Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2015 i Aperture

What compels someone to become a photographer? And what drives someone to continue to be one, for as many as seven decades? How does a veteran photographer describe years of questioning politics, personal experience, social unrest, landscape, and history through the camera? For this issue we have broken with our usual “Words” and “Pictures” format to offer nine in-depth interviews, firsthand accounts that underscore the generosity and intelligence of their speakers. Born between 1928 and 1947, the nine photographers here—Bruce Davidson, Paolo Gasparini, David Goldblatt, Guido Guidi, Ishiuchi Miyako, William Klein, Bertien van Manen, Boris Mikhailov, and Rosalind Fox Solomon—are still active today, adding to their already unparalleled bodies of work. In these pages, the medium is considered from various points of view, offering a range of philosophies, values, and…

Prankster, performer, and self-taught photographer Boris Mikhailov might be said to embody the archetype of the holy fool—that idea originating in the Russian Orthodox Church and carrying into literature in which someone pretends to be mad in order to offer spiritual guidance. Since he began making photographs in 1965, Mikhailov has continually broken the rules, both formal and ideological, to convey larger truths. He was born in 1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine; years later, in a now-famous story, Mikhailov was fired from his job as an engineer when he was caught using the factory’s darkroom to develop nude photographs of his wife. The body—whether his own or his subjects’—remains a constant presence in his work, including images from the 1970s and ’80s that played with and subverted Soviet-era visual codes. This…

Born in 1942, Bertien van Manen began her career in the 1970s as a fashion photographer. Commercial photography, however, soon left her wanting and unfulfilled; like many photographers of her generation, inspired by Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), she subsequently shifted toward an expressive and intimate documentary approach. Some of her earliest work addressed the lives of immigrant women in her home country, the Netherlands, and the curiosity that motivated that work prompted her to explore communities all over the world, from bootleggers in Appalachia to villagers in the former Soviet Union, for books including A hundred summers, a hundred winters (1994); East Wind West Wind (2001); Let’s sit down before we go (2011); Easter and Oak Trees (2013); and Moonshine (2014). Her photographs, made on trips throughout Eastern Europe,…

A look at the catalog that accompanied a onetime photography-only biennial Venice ’79 Lyle Rexer In 1979, Venice discovered photography— then turned its back on the medium. In a possible attempt to expand the Venice Biennale brand, the municipality, assisted financially by UNESCO and programmatically by the International Center of Photography, installed one of the largest photography exhibitions ever mounted in Europe. The catalog, Photography: Venice ’79, expressed the tentative hope that this might be “ the model for future such festivals.” Instead it was a one-off that, in retrospect, provides a revealing glimpse of where photography stood globally and the contradictions that would henceforth make any exhibition employing the generic term photography highly problematic. Like its off-year scheduling between two art biennials, photography’s position at the time might be…

“ Too much in photography is shoot and leave,” Bruce Davidson says in his conversation with curator Charlotte Cotton. Indeed, Davidson is often intent on looking back—not out of nostalgia for the past but rather to follow the course of his subjects’ lives. This has been the case with those he photographed in a number of his first and most acclaimed series, including Brooklyn Gang (1959); his work documenting the civil rights movement, the 1965 Selma march and the March on Washington two years earlier; and his project East 100th Street (1966–68), on the lives of Harlem residents. Davidson began photographing as a teenager in Illinois, transforming a closet into a darkroom and apprenticing at a local camera shop. While stationed in the military in France in the 1950s, he…

“C an a photograph have the significance of art?” This question has vexed the medium since its inception, and in 1922, the experimental arts journal Manuscripts (MSS) asked its contributors to offer their thoughts on the matter. They included the painters Charles Demuth and Arthur Dove, Marcel Duchamp, Sherwood Anderson, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Chaplin, among others. MSS’s prompt was specific: answers needed to be concise, the maximum word count was six hundred, and all responses would be published unedited. Photographers, however, were not invited to comment. Edited by journalists Paul Rosenfeld and Herbert J. Seligmann, with the support of Alfred Stieglitz, MSS was published in New York from 1922 to 1923, releasing just six issues. By issuing a questionnaire for their fourth issue, MSS joined a tradition of publications…

Justine Kurland is a photographer of the road. Since the early 2000s, she has regularly crisscrossed the United States, frequently with her young son in tow, making pictures of traveling hippies, train hoppers, mothers and their children, car mechanics, and many others seeking their personal utopias. Her photographs combine romantic vision with a documentary sensibility, exposing both the charm and difficulties of an itinerant life. Kurland lives in New York City with her son, and teaches at Parsons, the New School; the International Center of Photography; and Pratt University. Her forthcoming monograph, Highway Kind, will be published by Aperture in 2016. The works in this compendium follow one another as a stream of consciousness, with each successive selection invoked by the preceding one. My curriculum begins with love, moves to…

Untitled #9, 1952 When writer Aaron Schuman first arrived at William Klein’s apartment, five stories above Paris’s rue de Médicis, he was ushered into Klein’s living room by his assistant. Klein, eighty-seven, had been up until four thirty in the morning the night before and was having a rest. After an hour or so of thumbing through this Aladdin’s cave of trophies and treasures, Schuman heard Klein stirring in the rooms at the back of the apartment. “By the tone of his voice, I could tell that he had just woken up, and was reluctant to join me,” Schuman said. “His assistant pleaded, ‘But he’s come all the way from England!’” Finally, Klein entered the room, eyes wide and shining. This would be the first of two visits with Klein…

“E vents in themselves are not so much interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events,” David Goldblatt says to interviewer Jonathan Cane. While other photographers have focused on the turmoil of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid years, Goldblatt, who is now eighty-four, tends to train his lens on quieter subjects emblematic of the prevailing social order. He will soon be republishing his series In Boksburg (1979–80), in which he looked at daily life in a white middle-class community in the years of apartheid. Among his many series are Some Afrikaners Photographed (1961–68); On the Mines (1973), documenting South Africa’s mining industry; and The Transported of KwaNdebele (1989), addressing the plight of black workers forced to travel great distances for employment. More recently, for Ex-Offenders (2010–present), he…