Aperture 200 - Fall 2010

NOT.. OTE.. . Nearly a decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America continues to inspire a host of conflicted feelings-from admiration to heated criticism-both within its borders and around the globe. Artists grapple with these unpredictable, baffling, frightening-and sometimes wondrous-times, producing art engaged with what might loosely be called the American psyche, the contested landscape and culture in this moment of flux and political division. In the belief that art may serve as a powerful unifying force in periods of confusion, acclaimed artist Eric Fischl decided to organize a massive exhibition and take it on the road. We are pleased to present in these pages a selection from Fischl's ambitious America:NowandHere, a road show of works by more than 150 artists operating in all media. Author E. L. Doctorow, who penned the accompanying text, characterizes this unprecedented collective project as "the groundsong for our time of a diverse, still vibrantly alive society." Diverse and vibrant are two words easily applied to New York's street life. For his recent project In Visible Cities, photographer Barney Kulok has created imageless streetscapes by collecting the idiosyncratic names that city dwellers have given to their wireless networks. Poet Max Blagg, a longtime resident of New York, uses Kulok's work as a springboard to relay disparate anecdotes, creating an image of the restless panorama that is this city. Our hardwired culture, however, has inspired others to seek out a slower pace of life. Lucas Foglia's Re-Wilding is a study of people in the United States who are moving away from cities and suburbs and getting off the grid. His subjects take pride in their self-sufficiency and are often distrustful of the government and other institutions' capacity or motivation to take care of our needs. And what event could point more clearly to the government's unreliability than the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina? Photographers Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun were washed out of their home and studio in the Lower Ninth Ward when the storm hit back in 2005. In the intervening years, they have chronicled the stories of friends and neighbors displaced by the storm, focusing on local heroes, and discovering an inspiring resilience in the human spirit. Deborah Willis has written up these poignant and courageous stories in collaboration with the photographers. Baseball and fame are two enduring American preoccupations. In the mid-1970s, Mike Mandel questioned the new celebrity status of photographers, after the medium's long time languishing in the shadow of "art." The Baseball-PhotographersTrading Cards, a witty project that connects to other conceptual uses of photography in that era, features a lineup of heavy-hitters, among them Aperture founders Ansel Adams, Barbara Morgan, Beaumont Newhall, and Minor White, who all might be astounded to know that Aperture has survived long enough to publish this issue, our two hundredth. Additionally, we bring you two stories from Mexico. Photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and film historian David M. J. Wood discuss the archive of film entrepreneur Salvador Toscano, whose documentary movies and collection shed new light on twentieth-century Mexican history. And Martin Parr takes us on a taxi ride with self-taught photographer Oscar Fernando G6mez, who uses his vehicle's window as a framing device for his visual album of the city of Monterrey. Operating on a far more conceptual level, the elegant and provocatively enigmatic work of Clare Strand is considered by critic David Campany. In honor of our two hundredth issue, this edition of Aperture is being produced with two cover images (distributed randomly, both to subscribers and newsstand buyers): one by Strand and the other by Cindy Sherman, whose work is featured in Fischl's America:NowandHere. Finally, in "Mind's Eye," composer and multimedia artist DJ Spooky discusses the Antarctic landscape and the issue of constructing new realities through images. DJ Spooky's recent composition Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarcticawas inspired by this otherworldly terrain, which he looks at here through the eyes of Herbert Ponting, one of the intrepid explorers who first photographed the continent a century ago. As we conclude the first decade of the millennium, DJ Spooky reminds us of the "mercurial reality" photographs depict. -The

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REV.VIE.......W..S. LA SUBVERSION DES IMAGES Belgian poet; pictures by GhCrasim Luca, a Romanian who in 1944-45 invented a process of cutting photographs into squares and reassembling them (his piecemeal, mostly naked women existed long before Robert Heineken's Clich6 Vary series of the 1970s); the French novelist L6o Malet's 1936 "mirror objects," in which he moved a mirror out from the middle in both directions across an innocent enough photo illustration-the exhibition's wall text quotes Malet "discovering" secret "mouths and vaginas that open and close, muttering, shouting, screaming." Surrealist photography went public quite early. By the late 1920s and 1930s, Man Ray worked for Harper's Bazaarand Vogue (see his 1936 photograph of a model reclining before his Rulers, military strategists, political theorists, and religions make a

painting of enormous lips floating in the sky), Dora Maar

habit of trying to change the world. In the first half of the twentieth

made advertising photographs, and Claude Cahun illustrated

century, an uncommon number of artists and art movements laid

a children's book. (Children, who do not clearly distinguish

plans to do the same-not just to change art but to change human

fantasy from reality in their first years, would seem to be an

consciousness, perception, and the very nature of daily life. The

ideal audience for the less erotic versions of Surrealism; think

Italian Futurists thought art had this power, so did Kazimir Malevich,

of Alice in Wonderland.) Because photography transferred

and the Russian Futurists thought it could direct the will of the

readily to print media and wide distribution, it was Surrealism's

masses toward the world's transformation. Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the fathers of Dada, wrote: "Dada means nothing. We

most likely avenue to the public's eye. But once commerce heartily embraced it, the Surrealists were dismayed. They

want to change the world with nothing." Le Corbusier believed

played fast and loose with popular culture, especially in collage

architecture alone could alter life. The Surrealists were also true

(following the Dadaists' lead), but they didn't want popular

believers, and in fact they did make a major change, at least in

culture to play with them.

the visual environment, but not quite the way they meant to.

Surrealism's public presence is still robust: advertising,

La Subversion des images, a splendid exhibition at the

animation, record covers (and art photography, encouraged by

Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, presented more than

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Photoshop) loudly broadcast its credos. The pronouncement

three hundred photographic images, plus some one hundred

by Andr6 Breton, the movement's principal founder, that "it is

documents and a dozen films, bountiful evidence of how

through the power of images that, in time, real revolutions may

important photography was to the Surrealists. The team of

well be brought about" has, in one sense, come true. Breton

curators (Quentin Bajac, Cl6ment Ch6roux, Guillaume Le Gall,

wanted to change life itself, which required changing ways of

Michel Poivert, and Philippe-Alain Michaud) prodigally supplied

seeing, and ways of seeing did indeed change. Surrealism's

little-known images: "disturbing objects" by Paul Noug6, a

interest in the ideas of Sigmund Freud may even have abetted

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wandering the streets in search of the marvelous, and they played with voyeurism, that index of the eye's greed. Their minds were inordinately preoccupied with the female nude, which some of them liked trussed and others, Hans Bellmer particularly, preferred dismembered. Explicit sex was an obvious sop to voyeurism, and Jindfich Styrskq made its implicit message unmistakable: a copulating couple is watched by a multitude of oversized eyes-including, of course, the viewers'. Though vision was primary, the mind's eye counted most, and interior vision trumped the age-old kind. Many of the artists themselves posed for photographs with their eyes closed. Another world existed inside the head and yet another was hidden within facts. The inward gaze produced fantasies, unlikely combinations, disrupted realities-X-rays of the mind, imprints of the imagination on film. Photographers documented these by immersing their film in a subversive solution. the dissemination of Freud's revolutionary theories by inserting dreams, daydreams, and subconsciously driven free association

The Surrealists sought the Strange in the Real and greatly admired Brassai for finding it in ordinary objects and nighttime scenes. He said they misunderstood him: "The surrealism of my

into the public realm. Collage, which bloomed as photographic illustration crowded

pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist." That was

into the press, was an easy way to marry a sewing machine to

written long ago, but the capacity of the mind to entertain reality-

an umbrella or, as Maurice Tabard did, affix an enormous eye to an empty wall. The point was to jar a viewer's expectations

such as it is-in the same space as fantasy-such as it may

of reality; the camera's reputation for truthfulness magnified the impact. Surrealist photographers used their instrument to produce mysteries, such as extreme close-ups that dislodged the subject's meaning. (See BrassaY's photographs of debris and household substances. Salvador Dali captioned one of these pictures in a 1933 issue of the journal Minotaure "Basic roll form produced by a mental defective.") Photographic techniques could also be subverted, through

be-appears to be (virtually) expanding today, as it barrels along a track that was laid down with panache by the Surrealists.O -Vicki

Goldberg

La Subversion des images-Surrealism: Photography, Film was presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, September 23, 2009-January11, 2010. Vicki Goldberg is the author of many books, including Light Matters (Aperture, 2005) and The Power of Photography(Abbeville, 1991); and the editor of Photographyin Print (University of New Mexico Press, 1988).

solarization, burning (Raoul Ubac), and more. In films, time could run backward, hats could fly onto heads, and scenes might stand on their sides. Technical experimentation was hardly new: Georges MliAs saw film's possibilities at the century's beginning. But the Surrealists adopted subversion as a doctrine with the potential for radical change. They deemed the eye the preeminent sense and nominated the camera its surrogate. Adherents became flNneurs, OPPOSITE: Eli Lotar and Germaine Krull, Untitled, ca. 1930; THIS PAGE, TOP: Paul Noug6, Clis coup6s (Cut eyelashes), from the series Subversion des Images, 1929-30; BOTTOM: Roger Uvet, Une RegrettableAffaire (A regrettable affair), ca. 1947, from the album of the same name created with the rerelease of Livet and Jean Calvel's film Fleurs meurtries (Bruised flowers; ca. 1929). tola,

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REVVI..W S.......... CHANGING THE FOCUS: LATIN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY photography dominated by folkloric lyricism. Combining established stars such as Vik Muniz, Luis Gonz6lez Palma, and Liliana Porter with notable younger artists like Carlos Garaicoa and Melanie Smith, the show motivates its stated goals along three arcs: surroundings, theatricalization, and irony. Light-boxes, C-prints, installations, gelatin-silver prints, and other photo-based art give rein to photography's potential across media. Ostensibly ambitious in its premise, the show nonetheless provides only an average experience, with works devoted to class identity, artificiality and reality, and drug culture boasting the biggest chestnuts. Natalia Iguihiz's La otra (The other; 2001), for instance, featuring frontal shots of white housewives and maids of indigenous extraction, deploys the anodyne strategy of neutral juxtaposition to explore class compatibility. Glossy, dioramalike tableaux, such as Daniela Rossell's Jeanette en la casa de su madre #3 (Jeannette in her mother's house #3; 2002; from the series Ricas y famosas [Rich and famous]), resemble paeans to the kind of poshed-up lifestyles already fetishized in boutique magazines. Likewise, Teresa Margolles's Tarjetas para picar cocaina (Cards to cut cocaine; 1997-99), a backlit diptych with one image showing someone cutting the drug with the forensic mug of a drug-war victim beside a second shot of an anonymous man licking white powder off the same photographic card, is too stymied by the stock raciness of the tabloid expos6 to be categorized with sharp, socially responsive art. The potential in Changing the Focus can be glimpsed in the

In the view of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, commonly identified as the political conscience of Latin America, activism is the intrinsic fuel of Latin American history. Since World War II, leading up to NAFTA's free-trade negotiations of the 1990s, this aggressive stance became associated with various aspects of Latin American culture-with the notable exception of its art. Indeed, with few exceptions, only in the past two decades has social commentary become a common concern in contemporary Latin American art. Drawing on this recent tradition, Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography 1990-2005, presented earlier this year at the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles, showcases what the show's promotional texts refer to as "the artist's personally charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience." The survey, curated by Idurre Alonso, features more than seventy-five photo-based pieces by thirty-five artists, from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. The show's chronology separates this work-much of it digital, tackling social and political subject matter-from an earlier era of film

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opening galleries treating architecture, a topic that, if fleshed out, could have singlehandedly charted the recent history of social concern in Latin American art. Luis Molina Pantin's series Estudio informal de la arquitecturahfbrida, Vol. 1, La Narco-arquitectura y sus contribuciones a la comunidad (Informal study of hybrid architecture, Vol. 1, Narco-architecture and its contributions to community; 2004-5) is a quirky analysis of architecture funded by drug money laundered through the construction industry in Colombia. Though often whimsical in design-modeled on landmark buildings such as the Taj Mahal or on enduring styles such as Neoclassical design-narco-architecture has a strong public presence in Colombia, overstated by Molina Pantin through a promotional format: think muscular real-estate publicity shots, THIS PAGE: Alexandre Arrechea, Elementos arquitectonicos1 (Architectural elements 1), 2005; OPPOSITE, TOP: Gabriel Orozco, Sala de espera (Waiting room), 1998; BOTTOM: Luis Molina Pantin, ParqueJaime Duque 2, from the series, Estudlo Informal de la arquitecturahibrida, Vol. 1 (Informal study of hybrid architecture, Vol. 1), 2004-5. Arre

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heritage architecture in Havana. Counterweighing this optimism is his accompanying El sue6o de algunas ciudades es Ilegar a convertirse en otras (The dream of some cities is to become another; 2001), a photograph and a drawing that collectively damn the frailty of constructed imaginaries. Both images present views of solutions-one ideal, the other perilous-employed to stabilize decrepit buildings. Though erring on the cool side of moderate, the installation nonetheless targets the failure of Fidel Castro's 1970 brainchild, the Microbrigade proposal, encouraging citizens to join a construction task force to resolve the housing deficit, a project in this case consistent with the clout of drug cartels in Colombia.

abandoned after the fall of Socialism, which resulted in a Havana

But the view is far from eulogic. In ParqueJaime Duque 1, a

of incomplete buildings.

planter obstructs the view of the Taj Mahal look-alike, already

A similar misalignment between desire and reality hampers

compromised by the awkward side angle (here and in the rest

Changing the Focus as a whole. The show's progressive statement

of the series, the artist worked without the property owners'

of artists' charged responses to issues is so generalized that it comes across as forced. Like Castro's Havana, the show is thwarted

permission, and consequently had little chance to shoot from choice vantages). In this photograph, the disproportion between the building's pompous scale and small size recalls the jerry-built quality of an architectural folly. Molina Pantin ruthlessly applies

by a general lack of supportive mettle. Especially problematic is the prevalence of photographs that look poorly shot and poorly printed. Here, unfortunately, de-skilling is not balanced by conceptual rigor

this principle of the ersatz across the series to redefine the fraudulence of narco-architecture from a pathological standpoint-

but by flatfooted cheekiness. That said, MOLAA's heart is in the right place. This is a grand undertaking for a small museum committed to

very simply, that a corrupt and dangerous business results in

improving the community's exposure to the best Latin American art.

unreliable form.

One only wishes that formal excellence, rather than a shaky topical

Like Molina Pantin, Alexander Ap6stol's series Residente Pulido Ranchos (Polished resident shanty house; 2003) takes

platform, had been the foundation of this commendable venture.O -Prajna

Desai

a position on slum conditions using the formal geometry of his subjects, the hill shanties of Caracas that were built between the 1940s and 1960s to accommodate foreign and domestic immigrant influx. Identically sized at over six feet tall and set on the ground to lean against the wall, each print focuses on a single

Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography 1990-2005 was presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles, February14-May 10, 2010. Prajna Desai is a writer based in Los Angeles.

building, which towers slightly over a viewer of average height. Monumentality is also established through low-angle perspective, an obsequious variation on New Objectivism's dispassionate attention to architectural typology, though Ap6stol's full-color view, which roots for the economic underdog, is sly with charm. Hovering on the edge of twee, the series redeems itself by acknowledging the unsettling tension between empowering solutions and insurmountable problems. On one hand, sharp transitions between building materials indicate how slum residents added floors in defiance of zoning laws; on the other, by digitally plastering over the small windows that do exist, Ap6stol emphasizes how the poor opt for more interior space over better ventilation. The result is a home that looks like a citadel or prison. Carlos Garaicoa's pop-up book Plaza Vieja (Old square; 1994-2005) contains a fictional architect's plans to refurbish

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REVIEW S............................................................................. LINCOLN CENTER: CELEBRATING 50 YEARS New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, America's

was allotted a special area in the gallery). One shot shows the

leading multi-arts complex, has had a remarkable half-century of

maestro conducting in a plaid shirt and sport coat, caught in

existence, as seen in the exhibition Lincoln Center: Celebrating

expansive mid-gesture with open mouth and extended, expressive

50 Years, which tracked the center's life from planning and

hands (no baton), conjuring sound from the void surrounding him.

construction through the many music, theater, dance, film, and

You can see the invisible energy field in and around the man. The

opera productions that have taken place since its opening.

photograph, by Walter Strate Studio, captures a working-artist

Photographs made up the bulk of the show, including dozens of performance shots from five decades of presentations. All

reality that is far more captivating than the idealized looks of conductors seen in more "official" depictions.

those elaborate stage sets and ranks of opera singers! Dancers,

In another, similarly engaging picture, George Balanchine in

choreographers, actors! Orchestras, jazz ensembles, choruses!

shirtsleeves is leaning to his left in mid-dance-step, arms wide,

All those iconic shots of authoritative men in tuxedos-

while next to him, moving in unison, is Jerome Robbins. It's

Pierre Boulez, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin

apparently a light moment between the two famously intense

Maazel-wielding batons like tiny but potent wands of power!

choreographers-Balanchine is almost laughing, the notoriously

As a historical record, the exhibition was an impressive visual

saturnine (and competitive) Robbins is almost smiling. They could

collection of world-class performing-arts productions: very "official

be doing the hokey-pokey if we didn't know this was a Lincoln

history." As individual photographs, the images were of mostly

Center rehearsal hall. Shot by Frank Stewart, it's a deceptively

anecdotal interest, with potentially greater meaning to habitual

cool and altogether lovely moment that conveys the unexpected,

Lincoln Center performance-goers than to the casual viewer.

sometimes playful essence of art-making that has gone on behind

The more interesting photographs, however, were those of art

Lincoln Center's staid marble walls. This photograph tells you

in progress, rather than the creative product posed and frozen

something as important about dance at New York City Ballet as

for the record. Take those of Leonard Bernstein-a different

those formal portraits capturing the cast, costumes, and stage

conductor-animal altogether to judge by the images of him (he

sets for productions that are also on display in this show. One of the most compelling photographs was even more blatantly candid, almost a throwaway. A 1991 shot by Henry Grossman shows Robin Williams and Isaac Stern in academic gowns, offstage and waiting to receive awards, caught in post-shtick hilarity: comedian Williams has a smugly pleased expression while Stern, the great violinist, is wiping away tears of laughter. I would have liked to have known more about the story behind that one. And I think that is the story here: fifty years on, what stops the eye in Lincoln Center's mostly formal retrospective are the photographs of the unguarded personalities, the casual incidents, the creativity caught in motion. Institutional history is made of-and made more interesting by-these moments, too.0 -John

Howell

Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years was presented at the Donald and Mary OenslagerGallery, New York Public Library for the PerformingArts, October 15, 2009-January16, 2010. John Howell is editorial director for 3BL Media, consultant to the Delta Blues Museum, and a contributing editor to Aperture. Leonard Bernstein at Philharmonic Hall opening (now Avery Fisher Hall), Lincoln Center, New York, September 23, 1962. Photograph by Bob Serating. r.---

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REVIEW S........... POINTS OF VIEW: CAPTURING THE 19TH CENTURY IN PHOTOGRAPHS Maurice Vidal Portman's pseudo-objective study of Andaman islanders sought, variously, to show how recidivism and primitivism could be photographically verified. At others, though, it inflected consciousness more precisely. Who today does not know how a horse's legs fold mid-gallop or what the surface of the moon looks like? Eadweard Muybridge's famous motion studies altered the very parameters of perception, and in their 1874 series The Moon, Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, James Nasmyth and James Carpenter outlined the least lunar crater. Yet although striking, the latter images were fakes: photographs of carefully lit plaster models. To look at them now is to understand just how readily photographs-so innately persuasive-became the indispensable correlate of truth. There remained one area, however, where photography could not so easily claim to be just another fact among facts. The show's seven decades of portraits exhibited a perceptible shift as people became more mindful of the To every technology its age; to every age its consciousness. Such

camera. Certainly those early subjects, caught in the 1840s

might have been the watchword of Points of View, the exhibition of

by William Henry Fox Talbot or by his Scottish contemporaries

nineteenth-century photographs at the British Library galleries earlier this

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, seem unaware of the

year. Drawing on the library's collection of more than three hundred

lens. Their attention is directed not toward the camera, but

thousand images, the 250 works on display charted the genesis and

somewhere else instead. Only later, once people had become

rise of a medium that not only documented modernity, but also-the

accustomed to the fact that thanks to photography time was no

show seemed to intimate-was fundamental to its establishment.

longer merely fugitive, and that from now on the past, divided,

In the gallery's protective low light some of these rarely seen

would always threaten to reappear, did they start to learn the

pictures were like lustrous artifacts. A soft-toned 1854 Bisson

art of self-presentation. At first this happened in studios where

Frires salted paper print depicting a pair of gorilla skulls. The

headrests and knee-braces would keep them from moving during

anonymous 1859 three-by-three-inch Photomicrographof the

the necessarily long exposures. Soon enough, it was a more

Tongue of a Common Cricket, as beguiling as any Surrealist

autonomous process-Lady Alice Mary Kerr's ca. 1865 Portraitof

riddle. Such a compendium of treasures might easily have been

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a masterpiece of chiaroscuro intensity, the

overwhelming. Instead this exhibition picked its way through a

sitter's eyes even now boring their way through the centuries.

mass of material to shed light on how we, as a species, became

One hundred fifty years later, with every Facebook pose an

photographic. To identify the moment or even the decade this

ultra-knowing amalgam of countless other poses, we have come to

happened would be misleading if not impossible. Rather, the

understand ourselves through photography. By revisiting the time

curators chose to show how seamlessly photography fit in to the

when we first stepped into this hall of mirrors, Points of View lets

age of scientific and imperial expansion. Now the latest industrial

us glimpse ourselves before we became who we are.O

feats could be celebrated using this novel technological process,

-Jason

Oddy

while faraway lands or the mysteries of nature were suddenly brought within reach. Francis Frith's 1850s depictions of ancient Egypt and J. Albert's ca. 1866 picture of the Bony Structure of the Cochlea of a Newborn Baby show a medium so riveted to the thing it describes that the two somehow seem indivisible. At times this empirical advantage inspired a crude, superficial positivism. Alphonse Bertillon's survey of criminal types and

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Points of View: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs was presented at the PACCAR Gallery of the British Library, London, October 30, 2009-March 7, 2010. Jason Oddy is a photographer and writer. He is currently writing a book titled Notes from the Desert, to be published by Grasset. Edmund David Lyon, The interior of the Tuncum at Madura!, India, 1867-68. C-,lr•es, Bw,,sh i,ra,, Box•d

WHERE THREE DREAMS CROSS From nineteenth-century British colonialists' vistas of the

Throughout this meandering history, photographs that

Himalayas to contemporary shots of heaving slums in brilliant

demonstrate the camera's movement away from the hands of the

hues, the Indian subcontinent has long been both defined and

elite prove the most novel; among them are examples of Pakistani

tyrannized by the camera. Where Three Dreams Cross is an

street-studio portraits made with ruh khitch ("spirit-pulling")

overdue survey of photography that is firmly from rather than about

cameras, and early works by Golam Kasem Daddy, the father of

Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. In the more than four hundred

Bangladeshi photography, who documented the people around him with great spontaneity starting in the 1920s.

works on display, not one documents the aftermath of a natural catastrophe; there's a single bustling market scene, one image of

Most troublesome is the "body politic." While the curators have

fundamentalist fervor in Pakistan; and-defying Raghubir Singh's

chosen to document local issues-among them protests against

proclamation that "psychological empathy with black and white is

shortages of electricity and water in Karachi-the turbulent eras

alien to India"-the majority of photographs are monochrome.

of 1947 and 1971 feel underrepresented. However, of all the

But how to compact 150 years, eighty-two artists, and an entire

work here that deserves more space, none has more claim than

subcontinent into just three rooms? Another superficial exotic-

that of Sunil Janah: there is only a glimpse here of his varied

culture fix for Western audiences, cry the detractors. But this, the

output documenting injustices under British rule as well as the

first survey of its kind to amass all types of photography-from

later industrialization in India. Janah and other photographers are

amateur work, film stills, and publicity shots to all manner of

also done a disservice by the absence of wall texts: fascinating

documentary and fine art-deserves credit, at least for unearthing the overlooked and forgotten. The show goes beyond just

biographical details-such as the identification of Homai Vyarawalla as India's first female photojournalist-are found only

contemporary practitioners, beyond the usual handful of famous

in the show's catalog.

photojournalists, and widens the spotlight (which has long been trained on India alone) to encompass Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Ultimately, as is perhaps inevitable with such a broadranging survey, this exhibition succeeds in that it leaves you

Curators Sunil Gupta, Shahidul Alam, Hammad Nasar, and

hungry for more, and hopeful that the future will bring more

Radhika Singh grouped the works according to five themes: portraiture, performance, family, the street, and the body politic.

focused, in-depth studies.0 -Isabel Stevens

Of all the sections, "portraiture" offers the clearest view of the evolution of the medium. Here, images of maharajas from the 1880s, embellished with watercolor and glitter, rub shoulders with political and saintly giants a century later-Raghu Rai's portraits of Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa. But in general, the show's smaller, quieter works are the more interesting ones. In "performance," compare the endless Bollywood stills and headshots to the charm of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil's theatrical self-portraits from 1912-35, or Saibal Das's contemporary observations of offbeat moments in an Indian circus. Similarly, in the section devoted to "the street," it's not T. S. Satyan's well-known image of boys leaping into a river in Mumbai, but photographs of anonymous spaces with little or no human presence that intrigue: Praful Patel's midcentury aerial shots of empty expanses of roads and highways, and Dayanita Singh's shadowy backstreets from her 2008 series Dream Villa. Meanwhile, in the "family" grouping, Nony Singh's visual journal, begun in the 1960s, provides a refreshing sense of intimacy to the show. Nony Singh, My Sister, Guddi, Posing as Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind, Srinagar, India, 1962.

Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was presented at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, January 21-April 11, 2010. Isabel Stevens writes on art, photography, and film for a number of publications, including Sight & Sound and The Wire.

WITNES-S ...

HEROES OF THE STORM: FIVE YEARS AFTER KATRINA Photographed and reported by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick Written by Deborah Willis Calhoun and Chandra McCormick's photographic Keith collaboration has taken many forms, all based on love and respect for family and community. Together they have photographed dockworkers, sugarcane workers and their families, men incarcerated in prisons such as the Louisiana Penitentiary at Angola, and the expressive beauty of the local culture-including Mardi Gras "second lines," dance, music, and foodways. Most recently the couple has focused on the effects of Hurricane Katrina on their home city, New Orleans. Both photographers were born and raised in the city's Ninth Ward, and they have been documenting life here and in the surrounding areas for some thirty years. Tragically, Calhoun and McCormick lost nearly their entire photographic archive and equipment when their home and studio were destroyed by Katrina when it devastated most of the Gulf Coastand of course New Orleans in particular-on August 29, 2005. The media coverage of the storm had begun days earlier, and the photographers decided to pack up their two sons, a niece, a brother, and a friend, and head west toward Texas, believing they would return home in a few days. Before leaving, they placed their negatives, prints, photographic equipment, and notebooks in large Rubbermaid bins that they stacked on tabletops and high shelves-a precaution that turned out to be ineffectual. They made the nineteen-hour journey to Houston, where hundreds of families displaced by the hurricane had ended up at the George R. Brown Convention Center. There, Calhoun and McCormick were stunned by the sight of rows and rows of cots set up for the hoardes of people, all trying to make sense of this unfathomable situation. The photographers stayed for several days in the city, and eventually set up a more permanent home in the town of Spring, a suburb of Houston. It was clear they would not be going back to New Orleans anytime soon.

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Sharing the one camera they had brought with them, and using a borrowed tape recorder, Calhoun and McCormick began to make a visual chronicle with interviews of people who were being

In these pages are some of the results of their work: photographs of families, church members, a solitary home unmoored from its foundation. There are also portraits of three unofficial (and

housed at the convention center, as well as other displaced families living in the Houston area. There was no easy way to tell this story-but they knew they wanted to tell the version that was being ignored by the media and by the Federal Emergency

unrecognized) "first responders" during Katrina: locals who stayed in the Ninth Ward after the storm and rescued more than five hundred

Management Agency and other governmental organizations. They

goes bythe nickname "All-Night Shorty")-had come up continuously in interviews with victims of the hurricane, and McCormick and

saw the tragedy of the loss of the familiar and the devastation of family. They also saw the communal spirit of hope that ran through the groups of people forced to live in shelters. Calhoun and McCormick found schools for their children and settled down in Spring, though their hearts were set on moving back to New Orleans eventually. In 2006, they received a grant from the Open Society Institute (OSI) designated for projects related to the effects of Katrina. With this they were able to continue their ongoing documentation on the life of the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward-who were now relocated in Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Together they produced forty portraits and twenty oral histories for this project. The OSI fellowship was "a

residents there. The names of these men-Andrew Sawyer (better known as Michael Knight), Freddy Hicks, and Ernest Edwards (who

Calhoun sought them out to make their photographs. Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun moved back home to New Orleans in 2007. The process of recovery is neither quick nor easy. Their photographic work goes on.O OPPOSITE: Mother and daughter, George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston, 2005. McCormick photographed a young mother resting on a cot at the convention center. She was struck by the playfulness and innocence of the woman's little girl, whose lovely braids informed an essential story about the care her mother took of the girl while they were living in this temporary shelter.

light at the end of the tunnel for us, a blessing," says McCormick. "We were able to make a record of our experiences, create more

ABOVE: Home on the north side of the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, 2007. On Marian Green's property, the family placed a "Rest in Peace" sign in the front yard.

work, and capture the stories."

All photographs o

rtesY Chandra MCG)mrnk old [KPilh Cahour

110.

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I

A New Orleans father with his two daughters, Spring, Texas, 2006. McCormick and Calhoun were deeply aware of the troubles people experienced in their new environments: families were at first accepted and later rejected in their new locations; there was no work; and there was a never-ending longing to return to their real homes. Calhoun photographed a young father and his two young daughters who were living in an apartment complex in Spring, thirty miles from downtown Houston. The family was relocated to this area; it was a very different setting from their New Orleans home, where public transportation was easily accessible. In Spring, families with no transportation had to walk nearly a mile from the apartment complex to the closest bus line. When Calhoun met them, the man was changing the oil filter on his car, in preparation for a trip back to New Orleans to assess the damages to his home. His two daughters were watching their father as he worked. Calhoun says: I made the portrait in front of their home, with Dad holding the girls in his arms. I liked the love they displayed-despite their displacement and the hardships they were encountering."

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Freddy Hicks (left) and Michael Knight, both 2008. Before Katrina, Freddy Hicks and Michael Knight worked as salvagers and fishermen. They were watching the Weather Channel on the night of the storm, and they were planning to ride it out. But when the power went out, t1ey decided they had to leave. Then they saw the water rolling up the street, and they knew they weren't going anywhere. In the days after Katrina hit, Hicks and Knight rescued between four and five hundred people. "Ididn't know they had that many people down here," Hicks says. When John Mullen, a retired schoolteacher, woke up in the night and opened his front door. "it looked like the whole horizon was coming toward me, rolling water." He tried to close the door, but by the time he turned around, he says, "the red fish were swimming with me in my house." Mullen recalls that Michael Knight transported all the people who had made it to Martin Luther King, Jr. School to a nearby bridge. Knight had "the attitude and stance of ship captain, the way he navigated his boat through the murky waters," Mullen says. "If this man had any past sins, he should be forgiven, because he is truly a savior for many-a hero."

McCormick wanted to capture the emotion Knight has about the experience in a close-up. But initially she was cautious, thinking that what happened during Katrina might be a touchy subject for him; some of the rescuers continue to be haunted by the cries of people they had to leave behind on rooftops and tree branches. "I couldn't help but look into his eyes and wonder how he felt about the responsibilities he encountered during the storm," she says. But Knight is ext,emely passionate about the welfare of the people in his community. McCormick says: "Iwanted to show the strength of this five-foot-five man-who, to the people he rescued, looked as if he stood ten feet tall as he navigated his boat through waters that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward for some eight days." Knight is still living in the Lower Ninth Ward-his home is the only inhabited house on his block. Neither he nor Hicks left the city during or after the storm. They both tried to find work helping to rebuild and clean up their community, but no one would hire them. They were disappointed that they couldn't make use of their skills as salvagers to help move the abandoned boats, rusting cars, and other debris that littered the area.

10. 2( C (qItre

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Ernest "All-Night Shorty" Edwards, 2009. "All-Night Shorty" is sixty-one years old and has lived in New Orleans all his life. His home was at 2024 Deslonde Street, on the north side of the Lower Ninth Ward. He recalls Katrina hitting in the middle of the night: "At 4 A.M. the storm was in full bloom. You couldn't see nothing." He describes the night as "pitch white-just wind and rain, that's all you could hear, wind and rain." Shorty dropped his boat into the water on North Claiborne Avenue and Tennessee Street at nine in the morning. By then, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. On Tennessee Street the oak trees were filled with people, parents clinging to their children, screaming to be rescued. The water level was thirty-two feet. Days before the storm, Shorty had visited his friends Michael Knight and Freddy Hicks and told them they should "gas up their boats and cars," because "we may get a little water." Knight and Hicks told him that they planned to stay and ride out the storm. Shorty said: "That's fine, but you all better get ready." In the days after the hurricane, Shorty says, he was able to save everyone he knew who had stayedbut while rescuing those people, he saw others who were then gone when he returned with his boat. "It was a six-passenger boat, but I was taking twelve, and sometimes thirteen people at a time." It was a harrowing time. "I rescued a family of five-their house was floating down Jourdan Avenue. Just as we were pulling the daughter out of the house, the house went smashing into the bridge, disintegrating ... the daughter cut her head on the side of the bridge." Shorty is known to have carried at least two hundred people to the Claiborne Bridge, and later took boatloads from there to the St. Claude Avenue Bridge, where the Coast Guard was stationed. When Calhoun asks him why the Coast Guard wasn't rescuing people in the area where it was most needed, he says he isn't sure. "They should have been rescuing and transporting people. But they were parked at the St. Claude Bridge."

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Members of the Beulah Baptist Church, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, 2009. A minister leading prayer on a Sunday morning. This hundred-year-old church was destroyed during Katrina and lost a number of members. It is one of the few congregations that has returned to the north side of the Lower Ninth Ward. The bridge is seen as a monument to the congregation. Calhoun wanted to capture an image of the faith that has been maintained over the past five difficult years.

r1o. 2(C

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ON LOCATION

IN VISIBLE CITIES PHOTOGRAPHS BY BARNEY KULOK * WORDS BY MAX BLAGG

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell

In Visible Cities consists of three monochromatic

you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades'

I began by choosing two points in Manhattan, which would act as the frame. The titles of the pieces were chosen for places that once existed

curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the

panels and one photograph. To make each panel

at these coordinates, but no longer exist today.

same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationshipsbetween the measurements of its space and the events of

I then walked between these sites and, using my phone, collected the names of all the WiFi

its past.

route. I arranged the found text from each walk -Italo

Calvino, Invisible Cities

networks that appeared on my screen along the into grids and produced large stencils. On fourby-eight-foot aluminum panels I used acrylic paint and sprayed the ground black. Using the same pigment I then sprayed through the stencils,

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creatinga field of names rising in low reliefabove the monochromatic surface. The resulting works are cameralesslandscapes, invisible snapshots: representations of both the paths depicted and the moment of their recording, connecting the passage of time in the history of a city to the specific date the network names were recorded. This makes the project peculiarly photographic; the recording device has simply transformed from a camera into a phone. -B.K.

THIS PAGE: Untitled (Studio Wall), 2009.

Frank Lava Gunsmith (Weegee)

to Max's Kansas City 03/15/09, 2009.

I have always been intrigued by the proximity of New York City's past to its present, how it remains so tangible, despite the demolition, construction, and reconfiguration constantly taking place. I so much admired how Barney Kulok's In Visible Cities project redefined and re-mapped these familiar landscapes that I was inspired to follow his routes and project on them my own fragmented verbal history, based on thirty years of walkabouts in ano around the same urban premises. "Starting out with a single object !hat will solve the crime ... " The gun sign Weegee photographed is long gone along with the firearms dealers it once announced. On this side street of Manhattan a man once landed on the spikes of the railings around the Police Building, tossed out by drunken cops. It didn't even make the front page. The cops are gone to cemeteries in Queens, railings melted down for artillery shells, supermodels live here now, and across the street 400 Broome is a college dorm. In a previous life the building was an evidence locker, cluttered with drugs and weapons, the tag on a bloodstained hammer describing in clinical detail the end of a life, Massive quantities of confiscated dope from the French Connection were replaced with sugar and cornstarch, The theft was only discovered because insects were forming long lines to feed on the switched bait, by which time half the city was on the iod.

Who lives here now? Purple Haze Jezebel luigi Extreme pubic templefong 2 Guys and a Girfriend .kikiofbroomes treet mango-

for life. Lou Reed wrote a poem about the scars on Andy's chest that was published in the Paris Review soon after. Light floods over the low buildings from all

mama Mandalay haiku anothergreenwodd freefish mrsmoustache star8O El Bordello brasseyejackieho

directions, illuminating the sanitized park where Old Methadonians used to gather on damaged benches, junk crawling through their blood like snakes.

Each intersection

a gathering point for memory. Summon the dead who propelled you. Criminals were hanged and buried at crossroads so they would not know which road to take if they awoke. Lives in cities lost in so many ways; cut down by buses and cabs, by dagger and shotgun, knife and sword, crushed by elevators, sliced by axes, stuck with ice-picks and needles; even lightning bears down; that boy on a Village roof dancing in a storm, Thor sent the hammer, blew him out of his shoes. Guns and gunshots in Union Square. Valerie Solanas, crossing the park in that dumb newsboy hat, reread her manifesto for cutting up men, then went up to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West and fired a .32 slug into Andy Warhol's torso, damaging his oesophagus, gallbladder, liver, and spleen. Did Fred Hughes mess his custom-made pants when Valerie held the gun to his head? Wouldn't you? (I peed my pants when chased by skinheads once, took me years to admit that, terrified, I bolted like a rabbit. They didn't catch me.) Fred was spared when Valerie's pistol jammed. Andy survived, maimed

Skateboarders hit it now. At 17th Street, four cop cars equals one hundred well-dunked donuts, A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain. -John

Cage

In the greenmarket the dirt on the rutabagas and the celeriac was a murky black, as if they had been cultivated in industrial waste. Ruddy-cheeked farmers must explain why their spuds cost two dollars a pound, market prices adjusted to snare the yupsters sweeping through Whole Foods, waving credit cards sharp as knives. Richard Long doesn't consider the planet overcrowded, he still finds solitary places, empty landscapes in which to wander. The light is beautiful in Union Square today, sky as blue as Mongolia's. Or Prussian blue like an Austrian's eyes or an Yves Klein (no relation to Klein's where Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard rubbed soft sweaters on their way to poetry). Filene's has moved up from the basement. At the foot of Park Avenue, cabs unload punters outside the new hotel, ten yards from where Max's Kansas City once ruled the night, Jackie Curtis and Rene Ricard shrieking in the back room, dispensing pass and fail cards to the hip and the lame. "Candy says, I've come to hate my body/and all that it requires ... " n10. 2( C Ufff)-11R' / 29

Untitled (Coney Island High to 291 Gallery) 10/11/08, 2009.

Everything we come across is to the point. -John

of trying to top Jackson Pollock, secure in the bitter Cage

Saint Marks Place and Third Avenue. clerking at the

bookshop, thinking about the Five Spot, a jazz club gone before I airrived here with nothing but Frank

knowledge that it simply couldn't be done. The joint was smoked out by heroin eventually. Ghost traces of elegant and shabby saloons and salons, lines of blow on every flat surface, sickly glamour of the early '80s

O*Hara's Lunch Poems in my pocket. "The Day Lady Died" explained everything about New York, then and now. East across 8th Street toward Broadway, Grace

wafting in like rotten flowers.

Church silvered by winter sunlight, the buildings full of academics living large, vast apartments and tenure and regular publication of books that go directly onto the university syllabus. Green eyes scan the brutalist high-rise at Mercer Street. Ana Mendieta tried to fly

WeHaveMice Thoughtpolice chow downer Auntie Chnst

Who lives here now? Killyounnothersugarbush labranchina fatbooty FoHoCo

Fallopian Jackalsass Deadted Mafegaze Betelgeuse

On University Place the cobbler, an endangered species, bends to his lathe, but even he has a

here, Ana couldn't fly, Ana died. Carl Andre's influence on Richard Long cannot be underestimated, The ley lines glitter like rivers seen from a plane. One block south Mickey Ruskin made his last stand at the Chinese Chance, now a deli serving innocent apprentices. Mickey wouldn't give me the night shift, where the money was, where Julian Schnabel and

sideline in slightly used Chanel bags and Prada shoes. A Dawn Powell look-alike turns the corner of 11th Street, gray-haired lady going to hock her husband's Rolex at lana Fine Jewelry, established 1942. The Cedar Tavern no longer exists, where the big guys in overalls drank and fought and tore the toilet doors off their hinges, sneered at dapper Alex

Linda Yablonsky were flipping burgers and smashing

Katz chatting with Frank O'H., while hungry women

crockery, instead I had to deal with the daytime, furious merchants waving unpaid bills, and in the late afternoon a few alcoholic painters fried by another day

waited in line to undress for genius. Many died too soon of drink and heart attacks, left shards of glory on the walls of the wealthy.

3(, /

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Up through Union Square again to 23rd Street, broad avenue running out to Western skies, while the Flatiron glides north, terracotta sails undulating in the wind as it drags Fifth Avenue and Broadway in its wake. At 26th Street and Fifth in 1989 at a nightclub called MK, we held a Viking burial for Cookie Mueller, undone at forty like so many of our crew. Saluted her with noise and tears and roses, launched the funeral boat and refilled our powdered noses. Twenty-one years now in the country of the dead. Near Madison Square Park, a low-slung sun strikes the golden tower of the Metropolitan Life Building. Delicate skeletons of wintry trees remain in shadow. February, distant promise of spring, light gone in a minute. At the Little Church Around the Corner, someone is praying for someone to be healed. A few steps on, where the number 291 should gleam in polished brass, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery has disappeared, the building gone, erased and raised again, "turning the inside out.-

Church Street El

(Charles Sheeler) to Ninth Avenue El

The past? [Bucky] Fuller's answerC Keep it ...

cover it

with a dome.... -John

Cage

At 2 Rector Street, an office cleaner murdered here a month ago, stalked and killed by a maniac, has laid the her shadow on the building. Across Trinity Place, doesn't commerce, of temples by church, surrounded

(Berenice Abbott) 05/10/09, 2009.

courtesy

Nicole

Klagsbru

Galley, New York

coffee table, the neighborhood empty as a J. G. Ballard

across the lintel. "Water spilled from source to use."

story when we moved

Next door a store dedicated to cookboo6s,

in, a deserted

motorway to

some

ride bikes on, Art on the Beach. Forty North Moore, a quiet blue-collar high-rise, distinguished only by a

certainly written by Elizabeth

poodle plummeting from the thirtieth floor, flung by a raging boyfriend, and duly added to our coimpendium of

cooking instructions are random and casual: "Take a

defenestration. This garage on Greenwich Street used

seem like it could save me. By the World Trade Center,

to belong to the FBI, was always filled with fake cabs, ambulances, bread trucks stuffed with recording devices

carrion eaters earn a living from the dead by hawking

to document an endless stream of witless gangsters

pictures of 9/T., nine years on. Seven cranes are

mmumbling about macaroni and cannoli. Take the cannoli.

working in this massive pit, money pouring into the

Who said that' Tony Soprano lives across the street,

ground, and hovering in the air, unresolved, three

art imitating life, which keeps showing up. Here for

thousand souls still not properly dispersed to their

instance, posed like a Helen Levitt portrait, three girls

own Valhallas.

playing hooky, smoking cigarettes in the freezing street. One of them the daughter of an old friend. Last time

I feel proprietary about the Twin Towers because I

All imag

David,

who probably

ate mushrooms with John Cage, or should have. Her handful of butter...." She pokes fun at F T. Marinetti's critique of pure pasta, which makes me hungry, but this long stretch of Greenwich Street has nothing but the UPS building, flat and low, moving goods and packages day and night. Walked the saluki here in another life. He ran after cars and one finally caught him. At Morton Street acres of new glass rise above the waterfront where lines of empty trucks once parked, animated at night by dozens of copulating bodies.... Peter Hujar caught the cool menace of the Lower West Side in 1977, furtive men moving in shadows, looking

was walking my daughter to school that morning, five

I looked she was a tiny seal shimmering in a summer

hundred yards south of where the first plane went in.

pool. . . . Crossing Desbrosses Street, Jungle Red, a

It still enrages me, that they were so close to us, to

salon for the ages. Red gave great haircuts, and saved

her. I'd block their path to paradise il I could. Flight 11

small plastic packages of cut hair, like the bags strung

from Boston flew over my head so lcw I could see the

around somebody's tomato patch in the country to keep

markings on the underside and it just kept on going,

away the deer. Across the street, a small agile beauty

too low oh God too low and entered the North Tower

named Marcia documented the Mudd Club-bound mob

and disappeared in smoke and flame. The entire side

in her night studio. Madness enough for everyone.

of the building rippled like a pond struck by a stone • . . it was true to say I could not believe my eyes.

Who lives here now?

school and the old post office with its curving corners,

Wishbone Shoofly Vietcong be/locks dogknila French

dead letters, the young and the restless pacing tasteful

A jetliner piercing a skyscraper like a javelin. We are supposed to look back at the past without regret, but

kiss bitchslap

Lupus

rex

curmudgeon

for a kiss as a fatal virus leapt from one to the next. On the corner of Leroy Street, clever English lads working the art business. Smells

like fresh-baked

money. I warm my hands on Silke Otto-Knapp's interiors and leave. The industrious gallerists never look up from their laptops. Last block to Christopher Street is solid granite and brick, red as an Edward Hopper painting, mortar cured with the mason's piss. Past church and

puckfem

interiors, full to the brim with Adderall and midcentury furniture, blameless art.

who can dismiss the sorrow that morning brought?

gus-grissom shadrach meatshack mortimersnerd

And the years since, the persecution and destruction

On Canal Street a fender-bender has three drivers in a

of Iraq, the unnumbered dead who won't see this blue

rage of cell-phone conversations, hours of paperwork

helped him to Saint Vincent's, where he died. They're

sky today or rain tomorrow,

ahead,

bent

tearing down that hospital too. Let the old Bohemians

Can the philosophy, Sophie, and move on. Indepen-

mechanics. Geoff Hendricks's tiny house a museum

croak in their walk-ups. Nothing sacred, everything

dence Plaza at Harrison Street, ball of opium on the

of Fluxus beauty, Lawrence Weiner's words inscribed

remembered.O

arguing with

insurance

agents

and

Final ley line leads to Dylan Thomas, staggering from the White Horse as the El roared by, someone

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ARCHIVE

I

I

THE LAST THIRTY

YEARS OF MEXICO A FILM COMPILED AND ARRANGED BY SALVADOR TOSCANO BY PABLO ORTIZ MONASTERIO AND DAVID M. J. WOOD Two small, dusty, cardboard boxes were recently unearthed at the Quinta Los Barandales, a farmhouse some thirty miles west of Mexico City that houses the Fundaci6n Toscano's historical film archive, home to one of the country's foremost collections of silent newsreel footage. In the boxes were

several

hundred numbered

index cards

with groups of individual positive and negative 35mm nitrate

film frames

attached.

At first

glance, it seemed to constitute a storyboard for Carmen Toscano's acclaimed 1950 documentary Memorias de un mexicano (Memoirs of a Mexican), about the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution, its origins and aftermath-a film compiled from her father Salvador Toscano Barrag6n's huge collection of footage of Mexico, gathered over the first three

32 / .

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decades of the twentieth century. But on closer inspection, this

Romanov Dynasty and Dziga Vertov's 1934 Three Songs About

photographic index turned out to be something of even greater

Lenin) have gone down in film history as landmarks of documentary

historical, not to mention aesthetic, significance.

cinema, the innovative epic compilations of Toscano and his

When the engineer Salvador Toscano bought a Lumi6re cine-

contemporaries-in many cases made during the revolution, unlike

matograph in 1897, he embarked on a long career as a cameraman,

their Soviet counterparts that were assembled after the event-

exhibitor, and collector concerned with recording and narrating historical and everyday events through the moving image during

are all but forgotten, largely due to the failure of the majority of

one of the most tumultuous periods of Mexico's modern history. After more than a decade of mixed successes under the regime of

time. The several hundred index cards found at Los Barandales-

the stalwart modernizing dictator Porfirio Diaz, the fortunes of film

0ltimos treinta aF7os de Mexico (The last thirty years of Mexico)-

entrepreneurs such as Toscano took a turn for the better with the

offer a vivid insight into the ways in which revolutionary and

outbreak of the revolution in 1910: both urban and rural Mexicans

postrevolutionary Mexican audiences experienced the greatest

were now hungrier than ever for the realism and immediacy with

social and political upheaval of their time through the new and

which the cinematograph brought news from around the country.

fast-developing medium of documentary film.

the Mexican Revolution compilation films to survive the ravages of which refer to a chronologically ordered film enticingly titled Los

Unlike many of his competitors, however, Toscano was not content

Whether Los 6ltimos treinta aFJos was ever made in the manner

with simply churning out newsreels to keep up with daily events.

suggested by these index cards-which appear to constitute a form of editing script-is uncertain. No records have been found

j.

i ex-Presiden-,

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c:

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of a film with this title and by 1934, the year that this particular

cwTAtL1 de Frani de su vidael anciano _;ral .D.PorfirioD1gA la.ris

compilation seems to have been planned, the Mexican cinemagoing public's appetite for historical accounts of the long-finished armed revolution was decidedly on the wane. But more than a simple index to a single film, these bundles of surprisingly wellpreserved cardboard and nitrate constitute a palimpsest-a used and reused parchment on which a whole array of historical compilations, everyday newsreels, and even poetic, existential reflections are inscribed.

He spent the years of the revolution and the turbulent period that

Los 6ltimos treinta a5os seems to have been intended as an update of Toscano's 1928 compilation Veinticinco aFios de vida en la historia de M6xico (Twenty-five years of life in Mexican history),

followed building up a vast archive of footage, which he mined

which focused on material progress and folkloric celebrations

for the several versions of his Historia completa de la revoluci6n (Complete history of the revolution), updated numerous times from

during the final years of the reign of Porfirio Diaz, culminating in the exuberant 1910 commemorations of the centenary of the

1912 until the 1930s: historical compilation documentaries that

country's independence; the political and military events of the

ran, in some cases, to several hours long.'

1910-17 conflict; and the long path to pacification in the 1920s,

Toscano was both a businessman and an ideological advocate of certain revolutionary factions. He was also, in a sense, an heirto the

notably marred by Adolfo de la Huerta's 1923-24 uprising against the postrevolutionary regime.

early Polish champion of film preservation Boleslaw Matuszewski, who, as early as 1898, saw in the medium an exciting "new source of history": a tool for sharpening human perception that might heighten our comprehension not only of phenomenological reality,

film essays, traces of which lie within the script, and this same

but of history itself. Toscano likely did not share the technological idealism of

material formed the basis for Carmen Toscano's later Memorias

Matuszewski, who predicted that the visionary powers of the moving image would, in some cases, "eliminate ... the necessity of investigation and study." 2 But the Mexican film pioneer was

PAGE 32: Crowd at a bullfight during the celebrations surrounding the

undoubtedly a believer in cinema's power to record and narrate historical events for posterity. While the compilation films of the Russian Revolution (such as Esfir Shub's 1927 The Fall of the

.34 /

It is likely that Toscano used this same system of index cards over the years as a way of organizing and planning the material for his compilation films: Veinticinco auos emerged from previous

01'1ý-

centenary of Mexican independence, 1921; PAGES 32-33: Scene near Puebla during the uprising of Adolfo de Ia Huerta, 1923-24; THIS PAGE:

An example of Salvador Toscano's index cards, showing Francisco Madero's revolutionary encampments by the Rio Bravo River near Ciudad

Jubrez, 1911; OPPOSITE: Dictator Porfirlo Diaz's presidential train arriving at Ciudad Jubrez for talks with U.S. president William Taft, 1909.

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Madero on his triumphant journey to the capital; we might marvel at the elderly indigenous woman Antonia Diaz, smilingly bearing aloft a revolutionary standard in the early days of the conflict. We might reflect on the stark contrast between the innocent hordes of schoolchildren marching patriotically during the 1910 centennial of Independence, and, just a few years later, "Ram6n Garcia, the Little Dare Devil Corporal," standing proudly in front of the camera, one of the countless child soldiers tragically swept along by the revolution. Toscano was not simply a reporter of power struggles: his vocation was marked by a deep commitment to daily life. Even more immediately striking than the images themselves is the kaleidoscope of colors in which many of the nitrate frames appear. Before the invention of color-sensitive film stock, silentera filmmakers commonly drew on a whole range of techniques to tint their productions, whether with aesthetic, narrative, or simply decorative intent. However widespread this practice may have been,

I

virtually no colored silent-film footage has survived from Mexico. Yet among the four thousand-odd frames in Toscano's editing script, hundreds of reds, oranges, and yellows-and, less commonly, de un mexicano. But even as Toscano's presence is clear in this

blues, greens, and pinks-catch our eye, the result of the immersion

archive (the texts typed on the index cards are undoubtedly his

of the developed positive reel into chemical dyes: testimony that

own), the wide range of title and intertitle designs, originating

Mexican silent-film theaters exhibiting the events of the revolution

from a gamut of Mexican and U.S. film entrepreneurs, points to a polyphony of authorships, each with its own view, description, or

were lit up not by a monochrome gray, but by a whole spectrum of hues. The difficulty in establishing a narrative logic to the tinting

interpretation of the Mexican conflict.

of the positive frames is compounded by the diverse origins of the material; we cannot tell whether it was Toscano himself, the

If Toscano's political convictions evolved as the Mexican

I

I

Revolution went on, his historical vision in Los 6ltimos treinta

colleague or competitor from whom he bought the film, or some other

a6os is mostly consistent in its unreserved admiration for the

intermediary who colored a given frame. Two scenes in particular

tragic "Apostle of Democracy," Francisco Madero, who rose up

stand out among them: one showing Porfirio Diaz, portrayed as a

against the dictator Diaz in 1910, and for the revolutionary leader

venerable old man in his dying days in Parisian exile, and the other

Venustiano Carranza, whose Constitutionalist faction emerged

featuring the statesman Venustiano Carranza, displaying his various

victorious in 1917. Toscano seems to have had a guarded respect

functions as political leader, military strongman, and father. These

for Diaz himself, the great strategist-, pacifier-, and modernizerturned-tyrant; and a distaste, tinged with a fearful regard, for the

scenes make powerful use of this now-obsolete but still effective technique to celebrate and dignify these heroes, or antiheroes.

popular revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa (the latter in particular singled out in the index cards as "capricious and

of World War I, was the first great conflict to be filmed more or less

blind," with a "feline grin").

systematically, we have little idea of just how film audiences of the

But this is not simply a story of leaders, generals, and

Although the Mexican Revolution, which began before the start

day lived out this social and political upheaval through cinema. The

strongmen: one of Toscano's most remarkable achievements

discovery of Toscano's editing script not only brings us a step closer

is his circumstantial ability to reveal how momentous historical

to understanding the experiences of those remote spectators, it

events cut through the everyday lives of ordinary men, women,

offers a glimpse of a whole series of epic motion-picture narratives

and children,

forged over many years with a meticulous attention to detail. At last, perhaps, documentary film may now recognize its debt to

whose poses,

dress,

and appearances

lend

their own implicit takes on the revolution. We might admire the sleek composition (foreshadowing later Mexican avant-garde

Salvador Toscano.O

photography) of a mass of sombreros whose wearers celebrate Notes:

OPPOSITE: Aftermath of an uprising in Tamaulipas against the reactionary government of Victoriano Huerta, 1913; THIS PAGE: Internecine factional struggle during the Mexican Revolution, 1915.

1 Angel Miquel, Salvador Toscano (Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara/Gobierno del Estado de Puebla/Universidad Veracruzana/Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, 1997). 2 Boleslaw Matuszewski, "A New Source of History" [18981, Film History 7, no. 3 (1995): 322-24ý

1o. 2( (()crture

/ 37

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OPPOSITE, TOP: Francisco I. Madero (center rear, facing camera) among a crowd of supporters as he enters Mexico City, 1911; BOTTOM: A young woman greets the revolutionary leader Madero in Mexico City, 1911; THIS PAGE, TOP LEFT: Crowd outside the Sal6n Rojo cinema during Madero's Mexico City reception, 1911; BOTTOM LEFT: Madero's reception, Mexico City, 1911; BOTTOM RIGHT: Monument of George Washington, Mexico City, c. 1910-12. All images courtesy Fundaci6n Carmen Toscano I.A.P.

-.-.....ROADS LESS T1RAVELED-

Be-Wilding MOVING OFF THE GRID IN AMERICA

by Lucas Foglia I grew up with my extended family on a small farm in suburban Long Island. While malls and supermarkets developed around us, we followed many of the philosophies of the 1960s back-to-the-land movement. We heated with wood, farmed and canned our food, and barteredthe plants we grew for everything from shoes to dental work. But while my family continued to cultivate our land, we still managed to own three tractors,four cars, and five computers by the time I left for college in 2001. This mixture of the modem world in our otherwise rustic life made me curious to see what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like. In 2006 I started traveling around the southeastern United States, befriending, photographing, and interviewing a network of people who left cities and suburbs to live off the grid. Motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs, or predictions of economic collapse, my subjects build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearbysprings, and hunt, gather, or grow their own food. All the people in my photographs are working to maintain a selfsufficient lifestyle, but no one I found lives in complete isolation from the mainstream. Many of my subjects have websites that they update using laptop computers and cell phones that they charge on car batteries or solar panels. Like my family, they do not wholly reject the modem world. Instead, they step away from it and choose the parts that they want to bring with them. The following passages are excerpts from interviews with a variety of the inhabitants of these communities. The interviews were conducted from 2006 to 2009. -L.F.

/10. 2( ( (I•)CrIrtC

/ 41

KALEB (NORTH CAROLINA): The more I thought about what was wrong with the structure of our society, the more I felt like our

with it. And life feels so much freer and more spontaneous when you're not working for someone, and when you're not tied down to

biggest problems came from being disconnected from everything in our lives-from our clothes, from our food source, and from

paying rent or a mortgage ...

the authorities and the power structures that influence our lives

day-have every day be a new and exciting experience. It's totally

so heavily.

possible in America.

I was nineteen when I left home to hitchhike and hop freight trains. Being a traveling kid is a pretty feral existence. You sustain

DOUG (NORTH CAROLINA): Bees usually swarm just as the nectar

you can fulfill the natural instincts

that humans have to just get out and roam, and find food every

yourself from day to day. You don't know where you're going to sleep necessarily. You don't know where your food is going to come

flow starts. They make new queens, and they go off and find a

from. It's a very primitive sort of existence. As I did that, part of my purpose was to travel and see the country ... but the whole time

send off a scout bee to find their new place, and then they're gone. But if you get to the bees while they're there, you can shake them

my goal also was to learn more about living as naturally as I could, without having to purchase food or clothing. It had a dramatic

into a box and you have your own swarm.

effect on my view of the world when I suddenly went out and every day had to find somewhere to sleep and food to eat.

up-just hanging there, teasing me where I can't get to them. But I

place to stay for a little while-a few hours, a couple of days. They

So there's this swarm of bees in a hickory tree, about forty feet can't cut it down, because if you cut a tree it just crashes down and all the bees go flying off. So I think: "Could I possibly cut the tree

NATALIE (NORTH CAROLINA): A lot of us who live here came with a kind of post-activist outlook-realizing that the world is really messed up, that nature is being destroyed, and being incredibly dissatisfied with consumer culture and the whole idea of success in modern society. All of us wanted to live close to the land, and realized that the way things are going to change is not through

using some artful logging technique?"-to try to control not only the direction but the speed of the fall. So I cut a gap on either side of the tree so the center becomes a kind of hinge-and it works. The tree just goes down slowly, gradually, and the swarm hangs in place. For the last little bit it kind of free-fell, but we were able to put the bees into our swarm box.

activism. Of course it's not perfect, but it's the closest that I've ever seen when it's functioning . . . we're getting most of our food from the land and living mostly outside, getting to know the natural materials

And that hive produced a whole bucket of honey between May and August. A bucket of honey. We stripped the bark from the tree for baskets, and I soaked pieces of the wood in the pond and made

of our area-what we can make shelter out of, what we can eat, what we can make medicine out of. We are coming to understand

for tools). And I used the rest for firewood. Sometimes things work neatly like that around here.

tool handles from them (hickory is one of the best woods to use

how it's possible to live without civilization. LOWELL: One problem you run into is everybody's kind of indeLOWELL (TENNESSEE): A milk goat is the most valuable thing you can have. If they like you, they'll go anywhere you go. They live off of nothing. They furnish you with milk. They furnish you with meat. Before long, you've got a herd of them. Take five milk goats and you can live anywhere in the world. With that and a sack of sweet potatoes, you've really got it made. KALEB: America is a land of such abundance that it's really difficult not to survive, for an able-bodied individual. There's an abundance of everything to be had for cheap or free if you're willing to be resourceful about how you get it and what you do

42 / 11'1'1'..1J)C1('r1r1V.0tg

pendent. Most people who are independent enough to try to live separate from worldly things are too independent to listen to each other. They're headstrong. The Amish have it figured out. On Sunday afternoon, they decide what they're going to do for the week. When I lived near them, they'd come to me and say: "We're going to lay the blocks for your house Tuesday, so have everything ready." I mean, it's not "We'll PAGES 40-41: Pixie and Kyd's Duet, FallingLeaves Rendezvous, Georgia, 2007; OPPOSITE, TOP: Going Fishingon the Tennessee River, Tennessee, 2009; BOTTOM: Patrickand Anakeesta, Tennessee, 2007.

TOP: Nolan Scything the Lawn, Tennessee, 2008; BOTTOM: Andrew and Taurin Drinking Raw Goat's Milk, Tennessee, 2009.

4-4 / "'i". l)rIIr(. 01"

TOP: Rita and CoraAiming, Tennessee, 2007; BOTTOM: Watermelon Patch, Twin Oaks Intentional Community, Virginia, 2009.

fi0. 2C(( pl)erlIr(

/ 41

help you do it," it's "We're going to lay your blocks." It's just so much easier when you do things that way. CONRAD (TENNESSEE): Have you read the Scripture? Satan is bringing all humankind into bondage. Through the international banking system, he's

sinew off of deer as thread. Did you know you can use kerosene on wounds? You can pour sugar in a wound, or honey. And they've got bows and arrows. And duct tape. You can do a lot with duct tape.

accomplishing his goal. The international bankers

COLBERT (GEORGIA): Probably 20 percent of my food comes out of the swamp. Counting the meat, I

say: "You can't live without us, so all of you owe us

get probably 80 percent of the wild meat out of the

for your survival."

swamp. Beaver, otter, deer, raccoon, fish. Whatever

Well, I relinquished my driver's license. I relin-

I bump into. I've eaten owl.

quished my Social Security number. I stopped banking. I don't have insurance. I don't have benefits. They see everybody as a salable object, and they're going to try to put us all in the same box.

LOWELL: You know what frogs' legs taste like? Blue heron tastes just like it.

I'm just saying you can't number us. See, you can't

NATAUE: When I skinned my first raccoon, I cried. It looked so much like a fetus to me. It was really

treat us like that. Because we're not part of that

hard. But it's easy now. It's interesting how that

system.

changes.

LOWELL: The last year I worked in business, I made over $250,000. The next year I made $3,600

KALEB: How would I define feral? It's basically

[laughs]. It finally worked up to about $6,000. And we're doing fine. You don't spend money, so you

to a more wild and natural existence. It's not just

don't have bills.

and consciousness or through necessity.

RITA (TENNESSEE): When the banks go down, people will see that they can't get any money, and

TAUA (NORTH CAROLINA): Over the years I've come

then they're going to try to get whatever they can

do they have any desire to, radically change their

with what money they have-stuff they're going to need. Food is going to be number one, I think. Next

lives. Most people simply aren't doing anything

is guns and ammo. Then probably gas. And then

would help?

when you go from a domesticated, civilized state being wild, it's becoming wild-whether by choice

to realize that most people are not going to, nor

because they have no idea where to begin. What

medications. But they'll be thinking, "This is going

I do think there are things that people can do

to last six months, maybe." They won't be looking

without radically changing their lives. Most people

five years down the road. We're getting ready. We're gathering lots of

can't walk away from the kids' schools or their jobs

seeds. We can grow food. We figure we'll probably

and it would be asking too much for them to do

end up feeding a lot of people. But if things go from bad to worse-you'll have to post people all around

it. But they can take some steps in just teaching themselves-learning more about gardening,

the place to keep other people out. They'll show up

learning more about food preservation and taking

and say: "We're hungry; we haven't eaten in five

care of their own health.

or their mortgages, or whatever. They just can't,

days." You'll just have to tell them: "No, you can't

So there are things people can do to become a

come in." We'll be able to make it when most other people

little more self-sufficient ... if there's any hope at all of being able to transition into a less chaotic life.O

won't. A lot of the Rendezvous [Primitive Skills Rendezvous in Georgia] knowledge will come into

46 /

play. Fire without matches. Learning how to tan

Homeschooling,Tennessee, 2008.

hides and make clothes out of them. Using the

All photographs courtesy the artist

Vue'.1111'0I0l1X.rni

110. 2( ( (q)rIIlre

/ 47

MOONLIGHTING

0/SCAR BY MARTIN PARR

AND

• PHOTOGRAPHS

TAXI

BY OSCAR FERNANDO

GOMEZ

Oscar Fernando G6mez lives in Monterrey, Mexico.

couch, two large tractor tires just standing there,

For fifteen years he worked as a photographer of

apparently abandoned. The vehicle's window works

weddings and quincea6os celebrations. Going from

to energize the scene in front of us, as if reality

job to job, he found he was spending a lot of time

becomes more intense when it is framed so

in taxis, and so, in 2005, he decided to supplement

perfectly. The meaning of this place seems to build

his income by renting a green Nissan Tsuru and

up when we view a grid of these photographs. All

becoming a taxi driver himself. The taxi gave G6mez

these delicious, small details are both trivial and

the window-quite literally-to make photographs

enormous at the same time.

in his time between paying customers. One day he

Thank God G6mez did not attend photography

hopes to buy his own cab; maybe if enough people

school, and is not involved with contemporary pho-

like his photographs, he will be able to do it.

tographic practice. There is a refreshing sense of

A few years ago, when he found out that he was going to be a father, G6mez decided he wanted to

.t•

HIS

discovery in his work that allows him to convert small details into images of monumental stature.

create an album of urban images to show his daughter

When I met G6mez earlier this year in Mexico, he

eventually. Sadly, his baby did not survive-"From

seemed to me to have the uncertain exhilaration of a

one day to the next, everything was over," he says.

kid who hasjust discovered how to ride a bike: he knew

But G6mez continued to shoot his urban album.

he was onto something but didn't quite understand

Here, a selection of those images is shown in a

what it was. Looking through these images, riding

grid: the repetition of the window-frame becomes

in G6mez's taxi through the urban jungle of modern

almost hypnotic,

and the simple typology of

Monterrey, gives us a similar sense of exhilaration.

images seems to just sing off the page. The photo-

It reminds me of that excitement of arriving in a new

graphs are of typical Monterrey street scenes: men

country, where everything is so fresh and intense...

pushing wheelbarrows full of junk, an abandoned

just like that first ride from the airport in a taxi. e

(11)('1111p•re.r 'on)

/10. 2(

/( rll•

/ -49

5( /

WU'U'. (lf)crtIIrc. org

All photographs from the series Windows 2009, March 2009. All images courtesy the artist, who wishes to express great gratitude to the town and photo library of Nuevo Leon

110. 2( ( (pl./I•,ll-e

/ ,31

WORKIAND PROCESS

CLARE STRAND THE SPOT MARKS THE X BY DAVID CAMPANY

no. 2( C (If)CrtrIII

/

3,

Let's look at the facts. A man in a dark suit in a dark alleyway holds a divining rod. A woman stands on a gridded mat, her fingers wired

fiction. The Surrealists were drawn to it: Salvador Dali was transfixed

for some kind of monitoring. A girl's head and arms poke out of one

(who appropriated for his journal Documents a police photograph of a Chicago gangster frozen in ice) also saw something wild and

cardboard box while her legs extend from another, like a magician's trick. A figure shrouded in a black sheet festooned with stars stands

uncontainable in its supposedly sober facts.

on an office desk for what might be a performance or a perverse

The forensic really penetrated art in the 1960s and '70s. The

kind of punishment. A hand lifts the corner of a grubby carpet tile, as if to reveal some hidden significance. A chair is inexplicably

documentation of performances and site-specific Land art drew

knocked over in an otherwise explicable English dining room.

themselves as records of absent activities/things and as works of

Clare Strand gives us all this in the form of black-and-white photographs that would be equally at home in an art gallery, the

art in themselves. At the same time the limits of the document were

offices of a scientific institute, or the archive of a dark cult. The bright spotlighting common to most of these images illuminates in only the

Keith Arnatt, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Robert Cumming, John

most literal sense. They look like evidence, but of what we cannot

are now being re-explored by a range of younger photographers.

know. If they are prized answers, what on earth were the questions? "Research" has become a chronically earnest concept in

Recent books, such as Shannon Ebner's The Sun as Error(Wallis

contemporary art. So often the artist is supposed to "conduct" it in lieu of making things up, in order to be able to account for what

2009), and Johannes Schwartz's Das Prinzip (Van Zoetendaal,

he or she is doing. Artists who conduct research seem like safe bets: funding bodies like them, curators, publishers, biennials, and

Scent, play off the seductive promise of visual clarity against the

buyers like them. Strand is the parodic mirror image of all that. Nothing is safe here. Yes, she may be a "research artist"-but only because

work, this is as good as any. But really she is a photographer whose primary context is the medium itself and the habits of

her subject matter is research. Specifically, she is interested

Strand is at least as fascinated with anonymous images as with

audiences into a confrontation with photographs that presented

scrutinized in the playful yet philosophical "photoconceptualism" of Divola, James Welling, and others. The concerns of these figures

Annenberg, 2009), Michael Schmelling's The Plan (J & L Books, 2007), as well as Jason Evans's 2000-2005 series The New medium's inevitable betrayals. If there is a context for Strand's

seeing, knowing, and shooting that have formed around it.

in the kinds of photographs that are presented as "findings." If

her own. What makes her recent book Clare Strand (Photoworks/

photography thinks it is a competent witness, Strand is here to

Steidl, 2009) particularly engaging is the tantalizing inclusion

cross-examine.

of anonymous visual references. She has opened up her unruly

Her photographs conjure the kind of intense physicality that is often thought to be the essence of the medium. If a photograph

scrapbooks to present clippings of photographs marked with arrows, lines, and circles. The gun was found here. The criminal ran down

is at root a trace, a mark, then a photograph of a trace or mark is something like a primary instance. The evidential force of the

here then along there. Rod A attaches to axel B here and here. Time

photograph and the evidential force of the marks it records restate and compound each other. Although such logic was not what drove

magic tricks and illustrations of dubious psychic experiments.

photography to become a dominant medium of record (institutionalized as documentary work, photojournalism, medical and police photography, scientific imaging, and the like), it might account for the persistent fascination we have with such images well after their practical application has ceased. How else to explain, for example, the steady stream of books of archival police- and crime-scene photographs that have been published in the last decade or so? They do more than satisfy a curiosity about long-forgotten misdemeanors and the voyeur's desire to gawp at transgression or misfortune. They also let us contemplate photography.The forensic photograph in particular shows us the medium in all its success and failure: facts clearly stated yet unable to explain themselves. "Evidence of a novel kind," as William Henry Fox Talbot put it in 1844. Forensic and scientific imagery entered mass culture in the 1920s and '30s with the popularization of crime movies and pulp

.54 /

by the wayward visual excess of the document. Georges Bataille

u'wO1'- (Iln('t-lre'. oro~

and motion studies from the 1930s sit next to how-to guides to This adventure comes together with Strand's 2003 series Signs of a Struggle, comprising what look like 8-by-10 glossies of "incidents" housed in a yellowing archival file. A photograph of a herbaceous border with a miniature white picket fence is marked with a "2-" and an "A-." A photograph of a white bedroom with black dots on the wall is marked "GPS/13" (does it refer to the global positioning system, and if so what is its relation to this anachronistically black-and-white print?). When Strand declares that these images "are contemporary constructions of invented narratives or, alternatively, authentic images discovered in a folder in an archive" we are none the wiser, unless we just accept that it might not matter. The real subject may not be this or that struggle, but this or that sign. This or that image. Photography cannot be evidence of the world without first being evidence of itself. And there are fewer lessons in photography more simple and more complex than that.0

PAGE 52: From the series The Betterment Room-Devices for MeasuringAchievement, 2004-5; PAGE 53: Aerial Suspension, 2009; THIS PAGE: Girl in Two Halves, 2008.

f1o. 2( ( (1pe)fritl

/

5,5

,36 / too...•rl. r o.,,'

OPPOSITE: From the series Gone Astray Portraits,2002-3; THIS PAGE: From the series Signs of a Struggle, 2003.

110.

2((C (IMR'"I'"I'

/ 57

THIS PAGE, TOP: Kirlian StudyTred, 2006-7, from the series Unseen Agents; BOTTOM: KirlianStudy-Hair, 2006-7, from the series Unseen Agents; OPPOSITE: From the series Gone Astray Details,2002-3. All photographs CoUrtesy the artist

5S /

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110. 2( ( ap)ertillre / '59

PHOTOGRAPHER'S PROJECT Height: 61'$'

Weight: 200 + Born:

21

San Francisco

Home: Carmel, Ca. Throws: Right Bats:Right FC: None FO:

Ansel Adams

MIKE MANDEL: THE BASEBALLPHOTOGRAPHER TRADING CARDS

FP: Those that work FF: FPh: Daguerre

Without a deep understanding of the world in its natural aspects - an awareness of elemental shapes, textures, substances, and light - the photographer may discover himself in a precarious relationship with reality when he enters the more abstract fields of artificial lighting and its involved ramifications.

"Natural AD

p.

Lih

Photography

vi

Que,by Too, Ch-VIGum, 9r,o•kiy I Liho by what Rob.i

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@075 Mike Mandel

BY AARON SCHUMAN Height: 2 centimeters

In 1974, just a year before Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, classmates at the San Francisco Art Institute, were awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts to pursue what eventually became their seminal project Evidence, Mandel found himself becoming frustrated by the growing

11

Weight: 2 tons Born: On the moon Home: In a mouse hole Throws: multi-kinet ic Bats simultaneousFP:Archival napkin FC: Pinhole FF: FD: FPh: Chimpanzee

Barbara Morgan

competitiveness within photographic circles. "[In the Seventies] it seemed that the photo community

Photography is

was comprised of a group of dedicated artists,

language,

the worldts visual

shared.

who . . . had been snubbed by the art world for having the audacity to negate the imperative of the unique, precious object," Mandel wrote in 1999. "But a strange thing happened about that time: the art world discovered photography ...

Gumby ToW, Choeing Gum.Srookhyn/ Lito by Mike Roberts. Berkeley

*197s Mike Mandel

Competitions for NEA grants and university jobs began to revolve around the hierarchy of art world professionals." Mandel's response was to embark on The Baseball-PhotographerTrading Cards, a collection of 134 informal portraits of photographers posing as baseball players, which were produced in the manner of ordinary trading cards, complete

Height:

5'11i

Weight: 165 Born: Minneapolis Home: Boston Throws: How do I Bats': Neither FC: Mine FD: All

know? FP:1 like them all FF: I like them all FPh: Me

with index numbers, accompanying statistics, and quotes on the reverse side, and were then

Minor White

sold in packs of ten-with bubblegum donated by Topps, the leading producer of sports-related cards at the time. "I wanted to lampoon the

Baseball is

an amusing anecdote

about beautiful women.

newfound celebrity-hood of photo personalities in the art marketplace," Mandel explains, also remembering that during his own baseball-card

u.mbVTO• ChwiroGUM, Otbalklyn I Litho by MiIRb t

10*7s Mike Mandel 6(/ii'lvr(1per/l/re.

o01"

s.fl et"hey

Height: 6'3" Weight: 190 Born: Mass. Home: Albuquerque, N.M. Throws:Neither-I'm umpire Bats: " FP: FC: The latest FF: "

FPh- The best

FD

Beaumont Newhall A NY inventor has devised a magaz ne camera in which the plates can be developed automatically, as they are exposed. This is very good, but would it not be an improvement if it was al so supplied with a powerful and enter prising motor? Then it would only be necessary to wind it up and start it off on a photographic trip all by itself, while its enthusiastic owner could await in comfort under his fig tree the triumphal return of the gift ed camera bearing a dozen phenomenal negatives, all ready for filing in some handy ash barrel for future reference. -- Photo American, Dec. 1895 Ciws Mike Mandel

Height: 6' Weight: 140 Born: South Home: South Throws: Don't throw Bats:ron't bat FC: Don't know FD: Don't know

(

FP: Don1t know FF:Don't know FPh: Don't know

Bill Eggleston No comment

collecting childhood, "cards made the players more accessible-in fact, public property." Today, the persistent debate surrounding photography's validity as Art (with a capital A) can seem dated and tiresome, yet the underlying sense of inferiority that many worthy, accomplished, and celebrated photographers have suffered over the years is well evidenced throughout the medium's history, in both imagery and photo-related writings. Reassuringly, alongside this streak of angst there has also always run a vein of confidence in the medium as a relevant pursuit in its own right, without need for comparison or justification in relation to the traditional arts. In 1913, after spending several decades doggedly defending the artistic merits of photography, Alfred Stieglitz bluntly summarized his argument: "Photographers must learn not to be ashamed to have their photographs look like photographs." Several years later, encouraged by Stieglitz's call for "straight photography," Paul Strand famously rejected the conceits of Pictorialism-the art-photography of his day-dismissing it as "fuzzygraphs" that ultimately expressed "an impotent desire to

Gumby Toptt Chte,Ing Qum, Brooklyn I Litho by Mike RobWrts, 8-keley

01975 Mike Mandel

Height: 5141* Weight: 105 - 110 Born: Portland, Ore. Home: San Francisco, Ca.

Throws: Right Bats: Right FC: Rollei FD: FG-7

FP: Agfa Portriga FF: XX= FPh: Changes ?

Imogen Cunningham

Apparently do not know enough to quit.

1901-

paint." Similarly, Lewis Hine rejoiced in the fact that his documentary work had been recognized for conveying "the value of realistic photography, which has for some time been displaced by the fuzzy impressionism of the day." And even as late as 1971, Walker Evans was championing photography in the face of its straggling doubters: "Photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people," he remarked. "That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium." From these examples and many others, one gets the sense that photographers-at least certain kinds of photographers-have always taken pleasure in inhabiting the role of the outcast, the charlatan, the underdog. It is not surprising, then, that during the latter half of the twentieth century, when photography finally began to be

Qui, by T-PPo Che-ing G,m. Wrooklyn/ Litho by Mike Robe.n.. eiltiey

V97s Mike Mandel

/Io. 2(,( ( 1)e/r/11r- / 6/

embraced rather than rejected by the art world,

deliberately veer away from the strike zone at

mixed feelings were stirred, and a certain sense of mistrust arose among many practitioners. In

just the last second. It's as if all these newfound "photo-celebrities" are reminding the viewer-

response, a number of photographers rapidly

and perhaps more important, one another-that

turned away from notions of the medium as one

despite their impending art-stardom, at heart

of fine craftsmanship and purist aesthetics and

they're still just goofy kids with cameras who

sought refuge

don't take themselves too seriously.

in more vernacular territories,

experimenting with popular rather than "artistic"

Of course, today these cards no longer convey

forms of photography. In 1963 Ed Ruscha (#22

accessibility or lampoon the celebrity of their

in

subjects. Instead, they have become coveted icons in their own right, treasured totems to

The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards,

shielding his eyes from the bright sun in search of an imaginary fly ball) adopted an intentionally amateurish, "snapshot" approach in his Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and later adapted conventional aerial

photography

for

his

own

conceptual

purposes in Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967). In the late 1960s John Baldessari began incorporating

heroes of previous generations. Eggleston's cool bemusement is now legendary, the disorientating break of Mandel's artistic pitch is now venerated, and the overall wit and comedic self-mockery of 1970s Conceptual photography is much revered. Mandel fully acknowledges this: in the

intentionally "bad" or "wrong" photographs into

last several years, complete sets of the cards

his canvases, instantly imbuing them with artistic

have been auctioned, by Mandel and others, for

merit. In 1971 Stephen Shore produced Amarillo:

thousands of dollars. "Ifind myself in the position

Tall in Texas, a series of ten generic-looking,

of selling these at a premium, participating in the

geographically unspecific commercial postcards,

same commercial matrix that the cards originally

which he then surreptitiously distributed in various

intended to parody," Mandel has written. "I can

stores and postcard-racks across America.

accept that. Now they are historic artifacts of an

Mandel's Trading Cards sit comfortably within this movement-the

half-ironic,

earlier generation of photography."

half-sincere

Yet it is important to recognize that these

reappropriation of everyday images and photographic contexts-and also reflect an almost

are not just individual artifacts of particular practitioners. Collectively, Mandel's Trading

exaggerated

Cards testify to the humble, joyous, and ultimately

unpretentiousness

through

the

performances of many of their subjects. A baby-

supportive spirit of a small, tightly knit network

faced Larry Sultan (#13) is satirically pious as

that truly shared a passion for a once "disdained

an altar boy, his two hands clasped around

medium" at a particularly awkward point in time,

a baseball, his wide eyes aimed toward the heavens; a grinning Beaumont Newhall (#103) is

and mutually refused the egotism and envy that can so easily accompany the approach of artistic

subsumed by a face-mask and chest protector, jokingly playing the umpire-in-chief behind home

success. Now that photography, the art world, and the "commercial matrix" have fully merged to

plate; on the back of her card, Joyce Neimanas

form a severely competitive atmosphere around the medium, one hopes that Mandel's Baseball-

(#37) proclaims: "You should bunt to sacrifice yourself to the runner"; and on the front of another, Bill Owens (#31) does just that, bunting

Photographer Trading Cards will not only be

the approaching camera back down toward the

also serve as a quiet reminder that photography

ground; a bemused William Eggleston (#126)

thrives best on community and collectivity, rather

looks at his glove, apparently surprised that the

than through fierce competition. To quote Yogi

ball has actually managed to land in it-the back

Berra: "It ain't the heat; it's the humility."a

relegated to the collectibles market, but might

of his card reads "No comment." Even Mandel's own card (#24) shows him releasing a curveball, subtly implying that although he may appear to be aiming straight at the target, his delivery will

62

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All images from Mike Mandel's The BaseballPhotographerTrading Cards, 1975. All tmages courtesy the artist

Ann

TUKE

II

I

Height: 517" Weight: 145 Born: McKeesport Home: N.Y.C. Throws: Right Bats: Right FC: Nikon FD:

Height:

Ed RUSCHA

Pa. FP: No favorites tt FF: FPh: SR. Frank

Duane Michals In

Everything youtve ever wanted is right in your own backyard.

port Greyhounds - softball - I got

the team.

glossý

Ed Ruscha

high school I formed the McKees-

to play first

5'10"

Weight: 160 Born: Omaha, Nebraska Home: Hollywood, Calif. Throws: Right Bats: Right FP: Single wt. FC: Yashica FF: FD: Drugstore FPh: Brady

base because I formed

A

We were terrible.

T

Gumby

ophis ChewingGum. Brooklyn

Litho by Mike Roberts, Brkeley

Sor by TobbisChWeingGum. Brooklyn I LItho by Mike Roberts. Berkeley

@0175 Mike Mandel

Height: 5'7" Weight: 130

2

La. Home: Houston, Texas Born: Baton Rouge, Throws: Either Bats: Right FC: None FD: None

01*75 Mike Mandel

Height: 518" Weight: 170 Born: Budapest, Hungary

0

(28

Home: New York

Throws: Right Bats: Depends FC: Single lens FD:

FP: None FF: None FPh: None

Anne Tucker

FP: FF: Tri-X FPh: Edward Steichen

Cornell Capa An amusing idea is an amusing idea. I do not play baseball, my batting

My favorite sport was football would now be gymnastics or rodeo -

tool is the camera.

never has been baseball.

Like in base-

ball, the perfect game / frame does not exist.

Somby Topps ChewingnGum,Brooklyn i LItho by Mike Roberts,

sarkeley

Gum by ToPPi ChewingGum, Brooklyn / Litho by Mike Roberts, Berkeley

01975 Mike Mandel

01976 Mike Mandel

Height: 60 Weight: 160

Height: 5'6"

Born: Ashland, Wis. HOme: N.Y.C.

Throws: R Bats: R FC: Deardorf FD: D-23

Judy DATER

FP: None FF: Super XX FPh: Atget

Weight: 122 Born: Hollywood, Ca.Ca. Home: San Anselmo, Throws: Right Bats: Right FC: Deardorff FD: Rodinal

John Szarkowski Atget is my favorite, even though he didn't have a really sharp-breaking curveball like Kerteasz, or a high hard one like Weston', and couldn't cover a really big outfield like Cartier-Bresson, because he played position perfectly, handled everything that came his way, and made the whole thing look as easy as girl's softball.

Sutm by Topps Chi-Ing Gum, Brooklyn / Litho by MikeRoberts, Berkeley

0117T

Mike Mandel

FP: Agfa Brovira FF: Ilford FP4 FPh: August Sander

Judy Dater They say behind every great man

PNIý v

there's a woman. is

true too.

gin'

Well,

the reverse

'Course I'm not brag-

or nothin',

but I owe it

my husband, Jack Welpott, me everything I know.

all to

who taught

Almost every-

thing that is.

Gumby T-OgPChi•-lg Gum, r8oklty.n/ LitUOby Mike Roberts, Berkeley

@1975 Mike Mandel I

I10. 2( ( (IJpet-11Itv

/ 6j3

THEME AND VARIATIONS

AMERICA: NOWANDHERE A MULTIMEDIA EXHIBITION ORGANIZED AND CURATED BY ERIC FISCHL ESSAY BY E. L. DOCTOROW

Pete Seeger made a poignant statement about music that may be

music, he gathered a wide range of musicians who addressed-

applied to art in general: it can "help you survive your troubles,

and in some ways seemed to symbolize-what was tearing this

help distractyou from your troubles. But [sometimes it] helps you

country apart: Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Joni Mitchell, Tammy

understand your troubles, and

. . .

can help you do something

aboutyour troubles."

Wynette, Conway Twitty, Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder, Carl Perkins, Eric Clapton . . . the list of stunning contrasts goes on.

A little over two years ago, I reachedout to American artists and

Until the show came to an end in 1971, Cash put together

asked them if they would create a work of art about America in the

programs that did not shy away from hot-button topics, such

time between 9/11 and now. I told them that I wanted to put the

as the treatment of Native Americans, the Vietnam War, racial equality, feminism, and God. All these issues and fears that had

work onto trucks that would be specially designed to show art in the country. We would visit small towns, cities, military bases, and

so inflamed us at the time-that had eroded our confidence in the "common good" and left us with an angry, sickened feeling

campuses, reaching out to communities that are underserved by

that there could be no positive health in our future-all this was

the arts or intimidated by our art institutions.

washed away by shared harmonies. The musicians' love of music,

a museum-like setting and that we would travel this show around

The idea of America:NowandHere is simple: use the language

their understanding of its intertwined roots, and their respect

art creates as a way to talk to each other outside of the polarizing

for each other's undeniable talents made this show an uplifting

rhetoric, name calling, and general malaise that has gripped this

experience of common cause and celebration.

country over the last decade. To this end, more than 150 visual

The recurringimage and theme of the show was a moving train:

artists, poets, playwrights, singer/songwriters, and filmmakers

a train that carried all these great musicians across this land.

have contributed works related to the subject of America.

The train was bringing us hope and renewing our commitment to

There are many precedents for taking art around the country. Early on, stagecoaches brought instruments to wandering

shared values through musical celebration.

musicians and opera singers to remote show palaces. In the

steeled motion gave perspective to the landscape,to the American

mid-nineteenth century paintings were put on trains and toured

psyche. This train came to us, reaching deeply into the terrain of

around the country with all the fanfare of a Broadway spectacle. Circuses, magic acts, showboats, and Chautauqua tents were all

our anxiety, reassuringus at every stop about our inherentlygood

part of this great tradition that was meant to unite a vast and

obvious differences of style, genre, and generation because his sights were set on the more distant, largerhorizon.

diverse country through the shared experiences that the arts can provide. America:NowandHere continues this tradition.

I had forgotten how the stirring image of that black silhouette of

values and strong moral character.Cash's show transcended the

How buried in my memory, but how indelible that experience

Two years ago I picked up a DVD of episodes of the old Johnny

was on my life. When I had the inspiration for this project, the

Cash Show. I hadn't thought about that series since it aired on

seeds had been planted long ago by Johnny Cash, and nurtured

television back in the late 1960s. Watching broadcasts from forty

by his certainty and optimism that the arts are a necessary and

years ago, now set against the backdrop of current events, The

healing tool. America:NowandHere is traveling on tracks that were

Johnny Cash Show took on a very compelling significance. With

laid down by Cash some forty years ago.

his vision of inclusiveness and his deep belief in the bond of

61 / wwlr. (1per/11re. ol'o

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PAGE 65, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Trailer Wrap), 2010; Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Jan. 20th, 2009); Tod Papageorge, from It Goes On: Five Photographs Taken in the Streets of New York on September 11, 200&, Laurie Anderson, From the Air, sound sculpture with clay figures and looped DVD, 2006; Jeff Koons, Monkey Train, silkscreen with archival pigmented Inkjet on Somerset paper, 2007; THIS PAGE, TOP: Richard Misrach, Untitled, 2007; BOTTOM, LEFT: Andres Serrano, Beverly Pabon, U.S. Postal Worker (America), 2002; RIGHT: Julian Schnabel, Untitled (BEZ), oil, resin, and spray paint on polyester, 2008. Kruger: © the artist/courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Opie: © the artist/courtesy Regen Projects. Los Angeles. Papageorge: 0 the artist, 2008/courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery. New York; Anderson: courtesy the artist/Sean Kelly Gallery, New York: Koons: © the artist; Misrach: courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco/ Pace/MacGill Gallery. New YoroV Marc Selwyn Flne Arts, Los Angeles; Serrano: courtesy Ynon Lambert Gallery, New York; Schnabel: courtesy the artist

66 / unIvv.i,•rIrtuite.ort

A CALAMITY OF HEART BY E. L. DOCTOROW Artists in America don't usually band together. They are independent entrepreneurs of their imaginations. They create universes

gross economic inequalities, the forces of wealth thriving at the expense of the middle class and the shrill demagogues

of which they are the sole occupants. They may influence one another, they may be bundled by critics as members of an

of right wing radio and television shouting down all principled disagreement with what was happening. The resulting trauma to the American people's sense of themselves and their country

aesthetic movement, but they work alone and think alone, and if they gather on social occasions, like the members of any trade, it is for warmth, for they all know how few of them there are and how

is still being felt. We have not wanted to believe that a sitting president and his advisors could have so given themselves to an

unseen by most of the population. But there are critical moments in our national life when artists do come together as a constituency. In the 1930s, with the country

agenda of social, economic and environmental deconstruction, and with such relentless violations of constitutional law as to

mired in poverty, and with the ominous rise of European totalitarian states, artists were necessarily joined by their recognition of

here in the presumption that a politics of self-correction may not be enough to heal us, to recover us from our spiritual disarray. There is

political and economic crisis. They disagreed on how to respondsome looked toward the antebellum past, others aligned their spirits with the available varieties of Marxian socialism-but whether doing fervently idealistic murals, or machine art, or art as

render themselves, definably, as subversives. Artists, poets, and musicians are gathered

a lingering miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this country, the aftereffect of both the foreign terrorist attack on

political commentary or the art of American loneliness, all of them manifested an enlarged public presence in our national life. What

our land and the domestic political attack on our constitutional identity. A significant percentage of our population is given to hysteria of one sort or another. A mean-spirited despair, a

they delivered was a kind of groundsong of a diverse, still vibrantly alive society, proposing by the outpouring of their creative work an

concoction of populism, nativism, and racism, still poisons the political discourse. At the same time our politicians seem unable

underlying freedom, a constitutional identity that was, for all the difficulties of that moment, firm and enduring.

or unwilling to budge the unmovable structures of corporate wealth that hold our national priorities in check. The top-down flow of ideas and information still configures our debates, still

So here now today, in a new century, is this assemblage of artists, writers, and musicians, and we must ask what is the crisis today that impels them, in all their brilliant individuality, to present themselves as a group show? The fact is that some terrible deep damage to the nation was done in the aftermath of 9/11. The government that swung into action misdirected its response and, with devious arguments to the American people, took us to war. In short time it had adopted the policies of an authoritarian state. Americans

organizes the issues for our edification, and the habitual weekend retreats of media and telecommunication moguls attest to their righteous intent to own the screens of cyberspace as they do the airways, the TV channels, and the telephone frequencies. All of this together would seem to define a national identity crisis, a terribly weakened sense of ourselves as a proud citizenry in charge of our lives-a calamity of heart as bad as what America suffered in the Great Depression.

found themselves the sponsors of torture, and of the endless imprisonment without trial or counsel of presumed terrorists.

Under these circumstances our art, literature, music, all of which comes up from the bottom, uncensored, unfiltered,

They learned well after the fact that they themselves were subject

unrequested-the artists of whatever medium always coming out of nowhere-does tell us that something is firm and enduring

to secret illegal surveillance by their government, and they saw their Constitution disdained with the unilateral abrogation of international treaties such as the Geneva convention, though such treaties are constitutionally "the supreme Law of the Land." All these measures were claimed as wartime expedients and promoted with a propaganda of fear. At the same time the realities of scientific evidence of global warming were ignored, religious literalism was put in the way of medical advance, and regulatory agencies were given over to the very industries they were to regulate. Rife with wartime corruption, this government left to founder an American population severely alienated by

after all in a country given to free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate. Wildly different and individualistic in their political persuasions as well as their art, the artists, writers and performers here collected offer us the aroused witness the manifold reportage, the expressive freedom, the groundsong for our time of a diverse, still vibrantly alive society, that for all the difficulties of this moment would restore us to ourselves, awaken our stunned senses to the public interest that is our interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred constitutional text that embraces us all.0

THESE PAGES, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Lou Reed, The Pasl collaged Nepal paper, 2009; Vik Muniz, American Flag, 2009 Ralph Gibson, American Gothic, 2009; Cindy Sherman, Untitle•

Gornik, Shining Sea, 2009; Dana Schutz, Moonwalker, oil ani handcuffs), 2007; Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, from th4 Transfiguration, black-and-white high-definition video Reed: courtesy the artist. Smith: photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate/courtesy Pace Wildenstein, Ner Gibson: courtesy the artist, Sherman: courtesy the artist/Metro Pictures, New York. PAGES 70-71 Gallery, New York; Harris: courtesy the artist/CRG Gallery, New York: Crewdson: courtesy the artist,

2005; KIkM Smith, Assembly, ink and colored pencil on Eric Flschl, Samaritan, bronze with rust patina, 2007; 2008. PAGES 70-71: CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: April acrylic on canvas, 2009; Lyle Ashton Harris, Untitled (Silver ierles Beneath the Roses, summer 2007; Bill Viola, )n plasma display, 2007. (ork: Muniz: courtesy Slkkema Jenkins & Co. Gallery, New York Fischl: courtesy the artist; 3ornlk; courtesy the artist/Danese Gallery, New York; SchutZ: courtesy the artist/Zach Feuer .uhring Augustine. New York; Viola: performed by Blake Viola. photographs by Kira Perov

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Pray a house is not A home. And while you're at it, Pray that prayer is Not a funhouse mirror slid Between terror and God's face. Time to make something From nothing-garden, star chart, Beehive, birdhouse, abacus To add up what remains when What we thought was wealth is gone. -- Carol Muske-Dukes

a field of foreclosed flowers dreams of living rooms glass ware china ware nowhere the beautiful struggle here pray a house is not a home the middle of october leaves carry the sun families furnish rentals the margins gather for warmth where the buffalo don't roam -Suheir

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................ ......... . ................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ............................ ................................. F ES T IVALS.......... ................... RENCONTRES DE BAMAKO The appearance of such work alongside more playful projects may also signal the increasing sophistication and range of a rising generation of photographers. Baudouin Mouanda had an exquisite solo show on "La SAPE" (La SociCtA

des Ambianceurs

et des Personnes b6lgantes), a kind of gentleman's association whose members face off in the streets of Brazzaville in public contests of dazzling sartorial style. The siting of this exhibition in the museum's textile galleries was spot-on from the standpoint of subject matter-but from that of access, it was disastrous: these galleries require a fee for entry, ensuring that few would see the exhibition after the wave of international visitors had gone. Elsewhere in the pan-African galleries, topical issues such as migration, deportation, and asylum-seeking dominated. This was clearly in response to the biennial's designated theme of "Borders"-which was set in Paris by Culturesfrance (an agency of the French ministries of foreign affairs, culture, and communication) rather than by the event's creative directors, Michket Krifa and Laura Serani, or their Malian partners. These issues are acutely relevant to millions of Africans, yet the thematic frame was overbroad. Curatorial decisions to group certain works together aggravated this impression and tended to emphasize pat interpretations. Photographs by Lebohang Mashiloane, Jodi Bieber, and Myriam Abdelaziz depicting refugees (Somali, Mozambican, and Darfurian) were lumped together without respect for their varied intentions. Other work spoke openly of borders but was ambivalent in tone: four self-portraits by Robert Mafuta, including one with his identification number from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees emblazoned under a barcode on his The eighth edition of the biennial Rencontres de Bamako

back, and Fidisoa A. J. Ramanahadray's strangely lyrical scenes of

presented much excellent work and many contradictions, in shows

incarceration and law enforcement.

distributed throughout several venues in Mali's capital city. The pan-African exhibition at the National Museum included

A number of young artists are approaching the topics of sexuality and gendered subjectivities with revealing equanimity.

an exceptionally strong showing from Central Africa. Armel

The sense of cultural estrangement in the work of Zanele Muholi

Louzala from the Republic of Congo and Alain Wandimoyi from

is exhilaratingly vivid, and the inclusion here of her depictions of

the Democratic Republic of Congo both engaged the impact of

black queer bodies and desires gently pokes at the conservatism

the brutal wars that have ravaged their countries for more than a

evidenced in earlier Bamako selections. The transgendered,

decade. Deftly weaving together multiple narrative threads, these

elegant Miss D'vine (2007) is riveting against a blue sky; the

images depart radically from more familiar journalistic depictions

image was produced as a twenty-foot banner and dominated the

of the subject. Their inclusion here also marks a departure in

entrance to the Palais de la Culture in a heartening curatorial

curatorial vision from past editions of the festival, which have

gesture. Recall that the photographs of Jean Brundrit that were

tended to favor fine-art photography over documentary and

chosen for the 1996 Rencontres dealt with the topic of artistic

reportage. Wandimoyi's photograph of Olive Lembe Kabila, wife

censorship, since displaying her work on lesbian personae was, at

of DRC president Joseph Kabila, on an official visit to the Bulengo

that time in Bamako, out of the question.

refugee camp in North Kivu, captured the elusive connections between the province's 1,300,000 internally displaced people and the country's political elite. Formally arresting and analytically bold, it lingered in memory as the focal point of the gallery.

•'-I/H''"•I)'IHdOo•

THIS PAGE: Hassan Hahjaj, Nido Bouchra, photograph framed in walnut and empty cans, 2000; OPPOSITE: Zanele Muholi, Miss D'vine I, 2007; PAGE 76: Lilta Benzld, Cimetiere de Zaafrane (Zaafrane cemetery), 2008-9. r, the,31

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Majida Khattari smartly plays with the lingering allure of Orientalist painting: her photographic light-box figures pop in dimensional space, emphasizing the flatness of historic and contemporary renderings of North African or "Oriental" identity. In his multimedia project Living Queer Africans (2007), Nigerian artist Andrew Esiebo presented an incisive portrait of a young African man living in Europe. The piece brought together two trends notable in this year's biennial: the presentation of still images as video (as seen in works by Riason Naidoo, Abraham Oghobase, and Mounir Fatmi) and photographers' explorations beyond wellworn paths to and from the colonial metropole. In Lilia Benzid's images-one of the festival's hidden gems-we see a garden of tombstones nestled in the desert plains of Tunisia; swaddled with cardigans, turbans, shawls, and beads, the anthropomorphized stone markers repose with silk flowers or mugs of water. The ground ripples with signs of fresh loss. Visitors and artists alike mentioned radical disparities in presentations. Some photographers displayed fifty or sixty images, others four or five. The most arresting installation drew accidental attention to these disparities and to some imagined alternatives. Along an airy arcade at the Palais de la Culture, an expanse of wood panels held a mash-up of pasted prints, lush screened works, and panorama-format posters drawn from a workshop held in Matola, Mozambique, attended by photographers from eastern and southern Africa. Non-precious and sometimes unlabeled, works by Sammy Baloji, Berry Bickle, Albino Mahumana, Ren6 Paul Savignan, Andrew Tshabangu, and Pierrot Men glinted in the afternoon sun. The collage effect recalled posters papering any

urban landscape. It also provoked reflection about approaches to display and curation in a local context. Why not open the event to smaller, discrete curatorial projects that tap into artistic collaborations? Might not this make room for more visions and encourage a less top-down and institution-heavy approach? Concerns about sustainability persist as the festival has expanded and cannot be reduced solely to a matter of location-in one of Africa's poorest nations and in its fastest-growing city-or to the narrow remit of backers, or to the Paris-based remoteplanning apparatus. Video displays missing DVDs or not reset after routine power outages were commonplace-and have been lamented for years-raising questions about the transmission of information over time and among the various players. The quality of the prints (all executed in Paris) was uneven, and this problem was compounded by errors in printing and an apparent lack of discussion or exchange of test prints among photographers, printers, and curators. An unlabeled display of works by Malian photographers was an impolitic omission. Posters and banners of the exhibition works shone throughout the city and on the exterior walls of the museum gardens, but these went up only after the majority of the artists and international visitors had departed. They caught the eye of passing commuters, however, and sparked many an interesting conversation. It is to its credit that the Rencontres de Bamako has incited these conversations, and symptomatic of larger flaws in its planning and oversight that they remain, for the time being, on the outside.O -Jennifer

Bajorek and Erin Haney

The eighth Rencontres de Bamako took place November 7-December 7, 2009. Jennifer Bajorek is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Erin Haney is the author of Photographyand Africa (Reaktion, 2010).

Majida Khattari smartly plays with the lingering allure of Orientalist painting: her photographic light-box figures pop in dimensional space, emphasizing the flatness of historic and contemporary renderings of North African or "Oriental" identity. In his multimedia project Living Queer Africans (2007), Nigerian artist Andrew Esiebo presented an incisive portrait of a young African man living in Europe. The piece brought together two trends notable in this year's biennial: the presentation of still images as video (as seen in works by Riason Naidoo, Abraham Oghobase, and Mounir Fatmi) and photographers' explorations beyond wellworn paths to and from the colonial metropole. In Lilia Benzid's images-one of the festival's hidden gems-we see a garden of tombstones nestled in the desert plains of Tunisia; swaddled with cardigans, turbans, shawls, and beads, the anthropomorphized stone markers repose with silk flowers or mugs of water. The ground ripples with signs of fresh loss. Visitors and artists alike mentioned radical disparities in presentations. Some photographers displayed fifty or sixty images, others four or five. The most arresting installation drew accidental attention to these disparities and to some imagined alternatives. Along an airy arcade at the Palais de la Culture, an expanse of wood panels held a mash-up of pasted prints, lush screened works, and panorama-format posters drawn from a workshop held in Matola, Mozambique, attended by photographers from eastern and southern Africa. Non-precious and sometimes unlabeled, works by Sammy Baloji, Berry Bickle, Albino Mahumana, Ren6 Paul Savignan, Andrew Tshabangu, and Pierrot Men glinted in the afternoon sun. The collage effect recalled posters papering any

urban landscape. It also provoked reflection about approaches to display and curation in a local context. Why not open the event to smaller, discrete curatorial projects that tap into artistic collaborations? Might not this make room for more visions and encourage a less top-down and institution-heavy approach? Concerns about sustainability persist as the festival has expanded and cannot be reduced solely to a matter of location-in one of Africa's poorest nations and in its fastest-growing city-or to the narrow remit of backers, or to the Paris-based remoteplanning apparatus. Video displays missing DVDs or not reset after routine power outages were commonplace-and have been lamented for years-raising questions about the transmission of information over time and among the various players. The quality of the prints (all executed in Paris) was uneven, and this problem was compounded by errors in printing and an apparent lack of discussion or exchange of test prints among photographers, printers, and curators. An unlabeled display of works by Malian photographers was an impolitic omission. Posters and banners of the exhibition works shone throughout the city and on the exterior walls of the museum gardens, but these went up only after the majority of the artists and international visitors had departed. They caught the eye of passing commuters, however, and sparked many an interesting conversation. It is to its credit that the Rencontres de Bamako has incited these conversations, and symptomatic of larger flaws in its planning and oversight that they remain, for the time being, on the outside.O -Jennifer

Bajorek and Erin Haney

The eighth Rencontres de Bamako took place November 7-December 7, 2009. Jennifer Bajorek is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Erin Haney is the author of Photographyand Africa (Reaktion, 2010).

................ I.... -............ I....... ............................. ........... ......................... ............ ............................ ........... ...................................... ST-FE I VALS LIANZHOU INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Lianzhou is not a city that beckons with great legend or ancient

seemed intensely interested in the opening ceremonies and looking

charms, and you are not likely to find it in the index of any Western travel book. Located in the little-trod northwest corner of China's

at the photographs, both in the streets and in the exhibition halls. Altogether, the LIPF's director, Duan Yuting, and a team

Guangdong Province, the city is four hours from Guangzhou (and the nearest airport) by car, or bus on an impossibly cracked and pot-holed road. When the local governmental authorities initially

of others-including chief curators Robert Pledge and Chen Weixing-pulled off dozens of shows representing work by more

conceived of organizing a photography festival here, they surely had in mind raising the city's profile. The Lianzhou International

Chinese. the festival lived up to its "international" designation with groups of images by Western heavy-hitters such as Don

Photography Festival, which had its fifth incarnation last December,

McCullin, David Burnett, Gilles Caron, Jane Evelyn Atwood, and Annie Leibovitz. (Somewhat incongruously, McCullin's 1968 shell-

is doing its best to rise to these formidable challenges and create a place for itself on the cultural map of the world. The 2009 festival spread out under the all-encompassing rubric "Presence and Representation," with a loose focus on photojournalism. The main exhibitions were presented in three handsomely repurposed industrial buildings: a shoe factory, a candy factory, and a granary (this last with several wonderful, challengingly cylindrical gallery spaces). One innovation last year was to hang large-scale photographs in the streets of Lianzhou, with a view to engaging the city's residents in the event-and indeed, at least in the festival's first days, the local populace

than a hundred artists. While most of the photography was

shocked U.S. Marine at Hue was the festival's poster boy: the image was plastered all over town.) Leo Rubinfien, whose Wounded Cities series was featured, received one of the festival's gold medals. And several galleries were devoted to intriguing work by Korean photographers-including Byun Soon Choel's portraits THIS PAGE: Feng Li, from the series Day in the Night, Isolating,2008-9; PAGE 78: Zhang Lijie, An abandoned bed, relics of Xiao-Tang-Shan Hospital, Beijing from the series The Aftereffects of SARS, 2006-10: PAGE 79: Ou Zhihang, That Moment, at around 5:30 June 27, 2009, Shanghai, from the series That Moment, 2000-2010. All ia

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In conjunction witli tile publication of this issue, #200. Aperture is initiating a two-part conversation on the state of the modern magazine. Join leading editors and pubilishers as they discuss the opportunities and challenges of the rapidlyevolving magazine industry from hoth the creative and financial perspectives, as well as the impact recent changes have had on photograp)hers.

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of interracial couples, and Bang Dong-Hwan's fetching series of surrealistic doll-house-like rooms, After Dada. Photographers working in China are of course faced with the collision between the country's unfathomably long history and its dizzyingly transformational present. The Lianzhou festival engaged mostly the relatively recent past, though there were group exhibitions of both historical and contemporary photojournalism, under the headers "History's Nuance," "Reality's Expression," and "Representation of Survival." Several shows were devoted to a survey of photographs from Chinese newspapers, including Guangzhou's Nanfang Zhoumo, known for its relatively provocative investigative journalism. (Shortly before the festival took place, the paper's editorin-chief, Xiang Xi, was demoted after running an exclusive interview with President Obama that brazenly included inches of glaring white space, signaling just how much text had been censored out.) Many of the solo shows at the LIPF brought light to China's ongoing moment of change. Among these were Li Wei's series on the mutating landscapes of his native Inner Mongolia and Boris Svartzman's exploration of the dramatic social impact of the country's economic upheaval. In his recent Legends images, Yang Chengde looks at public sites-including a fantastic dinosaur theme park near Guangzhou-that intrude theatrically into contemporary life; Qiu Zhijie's 2008-9 color series PhotographicTheatre is similarly stagy and striking. A large, well-lit room in the candy factory was devoted to Liu Ke's deceptively serene 2008-9 Still Lake photographs: large pale-hued images of the region near Chongqing that was affected by the construction

aperturefoundation of the Three Gorges Dam. Zhang Lijie-one of the few women featured here-presented The Aftereffects of SARS (2006-10), an ongoing project on survivors of the devastating epidemic that originated in Guangdong Province in 2002. But in China, history is not always fair game. As one photographer succinctly put it: "You can photograph anything you like here-you just can't necessarily publish or exhibit it." When asked about censorship and restrictions imposed on the work shown at the festival, Duan Yuting insisted: "We are lucky to have a cooperative relationship with the local government ... they want critical work." Still, there was a clear dearth of risky imagery here: no sign of such thorny issues as Tibet or China's one-child policy, few representations of the naked body (with the notable exception of Ou Zhihang's 2000-2010 series That Moment). Several projects, however, did take on one of the country's most dire problems: pollution-among these were Jiang Penyi's All Back to Dust; Lu Guang's Focusing on China's Pollution; and Wang Jiuliang's powerful project Rubbish Besieged City (which took a top prize at the festival). The most startling work here was the black-and-white series Day in the Night, Isolating(2008-9) by Feng Li, a photographer with a remarkable eye for rich darknesses and the uncanny, and-an element that was otherwise largely lacking at this festival-a sense of humor. A bevy of children cascade down a water chute in giant plastic bubbles; a banana-shaped artificial moon is held up by scaffolding in the night sky; an obese boy lies naked on the cement ground, his weight pulling him into the earth. These are photographs that stop you in your tracks and make you look again more closely. If future editions of the festival include more work of this caliber, the LIPF may manage to provide the experience it is striving to offer. 0 -Diana C. Stoll

The fifth Lianzhou International PhotographyFestival took place December

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5-10, 2009. Diana C. Stoll is the senior ed tor of Aperture magazine.

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DJ SPOOKY (PAUL D. MILLER) ON HERBERT PONTING'S GROTTO INA BERG, 1911 building we thought we knew, which vanishes into thin air when the scaffolding is removed. I want to write about the sense of realism that travel photography brings to our collective psyche. Which brings me to my topic: photography in Antarctica. In the austral summer of 2008 I went to Antarctica, and took a studio along with me to document the process of creating a symphony out of acoustic portraits of ice. In June 1910 a ship called the Terra Nova set sail from England, heading for the South Pole. One of the thirty-three crew members under Captain Robert Scott's command was Herbert Ponting, the first "camera artist" to be taken to Antarctica. Think of this as the same approach to documenting reality that was undertaken with Neil Armstrong's first moon landing, and you can begin to imagine how complex the voyage was, how moving the images of ice that Ponting brought back would be to the "civilized" world on the edge of World War I. Realism, indeed. This was no reality anyone had seen before. Let's flip over to the moving image for a moment: French film pioneer Georges M61i6s was a magician as much as he was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his films. His work, like the earlier work of the LumiEre brothers and Dziga Vertov later on, resonates with the strange tension between realism and how editing can create an ambiguous relationship to "subjectivity" and portraiture. Without these people, exploration photography would not have the gravitas it has. The impossible The future isn't what it used to be. It's 2010: this year marks the twentieth anniversary of Photo-

voyage-that's what the best travel photography captures-and in a way, this was one of the inspirations for my composition Terra

shop, and we stand poised to see an IMAX version of the Hubble

Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. Historical photographs from the 1910s,

telescope's photographs of the cosmos, narrated by Leonardo

like this one, were guideposts for my journey in 2008.

DiCaprio. The hall of mirrors that we call modern finance is in

Like Orson Welles (another magician), I am interested in how

meltdown, and this is just everyday stuff for the cell-phone-mobile-

people can take our willingness to believe in the "unreal" and

camera-"enhanced-reality"-info-economy that we call home.

rework it into a kind of "hyperreality"-as Welles did with his infamous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, or Stalin with his

Capitalism induces insecurity on a vast scale, and cameras capture that; it's the basic premise of hyper-post-everything

penchant for erasing his opponents from photographs, etc. All

twenty-first-century realism. From Edward Burtynsky's

this comes to mind with the photographs that Ponting bequeathed

Manufactured Landscapes and Bernard Madoff's financial fictions

to us. I still have an eerie feeling when I see them. I'm haunted,

to the words of one of George W. Bush's chief aides, who said

too, by M61i6s and Welles-magicians who turn into filmmakers

that we are no longer in what he liked to call a "reality-based

and photographers, and back again. The realism of images, the

community"-there is a kind of unheimlich (Sigmund Freud's term

mercurial reality they depict, is always part of the debate we need

for "uncanny") pall that overshadows almost anything scientific

to explore as the twenty-first century continues to unfold. a

imagery can come up with. Reality, and realism, are like the plot of a story we all know-or like scaffolding around a familiar

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