Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i Aperture

Icons of Style When telling the story of fashion photography, certain names dominate the field. Now Icons of Style, a new exhibition at the Getty Museum, which includes 160 photographs by more than ninety photographers, seeks to spotlight lesser-known contemporaries of Helmut Newton and Irving Penn, arranging photographs by decade so that changes—aesthetic, technological, and social—are visible. “I was excited to find great fashion photographs by practitioners who have been underrepresented in previous exhibitions and books,” says associate curator of photographs Paul Martineau. Sharing a sense of discovery, Martineau will place works by frequent Harper’s Bazaar photographer Gleb Derujinsky and innovative 1970s photographer Kourken Pakchanian alongside—and in conversation with—photographs by Richard Avedon and William Klein. Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911–2011 at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles,…

Very few exhibitions can genuinely be regarded as landmarks, having instant and profound effects on perceptions. One of these was Film und Foto, the ambitious international survey first staged in 1929 in Stuttgart, Germany, to showcase all that was new and transformative about photography and cinema. FiFo (as it was known at the time) put aside anxieties about the status of photography as Art, capital A, to look instead at its comprehensive redefinition of modern vision and its diverse roles in society. Photography had become central to science, architecture, fashion, advertising, reportage, tourism, and more. Yes, it could be framed on walls, but it could also be used in the streets on posters and billboards, in books, journals, and magazines. And, of course, photography was a fundamental ingredient of filmmaking.…

An irregular chevron bursts with light, teems with nebulous eddies, and slices through a seemingly impenetrable darkness. Smoke Screen VI (2017), the sixth in a series of seven large-scale, gelatin-silver photographs produced by Anthony McCall, is all but illegible to the uninitiated. Or perhaps excessively legible, that is, multiplicitous to the extreme. McCall’s “solid light” (to use the artist’s term) installations, especially those projected down from the ceiling, are routinely analogized to divine revelations or encounters of the third kind. Smoke Screen VI similarly brims with associations. But to gain our bearings, we require a more technical description. To make the Smoke Screen series (2017), McCall photographed Swell (2016), a double-projector solid light film in which a line and a partial ellipse are projected through a haze-filled space to create…

Mo Yi is known by everyone in the Chinese photography world but by few outside of it. Born in 1958, in Tibet, to Chinese parents assigned there as Communist Party functionaries, Mo grew up wearing the red scarf of the Young Pioneers (the party youth organization) and diligently carrying the Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong) everywhere. As a young man, Mo earned his living as a professional soccer player; after retiring from sports, in 1985, he took a job as a hospital photographer in Tianjin, a coastal city about ninety miles from Beijing, and began to explore that bleak industrial port with his camera. When his early, documentary-style images of street scenes and city dwellers were criticized as too gloomy, Mo devised a number of unorthodox techniques…

In the mid-1960s, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up offered an indelible portrait of a suave fashion photographer in swinging London. The fantasy depicted in the film—where a swaggering photographer-protagonist manhandles his models at will—feels woefully anachronistic in the era of #MeToo, when gender dynamics in the film and photography industries are under intense scrutiny. A better mirror for our troubled times might be Antonioni’s Red Desert, a film that captured the physical and mental strain of modern life in toxic color. For Luigi Ghirri, the postwar Italian photographer, it offered a model for seeing the present. As Maria Antonella Pelizzari notes in this issue, Red Desert—enduring for both its style and story—continues to influence generations of photographers. The 1929 German exhibition Film und Foto also projects a long legacy onto the present,…

When Alex Prager first began teaching herself photography, at the age of twenty-one, in 2000, printing black-and-white pictures in a home darkroom in Koreatown, Los Angeles, she’d hang them in the laundry room of her apartment building. Some prints disappeared; this was intentional. “I was curious to find out what people liked, which pictures they were drawn to,” Prager says from her studio in LA. Since those formative days, the artist’s work has radically transformed—most visibly in her emergent predilection for lurid, captivating color and a consciously narrative approach. Prager is known for photographing psychological, hypervivid, theatrically constructed scenes that evoke stills from classic Hollywood films, as evident in her new monograph Silver Lake Drive (2018). Cinematic and filmic are adjectives frequently applied to Prager’s photographs, but for Prager that…

Shirin Neshat is an image maker of ample gifts. Born in Qazvin, Iran, she moved to California in 1974 to study art. In 1990, eleven years after the (fateful) Iranian Revolution, she returned to Iran and soon began work on her debut photographic series, Women of Allah (1994). Like poetry to decipher, these stark black-and-white portraits of women, many of whom have text inscribed on their bodies, offer up complex emotional registers. Some of her subjects carry firearms, evoking a battle recently waged, or a battle to come. Since then, Neshat’s work has taken a zigzag journey from photography to video installation and, finally, to cinema. Few artists have made such a seamless transition to creating feature films, and yet Neshat makes her restless movement between forms appear natural—necessary, even.…

A few years ago, the photographer Fouad Elkoury began riffling through his own archive. He was working on a book with a writer and an art historian, and they were curious to revisit sixty years’ worth of contact sheets. It took Manal Khader and Gregory Buchakjian four months to go through some fifty thousand images, which is still just a fraction of Elkoury’s oeuvre. As is often the case with his work, they turned up several images that both defied and played knowingly with viewers’ expectations. Born to a prominent Lebanese family in Paris, Elkoury studied architecture in London before reluctantly moving back to Beirut in 1979. Lebanon’s civil war had been ongoing for several years by then, and, however discomfiting, Elkoury soon found that he had slipped into its…

Since the mid-1980s, Gus Van Sant has directed a succession of films that, though often unpredictable from one to the next, has been consistently engaged in an ongoing study of storytelling and memory, life on the harsh margins of modern American society, and the disaffection of youth. After early films such as Mala Noche (1985), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1991) secured him a position as a celebrated indie director and a leading proponent of the New Queer Cinema movement, Van Sant won massive mainstream success with Good Will Hunting (1997), written by and starring then newcomers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. He returned to his independent roots with what he has called his “death trilogy”—Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005). The director’s latest film,…

The Way We Live Now More Good News was the title of Farah Al Qasimi’s breakout solo show in the fall of 2017 at New York’s Helena Anrather gallery. But Qasimi’s own career seems to be all about “good news” lately. Since participating in the 2015 Aperture Summer Open, Qasimi has been commissioned for assignments by major magazines—and her work was featured in Aperture’s “On Feminism” issue (Winter 2016). Qasimi is known for her opulent but incisive color photographs that explore gender and society in her native Abu Dhabi and the United States. She made one recent photograph on a road trip to Miami. There, in a public library, she happened upon a bright-blue hardback volume of United States Treaties and Other International Agreements, precariously suspended like a readymade artwork—or…

When Bunny Yeager appeared in a lace-bodiced gown, her blonde curls puffed up like fresh popcorn, on the popular game show What’s My Line?, in 1957, her given profession—disclosed only to the viewing audience at home—was cheesecake photographer. Her glamour and her gender stumped the panel, which declared after the reveal that she was on the wrong side of the camera. Yeager, in fact, got her start posing on the beach for newspaper pinups. But she soon determined that she wanted to be behind the camera too. After taking some photography classes at night, Yeager became the first woman to be both glamour model and glamour photographer. Yeager made many iconic pictures of other women, including over a thousand shots of Bettie Page, most famously with two live cheetahs. But…

“I never thought I would be a filmmaker. It wasn’t something I ever planned,” Sofia Coppola recently told the Guardian. “I felt frustrated at art school. I had so many interests—design, photography, music.” By turning to film she no longer had to choose. The form allowed Coppola to engage all her passions, especially photography, which has been central to shaping her cinematic language. From Coppola’s debut with The Virgin Suicides (1999) to Lost in Translation (2003) to Marie Antoinette (2006), the filmmaker has turned to the history of photography for inspiration for the interiors, costumes, and atmosphere of her films. Storyboards, replete with photographic references, were key to Coppola’s most recent—and controversial—film, the Civil War–era The Beguiled (2017), for which she won the Best Director Award at last year’s Cannes…

When it was released in 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert announced a radical departure from the documentary approach. The film was experimental for its color, sound work, slow camera movement, and its subversion of a traditional cinematic structure. Haunting images of an industrial wasteland of mining tips, fire-belching smokestacks, and hulking merchant ships pushing through Ravenna’s sulfurous industrial harbor shaped the narrative thread of an otherwise inanimate environment. Red Desert was about the striking artificiality of color, the poetry of a landscape recognized by its author as modern, the acknowledgment of a world that shared the surfaces of Pop art and introduced the postminimalism of arte povera. As Antonioni explained to his fellow filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, “Today what counts are things, objects, matter.” The film revolved around the question of…

In one image from Ryan Spencer’s recent series There Is No Light at the End of the Tunnel Because the Tunnel Is Made of Light (2016), a man holds up a camera to the lens, as if to photograph the viewer. At least, we assume, based on the blinding white circle emanating from the object in his hands, that it must be a camera. In Spencer’s work, light obscures as much as it illuminates. These pictures, taken with a 1970s-era Polaroid Land camera using Fuji FP-3000B instant film, capture still images from dozens of neo-noir movies set in Los Angeles. In this encounter between black-and-white camera and color TV screen, light takes on unexpected forms, sometimes enshrouding entire images in a pale gray wash—as in an image from Brian De…

Where can we locate the birth of the queer image, not just in content but in form? Almost upon its invention, photography supplanted painting as the medium of desire. The material of film, Roland Barthes reminds us, preserves some part of the thing it captures—if only a bit of light that once reflected off the surface of a sitter’s skin. That tantalizing scientific proximity brought queer photographers, persecuted for their sexuality, ever closer to the objects of their affection. Cinema offered an even tighter bond: not just the image of a lover, but a record of their every gesture. Facing censorship, early queer photographers and filmmakers focused intently on bodies forbidden to them, using the academic tradition of nude portraiture to mask idylls in immersive erotic landscapes. Inspired by the…

In two recent films, Kahlil Joseph and Arthur Jafa consider the poetics of African American life. In 1953, the renowned Harlem photographer Roy DeCarava snapped David, a black-and-white portrait of a young black boy from the neighborhood: Hair nappy, his hands are folded behind his back as he leans against a lamppost. A single button holds his shirt closed, and yet the frown he wears allows him to peer, fully represented, directly into the camera’s eye. “He don’t never smile,” observed the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes when the image appeared in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 admixture of 140 of DeCarava’s quotidian images—of black men, women, and children going about their days and celebrated jazz luminaries playing music—paired with Hughes’s narrative. It’s DeCarava’s impressionistic image of black…

“Their faces were secret, soft, utterly without trust of me, and utterly without understanding,” lamented journalist James Agee after meeting a young African American couple in Hale County, Alabama, in 1936. “And they had to stand here now and hear what I was saying, because in that country no negro safely walks away from a white man.” Appearing quite early on in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the landmark text and photobook that Agee and photographer Walker Evans collaborated on to explore the impact of the Great Depression on Southern sharecroppers, Agee’s account of his encounter with these African American residents of Hale County is one of just a handful of descriptions of black life in their over-four-hundred-page epic work. Agee leaves that scene with regret for bothering…

In the early 1900s, Jesuit abbé Josef-Alexis Joye began collecting films in Switzerland by acquiring them from the secondhand market in his native country and in Germany. The nitrate prints were used for his lectures at the Borromäum, an educational institution he had established, in 1898, to support the local Catholic community. Joye treated the films as instructional tools to be used in his Sunday classes for orphans, working-class families, and recent émigrés in his parish. By virtue of Joye’s charitable efforts, one of the major sources for the study of early cinema is now available to the public: the vast majority of surviving elements—1,158 by a recent count—were eventually deposited, in the 1970s, at the British Film Institute’s National Archive. Most of them, however, can be viewed today only…