federico Fellini. March 1965. Photographer unknown.
REVIEWS
ROBERT BERGMAN: PORTRAITS, 1986-1995
Seeing Robert Bergman's one-person show at the National Gallery
of Art brought to mind a novel I started to write twenty years ago.
The plot: an untrained, unsung street photographer is discovered
by a savvy New York dealer and becomes the toast of the art
world. Critics love him, curators and collectors fawn over him, and
he seems a sure bet for the next Biennial until . . . no, wait, that's
not my plot, it's John Waters's. from his 1998 movie Pecker,
about the eponymous Baltimore lensman who momentarily makes
it big in Chelsea.
Bergman's story is n o less remarkable or unlikely than
Pecker's. Granted, Pecker is a young kid and Bergman has
been around for years (he is now in his mid-sixties), but both
spring onto the art-world stage like Athena from the head of
Z e u s . According to National Gallery curator Sarah G r e e n o u g h
and various press accounts, Bergman has been on the s c e n e
16 / www. aperture, org
since the 1 9 6 0 s and has been taking color photographs since
1985. T h e thirty street portraits that comprised the National
G a l l e r y ' s show (a similar selection appeared simultaneously
at P.S. 1 in Q u e e n s ) were taken between 1986 and 1995. It
s e e m s a tad curious, t h e n , that scarcely anyone had heard of
Bergman before this show, much l e s s s e e n one of his pictures.
Perhaps the photography world is larger than we think,
or perhaps t h e r e ' s still room for genius to emerge at a late
age. Both are comforting t h o u g h t s . N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e r e ' s a
temptation to dismiss B e r g m a n ' s pictures a s latter-day Bowery
Bum photography. M o s t of his ink-jet-produced, moderately
sized prints show us t h e faces of people he encountered on
the s t r e e t s of major cities in the Midwest and e a s t e r n United
S t a t e s , They are p o s e d portraits: the subjects gaze down
or away into t h e distance, or else stare confrontationally
at the camera. For t h e most part, the people appear to be
downtrodden or at least on the outs with conventional society;
more than a few s e e m afflicted with a wasting d i s e a s e .
Unfortunately it is impossible to verify any of the questions
a viewer might have about these people, since Bergman
calls e a c h image " U n t i t l e d " and provides it with only a date.
No name, no location, no facts e x c e p t t h o s e given by the
lens—presumably Bergman wants his subjects to be open
to whatever preconceptions and prejudices his viewers may
project onto them. In t h e context of the gallery, t h o u g h , this
denial of extrapictorial detail s e e m s l e s s a social statement
than an aesthetic position: we are forced back on B e r g m a n ' s
compositions, his u s e of color, the c o n s i s t e n c y of his choices
of framing, e v e n his decision about which subjects to s h o o t .
In this regard, Bergman s h o w s that he is a tad more
sophisticated than Pecker. There is nothing radical about
his c o m p o s i t i o n s , but his harmonic handling of color and his
choices about how to fill the frame show that he is attuned to
the legacies of his contemporaries William Eggleston and Nan
Goldin. Overall the color s c h e m e is mostly autumnal in h u e ,
with occasional flashes of brightwork; most striking on this
s c o r e is a portrait of a gaunt, freckled woman of indeterminate
age who is struck by a pink light that turns her red hair to
flame. Her left clavicle sticks out from the s c o o p e d neckline of
her red d r e s s , an angry rebuke of whatever glamour the camera
might bring to the table.
Similar smart details are in several of the pictures, notably
one of a man in a black leather jacket who eyes the camera
while taking a drag on a cigarette. He looks unyieldingly hostile,
 us more attuned to human suffering in general (come back,
S u s a n S o n t a g , p l e a s e ) , but this aim is attenuated by our prior
e x p e r i e n c e of pictures in the s a m e v e i n . We might expect
anyone c o n v e r s a n t with recent photographic practice to know
this as an existing critical p r o b l e m , which leaves us with a far
l e s s e n n o b l e d idea of what is afoot h e r e : that Bergman is out
to convince us that he is a great photographer. Unfortunately,
he h a s appeared a half-century too late,©

— A n d y Grundberg

Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986-1995 was presented at Vie National Gallery

of Art. Washington. D.C.. October 11. 2009-January 10. 2010.

Andy Grondberg is an associate dean and Chair of Photography at the Corcoran

College of Art and Design in Washington. D.C.
but then you notice that the same hand that holds the cigarette
is c o s s e t i n g a pigeon feather. Like most of the s h o w ' s s u b j e c t s ,
this man is photographed o u t d o o r s , against a building, close-up
enough to eliminate most of his s u r r o u n d i n g s . B e r g m a n ' s
fallback position is the head-and-shoulders portrait, which
makes the inclusion of two non-portraits—one o f a pair of
h a n d s , the other of a m a n ' s t o r s o — n o m i n a l l y intriguing.

Taken with a hand-held, small-format c a m e r a , the pictures

have a gritty quality that, e v e n when switched to pixels,
r e s e m b l e s old-fashioned film grain reminiscent of the work of
R o b e r t Frank. T h e Frank connection is central to the s h o w in
more w a y s than o n e . Bergman cites Frank's The Americans as
having first inspired him to have a career in photography, and
B e r g m a n ' s pictures lean similarly toward s o c i e t y ' s margins. The
National G a l l e r y is home to Frank's a r c h i v e s , and G r e e n o u g h
recently organized the fiftieth-anniversary exhibition of The
Americans. Is it any wonder, t h e n , that B e r g m a n ' s p r o f e s s e d
ambition was to launch his exhibiting career at this m u s e u m ,
and with a o n e - p e r s o n s h o w no l e s s ? But the real w o n d e r is
that the m u s e u m collaborated in this willful and seemingly
quixotic e n t e r p r i s e .

Beyond t h i s , t h o u g h , it is really B e r g m a n ' s motives for

c h o o s i n g to photograph the people he d o e s that remain the
central q u e s t i o n . Surely he c a n ' t be c o n c e r n e d that t h e s e
pictures in any way improve the lives of the people they
portray, since we d o n ' t know where or who they are. P e r h a p s
the ambition is for our regard of the pain of o t h e r s to make

OPPOSITE: Untitled. 1990; THIS PAGE, ABOVE: Untitled. 1987:

RIGHT: Untitled, 1989.
All images C u t H - dMi^t w»ortvmo<j<. gifr To Hie Nfllwflal Gsllefv 0' Aft. waininiitoii. P C

IKi. It.)tj lljIVllltt'e / l~

BACK STORY
MICHAEL LESY: TIME FRAMES
When I was twenty-one, I roomed with a guy who w a s a delivery
boy for Technicolor Photo. He drove a Harley with a sidecar, back
and forth between the plant and every drugstore in the city. On
the way out, he delivered prints; on the way back, he carried film.
All day, every day, day after day. He could have been a drone
collecting pollen. The plant never closed. The bosses had their
own offices, but everyone else sat in someone else's chair and
stood in someone e l s e ' s place. It was like a bus station with
three shifts; it beat like a heart. If you worked there and had any
sense, you understood that you were just a version of someone
you hadn't met. One guy said he was a replica; another guy kept
talking about reincarnation.
The way it worked: thousands of little black film cassettes poured
out of red bags into bins. The bins rolled into the dark. Every
cassette split apart like a crystal, cracked like an egg, popped
open like a cocoon, unwound like a bud. Every spool was unstrung;
every roll w3s pulled, stretched, and weighted so it hung down to
the ground; hundreds of them hung in groves, jiggling like vines,
clipped to overhead lattices that passed them through chemical
developers.
At that moment, every dead interval was recalled and time past
was renewed. Somewhere, in the center of the plant, every gesture
of experience was recapitulated in outline, every object that had
vanished was retraced. The films became negatives. Somewhere
in the maze, smelling like fertilizer, they were taken down, fitted
into clear plastic sleeves, and threaded into a color analyzer that
sent a beam of light through each frame to discover its density. It
was that beam of clear light that made the negatives bloom, one
every twenty seconds, one after the other, the machine clicking
like a metronome. Clouded eyes returned their glance: dark lips
opened red; the hills in the background grew brown and then green;
the water in the lake grew white and then blue: the chrome of car
bumpers glinted, then sparkled; rooms filled with people; brides
stood among gifts; daughters danced with their fathers; sons
returned to their mothers; lovers embraced beneath trees; hunters
held their weapons as deer bled in the snow; cripples grinned,
waved, and then walked; wise men sat alone in corners, while
fools stood by the highway, pointing at signs. The whole goddamn
human race shot out of a print slot, in a continuous line, flat-out
to the cutting machines, where girls in white gloves shoved them
into envelopes and stuffed the envelopes back into red bags. Every
hour, one of the delivery boys, sweating in his leathers, climbed off
his Harley, walked in, and hauled off a new load.
Commercial technology being what it was, there were always
mistakes. Supervisors randomly checked prints for color balance
/ S / iru'ir. aperfure.org
and sent hundreds back to correct slight variations. The first tries
ended up in the trash. At the end of the day, there were enough
remakes to fill half a dumpster. That's when my buddy and I walked
through the plant to be sure everyone was too exhausted to notice
us; then we'd grab a few empty boxes and go over to the side of
the dumpster. We'd fill the boxes and go home. That went on, every
day of the week, for two months. We looked at seven thousand
photographs a week.
My buddy got fed up, left town, and became a fisherman. 1
kept looking at snapshots. For years and years and years. People
showed me pictures that had been left unclaimed at big photo-
finishers. Sometimes I think it changed my personality, and
sometimes I wonder if it didn't damage my brain.
What I mean is, if you look at a couple hundred thousand
snapshots, in various regions, under various circumstances, over
a long enough period of time, you begin to lose track of the idea of
people's individuality and freedom of choice a s guaranteed by the
U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. You begin to lose track of
specific faces and places, and you begin to think of genotypes. In
between the howls and the whimpers and the cosmic laughter, you
catch yourself short and start thinking about pictures as symbols:
and once you start on symbols, you get into a lot of trouble with
most civilians. Because it's not long before you start reading
comparative mythology. Which does you about as much good as
the study of chivalry did Don Quixote. The trouble comes because
scholars of comparative mythology claim that the actual details of
even the most significant events last only a s long as three hundred
years in collective human memory. After that, they say, whether it's
the life of a saint, a savior, a hero, or a fiend, it's assimilated as
part of an already existing, already ancient set of stories. That sort
of consciousness was very useful in detecting consistent, long-term
patterns, but it created a bit of distance between me and the flash
and the rustle of daily life.
There are a number of visual artists and art historians who
believe that snapshots have the charming grace of nineteenth-
century genre paintings; there are also those who claim to have
seen snapshots that possess the same miraculous beauty as
a unicorn prancing through a suburban garden. Unfortunately,
other people believe that whatever beauty such snapshots may
p o s s e s s is less miraculous than absurd, similar to that of a sonnet
produced by a million monkeys pounding away at their typewriters.
By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite
madeieine described in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. By itself, it
is as bland and common as a tea biscuit; but as a goad to memory,
it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has
 the power to deny time for the sake of love. In Proust's novel, the
discovery of the magical properties of the madeieine is fortuitous,
but such denials and affirmations through the use- of things seen
or eaten, built or burned, buried or unearthed, also characterize
religious rituals of renewal and recapitulation. Snapshots may
not have the numinous power of Communion wafers, Sabbath
candles, or Eleusinian sheaves—but they are often used as
relics in private ceremonies to reveal to children the mysteries
of the incomprehensible worlds that existed before love and fate
conjoined to breathe them into life.
If a snapshot is broken from its context of life and love and,
like some anonymous curiosity, is stuck to the wall of a studio or
pinned to the bulletin board of a study, it may appear to strangers
to be as enigmatic as a piece of quarried stone in the middle of
the desert. However, once it has been restored to its narrative and
iconographic context, the ordinary snapshot becomes the capstone
of a pyramid whose base rises from the human heart.
People in snapshots often strike (or have been directed to
strike) theatrical p o s e s , and make (or have been directed to
make) symbolic gestures whose meaning are to be deciphered by
their intimates and descendents. At times, they make gestures
of their own free will: at other times, their actions are directed by
photographers whose decisions about distance and point of view
slice the world apart, as if they were gods separating the water
from the dry land. When a camera is raised to the eye of a friend,
2t / www.aperture.org
a lover, or a parent, it becomes a symbol of judgment, an insight
even more intense and scrutinizing than that which ordinarily
characterizes such intimate relationships. Its presence transforms
the people it beholds into actors, standing in sets, posing with
symbolic props, the whole scene a private allegory of love, defined
by the edge of an imaginary proscenium stage.' Sometimes the
people pictured have been well rehearsed, know their parts, and
enjoy them. At other times they "forget" or improvise them, or
even evade them. Often the snapshot is a picture puzzle in which
everything manifest is only a fraction of what is revealed.
Years after such puzzles have been made, they inevitably fall into
the hands of children, whose pasts are made accessible to them
by images, which provoke questions never before asked or never
before answered. Once the puzzles have been worked, they reveal
to children that they have been standing in a place—until now
invisible—where four rivers of time converge: their own, private,
secret time ("Who is that baby? Is that me?"): their family's time
("Is that when we lived in St. Louis?"); their country's time ("Is
that when Daddy was in the army?"); and mythic time, the common
poetry of the human family ("Is that when you and Daddy were in
love? I mean, before you got married and had babies?").©
* Note: Cf. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. 1975): and Mario Praz. Studies in 17th Century
Imagery, 2nd ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. 1975).
ON LOCATION

PIEMONTE
KOUDELKA
Lingotto, former Fiat factory, t e s t t r a c k , Turin, 2004.
afi / irtrtt:<ijjcrtitrc.tir<!
O P P O S I T E : Bridge, Settimo Torinese, 2004;
THIS PAGE: Castello di Rivoll,
M u s e o d ' A r t e C o n t e m p o r a n e a , artwork by
Maurizio C a t t e l a n , 2004.

All images © Jost'l KwjUeiha/Magnuni Ptwtos

 THEME & VARIATIONS

I will be shot with a riile at 7:45 P.iii. I hope to have some good p h o t o s . —Chris Burden

P H O T O G R A P H Y

P E R F O R M A N C E

BY M A R K A L I C E DURANT

110. tyy aperture / ;ji

 There is something iconic about the images of performance from The goal of much performance and C o n c e p t u a l work of those

the 1 9 6 0 s and '70s. The photographic documentatiotn of fabled years was the dematerialization of art: an attempt to separate

Happenings and other a c t i o n s — b y the Fluxus artists, Viennese art from precious materials and pretentious institutions so that it

Actionists, Nouveaux Realistes, and individuals a s s o c i a t e d with could exist in more pure, l e s s c o m p r o m i s e d forms. Photography

t h e s e groups, either closely or by influence: J o s e p h B e u y s , Chris was u n d e r s t o o d and utilized as a functional medium meant

Burden, Marina Abramovic, Carolee S c h n e e m a n , Ana Mendieta. to produce an affectless record, without the taint of style or

Vito A c c o n c i , Yves Klein, Adrian Piper, and o t h e r s — m a y strike us authorship. That photography was a distinct discipline with its

today like rarified chronicles of some lost tribe's obscure rituals. own history and a e s t h e t i c s was rarely c o n s i d e r e d ; for many,

W o u n d e d arms, conversations with dead rabbits, leaps into the it was s e e n simply as a means either to document transitory

v o i d , self-inflicted bite marks, profane orgies, scrolls unfurling actions or to s e p a r a t e the viewer from direct engagement with

like viscera from the r e c e s s e s of the body . . . such actions an object. (It is of c o u r s e important to distinguish this utilitarian

have gained a prolonged life through photographs; they are now mode from the performance images by photographers s u c h as

burnished in the imaginations of artists, critics, and art historians, Peter Moore and Dona Ann M c A d a m s , who well u n d e r s t o o d the

to the point that at least some of them s e e m to be permeated by cultural significance of performance art and the n e c e s s i t y to

an unmistakable air of the s a c r e d . d o c u m e n t its e v e n t s , personalities, and t r e n d s — a n d who did so

with rigorous creativity.)
Photography s e r v e s performance in many ways: by saving the
ephemeral instant from disappearance, by composing a moment As curator Ann Temkin has pointed out, the ongoing power

at its narrative and symbolic zenith, and sometimes by banishing and influence of Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain is largely

from the frame all that may have distracted the actual w i t n e s s e s transmitted through the images Alfred Stieglitz made of the

of the event. "original" urinal. Beyond photography's documentary utility, its

Chris Burden's 1974 riff on Christian martyrdom, Trans-fixed. ability to distill and embellish the aura of radical p r o c e s s is one

lasted barely two minutes at the Speedway Garage in Venice. reason photographs are essential to the history and posterity of

California, and was s e e n by only a handful of people from across performance. Perhaps the days of groundbreaking body art are in

the street. T h e image of the artist's body splayed over the roof of the past, but the documents of that era have been transformed

a Volkswagen bug—to w h i c h Burden's hands had been nailed by from visual marginalia to images that are every bit as foundational

an a s s i s t a n t — r e p r e s e n t s the masochistic e x c e s s e s of body art for today's artists as the c a n v a s e s of J a c k s o n Pollock and Pablo

of the 1970s and has come to symbolize the violent ethos of its Picasso were for earlier generations.

time. Burden's subsequent ironic presentation of the hand-piercing So if photography has affected performance, how has per­
nails in a glass-and-velvet vitrine, as in a saintly reliquary, has not formance affected photography?
diminished the legend or the conceit of extreme self-sacrifice in A performative attitude may be s e e n in the widely diverse works
the name of art. of Nikki S. Lee, Vik Muniz, Steven Pippin, and Katy G r a n n a n , to

Ana Mendieta's performances s e e m to reference pre-Christian name just a few contemporary artists who produce "photographs"

iconography. Although the body and the earth were the sites of as if the word should be framed by quotation marks. That is to say,

her actions, she relied on photography to frame and transmit her they embody an attitude toward photography that is informed more

ideas. We are invited to imagine her actions as they unfolded, but by Conceptual art than by the lineage of Great Photographers. In

in effect, for most of us today, the photograph is necessarily the Lee's c a s e , it is impossible to peel away the performance from

prevailing work. Much of Mendieta's performance imagery is so its documentation. Whether hers are "good" photographs by

straightforward and seemingly absolute that we do not envision conventional standards is more than irrelevant: the very amateurish

how or under what conditions they were made: it is as if the image quality of her pictures is essential to her investigation into

came into existence as an apparition, or a kind of virgin birth. The establishing identity through the mundane ritual of the snapshot.

reality, of course, was less miraculous; just outside the frame of The distinction between the documentation of live performance
Imagen de Yagul (\mage fromYagul; 1973). for example, Mendieta's and of actions staged specifically for the camera is often
fellow graduate students at the University of Iowa were chatting d e l i b e r a t e l y b l u r r y . I n d e e d , t a x o n o m y b e g i n s t o fail us a s we
and keeping an eye out for security guards, while her teacher Hans
Breder danced around with camera in hand, taking multiple s h o t s . PAGE 30: Chris B u r d e n , Trans-fixed, V e n i c e , California, April 23, 1974;

Breder later said of this p r o c e s s : "Ana's work translates beautifully PAGE 31: Melanie Etonajo, Furniture Bondage: Hanna, 2007; O P P O S I T E ;
Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960.
into photography. The original action was not always riveting, but
Burden: V The arlisT/couf tpsy Gagosian Gallery. Mew YoiV Bonao: courtesy The arust/P.P.O.W Gallery, New Yort<: Klein-
the p r o c e s s of photographing transformed the work."
CD 2010 Artists R.ghls Society IWSl. New Tork/ADAGP. Pans/Metropolrtiin Museum OT ALL. New YofV/Aft Resource. New Yorv.

:jj / tnrir.iijicrliiri'.iirE
seek to peg certain works under identifying rubrics: the elaborate
tableaux imagery—curator Jennifer Blessing terms it "performed
p h o t o g r a p h y " — o f Jeff Wall, Gregory C r e w d s o n , Robert and Shana
ParkeHarrison, Roger Ballen, and Cindy S h e r m a n , among others,
for example. But clearly t h e s e photographers' works have more
in common with both the legacy of fine-art photography and the
narrative c o n c e r n s of theater and cinema than with the visual
archive of performance art.
(An Aid to Melancholia) (1998), was purportedly created over
the course of about a year, during which the artist traveled by
public transportation in England and Germany while wearing
dark g l a s s e s equipped with a pump system to deliver a constant
stream of tears trickling down from beneath the lenses. T h e work
was actually photographed (by Newman's collaborator Casey Orr)
over the period of a week, but by utilizing varying cameras and
photographic materials, and supplying the work with evidentiary

Parallel to the growing ambition and ubiquity o f narrative- texts in which the dates, locations, and circumstances are

s c e n a r i o photography over the last couple of d e c a d e s has been fabricated, the artist creates a seemingly larger performance, in

an incremental (but significant) shift away from the "heroic the vein of t h o s e by Adrian Piper and Bas Jan Ader. Here, the

g e s t u r e " in performative imagery toward something more relaxed document is unreliable evidence, a masquerade on at least two

and playful. M o s t contemporary artists do not appear to aspire counts: this is neither a woman truly weeping on the subway nor

to the mythological status attributed is it a record of an authentic yearlong

to the founding figures of performance performance. Remarkably, despite its
(Matthew Barney is a clear exception deceits, the image remains affecting,
here). There is a lighter touch, f o r evoking both compassion and wry
example, in the works of Gabriel Orozco. acknowledgment o f the power of
an artist who flits between materials photographs to compel in spite of their
and media like a modern-day trickster. artificiality.
Yet even though t h e camera h a s Melanie Manchot explores t h e
become an indispensable tool in his boundaries of trust and intimacy in a
transformation of the everyday, Orozco range of works in performance, photo­
has e x p r e s s e d a lack of interest in the graphy, and video. Gestures of Demar­
conventional c o n c e r n s of photography. cation (2001) is a series of six photo­
Instead, photography for him is a way to graphs in which a naked Manchot faces
e r a s e the line between the found and the camera in a variety of urban and rural
the arranged. Cumulatively, Orozco's environments, while an androgynous
seemingly c a s u a l imagery offers a n figure, facing away from the camera,
inventory of minor delights. T h e s e arise tugs at the artist's naked skin. Like a
not only from the whimsical nature contemporary Saint Sebastian, Manchot
of his "finds," but also because it is seems unaffected by the repeated
unclear whether the arrangement of •^•^•^•^•^•^•^•^•1 violation. Yoko Ono's Cut Piece comes
objects within the frame is the result of the artist's intervention to mind (a Happening first enacted in 1964, in which audience
or if he is just the luckiest and most sharp-eyed flaneur in the members were asked to join the artist onstage and cut away at her
world. His shuffling of products in the supermarket, where cat- clothing with a pair of scissors), as do several of Marina Abramovic's
food cans balance on watermelons, for instance (Cats and performances, in which viewers were invited to interact and even
Watermelons; 1992). is sweetly hilarious, showing just how violate the artist's body with an assortment of implements. By
easily the categories of the prosaic world can be undermined contrast, with Manchot's works, although we may experience a
and reimagined. And the humbly elegant Extension of Reflection visceral reaction to the intrusion, the event is enacted solely for the
(1992), which depicts the transient marks of a bicycle's tracks camera and not for a live audience: the viewer is thus never personally
through a pair o f puddles, is astoundingly economical in its implicated in the breach of the artist's physical boundaries.
evocation of things both earthly and celestial.
To paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty. the body d o e s not occupy
Intrigued by the canonical status that many performance images space like an object or thing, but instead inhabits, animates, or
have attained, and by how t h e s e often chaotic and impromptu even haunts s p a c e . In Erwin Wurm's "one-minute sculptures."
events had been formalized through photography, Hayley Newman the body performs or e x p e r i e n c e s a slapstick rebuke of personal
created a faux a r c h i v e — s h e calls it an "aspirational portfolio"— s p a c e and social etiquette. Wurm cloaks his Conceptualism
for a nonexistent performance career. One action. Crying Glasses behind the deadpan nature of the s n a p s h o t in pictures s u c h as

tin. it.}(.) tijivrtinv /

 Looking for a Bomb (2003), in which a kneeling man reaches J o s e p h Beuys is said to have c o n s c i o u s l y drained his per­
deep into another man's p a n t s ; Inspection (2002), in which a formances and installations of color in order to distance his work
woman sits with a friend in a restaurant while stoically enduring a from real life, desaturating his actions to make them more like
man's head thrust d e e p into her blouse: and the self-explanatory black-and-white photographs. Beuys understood the photographic
Spit in Someone's Soup (2003), T h e s e rude interventions in the document not simply as a n e c e s s a r y footnote to the main event;
everyday are part of Wurm's larger project Instructions on How to rather, the image had the talismanic authority to transmit his
Be Political'ly Incorrect. disembodied power through time. N o n e t h e l e s s , viewing the
If all we saw of Lilly M c E l r o y ' s work was a single photograph of iconographic record of 1 9 6 0 s and '70s performance art, you get
a young woman frozen in midftight, we might c o n s t r u e it as simply a sneaking s e n s e that if you were not there, you were sinfully
an embarrassing moment of drunken e x c e s s . But the cumulative absent from a hallowed e v e n t — y o u m i s s e d J e s u s walking on
effect of her s e r i e s / throw myself at men ( 2 0 0 6 - 8 ) transforms water b e c a u s e you were too young, not hip e n o u g h , lived in the
an indecorous act into a playful riff wrong town, or were j u s t too lazy to
on late-night desperation. McElroy go out that evening.
describes the series as "loving It is a paradox that photography and
and cruel . . . literal and clumsy, a performance, tied as they are to the
c r o s s b e t w e e n physical comedy and transitory, fused to create such an
earnest c o n f e s s i o n a l . " T h a t ' s a fair august archive of dramatic images. The
assessment of these deliberately Utopian themes that were circulating
awkward moments in which the in the 1960s and '70s were often
artist/protagonist flings herself embodied in the redemptive gestures
toward apparently unprepared male of performance art. The shine may
subjects. Like Girls Gone Wild have faded on the messianic promise
meets Yves Klein's Leap into the of image and action—but in fact it may
Void (1960), / throw myself at men be healthy not to indulge such romantic
combines low-rent barroom behavior fantasies anymore. Mia Fineman
with a performance artist's bravado. writes of Orozco's photographs: "At
T h e c h e a p spectacle is made all the times, it seems like he is simply
more pathetic by the pedestrian style adding punctuation to the prose of
of the photographs, in which the the everyday." This notion articulates
flash fills and flattens every r e c k l e s s the more earthbound ethos that
action and grimy barstool, marks our diminished expectations

William Lamson is unique among of art and life.

this group in that he was an Some of Melanie Bonajo's photo­

accomplished photographer who pro­ graphs, for example, reveal an
duced finely c o m p o s e d portraits and attitude that finds temporary solace
landscapes in the social-humanist tradition before deciding to in the humor of dispirited futility. With echoes of Charles Ray
spend more time in front of the camera than behind it. Crediting and Martha Rosier. Bonajo's Furniture Bondage series (2007-8)
Roman Signer's "action sculptures" as a catalyst, Lamson now presents an array of young w o m e n , t r u s s e d to the saddest
works in sculpture, video, and performance, as well as photography. assortment of generic domestic items. Unencumbered by any duty
His performance-inspired photo-series Intervention (2007-8) could to the heroic, yet still capable of provocation, Bonajo's photographs
be described as documents of temporary urban earthworks. As if present a cruel joke, as if Ikea had promised salvation but delivered
to convince us that the world is full of these l e s s e r epiphanies if we only unrelenting boredom. We laugh, and then an uncomfortable
would only open our eyes to s e e them, Lamson's simple and direct shudder of recognition chills our b o n e s . O
photographs allow us to imagine stumbling upon random poetic
collisions of materials, such as a helium-filled balloon strategically T H I S PAGE: Ana Mertdleta, tmagen de Vagal (Image from Yagul), 1973:

placed to blind a surveillance camera; a ladder made of twine and
bananas, scaling a tree; a discarded mattress pinched into a bald
tire like an elderly man squeezing into his old military uniform.
O P P O S I T E , T O P : Melanle M a n e hot. Gestures of Demarcation II, 2001;
B O T T O M : Lilly M c E l r o y , I throw myself at men #14, 2006.
MemJieta" <D Estate of Ana Menoieia Colfecticn/coortesy Gatene Leiong. New York: MancrioT: courtesy Robert GoJJ
Gallery. New Vorx; McElroy: © IhB artist/courtesy Thomas BoOerteJto GaHery. Chicago

;;_/ / irtrtr.upt'rfnrv.urii
no, tt,)(.) tt/H'rfnrr / ;{j
 THIS PAGE, T O P : E r w i n Wurm, Inspection, 2002; B O T T O M : Gabriel Orozco, C a r s and Watermelons, 1992;
O P P O S I T E : William L a m s o n , Intervention 11/14/07, 2007.

Wurm: courtesy Xavrer Huberts. Brussels: Ororco: courtesy the artm/Marlan Goodman Gallery. Mew York: Lamson: courtesy Che artist

;}fi / www. aperture. w/j?

iii). itjtj aperture / #J
ROADS LESS TRAVELED
PHOTOGRAPHS B Y K E L L Y POE
B Y S U S A N M O R G A N
Above the South Dakota Badlands, the western s k y is vast and
numinous, bright, and fraught with the anticipation of sudden
rain. The land below is ancient and deeply furrowed, a boundless
expanse of pale-clay stone cliffs, a ghostly contour map created
by the rushing waters of some vanished river. In New York City, as
a wintry s u n s e t s , the urban skyline dissolves into silhouette and
a glitter path—the trail of light reflected on rippling water—spills
across the bay toward Rockaway Beach. Deep in a forest, a lush
carpet of ferns springs up around a felled redwood crusted with
chartreuse lichen. Along Lake Michigan's northwest coast, great
undulating sand dunes roll downward into the inland s e a . When we
look at these disarmingly beautiful landscapes, we encounter the
ineffable complexities of the world that surrounds u s .
For more than ten years, Los A n g e l e s - b a s e d artist Kelly Poe
has been circling questions about how nature, politics, science,
and culture intertwine. A s a photographer and a longtime envi­
ronmentalist, s h e has worked with wildlife biologists and orni­
thologists, documenting fieldwork on migratory birds, degraded
habitats, and the loss of biodiversity. In Poe's series Birds of North
America (begun in 2005 and ongoing) each bird is pictured alone,
caught in a web. beating its wings and staring directly into the
camera. Although 0/rds of North America openly references the
tradition of ornithological portraits and its mix of art and science,
these birds bear little resemblance to John James Audubon's
handsomely wire-rigged nineteenth-century specimens or even
Eliot Porter's 1970s strobe-lit s c e n e s of birds happily at home
in the wild. In Poe's photographs, the startled c r e a t u r e s — a barn
owl, a house finch—appear trapped in mist nets as they are about
to be banded and set free again by researchers. T h e images are
precisely observed, full of implication yet disturbingly oblique: each
suspended moment feels tense and somehow inexplicable. It is a
/ wtvw.aperture.org
disorienting glimpse of a man-made effort to work with animals in
order to better understand the earth.
For Poe, the idea of nature photography in the twenty-first century
is both undeniably troublesome and vitally necessary. As part of a
2 0 0 4 exhibition, she produced free posters for gallery visitors: a
Photoshop-altered version of the iconic 1972 view of Earth taken
from the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the moon—here, the
famous "blue marble" is re-formed into a rigid cube. Against a pure
black background, the mutated planet floats beneath a wry headline
set in simple white type: "I'll never be what you want me to be."
Poe looks carefully and reads widely. Her conversation can
veer unselfconsciously from William Eggleston to Rachel Carson,
Bill McKibben to Diane Arbus. In a 2 0 0 6 artist's statement, she
questioned how artistic depiction and political actions might
intersect, a n d included a quote from Angela Davis: "Progressive
art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at
work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely
social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel
people toward social emancipation."
In the autumn of 2 0 0 6 Poe began to correspond with incarcer­
ated environmental- a n d animal-rights activists and initiated her
current ongoing collaborative project, for the wild,
"Domestic terrorism" w a s newly defined when the 2001 U.S.
Patriot Act w a s created in the wake of 9 / 1 1 : according to
federal prosecutors, offenses or actions calculated to influence
government policy or intimidate civilian populations could be
deemed terrorist acts. Throughout the civil-rights era. direct action
protests—organized marches, sit-ins, and even church bombings
and a s s a s s i n a t i o n s — h a d been prosecuted at the local level.
Under the new act's expanded definition, many of these actions
were criminalized and subject to federal sentencing guidelines
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 that included a "terrorism e n h a n c e m e n t " that added extra years Luers were multiplied and his actions regarded as eco-terrorism.
to prison s e n t e n c e s . The FB! a n n o u n c e d that eco-terrorism was He was s e n t e n c e d to twenty-two years and eight months in federal
the country's number one domestic terrorist threat; in 2004, they prison, (The three damaged vehicles were reconditioned and sold.)

launched Operation Backfire, an investigation into actions allegedly As Luers continued to write to Poe, he d e s c r i b e d times s p e n t with

perpetrated by the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation two e n o r m o u s t r e e s : a Moreton fig tree "with roots as high as my

Front. Environmental activists and First Amendment supporters waist" in Downey, California (the Los Angeles suburb where he

s e n s e d an echo of the Communist witch-hunts of the 1 9 4 0 s and grew up), and a redwood nicknamed "Happy," d e e p in a threatened

'50s and declared that "Green is the new Red." forest where he had staged a tree-sitting campaign. T h e close of

As news of the Green Scare continued to surface, Poe sent out Luers's letters was often an exultant rallying call—"for the w i l d " —

query letters introducing herself to incarcerated eco-activists, that captured the spirit of the collaborative project.

expressing her c o n c e r n s and support, and proposing a photographic Poe's letter writers were all variously earnest, g u a r d e d , respect­

collaboration. "What are the places that you travel to inside your ful, and ultimately confiding. Marie M a s o n , serving twenty-two

mind's eye, the sacred places that you visualize that help to keep years on charges of property destruction, initially replied to Poe's

you s a n e ? " she wrote. "I could visit those places and make pictures query with questions of her own. pointing out that her privacy has

to send to y o u . Let me be your eyes. Tell me where to go and which long been protected through silence. Relationships and the artistic

vantage point to photograph. I'll go there to make a picture for you rapport developed through an incremental epistolary p r o c e s s . The

and I'll describe the place to you," letters, often handwritten, were examined by authorities and sent

When Jeffrey " F r e e " Luers first replied to Poe, his letter was through the post office. Daniel M c G o w a n , s e n t e n c e d to s e v e n

ingenuous and unexpectedly poignant. "Part of the reason I haven't years for conspiracy and attempted a r s o n , r e s p o n d e d with great

written back is I've been searching my memory for places you could enthusiasm for the project's capacity to expand a w a r e n e s s and

visit. T h e problem is that I'm not as widely traveled or experienced quickly provided vivid word pictures of "the places that remind

as people a s s u m e . I w a s only 21 when I fell," wrote Luers, who was

profiled in the 2 0 0 2 New York Times feature "From Tree Hugger PAGE 39. T O P : Marie Mason, Sleeping Bear Dunes. Empire, M i c h i g a n ,
2009; B O T T O M : Marie M a s o n ' s letter from Newaygo County Jail,
to Terrorist." Luers was arrested in 2 0 0 0 for setting fire to three
M i c h i g a n , 2009; THIS P A G E : Daniel M c G o w a n , Rockaway Beach, New
light trucks at an Oregon car dealership. His action, intended to
York, 2008; O P P O S I T E , T O P : Jeffrey "Free" Luers, "Happy," Fall Creek,
draw attention to global warming and fossil-fuel consumption, was Oregon, 2007; B O T T O M : Jeffrey "Free" Luers's letter from t h e Oregon
originally classified as "criminal mischief one." an offense carrying S t a t e Penitentiary, Salem, 2007. Note: The title "for the wild" on page 38
a one-year sentence. During the trial, however, the charges against is in Luers's handwriting, from one of his letters t o Poe.

./r / www.aperture, org

tin. aperture / 41
 me of who I am + why I care''—an old-growth
forest along the rugged shoreline of northern
California's Lost C o a s t , and the 88th Street
jetty at Rockaway Beach. New York, close to his
childhood home.
The directions that Poe receives take
deeply personal form, shaped by memory and
meditatively attentive. When she travels
the described s i t e s — a Madrean sky island in
southern Arizona or the iconic Devils Tower, the
spectacular stone monolith that rises out of the
Wyoming grasslands—the artist is seeking both
an exact location and exploring an unanticipated
experience: looking at an actual place
seeing it as it appears within another person's
memory. After producing a round of digital and
35mm scouting shots, she sends an account of
the trip and a set of prints to her collaborators
for feedback. In Poe's letters, the descriptions
are sharp and immediate—the Northwest light
is "full of trickery" and "never constant,"
lakeshore landscape is a "sneaky beauty." and
a quiet canyon is wakened by "a riot of birds."
When the views are agreed upon. Poe returns to
the site and takes the final photograph. Traveling
mostly alone, she hikes into far-flung places,
packing an 8-by-10 Deardorff view-camera. With
astonishing empathy and patience, Poe records
a the majesty and tender solace of a landscape.
C o r r e s p o n d e n c e s are at the heart of this
to project: the exchange of confidences e x p r e s s e d
though letter writing, the understanding that
committed actions can articulate i s s u e s and
implement change, and the capacity of art
to realize what exists in the mind's eye. As
writer Elaine Jahn has noted, there is a spiritual
and landscape that exists within a physical land­
s c a p e . In Kelly Poe's collaborative photographs,
those corresponding landscapes are wonder­
fully revealed.©
A B O V E : Peter Young, Devils Tower, Crooks County,
Wyoming, 2007; RIGHT, T O P : Peter Young, Badlands,
South Dakota, 2008; B O T T O M : Peter Young's
a letter from the Federal Correctional Institution II,
Adelanto, California. 2006.
Ail images courtesy trie arlisl

jfi / www.aperture.org
 I am interested in learning more about your project, as well
as the responses from other prisoners. After weighing on your question
r e : the places I travel to in my mind's eye to deal with the insane
world of prison, I have come to a couple of answers which I will share
with you.
WORK AND P R O C E S S

F L E S H AND BONE
UNIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS BY R I C H A R D LEAROYD

When you first encounter Richard Learoyd's beyond-life-size and about nature as "a field of wonders past our comprehension."
portraits, mainly of unconventionally beautiful women, you sense I was wondering, have you found inspiration in Fox Talbot's work
that the passage of time is expressed by their stillness: the and writings?
repose through which they convey the powers they exert. The
thing about his photographs that makes looking at them exciting, R I C H A R D L E A R O Y D : I think many contemporary photographers

and somewhat unsettling, is that they provoke an escape from would be foolish to deny the influence of Fox Talbot, Andreas Gursky

rational thought. The sensuous landscape of flesh, the eyes clear and the Prada series, for example, or Robert Mapplethorpe's

as glacial pools, are so immediate and involving that all one ladders, and now Hiroshi Sugimoto with his new positive images.

can do is to look, and look again. Time, motion, speed—some I often muse over what might have come about if Fox Talbot

of photography's attributes that are enhanced by the effect of a had not invented the means to reproduce photographic images

frame, and that often distance this medium from painting—are as multiples; maybe a completely different way of seeing would

absent. But the massive scale and surface quality of Learoyd's have emerged, leaving photography as a more singular viewing

portraits share features with both the painting and the photography experience, where the value of the photographic object was

of nineteenth-century France; they have an intentionality that is maintained. But what Fox Talbot did was to introduce larger issues

imposed by the maker rather than received from the sitter. This is of mortality and religion into photographic imagery. T h e sometimes

perhaps why his photographs invoke the sublime. clumsy symbolism-—which could seem irrelevant in our time—

My initial conversation with Learoyd took place at New York's undoubtedly speaks of someone inventing a new visual language.

McKee Gallery during his first U.S. soto exhibition there last October. The ladder rising into the blackness of a hayloft (from his Pencil

I felt that I was seeing something new in photography; I wanted to of Nature) is a strong influence; for me it is the first word in an

know more about his thought and process, to shed light on the ways emerging photographic language.

in which artistry and optics combine in these unique photographs, I see my work more in the lineage of the French—referring to
which are made with a room-size camera obscura. The following daguerreotypes: those nonreproducible photographic objects
interview took place in the last two weeks of 2009. —P.R. whose multiplaned surface and miraculous depth of field fascinate
me. With my work I am interested in the moment when the image
P E G G Y R O A L F : I was reading an essay by Mark Haworth-Booth becomes dye and color, when the illusion of it being a reflection
recently about William Henry Fox Talbot. He was onto the magic of or projection breaks down. I think you get that s e n s e with
photography and talked about his invention as if it were a fairytale, daguerreotype images: you see the object before the illusion. With

I N T E R V I E W BY P E G G Y R O A L F

/ irii'ir.apt'iiitn'.oiii
my pictures, the illusion is very strong and breaks suddenly, and
often only momentarily, which is something I like.

P R : The nature of film photography today generally excludes any

s e n s e of the surface from its describable qualities. When and
how did you realize that you could bend traditional photographic
p r o c e s s e s to create the s e n s e of mass and volume that's evident
in your photographs?

R L : I was lucky enough to be in the generation before computers

became the norm. I studied at Glasgow School of Art under Thomas
J o s h u a Cooper, who is a wonderful landscape artist. During that
time the frontier seemed to be a place of ideas realized with
persistence and craft, where all was valued until proved u s e l e s s .
I look back at the time I had there and realize that's when my life
really began.

I first started experimenting with the camera o b s c u r a , or the

room-camera method that I use now, during my postgraduate
year at Glasgow. It was C o o p e r who lent me the lens from a
nineteenth-century portrait camera he had in his office. At the
time postgraduate students were given studios: this enabled me
to experiment with a different set of ideas instead of being out in
the world searching for something to photograph. Until then, my
work had been l a n d s c a p e - b a s e d ; it was fairly quiet and thoughtful,
almost reticent in a way. I s u p p o s e something in me craved a
s e n s e of power or d i r e c t n e s s in my work that I felt was lacking
in my landscape photographs. Working with the camera o b s c u r a
s e e m e d to satisfy this n e e d .
For the next several years I taught photography at a university
and worked as a commercial photographer. At a certain point I
had learned what I could from that and it was time to get on with
being an artist. In 2 0 0 4 I built the first version of the camera I
use now, as an extension of the work I had begun fourteen or so
years earlier. But now I knew what I was doing. I was inventing
photography for myself in a way that I could, and began making
the photographs I had imagined could be made. I don't
why. but the camera obscura s e e m e d to me the most natural of
methods. The apparatus I use c o n s i s t s of a lens, some lights, and
a processing machine. The p r o c e s s has certain built-in qualities to
do with physics and optics, but the most important quality for me
is that it is capable of producing photographs that fascinate me.
that match my vision.
It is an incredibly restrictive p r o c e s s and there are many
things you simply can't do. It's slow and painstaking, with much
that can go wrong. The method gives parameters of what you
c h o o s e to photograph. It's very liberating to have limited c h o i c e s ,
and the technique offers immediacy as it jumps past the print-
making p r o c e s s .
P R : At one point you mentioned that people in charge of their
bodies, such as dancers, s e e m to have a different center of gravity.
How d o e s this observation manifest in your work?
know R L : One thing that this p r o c e s s , at b e s t , can do is to translate
weight, density, and m a s s — n o t only in a physical s e n s e , but in a
more psychological way. When a picture is s u c c e s s f u l , the mental

All photographs are unique llfochrome prints; dimensions are given state of the sitter s e e m s to radiate from that person's physicaiity.
height x w i d t h . P A C E 45: Maaike. 2007, 68 x 48 in.; O P P O S I T E : Richard
on Armature, 2007, 68 x 48 in.: THIS PAGE: Agnes in Red Dress. 2008, P R : The surface quality o f your photographs is remarkable, in its
68 x 48 i n . s h a r p n e s s , a n d in t h e way t h a t y o u a d j u s t t h e f o c a l p l a n e t o

mi. iiji.) tiiwrhttf / 4~

shift back and forth within an extremely shallow range. C a n you
point to a moment w h e n you found that this was p o s s i b l e on a
large s c a l e ?

R L : While I must admit to disliking the use of shallow focus in

most conventional photographs today (it s e e m s like a device within
a device), I think a big influence on my understanding how the
focus issue could work for me was revisiting some early Lewis
Baltz pictures of scrubland. Don't ask me why, but they stuck in
my mind. The minute depth of field in t h e s e pictures is part of a
restrictive practice; it's quite simply physics. Every artist, whatever
their medium, has to deal with the rules of the universe. I think
the secret is to accept it and move o n . For me, in my work, the
implication or meaning of this shift between extreme s h a r p n e s s
and blur is an emerging and submerging of a p e r s o n ' s conscious­
n e s s , and emphasis of their immediate p r e s e n c e .

Learoyd's portrait of a nude man. Richard on Armature (2007).

shatters the silence created by the women in this artist's prospect.
In its formality, the pose is not unlike those of the women, whose
flesh and bone seem relaxed, as if settled into place by gravity's
pull. But the twisting of the legs, the subject's slight incline toward
the viewer, the intensity of his outward gaze, suggest that the man's
consciousness has been usurped by a powerful memory. The
emotion conveyed is raw, almost palpable. Is this a metaphorical self-
portrait? I wondered why Learoyd imposes such different demands
on the men that he places before his lens. His response:

I think that maybe my search for detail or perfection in photographs

is a desire to illuminate imperfection and h u m a n n e s s . The invitation
to scrutinize another, which is undoubtedly in my work, inevitably
highlights the loneliness of the soul and the depressing isolation of
the human condition. After all, who do we get to look at s o closely,
so carefully that the pores of their skin and the meniscus of liquid
under their eyes are visible? It is the opportunity to look without
e m b a r r a s s m e n t — a s we do with our children or lovers. Perhaps I
differentiate between men and women in that I am drawn to a more
profound intimacy with women, and s e e m to s e e men as more
physical beings. T h e barrier of the photographic surface mimics
the distance I feel from others and my frustrations with the desires
I have for intimacy.©

THIS P A G E , T O P : Jasmijn Towards the Light, 2008, 58 x 4 8 in,;

B O T T O M : Jasmijn Nude, 2008, 58 x 4 8 in.; O P P O S I T E : Fay Painting,
2009, 48 x 4 8 in.

All images O Ricnaru LoaroyO; jasnnjrt images courtesy Fraemef Galley. S a n F r a n c i s c o ; ail other images courtesy
M c K e e Gallery. New York
mi. Hjy u/iiTinrr / 41.)
WITNESS

WEAPONS
PLATOON
PORTRAITS AND NOTES
F R O M A U.S. MARINE C O R P S
B A S E IN AFGHANISTAN
BY S T E P H E N DUPONT

They call this place Dashti Margo, or

"Desert of Death," There's nothing here
but sand and rock and endless baking
horizon. If the homemade bombs don't
kill you, the heat will. This is Helmand
province, the Taliban's heartland.
It's pitch-black out, and I'm crammed
into a vehicle with three Marines, two other
journalists, and a very nervous Afghan
police chief. We are in the U.S. military's
latest and safest armored personnel
carrier—a metal box on wheels that is
supposed to protect you from just about
anything the enemy can shoot, plant, or
throw. But the insurgents are fanatical
and cunning and keep building bigger
bombs—explosives that can take down
entire buildings, and that have become
the Marine Corps' greatest threat.
We have barely left the base and we're
already bogged down in four feet of sand.
The only view I have of the outside is the
night-vision monitor the driver is using
to navigate us through the unknown. It
takes us two hours to drive six miles to
our destination, Forward Operating Base
(FOB) Castle.

) have been coming to Afghanistan for

nearly two decades now, documenting
its ever-changing landscape and human

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condition. It s e e m s to have gone from
bad to worse. First, the civil war in 1993,
followed by the refugee crisis, the rise
of the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda's 2001
assassination of Afghanistan's national
hero, Ahmed Shah M a s s o u d , who led the
resistance against the Taliban, And now
the suicide bombings and the U.S.-led
"war on terror." I am here now to spend
time with the Weapons Platoon of the
U.S. Marines Expeditionary Brigade 2nd
Battalion's Delta Company.

FOB Castle is an ancient fortress over¬

looking the poppy enclave of Khan Neshin.
It was the main headquarters of the Taliban
in this region until the Marines swept in
some weeks back. It's at Afghanistan's
southernmost frontline and it will be our
home for the next few weeks.

My bunkmates in a small bombed-

out guardhouse are two journalists from
the New York Times and two American
contractors. There are sandbags in the
window frames and a ripped parachute for
a roof. There is barely enough room for our
bags, boxes of water, and MREs (meals
ready to eat), so we all sleep outside
under the stars and brave the poisonous
scorpions that come out at night.
It is a relentless 130 degrees Fahrenheit
every day. My routine consists of morning
and evening patrols "outside the wire" with
the Weapons Platoon. But there is little
action down here; most of the enemy fled
when Delta Company moved in. Those still
around hide in private compounds and mix
with the locals—in many c a s e s , they are
the locals. It's a mind fuck. The war has
become a game of cat-and-mouse, with
the insurgents resorting to classic hit-
and-run guerrilla tactics. lEDs (improvised
explosive devices) are planted regularly;

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person,
every day, mortars and rockets wreak
havoc on the Marine base. The platoon is
doing both military and police work. The
J'^t Peep J**nq fh>2 for
daily highlights are searching compounds
that might lead to hidden weapons caches, Itfflq ev°vyi vt'm net svpe
0 1 a fire fight with the laliban.
In the end the most challenging battle is
with hearts and minds. Building trust with
the local people is a constant struggle for
both the Marines and the Afghan security
forces that accompany them.
On the base, I gradually get to know the
platoon. Hanging out in the tent, the boys
1
>'-M M J • '
play cards and talk. They have adopted a
rabbit they call Roger and they spend much
of their time protecting the animal from
Afghan soldiers set on eating it. They tell
stories about the war in Iraq, high-school
pranks, girlfriends, wives, fast c a r s , sex.
We drink tea and smoke cigarettes. We
speak about the patrols and about the
Taliban—whom we don't see much of,
Jf* %mMmrt l its
We sit on stretchers watching episodes of
Generation Kill on the computer. There's
a relaxed feeling in the air—until rockets
and mortars hit the base and the boys
suddenly become men.
Nate Nails, one of the members of the
platoon, tells me about a soldier who was
killed in action a few weeks back. The guy
was taking a piss when a mortar round fired
from outside the wire began landing inside in els? cm\o
the base. One landed near the latrines,
spraying out jagged, razor-sharp slivers of
shrapnel. While the man was still conscious
and bleeding heavily, Nate helped carry him \>e, R?5f*i£5j ife /ovin^ fte
to the medics. I can feel Nate's fear and
anger as the remembered moment engulfs
us both, I hear other versions of the same Corf 3 i3 KwmL 'liV\<§
story and I can see the stress of war eating
away at the minds of the Marines.
 For this project, I want to gain an
intimate window into the lives of this one
platoon. I'm hoping to capture something
of these men's hopes and fears, their
nationalism and pride, the thrill and the
terror, the impact of a never-ending war. I
begin by asking each Marine to write down
his answer to a simple question: "Why are
you a Marine?" I leave my small notebook
with them over many days, so that each
man will have time for reflection and to
write something personal. 1 shoot a series
of candid Polaroid portraits of the Marines
around the base, and give each of them a
positive copy as a gesture of thanks.

From the confessions in their eyes to

their handwritten testimonies, 1 believe
there is an important message that prevails
here. There are no tricks or lies in these
documents, just a small piece of truth
within the massive U.S. military machine.
I saw naivete and fire inside these men,
but I also saw devotion and questions and
mighty hearts.
These soldiers of the Weapons Platoon
survived; many others did not. T h e s e men
are all back home now, with their wives,
their girlfriends, their families. Some will
leave the Marines and start new lives,
and others will go back to Afghanistan to
fight again. All of them have to contend
with demons inside.©

This project was made possible by a

W. Eugene Smith Grant (or Humanistic
Photography.

AH images from Stephen Dupont's Marines

Journal, Polaroids, paper, and ink, August 2009.
An images © Stephen Dupont/Conlaei Press Images

11(1. I(.}(J (IjICI'llllC I gfj

DIALOGUE

THE KNIGHT'S MOVE

A C O N V E R S A T I O N W TH PAUL GRAHAM

BY AARON SCHUMAN

A look at three decades of Paul Graham's photography suggests a work from when 1 started to journey abroad m o r e — N e w Europe,
restless mind behind the camera. From his association with British Empty Heaven, the Ceasefire clouds, and Television Portraits
color photography to his recent experiments with sequencing, [ 1 9 8 8 - 9 6 ] — w h i c h are less classically "documentary," share a
Graham has continuously challenged expectations. Here, on the poetic use of photographic language, and personally represented
occasion of a major European traveling retrospective, and on the a break away from the New British Color movement, which had
heels of his 2009 show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the grown quite big by that time. And finally. End of an Age. American
photographer speaks with writer and curator Aaron Schuman about Night, and a shimmer of possibility [ 1 9 9 6 - 2 0 0 6 ] , which, besides
the trajectory of his career and what motivates him to pick up the being what they are about—the turbulence of youth; the United
camera. — T h e Editors S t a t e s — e x a m i n e the strictures of photography: End of an Age
alternates between sharp and blurry photos, so that considers
AARON SCHUMAN: A midcareer survey of your work is currently
focus: American Night has very light and dark pictures, so that
touring Europe. How did that come about, and how did you go about
deals with light intensity—aperture: and shimmer u s e s stuttering
organizing twenty-five years' worth of images?
single frames, s o that reflects upon time frozen or flowing through
P A U L G R A H A M : When I was a young photographer. Ute E s k i l d s e n — the camera shutter. Focus, aperture, and shutter. . . .
the photography curator at the Museum Folkwang in E s s e n — g a v e
A S : Many photographers find a way of working—an approach,
me a small prize. Since then we have always kept in touch, and
strategy, or theme—that suits them, and then stick with it
two years ago she suggested that we work on a survey. As my
throughout their career. You, other the other hand, seem to be
exhibition was to be the last one before the museum closed for
experimenting all the time.
reconstruction, they had already cleared out their permanent
collection, which gave me a generous amount of space for it. We P G : It's simply about keeping the medium alive and exciting for
decided to divide the show into three sections. Firstly, my early myself, and having a protean approach d o e s that. After Troubled
color work from the 1 9 8 0 s — A l : The Great North Road, Beyond Land, I was invited to produce similar landscapes, with secreted
Caring, and Troubled Land [1981-86]—which deal with a journey war details, in a number of disputed territories—South Africa.
through Britain, unemployment, and Northern Ireland. Secondly, Israel, and so o n — a n d I could have continued treading that path

,jfi* / ii'tftr.>i/i<'i/iirt:f>rir
 PAGE 5G: Bible. Driver's Bedroom. Blyth Services, B l y t h , Nottinghamshire, February 1981,
from the series Ai—Tlic Great North Road, 1 9 8 1 - 8 2 : PAGE 57: Untitled #39, from the series End of an Age, 1 9 9 6 - 9 8 ;
THIS PAGE: Untitled #41 (Man in Wheelchair, New York), from t h e series American Night. 1998-2002.

jS / iririr.apcrliirr.Drg
for a good while. But to me that would have been a creative death:
1 just couldn't do it. That said, if someone has an idea and makes
a lifetime's worth of work out of it, I think that's great too. as long
as their idea is truly profound enough.
A S : Are there any particular photographers that have inspired
you, who share your "protean" approach to the medium? In the
monograph Paul Graham [Steidl, 2009], William Eggleston's
Election Eve gets a mention.
P G : Early in my career, I saw this little brochure from Election Eve,
but it had only three or four pictures in it. What really inspired me
about Eggleston is his freedom, and his tangential approach to
photographing the world.
A S : As far as I understand it, Election Eve came about through a
Roiling Stone commission, which was ultimately rejected by the
magazine because it was too obscure. Eggleston was given a
rather straightforward documentary assignment related to Jimmy
Carter's 1976 election campaign, but then went off the rails and
did something much more on the periphery of the assignment. It
seems like that's a part of your photographic strategy as well—as
in Troubled Land and American Night, which both center around
rather traditional social-documentary themes, but approach them
from quite oblique angles.
P G : Exactly. Instead of photographing the obvious, Eggleston
did this incredible circumnavigation, slowly spiraling toward the
subject, though never actually reaching "it." So from him I learned
that you needn't go directly to the source, but can make work much
more elliptically. Also, someone like Lee Friedlander interests me
in the way he moves around—from Factory Valleys [1982] to Cherry
Blossom Time in Japan [1986], and so on,
A S : Do you consider your work political?
P G : It's sometimes political with a small "p," but that is not all
it is. For example, American Night is about the social fracture of
the United States, but it's also about the landscape of America,
about seeing and not seeing, lightness and darkness, visibility
and invisibility, and so on. When people come from a photographic
background, they tend to lock in on the social-documentary aspect
of American Night only, and that surprises me. Additionally, some
people think that shimmer is just about the peripatetic dispos­
s e s s e d in America, but there's actually a whole series in there
shot in New England, with middle-class homes, two-car garages, a
woman collecting the post from her mailbox, and so on.
A S : But it's easy to assume that such a series, sitting among the
rest of the work, is intended as a sharp contrast to those that
focus on poverty, and is therefore meant to be a disdainful look at
the middle class.
P G : I grew up in new housing, s o when I see McMansions and
cookie-cutter homes I feel a warmth toward them; to me they
represent childhood memories. When I see a brand-new house,
I have very embedded emotions, s o it's certainly not intended as
disdainful.
Fundamentally, a major thing that engages me is keeping this
wonderful medium alive and moving forward. We can all identify
c a s e s of rather moribund photography, and however hard those
photographers have worked—however worthy their intentions—
they're using a language that has essentially dried up. It fails to
reach people anymore, so it's self-defeating.
A S : But that language was once very effective.
P G : Absolutely. It had its time and, of course, many of those
social concerns are still very relevant. But we've got to find a fresh
language. We don't write books in the same way we did in 1952;
authors now have to explicitly engage with the structure and history
of the novel. And the same is true for photography—it's vital to
engage with both your subject and your medium,
A S : But if the viewer isn't entirely familiar with the medium, its
inner workings, or the critical debates that surround contemporary
photography, isn't there a risk that such an approach might make
your work less accessible to a general audience?
P G : It's difficult only when it's brand new. For example, when
Beyond Caring came out in the early 1980s, people said: "Oh my
God, it's color. You're ruining good pictures!' At that time, using
color was still considered transgressive by many, and I was verbally
attacked during lectures for using it. Some people also got very
offended by Troubled Land at first, because I was mixing landscape
and conflict photography. Today, one wonders what the fuss was
all about,
A S : Did such criticism bother you?
P G : Well, it affected me. I knew that I was right and they were
wrong, but I was a twenty-six-year-old photographer, so who was
I to say "Screw y o u " to a critic? More recently, a similar thing
happened with American Night—people weren't really sure about
the overexposed pictures. For d e c a d e s , photographers have
taken correctly e x p o s e d negatives and then printed them d o w n ,
pushing the tonal range into darkness and shadows. But take
that same negative and push the tonal range up by the same
amount, and everyone says: " Y o u ' v e manipulated it!" So one
discovers that this is one of the unwritten rules in photography:
if a picture is about poverty, you're allowed push it down into
gloomy shadows—that's acceptable—but you're not s u p p o s e d
to go the other way!
A S : Do you intentionally search for counterintuitive images?
no. t<j<,) aperture / 50
 P G : You can't really do that. All photographers have some idea of
what they're hoping to find when they go out to shoot, but you have
to be open to what the world throws at y o u , and engage with how
it challenges and transforms your initial idea. That's the beauty of
the medium. That's its unique quality, and that's why I generally
admire photographers who deal with the world as it happens.
Somehow—through intelligence, sensitivity, and creativity—they
respond to the world, it responds to them, and these wonderful
bodies of work are the result.
A S : Why did you move to New York?
P G : Once when I was visiting New York, I opened up the New
York Times and found a review of Garry Winogrand's 1964. It was
two-thirds of a page long, and the level of assumed knowledge
in it was wonderful: " . . . Winogrand was in Szarkowski's New
Documents with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. . . ." and then
it just went on, as if everyone knew who Szarkowski, Arbus, and
Friedlander w e r e — a s they should do. And then, the other third of
the page was a review of Boris Mikhailov. So I immediately thought:
"I belong here.'' Additionally, there's the M u s e u m of Modern Art,
which has historically been incredibly dedicated to photography.
While in the U.K. the big YBA [Young British Artists] explosion was
happening, s o there wasn't much room for other dialogues there
at the time. But fundamentally, it wasn't really about the New York
Times, or MoMA, or the Y B A s — I just needed to continue growing;
to stop being a good "British photographer" and engage on an
international level. So I moved abroad.
A S : In his Guggenheim application for The Americans, Robert
Frank wrote: "It is fair to assume that when an observant American
travels abroad his eye will see freshly, and that the reverse may
be true when a European eye looks at the United States." Do you
think that you've benefited from having a "fresh e y e " in America,
particularly in American Night and shimmer?
P G : I have traveled quite a bit, but 1 don't really think that my
nationality plays s u c h an important role in my work. I have a live/
work space in New York, but I don't take part in normal city life—I
don't go to work in an office, or commute on the subway, I rarely
go uptown. So when I do go out into "normal" life, it's a shock: in
midtown watching office workers, or driving in suburban America, I
feel like I've landed on Mars, and that is something that I seek to
maintain. I do try to keep looking at the world with fresh eyes, but
not simply by being abroad.
A S : Has your nationality played a role in how your work has been
received in the States?
P G : In the past, I've tended to get lumped in with Martin Parr, John
Davies, and so on. When shimmer was shown at MoMA last year,
(•ii / inrir.afXTtuiv.nra:
I think people finally began to realize that I was not simply a New
British Color photographer. Furthermore, I've found that Americans
are often surprised if you reference non-American work, such as
Scandinavian or Japanese photographers—I do think that the
States could internationalize its outlook a bit more. Today, there
are s o many photography c o u r s e s in America that are producing
graduates with quite conventional, isolationist perspectives.
A S : In the exhibition catalog Mirrors and Windows [Museum of
Modern Art. 1978]. John Szarkowski wrote: " T h e rapid decay of
the traditional professional opportunities for photography has
been paralleled by an explosive growth in photographic education
. . . one of the byproducts of [which] has been the creation of
an appreciative audience for the work of the student body's most
talented teachers."
P G : In my opinion, Szarkowski's greatest contribution w a s in
recognizing and demarcating an artistic space that was unique
to photography. He saw classic, black-and-white reportage
photography and pushed that slightly to one side. He saw self-
conscious fine-art "ARAT" photography—"Another Rock, Another
T r e e " — a n d pushed that to one side. And then he said that the
space between these two areas, where documentary and artistic
instincts overlap, is unique to photography. He defined this territory,
defended it. and promoted it tirelessly through MoMA.
A S : How did you first discover Szarkowski, New Documents, and
so on?
P G : After university, I was a lowly bookshop assistant at the
Arnolfini in Bristol. I was in charge of the photography section and
learned about photography through books. Books disseminate
photography very well—they often are the original, in the s e n s e
that they represent the complete body of work. The magazine
Creative Camera was also tremendously important to me. It
had a "Letter from America" by Robert Frank in it almost every
month, and you'd find portfolios by Arbus. Friedlander, Winogrand.
and s o on. Through Creative Camera, I learned about all sorts of
photographers whom I shouldn't by rights have known about as a
twenty-two-year-old stuck in the West C o u n t r y — J o h n Divola. early
Richard Misrach, Thomas Barrow's Cancellations.
A S : In Paul Graham, the layouts of all of your books are reproduced
in full. Do you consider your books to be the "originals." more than
your exhibition work?
P G : In the past, the exhibitions were a little bit secondary to the
books, but today the gallery and the book are equally important to
me. In a book you have a one-to-one dialogue, and slightly more
control over the viewer. But an exhibition has presence, much
finer reproduction, and the possibility of surprise. I've certainly
Pittsburgh (Man Cutting Grass), 2004, from the series a shimmer of possibility, 2004-6.

no. tytj aperture / Hi

never wanted an exhibition to be a book on the wall, or a book to be an
exhibition catalog. Paul Graham was carefully produced with S t e i d l M A C K t o
parallel the s u r v e y — i t ' s not an accompanying catalog, it's an independent
monograph.

A S : Do you always carry a camera with you?

P G : No, not anymore. In the 1 9 8 0 s , whenever 1 went to a photography

lecture, the Magnum guys would be at the back with their Leicas dangling
over their shoulders—I j u s t thought it was all a bit silly, so I began to
resist that approach. It's a little sad though; I u s e d to take a camera
everywhere.

A S : So what propels you to pick up a camera?

P G : I try to go out and take pictures most days. One good thing about a
road trip is that you're isolated, s o even if you don't take any pictures for
a t h o u s a n d miles, you're forced to think quite deeply about your work, tt
allows you s p a c e to make the knight's move, like in c h e s s . Rather than
just thinking in terms of straight lines and diagonals, you go up, over, and
across. By isolating myself in this way, I can make that knight's move in my
thinking, and that's very productive for me.

A S : Do you think digital a d v a n c e m e n t s have c h a n g e d your relationship

with p h o t o g r a p h y ?

P G : When I got my first digital camera, I thought that I'd shoot both film and
digital for a couple of years, but I've only shot two rolls of film since t h e n .
Once you realize the convenience and quality of digital, it's hard to shoot
film again. But in terms of using the camera, digital really hasn't made
that much of a difference for me. At the end of the day. I'm walking around
with a dSLR, which presents exactly the same problems as before—focus,
aperture, shutter s p e e d , and the biggest problem of all: where to point
the camera. The fact that it's a piece of silicon recording the information
rather than gelatin emulsion doesn't really matter. The real shift has been
in postproduction, where digital d o e s create new opportunities.

A S : Is that something you've experimented with?

PG: Sure, Although the negatives for American Night were already
overexposed, Photoshop made them a lot easier to print, because I
could increase the shadows and midtones and still keep some detail in
the highlights. And with shimmer, it was about seeing the workflow on
the computer screen rather than on a contact sheet. The earliest series
were shot on film but then s c a n n e d , and I began to notice something very
interesting as 1 clicked through, and experienced them as stuttering filmic
sequences.

A S : What in particular interested you about the stuttering sequence?

(continued on page 86)

American Night #11 (Memphis), 2000, from the series American Night, 1998-2002.

All DtHjloKrapns courtesy Salon 9 4 . New York/Grecnoerg Van Doren Gallery. New VorV
 Paul Graham (continued from page 62)

PG: It's a hard thing to answer. As I went across America, I some­

times felt like I was failing because I wasn't doing Election Eve or
The Americans, or 1964. And then I thought: "Relax. It's every­
where and everything. It's that guy smoking a cigarette at the bus
stop opposite y o u . He may not be Frank's cowboy, but this guy is
standing there trying to keep out of the sunlight because he's got
slight psoriasis, and that's just a s amazing." So I just kept taking
pictures, and tried to tap into the flow of life without forcing myself
on the world. Someone I know, who is working on the 2010 Henri
Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA and has seen his contact
sheets, said to me: " T h e 'decisive moment' is bullshit." There are
ten pictures before and ten pictures after every one of them; he
actually took thirty pictures of people leaping over that puddle.

AS: But the difference in a shimmer of possibility is that you chose

to print all thirty.

PG: Exactly. In shimmer. I relaxed and recognized that it's about

the moment before and the moment after as much as it's about
the "perfect" moment. There's a series where I'm walking behind
two people carrying some c a s e s of Pepsi on their shoulder, and
then the attention flips to a couple waiting at a bus s t o p — w e all
just happened to walk past them, so ! took a picture. Then I went
back to photographing the guy carrying the Pepsi. Then we passed
a little boy trying to u s e a plastic bag as a kite in his garden, so I
took a picture of that, and then returned to the guy with the Pepsi
again. Life's SO wonderful!

AS: Do you find that people struggle to understand this type of

work, especially if they aren't intimately familiar with the process
that photographers go through to get pictures?

CHRISTOPHER HYIAND PG: Not s o much with shimmer: it's fairly open, and people seem to
get it. Could 1 be the devil's advocate and argue that this sequence
P H O T O G R A P H Y C O L L E C T I O N
represents a more natural way of seeing; that we as photographers
June 5 - August 8 have become too o b s e s s e d with looking for this "special moment."
this one punctum in life?
T h e E l l e n aticl Richard Cudii Foundation
O f t h e C a p o C o d Foundation AS: Fair point. I've often found that if I show one Garry Winogrand

Elizabeth Gamer Martin Fund o f llic Capo Cod Foundation photograph to my students, they're like: " S o what? Lucky shot."
U.S. Trust. Bank of America Private Wealth Management But if I show them thirty, they recognize the incredible consistency
of his work, and the skill involved in the making of them.

PG; I t ' s very frustrating sometimes. Often, when someone

approaches photography from a fine-art, theoretical, or post­
modern perspective, they see Winogrand as simple snapshot luck,
whereas if Jeff Wall recreates a similar scene with ten models,
a massive team behind the s c e n e s , and lots of postproduction,
everyone accepts it as legitimate because the artistic and creative
process is clear. The synthetic is acceptable, whereas the
508-385-4477 • www.ccmoa.org
analytic—pulling something revelatory from the flow of life rather

CapeCod /f\(H^cJuMett^
" m a s s v a c a t i o n . c o m
 Q / - Y F - H P K \ / C I I N S T I T U T E O F A R T

\ ^ L « I I L ^ / T * ) | L O N D O N • H E W Y O R K • S I N G A P O R E

than staging it—is just "lucky observation." That said, I'm a great YOUR PATHWAY TO A C A R E E R I N T H E I N T E R N A T I O N A L ART WORLD

admirer of the best of Jeff Wall, and don't have any problems
with what he does. What I do have a problem with is that Wall
is obviously very influenced by Winogrand, but many of the same
people who love, admire, and promote Wall in the art world have
never even heard of Winogrand.

A S : Are you optimistic about the future of the medium?

P G : Until recently, the art world's embrace of photography has

been very narrow. I would argue that, like Abstract Expressionism
or Pop art, the bloom of American photography in the 1960s and
'70s—from N e w Documents to New Topographies—was one of
PHOTOGRAPHY
MASTER'S DEGREE I POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA
the major art movements in postwar America, yet it still remains C O U R S E B E G I N S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0

generally unrecognized to this day. That said, I'm optimistic that

S O T H E B Y ' S I N S T I T U T E O F A R T - L O N D O N P R E S E N T S A N I N N O V A T I V E

this embrace will expand; people are starting to reach outward M A S T E R ' S D E G R E E P R O G R A M M E I N H I S T O R I C A L A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y

and their knowledge base is growing. And I think that the art world P H O T O G R A P H Y A I M E D A T T H O S E W I S H I N G T O P U R S U E A C A R E E R A S A

could become 3 great place for photography to live and evolve. S P E C I A L I S T I N P H O T O G R A P H I C I M A G E R Y A N D O B J E C T S .

Ultimately, it's a grave mistake to define art and photography as

A P P L Y N O W F O R E N T R Y I N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0

oppositional: we have to find new ways to blur such boundaries.

T : + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 4 6 2 3 2 1 9 E : I N F O @ S O T H E B Y S I N S T I T U T E . C O M

W W W . S O T H E
A S : S o what's next for you?
S O T H E B Y ' S I N S T I T U T E O F A R T I S A D I V I S I O N O F C A M B R I D G E I N F O R M A T I O N
C R O U P A N D A N A F F I L I A T E D I N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A N C H E S T E R

P G : Because of the nature of shimmer, I'm often asked if I plan

to make films in the future, but I remain absolutely committed to
still photography. That said, I think that if you're too comfortable
with what you're doing, you can become your own worst enemy.
One of the difficulties that I'm facing at the moment is that I am
J O H N D E L A N E Y
comfortable with shimmer—I think it's a good piece of work, and I
find that slightly scary, because I normally think: "You can always
do better." But I'm not going to worry about it—as I said: "Relax. FINE B&W
It's everything, and everywhere."© • •
1"
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I
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I
D D I
O p e n E n d e d (continued from page 69) I
1
A
suggests a reexamining of the building blocks of ordinary life, and
1 P I
1 R
so a desire to see the whole world new. as if on the atomic level, N
where, in Eshkar's words, "the object breathes in the way it blooms
(> Q I
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with light." The wooden alphabet letters, used to spell out one- G
A 1
A
syllable words, are of a piece with this impulse to begin from the
1 s I
beginning, which is of a piece with a scene of a child spinning in •
S
I
play, which is of a piece with the overall address of gravity: child, 1 V
1

I
artist, viewer are all probing the rules of the world, and of their own n s
physical bodies within it. And yet. at the same time, there is this
peculiar sense of the body dispersing, dropping away; and in the C L I E N T L I S T S E R V I C E S

heightened, assisted vision granted us by the computer, there is a

peculiar s e n s e of blindness, of floating in the dark. We are being WWW.FINEBW.COM
asked to relearn how to s e e . ©

P R I N T I N G
G R E E N W I C H V I L L A G E , N E W Y O R K C I T Y
 MIXING T H E MEDIA

OpenEnded Group
ARTISTS WITHOUT BORDERS
BY DAVID F R A N K E L

For all their importance and currency in art today, video

and electronic media largely remain tied to flatness,
the intrinsic quality of the screen on which their images
appear. In other words, in visual terms they face the same
problems, use the same formulas, that painters have been
working with since the Renaissance and photographers
since Talbot and Daguerre. Film made a mostly cheesy
venture into three dimensions in the 1950s, and a recent
scattering of 3-D movies (notably, of course, J a m e s
Cameron's Avatar), and talk of 3-D TV, suggest a coming
mass-audience resurgence of that kind of spectacle, this
time with better technology. In the art world, though, the
OpenEnded G r o u p — M a r c Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and
Paul Kaiser—is as usual ahead of the game.

The team first became widely known through dance-

related scenarios created for Merce Cunningham,
beginning with Hand-Drawn Spaces and Biped in 1998
and 1999, and for Bill T. Jones, with Ghostcatching of
1999. But they also make independent works, and among
their current projects is Upending, which premiered in
late March at the EMPAC Theater in Troy. New York, EMPAC
(the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center)
is a lavishly equipped on-campus facility at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, where the group had an artists'
residency. The theater made available to them some
ambitious technology, including a digital projector capable
of casting high-definition stereoscopic images onto its
grand-sized screen.
Different sequences of Upending, which I saw parts
of as it was in process last year, are made by different
methods, some of which the group has used in the past.
One involves drawing by hand on an electronic tablet, which

HO. !(•}<•) (ipcrhiri' / fV-j

 passes the drawn lines on to software that projects them as floating
three-dimensional images. Other passages use motion capture,
which the group pioneered in its work with Cunningham and Jones:
electronic sensors set on people's bodies allow their movements
to be shifted into images that can look like—almost anything
(Cameron's Avatar uses motion-capture techniques) but that are
based on and tied to the human form. Perhaps the most magical
effect, though, and the one that looks least like anything you have
seen before, requires taking hundreds of digital photographs of an
object—a car, a rock, a tree—from every available direction. Given
enough photographs, enough visual information, the computer can
construct from them a totalizing image, calculating the size, shape,
and appearance even of parts of the object that the camera has not
reached: the top of the tree, say, as if the three artists had a crane,
which they don't. Not only that, but the image can be rotated in all
directions in space. If you ever wanted to look at a tree the way you
can look at a pebble you're turning in your hand, now you can.
While the methods used to create Upending are abstruse, they
are rooted in familiar and in fact ancient art forms. Drawing and
dance are foundational: the artists are deeply conversant with music
(the score is Morton Feldman's String Quartet no. 1, recorded for
fi& / www.operture.org
the occasion by the Flux Quartet); and some of the images that
drift through the piece are clearly if schematically architectural.
Matching a concern with essential cultural traditions is a focus on
basic human artifacts and activities. Room—chair—door—crib—a
child's wooden alphabet blocks—a woman's hair tied in a bun: the
forms that the group plays with are old to the eye. In part, perhaps,
the choice is somewhat functional: given the complexity of the
visual processes to which each object will be subjected, it may
need to be easily recognizable if it is to be recognizable at all. But
the group's work also suggests a slow, searching meditation on
"things the mind already knows," in Jasper Johns's phrase, things
that what the group calls its "frameless photography" can refocus
in our attention, restoring their facticity to vision.
The most dramatic quality of Upending, though, is its venture
into the third dimension. As in an IMAX cinema, the viewers wear
glasses that fully encompass their eyes, so that, much more than in
a conventional movie house, they feel encased in a completely dark
space. And since the space conjured by the images they are watching
is three-dimensional, so that, while still experienced frontally, it
is also encompassing and submersive, the effect is of floating in
an environment recalling the night sky. or somewhere farther out.
P A G E S 6 4 - 6 5 : B i p e d , 1999. is an extended
digital animation that serves as the visual decor
for a dance by Merce Cunningham. T h e move­
ments are largely derived from motion-captured
phrases from the choreography, which drive
abstracted images of hand-drawn dancers moving
through spare and evocative s p a c e s . In perfor­
mance, the imagery is projected onto a huge
transparent scrim covering the front of a large
proscenium stage, giving the illusion that it floats
in front of and among the live dancers behind it.
PAGE 66: Forest, 2007. Installation al the
Centre for Contemporary Art. Glasgow. In this
five-screen live installation, virtual children
wander through a forested parkland playing
among the trees. The circular frame of each
projection plays odd tricks with perception,
gently undermining the viewer's sense of
gravity, especially when the camera angle rolls
slightly. The rich ambiguity of visual perception
is intensified by the "visual physics" embedded
in the custom 3-D renderer that was created
for this work, which for example can conjure up
the moving image out of the propagation of its
own gram. Each of the "portholes" in this piece
looks out on the same forest s c e n e , but these
views are in dynamic disequilibrium with each
other. When one porthole decides to jump to
a different camera angle or color palette, the
adjacent views then struggle to match it.
T H I S PAGE: Ghostcatching, 1999. is a digital art
installation that fuses dance, drawing, and com
puter composition. Based on the motioncaptured
dance phrases of choreographer Bill T. Jones,
the work is a meditation on the acts of being
"captured" and of breaking free. Captured
dance phrases are the building blocks for the
virtual composition: as data, the phrases can be
edited, rechoreographed. and staged for a digital
performance in the 3-D space of the computer.
Here, the figure of Jones is multiplied into many
dancers, who perform as three-dimensional
drawings. Their anatomies are intertwinings of
drawn strokes, which are in fact painstakingly
modeled as geometry on the computer, and
never actually rendered on paper.
PAGE 68: Enlightenment, 2006. Public art
installation at Lincoln Center. New York City.
Enlightenment is a live digital work that investi­
gates, visualizes, and reconstructs some of the
deeper structures in the music of Mozart by means
of artificial intelligence and real time graphics.
The work applies Information Age methods—akin
to DNA sequencing and data-mining—to make
new s e n s e of M o z a r t , a quintessential figure of
the Age of Enlightenment. More precisely, it solves
a problem of its own making—to intelligently
reconstruct one of M o z a r t ' s intricate musical
structures (the coda to his Jupiter symphony)
with a minimum of prior musical knowledge.
PAGE 69: Breath, 2007. Public art installation at
Lincoln Center, New York City. This piece explores
the idea of sacred music through an interlocking
series of banners and light-boxes, the lighting
of which is coupled to the flow of a live musical
composition. The imagery on each light-box
derives from a computer-assisted analysis of a
given subject: patterns in information often so
dense as to elude manual search.
PAGES 70-71: Upending, premiere: March 25,
2010. EMPAC theater. Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. Troy, New York, *JI i m a g e s CLCUJdoSy t h r . H t ^ l V
ftft. ityj aperture / 6j
Scale and distance lose meaning—objects
could be near or remote, huge or tiny, macro
or micro—and gravity seems suspended, an
impression the piece heightens through its
angles of view and the slow, hovering glide
of the camera. But of course there has been
no camera in the usual sense; while the rules
of camera optics continue to hold, Upending
takes them elsewhere.
The night-sky quality becomes inescapable
in passages in which the image is made
up, not of line or mass, but of countless
starlike dots of light, arranged in cobwebby
nets—what the members of the group,
whose conversation is studded with phrases
both poetic and precise, call "point clouds."
T h e s e are the sequences constructed by the
computer out of hundreds of photographs
of real objects. The impulse to compose
an image of something by viewing it from
many angles shows a strange and striking
parallel with Cubism, which made its own far-
reaching attempt to recast vision a century
ago, and which strangely and strikingly also
tended to focus on the familiar—the stuff
of the daily cafe table, the human figure.
Where Cubist devices were planar, though,
here objects become constellations, giving
up their solidity. Not only can the artists turn
that tree like a reed, they can disintegrate
its substance, transparentize it. dissolve its
material borders. By extension, we too feel
disembodied, floating weightless in a space
in which we have lost our dermal edge.

Though I saw Upending in incomplete

form, its different elements seemed to be
cohering in unified ideas, both analytic and
instinctive. To record the Feldman quartet,
the instruments were so closely miked that
the scrape of bow across string sounds
virtually tangible, as if we were as deep inside
the violin's grain as we seem to be inside
the group's three-dimensional images. The
training of advanced technology on simple
objects and actions (continued on page 87)
 Q / - Y F - H P K \ / C I I N S T I T U T E O F A R T

\ ^ L « I I L ^ / T * ) | L O N D O N • H E W Y O R K • S I N G A P O R E

than staging it—is just "lucky observation." That said, I'm a great YOUR PATHWAY TO A C A R E E R I N T H E I N T E R N A T I O N A L ART WORLD

admirer of the best of Jeff Wall, and don't have any problems
with what he does. What I do have a problem with is that Wall
is obviously very influenced by Winogrand, but many of the same
people who love, admire, and promote Wall in the art world have
never even heard of Winogrand.

A S : Are you optimistic about the future of the medium?

P G : Until recently, the art world's embrace of photography has

been very narrow. I would argue that, like Abstract Expressionism
or Pop art, the bloom of American photography in the 1960s and
'70s—from N e w Documents to New Topographies—was one of
PHOTOGRAPHY
MASTER'S DEGREE I POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA
the major art movements in postwar America, yet it still remains C O U R S E B E G I N S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0

generally unrecognized to this day. That said, I'm optimistic that

S O T H E B Y ' S I N S T I T U T E O F A R T - L O N D O N P R E S E N T S A N I N N O V A T I V E

this embrace will expand; people are starting to reach outward M A S T E R ' S D E G R E E P R O G R A M M E I N H I S T O R I C A L A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y

and their knowledge base is growing. And I think that the art world P H O T O G R A P H Y A I M E D A T T H O S E W I S H I N G T O P U R S U E A C A R E E R A S A

could become 3 great place for photography to live and evolve. S P E C I A L I S T I N P H O T O G R A P H I C I M A G E R Y A N D O B J E C T S .

Ultimately, it's a grave mistake to define art and photography as

A P P L Y N O W F O R E N T R Y I N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0

oppositional: we have to find new ways to blur such boundaries.

T : + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 4 6 2 3 2 1 9 E : I N F O @ S O T H E B Y S I N S T I T U T E . C O M

W W W . S O T H E
A S : S o what's next for you?
S O T H E B Y ' S I N S T I T U T E O F A R T I S A D I V I S I O N O F C A M B R I D G E I N F O R M A T I O N
C R O U P A N D A N A F F I L I A T E D I N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A N C H E S T E R

P G : Because of the nature of shimmer, I'm often asked if I plan

to make films in the future, but I remain absolutely committed to
still photography. That said, I think that if you're too comfortable
with what you're doing, you can become your own worst enemy.
One of the difficulties that I'm facing at the moment is that I am
J O H N D E L A N E Y
comfortable with shimmer—I think it's a good piece of work, and I
find that slightly scary, because I normally think: "You can always
do better." But I'm not going to worry about it—as I said: "Relax. FINE B&W
It's everything, and everywhere."© • •
1"
H 1)
I
R. A
( I
A N
I
D D I
O p e n E n d e d (continued from page 69) I
1
A
suggests a reexamining of the building blocks of ordinary life, and
1 P I
1 R
so a desire to see the whole world new. as if on the atomic level, N
where, in Eshkar's words, "the object breathes in the way it blooms
(> Q I
N c
with light." The wooden alphabet letters, used to spell out one- G
A 1
A
syllable words, are of a piece with this impulse to begin from the
1 s I
beginning, which is of a piece with a scene of a child spinning in •
S
I
play, which is of a piece with the overall address of gravity: child, 1 V
1

I
artist, viewer are all probing the rules of the world, and of their own n s
physical bodies within it. And yet. at the same time, there is this
peculiar sense of the body dispersing, dropping away; and in the C L I E N T L I S T S E R V I C E S

heightened, assisted vision granted us by the computer, there is a

peculiar s e n s e of blindness, of floating in the dark. We are being WWW.FINEBW.COM
asked to relearn how to s e e . ©

P R I N T I N G
G R E E N W I C H V I L L A G E , N E W Y O R K C I T Y
 MIXING T H E MEDIA

OpenEnded Group
ARTISTS WITHOUT BORDERS
BY DAVID F R A N K E L

For all their importance and currency in art today, video

and electronic media largely remain tied to flatness,
the intrinsic quality of the screen on which their images
appear. In other words, in visual terms they face the same
problems, use the same formulas, that painters have been
working with since the Renaissance and photographers
since Talbot and Daguerre. Film made a mostly cheesy
venture into three dimensions in the 1950s, and a recent
scattering of 3-D movies (notably, of course, J a m e s
Cameron's Avatar), and talk of 3-D TV, suggest a coming
mass-audience resurgence of that kind of spectacle, this
time with better technology. In the art world, though, the
OpenEnded G r o u p — M a r c Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and
Paul Kaiser—is as usual ahead of the game.

The team first became widely known through dance-

related scenarios created for Merce Cunningham,
beginning with Hand-Drawn Spaces and Biped in 1998
and 1999, and for Bill T. Jones, with Ghostcatching of
1999. But they also make independent works, and among
their current projects is Upending, which premiered in
late March at the EMPAC Theater in Troy. New York, EMPAC
(the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center)
is a lavishly equipped on-campus facility at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, where the group had an artists'
residency. The theater made available to them some
ambitious technology, including a digital projector capable
of casting high-definition stereoscopic images onto its
grand-sized screen.
Different sequences of Upending, which I saw parts
of as it was in process last year, are made by different
methods, some of which the group has used in the past.
One involves drawing by hand on an electronic tablet, which

HO. !(•}<•) (ipcrhiri' / fV-j

 passes the drawn lines on to software that projects them as floating
three-dimensional images. Other passages use motion capture,
which the group pioneered in its work with Cunningham and Jones:
electronic sensors set on people's bodies allow their movements
to be shifted into images that can look like—almost anything
(Cameron's Avatar uses motion-capture techniques) but that are
based on and tied to the human form. Perhaps the most magical
effect, though, and the one that looks least like anything you have
seen before, requires taking hundreds of digital photographs of an
object—a car, a rock, a tree—from every available direction. Given
enough photographs, enough visual information, the computer can
construct from them a totalizing image, calculating the size, shape,
and appearance even of parts of the object that the camera has not
reached: the top of the tree, say, as if the three artists had a crane,
which they don't. Not only that, but the image can be rotated in all
directions in space. If you ever wanted to look at a tree the way you
can look at a pebble you're turning in your hand, now you can.
While the methods used to create Upending are abstruse, they
are rooted in familiar and in fact ancient art forms. Drawing and
dance are foundational: the artists are deeply conversant with music
(the score is Morton Feldman's String Quartet no. 1, recorded for
fi& / www.operture.org
the occasion by the Flux Quartet); and some of the images that
drift through the piece are clearly if schematically architectural.
Matching a concern with essential cultural traditions is a focus on
basic human artifacts and activities. Room—chair—door—crib—a
child's wooden alphabet blocks—a woman's hair tied in a bun: the
forms that the group plays with are old to the eye. In part, perhaps,
the choice is somewhat functional: given the complexity of the
visual processes to which each object will be subjected, it may
need to be easily recognizable if it is to be recognizable at all. But
the group's work also suggests a slow, searching meditation on
"things the mind already knows," in Jasper Johns's phrase, things
that what the group calls its "frameless photography" can refocus
in our attention, restoring their facticity to vision.
The most dramatic quality of Upending, though, is its venture
into the third dimension. As in an IMAX cinema, the viewers wear
glasses that fully encompass their eyes, so that, much more than in
a conventional movie house, they feel encased in a completely dark
space. And since the space conjured by the images they are watching
is three-dimensional, so that, while still experienced frontally, it
is also encompassing and submersive, the effect is of floating in
an environment recalling the night sky. or somewhere farther out.
P A G E S 6 4 - 6 5 : B i p e d , 1999. is an extended
digital animation that serves as the visual decor
for a dance by Merce Cunningham. T h e move­
ments are largely derived from motion-captured
phrases from the choreography, which drive
abstracted images of hand-drawn dancers moving
through spare and evocative s p a c e s . In perfor­
mance, the imagery is projected onto a huge
transparent scrim covering the front of a large
proscenium stage, giving the illusion that it floats
in front of and among the live dancers behind it.
PAGE 66: Forest, 2007. Installation al the
Centre for Contemporary Art. Glasgow. In this
five-screen live installation, virtual children
wander through a forested parkland playing
among the trees. The circular frame of each
projection plays odd tricks with perception,
gently undermining the viewer's sense of
gravity, especially when the camera angle rolls
slightly. The rich ambiguity of visual perception
is intensified by the "visual physics" embedded
in the custom 3-D renderer that was created
for this work, which for example can conjure up
the moving image out of the propagation of its
own gram. Each of the "portholes" in this piece
looks out on the same forest s c e n e , but these
views are in dynamic disequilibrium with each
other. When one porthole decides to jump to
a different camera angle or color palette, the
adjacent views then struggle to match it.
T H I S PAGE: Ghostcatching, 1999. is a digital art
installation that fuses dance, drawing, and com
puter composition. Based on the motioncaptured
dance phrases of choreographer Bill T. Jones,
the work is a meditation on the acts of being
"captured" and of breaking free. Captured
dance phrases are the building blocks for the
virtual composition: as data, the phrases can be
edited, rechoreographed. and staged for a digital
performance in the 3-D space of the computer.
Here, the figure of Jones is multiplied into many
dancers, who perform as three-dimensional
drawings. Their anatomies are intertwinings of
drawn strokes, which are in fact painstakingly
modeled as geometry on the computer, and
never actually rendered on paper.
PAGE 68: Enlightenment, 2006. Public art
installation at Lincoln Center. New York City.
Enlightenment is a live digital work that investi­
gates, visualizes, and reconstructs some of the
deeper structures in the music of Mozart by means
of artificial intelligence and real time graphics.
The work applies Information Age methods—akin
to DNA sequencing and data-mining—to make
new s e n s e of M o z a r t , a quintessential figure of
the Age of Enlightenment. More precisely, it solves
a problem of its own making—to intelligently
reconstruct one of M o z a r t ' s intricate musical
structures (the coda to his Jupiter symphony)
with a minimum of prior musical knowledge.
PAGE 69: Breath, 2007. Public art installation at
Lincoln Center, New York City. This piece explores
the idea of sacred music through an interlocking
series of banners and light-boxes, the lighting
of which is coupled to the flow of a live musical
composition. The imagery on each light-box
derives from a computer-assisted analysis of a
given subject: patterns in information often so
dense as to elude manual search.
PAGES 70-71: Upending, premiere: March 25,
2010. EMPAC theater. Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. Troy, New York, *JI i m a g e s CLCUJdoSy t h r . H t ^ l V
ftft. ityj aperture / 6j
Scale and distance lose meaning—objects
could be near or remote, huge or tiny, macro
or micro—and gravity seems suspended, an
impression the piece heightens through its
angles of view and the slow, hovering glide
of the camera. But of course there has been
no camera in the usual sense; while the rules
of camera optics continue to hold, Upending
takes them elsewhere.
The night-sky quality becomes inescapable
in passages in which the image is made
up, not of line or mass, but of countless
starlike dots of light, arranged in cobwebby
nets—what the members of the group,
whose conversation is studded with phrases
both poetic and precise, call "point clouds."
T h e s e are the sequences constructed by the
computer out of hundreds of photographs
of real objects. The impulse to compose
an image of something by viewing it from
many angles shows a strange and striking
parallel with Cubism, which made its own far-
reaching attempt to recast vision a century
ago, and which strangely and strikingly also
tended to focus on the familiar—the stuff
of the daily cafe table, the human figure.
Where Cubist devices were planar, though,
here objects become constellations, giving
up their solidity. Not only can the artists turn
that tree like a reed, they can disintegrate
its substance, transparentize it. dissolve its
material borders. By extension, we too feel
disembodied, floating weightless in a space
in which we have lost our dermal edge.

Though I saw Upending in incomplete

form, its different elements seemed to be
cohering in unified ideas, both analytic and
instinctive. To record the Feldman quartet,
the instruments were so closely miked that
the scrape of bow across string sounds
virtually tangible, as if we were as deep inside
the violin's grain as we seem to be inside
the group's three-dimensional images. The
training of advanced technology on simple
objects and actions (continued on page 87)
 Q / - Y F - H P K \ / C I I N S T I T U T E O F A R T

\ ^ L « I I L ^ / T * ) | L O N D O N • H E W Y O R K • S I N G A P O R E

than staging it—is just "lucky observation." That said, I'm a great YOUR PATHWAY TO A C A R E E R I N T H E I N T E R N A T I O N A L ART WORLD

admirer of the best of Jeff Wall, and don't have any problems
with what he does. What I do have a problem with is that Wall
is obviously very influenced by Winogrand, but many of the same
people who love, admire, and promote Wall in the art world have
never even heard of Winogrand.

A S : Are you optimistic about the future of the medium?

P G : Until recently, the art world's embrace of photography has

been very narrow. I would argue that, like Abstract Expressionism
or Pop art, the bloom of American photography in the 1960s and
'70s—from N e w Documents to New Topographies—was one of
PHOTOGRAPHY
MASTER'S DEGREE I POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA
the major art movements in postwar America, yet it still remains C O U R S E B E G I N S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0

generally unrecognized to this day. That said, I'm optimistic that

S O T H E B Y ' S I N S T I T U T E O F A R T - L O N D O N P R E S E N T S A N I N N O V A T I V E

this embrace will expand; people are starting to reach outward M A S T E R ' S D E G R E E P R O G R A M M E I N H I S T O R I C A L A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y

and their knowledge base is growing. And I think that the art world P H O T O G R A P H Y A I M E D A T T H O S E W I S H I N G T O P U R S U E A C A R E E R A S A

could become 3 great place for photography to live and evolve. S P E C I A L I S T I N P H O T O G R A P H I C I M A G E R Y A N D O B J E C T S .

Ultimately, it's a grave mistake to define art and photography as

A P P L Y N O W F O R E N T R Y I N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0

oppositional: we have to find new ways to blur such boundaries.

T : + 4 4 ( 0 ) 2 0 7 4 6 2 3 2 1 9 E : I N F O @ S O T H E B Y S I N S T I T U T E . C O M

W W W . S O T H E
A S : S o what's next for you?
S O T H E B Y ' S I N S T I T U T E O F A R T I S A D I V I S I O N O F C A M B R I D G E I N F O R M A T I O N
C R O U P A N D A N A F F I L I A T E D I N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A N C H E S T E R

P G : Because of the nature of shimmer, I'm often asked if I plan

to make films in the future, but I remain absolutely committed to
still photography. That said, I think that if you're too comfortable
with what you're doing, you can become your own worst enemy.
One of the difficulties that I'm facing at the moment is that I am
J O H N D E L A N E Y
comfortable with shimmer—I think it's a good piece of work, and I
find that slightly scary, because I normally think: "You can always
do better." But I'm not going to worry about it—as I said: "Relax. FINE B&W
It's everything, and everywhere."© • •
1"
H 1)
I
R. A
( I
A N
I
D D I
O p e n E n d e d (continued from page 69) I
1
A
suggests a reexamining of the building blocks of ordinary life, and
1 P I
1 R
so a desire to see the whole world new. as if on the atomic level, N
where, in Eshkar's words, "the object breathes in the way it blooms
(> Q I
N c
with light." The wooden alphabet letters, used to spell out one- G
A 1
A
syllable words, are of a piece with this impulse to begin from the
1 s I
beginning, which is of a piece with a scene of a child spinning in •
S
I
play, which is of a piece with the overall address of gravity: child, 1 V
1

I
artist, viewer are all probing the rules of the world, and of their own n s
physical bodies within it. And yet. at the same time, there is this
peculiar sense of the body dispersing, dropping away; and in the C L I E N T L I S T S E R V I C E S

heightened, assisted vision granted us by the computer, there is a

peculiar s e n s e of blindness, of floating in the dark. We are being WWW.FINEBW.COM
asked to relearn how to s e e . ©

P R I N T I N G
G R E E N W I C H V I L L A G E , N E W Y O R K C I T Y
PORTFOLIO

Diane Arbus
CHRIST IN A LOBBY AND OTHER UNKNOWN OR A L M O S T - K N O W N PHOTOGRAPHS

Recently, sculptor Robert Gober was invited to study a little-known body of photographs

by Diane Arbus, and to select from among them a group for exhibition at Fraenkel

Gallery in San Francisco. Gober chose forty-eight works spanning the artist's career;

the earliest of them was made in 1956, and the latest in 1971, the last year ofArbus's

life. In the following pages are nine rarely seen photographs from Gober s selection.

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are.

Not what mv influences are, but who. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories,

sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences,

it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed

awav much too earlv, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

— ROBERT GOBER

72 / www. aperture, org

All photographs by Diane Arhus. Christ in a lobby. N. Y.C., 1964.

im. lt.)<) aperture / rj

 A B O V E : Two girts in curlers, N.Y.C.. 1963; OPPOSITE: Teenager with a baseball bat, N.Y.C.. 1962.

-4 / ti'trir.rtjti'rttiiY.ttig
O P P O S I T E : Barefoot child jumping rope, N.Y.C.. 1963: A B O V E : Couple dancing in front of a curtain, N. Y.C., ca. 1 9 5 8 - 1 9 6 2 .

tin. itjtj aperture /

n o . H.)tj aperture / ~<j
no. t\j() aperture / Si
BOOKS

R i c h a r d Burbrldgc

IN THEIR FASHION
Anyone with even a passing interest in fashion photography issue of Arena Homme +, the British men's biannual, which pays
would have to agree that the ideal delivery system for a fashion tribute to legendary stylist Ray Petri ( 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 8 9 ) with images by
photograph is a fashion magazine. Not only is the larger context key collaborator Jamie Morgan of original Petri models, as well as

essential to an appreciation of the photograph's underlying their sons and daughters, dressed in the DIY Buffalo style. And

function (selling something), but the format allows the image to be then there's the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of AnOtherMan, where,

viewed in its natural habitat—as one element in a sequence (or over the course of thirteen pages, photographer Norbert Schoener

"story") that might go on for twenty or thirty pages. Although great and stylist Nicola Formichetti conspire in a wonderfully bizarre

fashion pictures are not wholly dependent on one another, when take on survivalist chic.

seen alongside other pictures by the same photographer, in their Unfortunately, these titles have been off the newsstand for

original context, their meaning tends to open up, mutate, and get months now, so our focus is books, which have a longer life. Given
the context criteria, the format of Another Fashion Book ( 7 L /
more complicated.
Steidl. 2009), a nearly text-free compilation of images published
So perhaps I should really be reviewing the October 2009
in Another magazine since its launch in 2001, would seem to be
issues of German Vogue—three hefty magazines, each with
ideal. One of the smartest and most adventurous of the British
a different cover and editorial well, produced in celebration of
fashion titles. Another might seem a little young for a retrospective
that publication's thirtieth anniversary. Multiple covers are not
volume, but it has used some of the best photographers in the
uncommon, especially for European fashion quarterlies with an
field and nurtured a number of the strongest young contenders. A
eye on the collectors' market, but commissioning three entirely
spinoff of the unpredictable pop-culture mag Dazed & Confused,
different editorial sections from three busy photographers
it has never shied away from provocation; a s editor in-chiet
(Bruce Weber. Peter Lindbergh, and Karl Lagerfeld) is, I believe,
Jefferson Hack writes in the book's introduction: "We offered our
unprecedented. Or I could write about the Winter/Spring 0 9 / 1 0

Si: / irtrn:ti/j<'ilun:f/i'g
collaborators a license for creative rebellion and a freedom to

experiment." The results are often startling, including some of

the strangest and most sensational fashion pages published in

this new century by Nick Knight and Mario Sorrenti. T h e r e ' s also

terrific work by Glen Luchford, David Sims, Craig McDean. Cedric

Buchet, and two artists not known for fashion photography, Sam

Taylor-Wood and Will McBride. All this work is shown full-bleed and

in s e q u e n c e s that suggest abbreviated magazine spreads, minus

the typography. But the book's minimalist design ends up being greater s h o c k s as the decade
not j u s t boring but oddly intrusive, with photographers' names closed. The terms of art
production were tipping.
clumsily superimposed on their pictures and way too many images
A r t i s t s folded p h o t o g r a p h y
lost in the gutter. Not a disaster—great photographs are great
Into their practice a s a tool
photographs—but a disappointment. in r e p r e s e n t a t i o n w h i l e
Among the most reliable diversions in fashion magazines ongoing critical debates
contested the slippery slope
over the past decade are Juergen Teller's ads for Marc Jacobs,
of t h e m e a n i n g o f p i c t u r e s .
hundreds of which have been collected in the massive Marc
Szarkowski's promotion
Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 {Steidl, 2009). Teller's approach of E g g l e s t o n ' s formalist
is predictable and relentless—perfect for establishing the identity vernacular description—the
p i n n a c l e o f his t h e o r e t i c a l
of a brand whose look needs to change from s e a s o n to s e a s o n .
s t r u c t u r e for a n a u t h o r l e s s
Framed by lots of expensive white s p a c e , his photographs of
photographic transparency
models and celebrities (an oddball assortment that includes Roni that had c o m e forward with
Horn, Michael Stipe. Sofia Coppola. Ryan McGinley, and Victoria The Photographer's Eye
(exhibition. 1964; book.
Beckham) are cold, unflattering, often quite •wkward, and great
1966) and N e w Documents
fun. They're also, in Teller's signature style, so overlit they look
( 1 9 6 7 ) — c r a s h e d headlong
amateurish, which really makes them stand out in the fashion Into a n e v e r - w i d e n i n g
pages, where everything is polished to a high g l o s s . Seen back-to- field of I m a g e - m a k i n g . A
new generation of artists
back here, their rude wit and audacity are hard to resist, especially
w a s far l e s s I n t e r e s t e d in
in the series that features the nearly naked photographer in P H O T O G R A P H Y IN A M E R I C A
p h o t o g r a p h y ' s Identity, p e r
bed with the unflappable Charlotte Rampling (who also shares a 1970-1980
s e , t h a n t h e y w e r e in I t s
ny: Hatje Cantz. 2010
bed with the fully d r e s s e d William Eggleston in later ads), and a utility a s a m e d i u m c a p a b l e
it t o o k s e v e r a l y e a r s f o l l o w i n g of i n t e r r o g a t i n g i t s e l f a n d t h e
collaboration with Cindy Sherman that s e a l e d the c a m p a i g n ' s
John Szarkowski's wildly surfeit of everyday images
controversial exhibition from t e l e v i s i o n , films, a n d
Photographs by William advertising.
Eggleston for t h e a r t w o r l d —from James Crump's essay
t o fully a b s o r b i t s i m p a c t
a n d t h e I m p l i c a t i o n s for
w h a t in h i n d s i g h t s e e m e d
like a b o m b s h e l l . A l t h o u g h Madrid: Fundaci6n Mapfre, 2009
Eggleston s work was A w o m a n I s s i t t i n g in a cantina
greeted sternly by critics of with a cigarette between her
MAHC J , C O i l
photography, t h e exhibition f i n g e r s and a n e m p t y g l a s s
and its companion book, in front o f her. W i t h a n o d d
William Eggleston s Guide, e x p r e s s i o n o n her f a c e , s h e
reverberated well Into s e e m s t o t a l l y lost in t h o u g h t ,
the next decade and led o b l i v i o u s of t h e p h o t o g r a p h e r ' s
t o a full e m b r a c e o f c o l o r p r e s e n c e . B e h i n d her. an
g e n e r a l l y a n d , in p a r t i c u l a r , enormous skull painted on the
OPPOSITE: Photograph by Richard Burbridge, from the book Another Fashion p h o t o g r a p h y ' s n a s c e n t rise w a l l p r o v i d e s a fitting n a r r a t i v e
Booh (71 strirli 2009); THIS PAGE: Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. Photo­
a s t h e defining m e d i u m o f s y n t h e s i s o f a d i s s o l u t e life:
graph by Juergen Teller, from the book Marc Jacobs Advertising (Steidl. 2009):
c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t . B u t if from m i s e r a b l e hotel r o o m t o
PAGE 84: Vogue Italia. July 1995. and issue supplement: cover photographs of
Linda Evangelista by Steven Mefsel, from the book Three Hundred Seventeen t h a t w a s a s h o c k in 1 9 7 6 .
& Counting: Covers for Vogue Italia. 1988-2009 (Mallard/Janvier. 2009). a u d i e n c e s w e r e in for m u c h continued on next page

mi. kjij upertm. V;

(Iturbide continued)
•LW~t. ^^^^^
i 2009; distributed by University of
GRACIELA ITURBIDE
h o s p i t a l b e d , a n d ultimately,
t o final r e s t i n g p l a c e — a
n i g h t m a r e Is b e i n g p l a y e d
o u t . M o s t e n i g m a t i c o f all,
h o w e v e r , is t h e w o m a n herself.
T h i s w a s o n e o f G r a d e la
( t u r b i d e ' s first p h o t o g r a p h s
a n d , a l t h o u g h it is difficult t o
b e l i e v e , It w a s t a k e n in a w a x
museum, , . .
W h e n asked about her
work, the author herself
Is c a r e f u l t o remind t h e
questioner that "photography
is a p r e t e x t t o d i s c o v e r . " B u t
w h e n Iturbide p r o n o u n c e s t h e
w o r d " d i s c o v e r , " it b e c o m e s
s y n o n y m o u s w i t h living, with
being In t h e w o r l d , w i t h s i m p l y
being. It is a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g
of p h o t o g r a p h y b a s e d o n t h e
value o f o n e ' s o w n e x p e r i e n c e
of life
Looking at her pictures,
we might conclude that,
from t h e o u t s e t , I t u r b i d e
recognised these side effects
of t h e p h o t o g r a p h i c s h o t , t h i s
backfiring t h e c a m e r a s e n d s
in Its a u t h o r ' s d i r e c t i o n a n d
w h i c h is, t o a g r e a t e x t e n t ,
o n e o f t h e major l e g a c i e s o f
Surrealism, always keen t o
s u r p r i s e t h e u n c o n s c i o u s in
any p h o t o g r a p h e d c o r n e r . B u t
in her c a s e , it is i m p o r t a n t t o
n o t e t h a t t h i s is n o t s o m u c h a
m e t h o d o r a s t y l e , a s a n early
q u e s t i o n i n g — b o t h Inevitable
and l e g i t i m a t e — o n t h e
ambivalence of photography,
a medium a s p r e d i s p o s e d t o
a c c u r a t e d e s c r i p t i o n a s it is t o
fantasy.
—from Marta Daho's essay
erture.oru
Reuben Cox
THE WORK OF JOE WEBB:
APPALACHIAN MASTER O F
RUSTIC ARCHITECTURE
Highlands. N.C.: Jargon Society, New
Trends
Georgia Press
T h i s book Is not m e a n t t o be
a t a x o n o m y of t h e log h o m e s
d e s i g n e d and built by J o e
Webb (1881-1950) 1 have
p h o t o g r a p h e d all of J o e W e b b ' s
e x t a n t s t r u c t u r e s Inside
and out w i t h t h e c o m p u l s i v e
temperament of the average
completist record collector but
have chosen to present those
i m a g e s t h a t b e s t s u c c e e d as
cult status. Even more than his editorials, these ads also sealed
photographs.. ,.
Teller's rep as one of the most distinctive and unlikely fashion
J o e W e b b ' s w o r k is unique
b e c a u s e it r e p r e s e n t s t h e photographers of the turn of the millennium.
c o n f l u e n c e of s o m a n y t h i n g s , Three Hundred and Seventeen & Counting (Mallard/Janvier,
n o n e o f w h i c h e x i s t any l o n g e r
2009; available only through mallard-janvier.com), a collection
in A m e r i c a : t h e s e e m i n g l y
of every cover Steven Meisel photographed for Italian Vogue
e n d l e s s s u p p l y of natural
r e s o u r c e s a n d c h e a p , available between 1988 and 2009, is nothing but context. Meisel had an
land in a n u n s p o i l e d m o u n t a i n exclusive on the covers {and, after the first few years, the long
arcadia with even cheaper
opening stories) of the magazine during this period, and it was
labor. . . . All of t h e s e f a c t o r s
an ideal showcase for his mercurial vision. Like Avedon—the
h a v e e v a p o r a t e d and n o w leave
only other fashion photographer with a comparable range, humor,
no linear point of d e p a r t u r e
beyond t h e work, enshrining and intelligence—Meisel holds up a mirror to his times, making
W e b b ' s o e u v r e in t h e h i s t o r i c a l
pictures that center on women and clothes but reflect a much
e q u i v a l e n t of t h e L a B r e a Tar
P i t s . H e is t h e l a s t , and h a s no larger world, often with a satirical bent. He has mined subjects
d e s c e n d a n t s in t h e t r a d i t i o n from plastic surgery, rehab, prison, surf culture, and after-hours
of c a b i n building b r o u g h t t o clubs to the airless luxe of Beverly Hills mansions. He takes
A m e r i c a In t h e s e v e n t e e n t h
inspiration from art, film, performance, photojournalism, paparazzi
c e n t u r y by t h e S w e d e s ,
though, of course, log cabins shots, celebrity tabloids, and the whole history of photography,
c o n t i n u e t o be built in q u a n t i t y but h e ' s not a plagiarist, h e ' s a transformer. And h e ' s particularly
today—just as daguerreotypes suited to cover work because he never does the same thing twice.
are still p r o d u c e d , p a i n t e r ' s
The images here vary constantly in framing, orientation, and type
p i g m e n t s a r e still g r o u n d b y
hand, and madrigals sung. treatment; the only thing they have in common is offbeat glamour
and graphic impact. And, of course, great models. Meisel didn't
invent Linda Evangelista. Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell,
or any of the other models he turned into cover stars, but his
photographs defined them more authoritatively and sympathetically
than any others. With a Meisel retrospective book still only a
dream, this is the next best thing, essential to an appreciation of
what contemporary fashion photography is capable of.©
— V i n c e Aletti
Vmce Aletti reviews photography exhibitions tor ihe New Yorker's "Gomes on
About Town" section and photo books for Pnotogr;ijjh.
collaborators a license for creative rebellion and a freedom to

experiment." The results are often startling, including some of

the strangest and most sensational fashion pages published in

this new century by Nick Knight and Mario Sorrenti. T h e r e ' s also

terrific work by Glen Luchford, David Sims, Craig McDean. Cedric

Buchet, and two artists not known for fashion photography, Sam

Taylor-Wood and Will McBride. All this work is shown full-bleed and

in s e q u e n c e s that suggest abbreviated magazine spreads, minus

the typography. But the book's minimalist design ends up being greater s h o c k s as the decade
not j u s t boring but oddly intrusive, with photographers' names closed. The terms of art
production were tipping.
clumsily superimposed on their pictures and way too many images
A r t i s t s folded p h o t o g r a p h y
lost in the gutter. Not a disaster—great photographs are great
Into their practice a s a tool
photographs—but a disappointment. in r e p r e s e n t a t i o n w h i l e
Among the most reliable diversions in fashion magazines ongoing critical debates
contested the slippery slope
over the past decade are Juergen Teller's ads for Marc Jacobs,
of t h e m e a n i n g o f p i c t u r e s .
hundreds of which have been collected in the massive Marc
Szarkowski's promotion
Jacobs Advertising 1998-2009 {Steidl, 2009). Teller's approach of E g g l e s t o n ' s formalist
is predictable and relentless—perfect for establishing the identity vernacular description—the
p i n n a c l e o f his t h e o r e t i c a l
of a brand whose look needs to change from s e a s o n to s e a s o n .
s t r u c t u r e for a n a u t h o r l e s s
Framed by lots of expensive white s p a c e , his photographs of
photographic transparency
models and celebrities (an oddball assortment that includes Roni that had c o m e forward with
Horn, Michael Stipe. Sofia Coppola. Ryan McGinley, and Victoria The Photographer's Eye
(exhibition. 1964; book.
Beckham) are cold, unflattering, often quite •wkward, and great
1966) and N e w Documents
fun. They're also, in Teller's signature style, so overlit they look
( 1 9 6 7 ) — c r a s h e d headlong
amateurish, which really makes them stand out in the fashion Into a n e v e r - w i d e n i n g
pages, where everything is polished to a high g l o s s . Seen back-to- field of I m a g e - m a k i n g . A
new generation of artists
back here, their rude wit and audacity are hard to resist, especially
w a s far l e s s I n t e r e s t e d in
in the series that features the nearly naked photographer in P H O T O G R A P H Y IN A M E R I C A
p h o t o g r a p h y ' s Identity, p e r
bed with the unflappable Charlotte Rampling (who also shares a 1970-1980
s e , t h a n t h e y w e r e in I t s
ny: Hatje Cantz. 2010
bed with the fully d r e s s e d William Eggleston in later ads), and a utility a s a m e d i u m c a p a b l e
it t o o k s e v e r a l y e a r s f o l l o w i n g of i n t e r r o g a t i n g i t s e l f a n d t h e
collaboration with Cindy Sherman that s e a l e d the c a m p a i g n ' s
John Szarkowski's wildly surfeit of everyday images
controversial exhibition from t e l e v i s i o n , films, a n d
Photographs by William advertising.
Eggleston for t h e a r t w o r l d —from James Crump's essay
t o fully a b s o r b i t s i m p a c t
a n d t h e I m p l i c a t i o n s for
w h a t in h i n d s i g h t s e e m e d
like a b o m b s h e l l . A l t h o u g h Madrid: Fundaci6n Mapfre, 2009
Eggleston s work was A w o m a n I s s i t t i n g in a cantina
greeted sternly by critics of with a cigarette between her
MAHC J , C O i l
photography, t h e exhibition f i n g e r s and a n e m p t y g l a s s
and its companion book, in front o f her. W i t h a n o d d
William Eggleston s Guide, e x p r e s s i o n o n her f a c e , s h e
reverberated well Into s e e m s t o t a l l y lost in t h o u g h t ,
the next decade and led o b l i v i o u s of t h e p h o t o g r a p h e r ' s
t o a full e m b r a c e o f c o l o r p r e s e n c e . B e h i n d her. an
g e n e r a l l y a n d , in p a r t i c u l a r , enormous skull painted on the
OPPOSITE: Photograph by Richard Burbridge, from the book Another Fashion p h o t o g r a p h y ' s n a s c e n t rise w a l l p r o v i d e s a fitting n a r r a t i v e
Booh (71 strirli 2009); THIS PAGE: Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. Photo­
a s t h e defining m e d i u m o f s y n t h e s i s o f a d i s s o l u t e life:
graph by Juergen Teller, from the book Marc Jacobs Advertising (Steidl. 2009):
c o n t e m p o r a r y a r t . B u t if from m i s e r a b l e hotel r o o m t o
PAGE 84: Vogue Italia. July 1995. and issue supplement: cover photographs of
Linda Evangelista by Steven Mefsel, from the book Three Hundred Seventeen t h a t w a s a s h o c k in 1 9 7 6 .
& Counting: Covers for Vogue Italia. 1988-2009 (Mallard/Janvier. 2009). a u d i e n c e s w e r e in for m u c h continued on next page

mi. kjij upertm. V;

(Iturbide continued)
•LW~t. ^^^^^
i 2009; distributed by University of
GRACIELA ITURBIDE
h o s p i t a l b e d , a n d ultimately,
t o final r e s t i n g p l a c e — a
n i g h t m a r e Is b e i n g p l a y e d
o u t . M o s t e n i g m a t i c o f all,
h o w e v e r , is t h e w o m a n herself.
T h i s w a s o n e o f G r a d e la
( t u r b i d e ' s first p h o t o g r a p h s
a n d , a l t h o u g h it is difficult t o
b e l i e v e , It w a s t a k e n in a w a x
museum, , . .
W h e n asked about her
work, the author herself
Is c a r e f u l t o remind t h e
questioner that "photography
is a p r e t e x t t o d i s c o v e r . " B u t
w h e n Iturbide p r o n o u n c e s t h e
w o r d " d i s c o v e r , " it b e c o m e s
s y n o n y m o u s w i t h living, with
being In t h e w o r l d , w i t h s i m p l y
being. It is a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g
of p h o t o g r a p h y b a s e d o n t h e
value o f o n e ' s o w n e x p e r i e n c e
of life
Looking at her pictures,
we might conclude that,
from t h e o u t s e t , I t u r b i d e
recognised these side effects
of t h e p h o t o g r a p h i c s h o t , t h i s
backfiring t h e c a m e r a s e n d s
in Its a u t h o r ' s d i r e c t i o n a n d
w h i c h is, t o a g r e a t e x t e n t ,
o n e o f t h e major l e g a c i e s o f
Surrealism, always keen t o
s u r p r i s e t h e u n c o n s c i o u s in
any p h o t o g r a p h e d c o r n e r . B u t
in her c a s e , it is i m p o r t a n t t o
n o t e t h a t t h i s is n o t s o m u c h a
m e t h o d o r a s t y l e , a s a n early
q u e s t i o n i n g — b o t h Inevitable
and l e g i t i m a t e — o n t h e
ambivalence of photography,
a medium a s p r e d i s p o s e d t o
a c c u r a t e d e s c r i p t i o n a s it is t o
fantasy.
—from Marta Daho's essay
erture.oru
Reuben Cox
THE WORK OF JOE WEBB:
APPALACHIAN MASTER O F
RUSTIC ARCHITECTURE
Highlands. N.C.: Jargon Society, New
Trends
Georgia Press
T h i s book Is not m e a n t t o be
a t a x o n o m y of t h e log h o m e s
d e s i g n e d and built by J o e
Webb (1881-1950) 1 have
p h o t o g r a p h e d all of J o e W e b b ' s
e x t a n t s t r u c t u r e s Inside
and out w i t h t h e c o m p u l s i v e
temperament of the average
completist record collector but
have chosen to present those
i m a g e s t h a t b e s t s u c c e e d as
cult status. Even more than his editorials, these ads also sealed
photographs.. ,.
Teller's rep as one of the most distinctive and unlikely fashion
J o e W e b b ' s w o r k is unique
b e c a u s e it r e p r e s e n t s t h e photographers of the turn of the millennium.
c o n f l u e n c e of s o m a n y t h i n g s , Three Hundred and Seventeen & Counting (Mallard/Janvier,
n o n e o f w h i c h e x i s t any l o n g e r
2009; available only through mallard-janvier.com), a collection
in A m e r i c a : t h e s e e m i n g l y
of every cover Steven Meisel photographed for Italian Vogue
e n d l e s s s u p p l y of natural
r e s o u r c e s a n d c h e a p , available between 1988 and 2009, is nothing but context. Meisel had an
land in a n u n s p o i l e d m o u n t a i n exclusive on the covers {and, after the first few years, the long
arcadia with even cheaper
opening stories) of the magazine during this period, and it was
labor. . . . All of t h e s e f a c t o r s
an ideal showcase for his mercurial vision. Like Avedon—the
h a v e e v a p o r a t e d and n o w leave
only other fashion photographer with a comparable range, humor,
no linear point of d e p a r t u r e
beyond t h e work, enshrining and intelligence—Meisel holds up a mirror to his times, making
W e b b ' s o e u v r e in t h e h i s t o r i c a l
pictures that center on women and clothes but reflect a much
e q u i v a l e n t of t h e L a B r e a Tar
P i t s . H e is t h e l a s t , and h a s no larger world, often with a satirical bent. He has mined subjects
d e s c e n d a n t s in t h e t r a d i t i o n from plastic surgery, rehab, prison, surf culture, and after-hours
of c a b i n building b r o u g h t t o clubs to the airless luxe of Beverly Hills mansions. He takes
A m e r i c a In t h e s e v e n t e e n t h
inspiration from art, film, performance, photojournalism, paparazzi
c e n t u r y by t h e S w e d e s ,
though, of course, log cabins shots, celebrity tabloids, and the whole history of photography,
c o n t i n u e t o be built in q u a n t i t y but h e ' s not a plagiarist, h e ' s a transformer. And h e ' s particularly
today—just as daguerreotypes suited to cover work because he never does the same thing twice.
are still p r o d u c e d , p a i n t e r ' s
The images here vary constantly in framing, orientation, and type
p i g m e n t s a r e still g r o u n d b y
hand, and madrigals sung. treatment; the only thing they have in common is offbeat glamour
and graphic impact. And, of course, great models. Meisel didn't
invent Linda Evangelista. Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell,
or any of the other models he turned into cover stars, but his
photographs defined them more authoritatively and sympathetically
than any others. With a Meisel retrospective book still only a
dream, this is the next best thing, essential to an appreciation of
what contemporary fashion photography is capable of.©
— V i n c e Aletti
Vmce Aletti reviews photography exhibitions tor ihe New Yorker's "Gomes on
About Town" section and photo books for Pnotogr;ijjh.

W. EUGENE SMITH AND THE JAZZ LOFT
In 1957 W. Eugene Smith, desperate to complete his epic photo­
graphic "poem" to the city of Pittsburgh, moved into a seedy loft at
821 Sixth Avenue in New York City. He affixed some two thousand
prints to the walls of his studio and down the stairwell, but "always
there is the window." he wrote to his friend Ansel Adams in 1958,
"It forever seduces me away from my work in this cold water flat."
Smith would never discover a satisfactory end to the
Pittsburgh project, but he found a s e c o n d life in the loft. On
most nights, from about eleven P.M. until morning. 821 was host
to jam s e s s i o n s involving many of the midcentury's finest jazz
musicians, among them Thelonious Monk, Zoot S i m s , and Bill
Evans (not to mention visits by Norman Mailer, Salvador Dali,
and Diane Arbus). Of one fevered s e s s i o n that drummer Ronnie
Free kept going for a week, Smith o b s e r v e d : "He was working on
something, searching for something, and he kept playing until he
found it." T h e same might be said of Smith himself.
Smith made some forty thousand pictures during his eight
years in the building—of the musicians and of the street outside
his fourth-floor window. He also filled 1,740 reel-to-reel tapes
with the sounds of some three hundred musicians and a random
environmental sampling of radio s h o w s , conversations, telephone
calls, and street noise. (WNYC produced a fascinating ten-part
series on these tapes.) Sam S t e p h e n s o n sifted through twenty-
two tons of Smith's archives to assemble The Jazz Loft
Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821
Avenue. 1957-1965 (Abrams, 2009), which features a hefty
selection of black-and-white photographs, transcribed excerpts of
audio recordings, and recollections of other loft-habitues.
Smith had previously produced humanist photo-essays for Life,
but in the loft, notes his friend Robert Frank. "Gene went from a
public journalist to a private a r t i s t . . . I'm sure the
intensity was still the same, but there weren't the
goals of changing the world with this body of work.
Smith was galvanized by the musicians' p a s s i o n —
according to Stephenson, "he gained sustenance
from [them] and identified with their need to t e s t
t h e m s e l v e s in a noncommercial setting." He
s e e m s to have been likewise inspired by their
s o u n d ; the photographs frequently suggest a kind
of rhythm: there are the moody, improvisatory shots
of musicians at work, but also, for instance, the
syncopated beat created by a series of four images
that show a woman roaming a patch of street while
Chaos Manor, experimental image with cutouts, ca. 1960.
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BOOKS
trying to hail a cab. Even a bird's-eye view of footprints in the
snow imitates a diagram of dance steps.
The photographs are also patently theatrical. "My window is a
proscenium arch," Smith declared. "The street is staged with all
the humors of man." A woman pauses to rifle through the contents
of her purse; a lonely fire hydrant, out of reach of the glow from
a flower shop's windows, gazes into the damp dark of the street.
Elsewhere, an older man peers across the sidewalk at a young
blond reading a book. The scene is bisected by the blurred
jungle of a fire escape caught in the foreground and, tellingly, by
an oversize pair of spectacles hanging from an optician's sign.
Smith often closed in tightly on his subjects, filling the frame with
Monk's hands moving across the piano or a woman's leg plunging
out of an open car door. From his vantage above the street,
Smith pivoted and tilted in his window like a gunner, pointing
his lens at 180 degrees of the world. In one image, a police car,
photographed diagonally, crowds the picture plane. The white
rectangle of its hood and trunk are stark counterpoints to the
dark triangles of pavement on either side. Another image appears
reflected in the rear window—the tiny needle of the Empire State
Building, just half a dozen blocks north.
It is ironic that these vital images came into being simply as a
result of Smith's distraction from another project—one that he
Project: once compared in scope to Beethoven's late string quartets. And
Sixth yet, as photographer Harold Feinstein notes, "Gene had a s e n s e
of history. There's always a major project in the back of his mind,"©
—Nicole Rudick
Nicole Rudick is a writer based in New York.
no. I<JI.) aperture/ \T
 D'S E Y E

JOHN WATERS
O N L E E F R I E D L A N D E R ' S NY STATE, 2001
This d o e s the trick. The cars on the auto
transport blink their turn signals in a subtle
symphony of conspiracy and the stupid truck driver
jumps from his cab in total confusion. Maybe he's
seen that early Spielberg movie about the killer
truck. Duet—who knows? But that gives you an
idea. " L e t ' s watch a car-horror movie!" you yell
to your new friends, popping your hood. All at
once, the happy new cars shout their affirmation
by setting off their alarms and the trucker takes
off like he just saw a ghost. "Sure, you heard
about the movie Christine when you were being
manufactured in the plant, but that was about
a 'classic' car," you sneer, flipping on the air
conditioner full-tilt, "and who cares about those
old farts? . , . Let's watch The Carinstead,"
you holler, turning on your windshield wipers. "A
driverless black sedan terrorizes a whole town."
you enthuse, cranking up your radio loudly, "and
it's sooooo good! It came out in 1977 and was
directed by Elliot Silverstein and you've got to see
it!" The future-film-buff cars inflate and deflate
their air bags in cinematic anticipation. "We're
here, we're in gear, so get used to u s ! " your new
friends chant by violently spinning their wheels
still chained in place to their slave ship.

Suppose you were a car and didn't know there were other cars. Aren't you readers of Aperture glad that the great photographer

Especially ones that were a little different from you. Virgins. Never Lee Friedlander documented the secret world of human detachment?

dented. Hoods unopened by any contaminated drivers. Imagine We cars like him, even if he did expose our hidden camaraderie and

the exhilarating feeling when, out on your own for the first time and newfound militancy to the outside world. Maybe it was time to break

freshly escaped from your domineering owner, you s e e a whole the code. Now you will finally know that your own vehicles resent you.

truckload of fellow cars. "Can I come with you!?" you shout out in even hate your guts. It d o e s n ' t stop in the driveway either. Your

loneliness by gurgling your oil. "Yes!" the cars' ignitions whisper back own clothes hanging in your closets are whispering insults about

joyously as they combust. you as they wait to be c h o s e n . Even food in the refrigerator cringes

Will t h e s e freshly loaded, never-been-on-the-road newborns think every time the door opens and an eater's hand reaches inside

you are oid? Will they shun you as a used car, an outsider, even thoughtlessly for a snack. We inanimate objects are watching y o u .

though you have only been that way for twenty-four hours? "Let And we are saying awful things about y o u , too. Except for

me show you the r o p e s , " you accelerate your engine, cursing the Lee Friedlander, of course. H e ' s our friend. He noticed us.©

muffler's silencing effect. "Pretty s o o n , " you warn your new friends
in paranoia, blaring your horn, "we'll all be rental cars: the saddest Lee Friedlander, NY State. 2001.
cars in the world."

SS / iririr.rtpt'rtiiiv.iinj