issue #1 summer 2016
UNFOLD
NOW AND THEN
This is a magazine about storytelling : about both, how people tell stories with photography, and about telling stories in a new way, in a new context, in a new light. We invite you to be an adventurer and to unfold these stories.
I N D E X
Now and then
07
Butterf lies
14
Skin stories
18
Still Lifes
28
47
Inside Out
63
Recommendations
65
Overpainted
73
Moor
77
Word on the Street
NOW AND THEN
This new magazine is all about those stories. The most important trademark for what makes a story a story is the development that occurs from the start of the story until the very end of it. How you or things are now, compared to how they were back then. That is also exactly what this issue’s topic is about: Now & Then. This is perfectly portrayed by our first topic of this issue. Where the f low of time is shown by the evolution of pictures taken back then, as opposed to how they are taken in this day and age. But it doesn’t have to be taken so literally. There is also a beautiful story about erasing past memories. Tattoos once were the definition of permanent commitment, but that doesn’t have to be the case anymore. Although removing a tattoo is a painful and expensive procedure, for the people dealing with their haunting memory it’s still worth it. Change is a subjective topic. Often happening quietly and unseen. One of our other main stories focuses on a mental transition. An anonymous source shares her story about a painful memory and her train of thoughts throughout her experience. We hope you enjoy the content as much as we do. Some photographs might be graphic, some might be soft, but they always tell a certain truth. A truth that will make you look at things in a different perspective, broaden your mind and give you new insights. Isn’t that what we all must do as humans?
E D I T O R I A L
Have you ever thought of the fact that your whole life is one big story with plot twists and changes? They may not always have been the changes you wanted, but they have created the person who you are today.
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07 NOW & THEN
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How do we define our personality and how do we present it to the world? – A comparison between long forgotten slides and modern day pictures.
14 BUTTERFLIES
BY ROGER DEAN KISERA
There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me. I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage turned me into an old man. I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little soldier that I had become and then I would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my dormitory. After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the house parent chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the azalea bushes strewn around the orphanage. I carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after the other, and then took them from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet. How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty. I had walked many times out into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterf lies could land on my head, face and hands so I could look at them up close. When the telephone rang the house parent laid the large cardboard paper down on the back cement step and went inside to answer the phone. I walked up to the cardboard and looked at the one butterf ly who he had just pinned to the large paper. It was still moving about so I reached down and touched it on the wing causing one of the pins to fall out. It started f lying around and around trying to get away but it was still pinned by the one wing with the other straight pin. Finally it's wing broke off and the butterf ly fell to the ground and just quivered. I picked up the torn wing and the butterfly and I spat on it's wing and tried to get it to stick back on so it could fly away and be free before the house parent came back. But it would not stay on him. The next thing I knew the house parent came walking back out of the back door by the garbage room and started yelling at me. I told him that I did not do anything but he did not believe me. He picked up the cardboard paper and started hitting me on the top of the head. There were all kinds of butterfly pieces going everywhere. He threw the cardboard down on the ground and told me to pick it up and put it in the garbage can inside the back room of the dormitory and then he left. I sat there in the dirt, by that big old tree, for the longest time trying to fit all the butterfly pieces back together so I could bury them whole, but it was too hard to do. So I prayed for them and then I put them in an old torn up shoe box and I buried them in the bottom of the fort that I had built in the ground, out by the large bamboos, near the blackberry bushes. Every year when the butterflies would return to the orphanage and try to land on me I would try and shoo them away because they did not know that the orphanage was a bad place to live and a very bad place to die.
« When I was fourty I got back together with my first love. I was convinced it was a proof of love after two months . After two more months we broke up. »
« It was a youth sin. Just for fun. As soon as I was old enough I got it. »
Most people take pride in their tattoos, but twenty percent to remove them in the end. Some after a month of regret, some after ten years and some after growing up a little.
Tattoos are stories we put on our skin. a memoir to our family, a reminder of a beloved person, a presentation of the values that are important to us. Or something that we think looks amazing. Some are made spontaneously, some were thought about for a long while.
« It was a hard time, I lost my girlfriend and it symbolized change for me. »
18 SKIN STORIES
« Please inform yourself before you get a tattoo. Mine was done so badly. »
« All of my collegues had one. A friend of a friend said that he could tattoo me for free. »
ÂŤ Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth. Âť GERHARD RICHTER, 'NOTES' , 1962
28 Still Lifes VERA MERCER
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The picture language of Vera Mercer reminds of baroque festivity: sensual opulence, carefully and subtly arranged in front of solumn backgrounds filled with antique silverware, valuable china and fine glasses. They celebrate life and momentariness, change between beauty and horror, light and shadow, the art of cooking and the process of decay.
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« When he said he had feelings for me but I said I didn’t, he said he understood. »
47 INSIDE OUT
« So in fear of things getting worse, I endured that whole night. »
« Making myself believe I was protecting myself by acting like I was still sleeping. »
« I made a playful comment that I didn’t want anything to happen. » « And he said: ‘No of course not, just maybe a cuddle.’ »
« I make myself believe it‘s not bad, I can get over this. »
« I was scared, angry and confused. »
« So being as trusting as I was I agreed to that. »
« I tell myself that what that person did to me didn‘t affect me.»
« I can‘t let people know I can be hurt like that. I needed to believe this myself
« Why did you go back? Were you asking for trouble? »
« Are you talking about this shit again? Seek some help. »
« Some reactions I got from friends and family made me feel like shit even more. »
« Why didn’t you just punch him? How can you let him do that to you? »
FUCK OFF
R E C O M M E N D A T I O N S 6 3
DIANE ARBUS IN THE BEGINNING This landmark exhibition will feature more than 100 photographs that together redefine Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971), one of the most inf luential and provocative artists of the 20th century. It will focus on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognized praised, criticized, and copied the world over. The majority of the photographs in the exhibition have never before been seen and are part of the Museum‘s Diane Arbus Archive, acquired in 2007 by gift and promised gift from the artist‘s daughters, Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus.
STORIES WE TELL
MYSTERY Mystery Show is a podcast hosted by Starlee Kine. Each week she is solving a different real life mystery. Along the way, Kine interviews people who may have a connection to the mystery finding different personal stories. The show finds emotional angles on just about everything, and its 'everybody has a story' attitude is affirming, humane. w w w.gimletmedia.com
13.06.2016 - 27.11.2016 The Met Breuer - New York
CELSO BRANDÃO BOÎTE NOIRE
If you have a mystery in your life that you’ve always wanted solved, send an email to mysteries@gimletmedia.com The only rule is that the answer to your mystery can’t be found by just Googling.
In this inspired, genre-twisting film from 2013, Oscarnominated writer and director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth always depends on who is telling it. Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets kept by a family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions. As each relates their version of the family mythology, presentday recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of their mother, who departed too soon, leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: always complicated, warmly messy and fiercely loving.
TRUE is a british photography journal that showcases the unpublished personal projects of established and emerging photographers. Unconstrained by commercial focus, it sets different parameters for the creative conversation between publication and contributor. Photo Journal issue 2 19 €+ shipping Published May 2016
The brazil photographer and filmmaker. Concentrating on directing documentaries his photography style is very observant as well. For Boite Noire - Black Box - he abstains from color. Far from the spectacular effects of a wide-angle lens, it is through the practice of magical realism that he reaches the human depth of his country. His inner radicalism enables him to access his surrealist roots and the raw beauty that oscillates between heaven and earth. 15.06.2016 - 28.08.2016 Maison Européenne de la Photographie - Paris
w w w.storieswetellmovie.com
http://w w w.mep-fr.org
w w w.metmuseum.org
truephotojournal.com
TRUTH AND RIGTHNESS
We all have photographs at home, pictures of our babies who become children and then adults, our parents and siblings, our husbands and wives, our friends, our vacations. They lie in boxes or are organized in albums or languish in a computer file. Over time, they become markers of our mortality, small windows onto earlier moments in our lives, some of which are remembered, some not. These images are suffused with personal meanings. My parents as teenagers. My child as a newborn. At her sixth birthday. At eighteen. My young husband before his hair turned gray. My father, now dead. But there is nothing so banal as the snapshots of other people’s families—strangers who stand on a mountain top grinning or pose on the beach or hold up their infants to the camera.
26.6.08
16. Juni 2000
8. April '05
2.April 2001
Siri Hustvedt about ‘Overpainted Photographs’
65 Overpainted 15.April '05
22. April '05
18.5.07
11.02.98
GERHARD RICHTER
27.4.08
19.2.92
15. März 03
Jan. 92
We don’t use these pictures the way we use art, if we can be said to use art at all. For me, a work of art must be an enigma. It must push me into a position of unknowing or else I find myself bored by my own comprehension. I don’t write about art to explain it, but to explore what has happened between me and the image, both emotionally and intellectually. The act of looking, after all, always takes place in the first-person. I see the object, but the very act of seeing it breaches the divide between me and it. At that moment aren’t subject and object bound together in a unified loop of perception? Gerhard Richter’s history of using or referring to photographs in one way or another is long and complex, but whatever he does with an actual photo or the idea of a photo, it always feels reinvented.
24. März 2003
7.6.08
9. Jan. 2000
The faces and bodies of people dear to the painter appear and vanish or reveal themselves only as obscured presences, or even ghosts, and there are also people and places I cannot recognize because they are strange to me. That they are in some way personal is implicit in the very idea of the underlying photograph: He was there. He took a picture of that. But it can’t be explicit for me as a viewer who comes to the gallery to see them. My recognition comes from a familiarity with the underlying form itself, which has then been utterly reconfigured or abstracted by the intrusion of the imaginary—a fictive act of motion and color that is both right and true.
What happens when these images of what was are painted over? Their meanings change It instantly catapults the image into another tradition, another mode of seeing which is placed inside the long history of painting. A painting doesn’t 'save' a moment in the world. It isn’t a document recorded by a machine, but the trace of someone’s lived experience that may or may not represent things in the world. The dynamic between photo and paint becomes one of revelation and concealment, of seeing and blindness, of playing one dimension against and with the other, and of creating ambiguities between them. Where does the paint end and those leaves and branches begin?
12.3.89
14.2.98 25. Nov. 99
14. Nov. 1999
10.5.08
20.5.08
12.8.89
4. März 03
8.Nov. 1999
Some of the beach photos are given what I came to think of as the wave treatment. A great form of blue, turquoise, gray, green, and white rise up over a woman and child. Her face juts over its edge against an intensely blue sky, her legs partly visible beneath. All we see of him is the top of his head and another bit of his skin below. The artist’s intervening hand has created a thing in the scene that connotes, but doesn’t denote water. And by partly hiding them, the f luid shape has made the figures more intriguing, no longer the painter’s wife and son exactly, but creatures of an artistic imagination, transfigured by an embodied thought.
12. Febr. 01
Before their transformation, these were the artist’s personal photographs, some of them of his wife and children. In many of them, the intimacy between photographer and subject is apparent. There are also landscapes and cityscapes. There are houses snapped from the outside and the inside. There’s an airport with a plane. There are windows and doors and parts of rooms, a few of which include Richter’s paintings in the background, looking a little distant and dull, not anything like reproductions in a catalogue, but which made me think of his own blurred canvases. All in all, what I can see of the “before” pictures isn’t so different from the rather pedestrian photos I’ve taken myself. These glimpses of the ordinary snapshot that lies behind, below, between, or above the paint are essential to the cumulative emotional effects of these works.
73 MOOR
MAX SCHMELCHER
The location of the atelier looks like a stereotypical postcard of the Allgäu region. The old house is surrounded by rolling hills, a mineral spring just a few meters away, butterflies are flying around. When Schmelcher was twenty he left this scenery to travel the world after learning to be a carpenter. Iran, Saudi Arabia, USA, India – five years he was working in different countries drawing locals in his spare time. After returning Schmelcher starts to study art. Four decades later, the garden around his atelier is lined with the sculptures he created in his years of study. Demolished. Schmelcher decided that he will never be the next Michelangelo and therefore destroying and interpreting the motifs in a new way.
Are you telling a certain story with your sculptures, paintings and installations or are you rather presenting abstract ideas or memories?
Is Past an important theme of your artwork?
I recognized all of them as childhood memories. I think back to subjects that fascinated me when as a child. I used to catch and impale butterflies. I owned one of the biggest butterfly collection in the Allgäu. Now, I breed butterflies and set them free in the places I used to catch them. I make up for what I destroyed at that time. As children we jumped into mud holes at the Waldsee. Head first. When we stood in the sunlight afterwards the mud dried and blistered, linking the peat I use now to that memory. The story of the glass negatives is similar: We used to go up in the attic, go through all of these boxes and look at the pictures my granddad made. I was fascinated by them and now I can use this fascination. Children do things like that spontaneously. So these are the memories and experiences that I am building on. However, this happens unconsciously. You discover and then you experiment. When you’re an adult you have to relearn how to experiment, how to play.
I would say time is. The old glass negatives for example: If you count the years - babies who were photographed are eighty or ninety years old now. When I showed the installations twenty years ago, some visitors recognized themselves. The older people on the pictures have lived around eighty years as well. If you add up, that’s 170 years of history. Peat bog is growing a millimeter a year. Digging out ten centimeters of peat means you’re holding hundred years of history in your hands. That’s amazing, the peat bog is ten thousand years old, but it’s still alive, it’s organic. Some parts in the peat are still green and living. When I finally dry the material, it dies. You won’t be able to reverse that process. The butterfly topic is about metamorphoses. The egg becomes a flying butterfly. So that’s about time as well. About death, about life and about time.
I would like to tell the process of the emerging butterflies as a story. But how do you do that in a comprehensible way? I can’t describe it with words, so I’ll make a physical object. There are stories everywhere, even in the peat. It’s a ten thousand years old material. We barely know anything about the life after the ice age ten thousand years ago. The peat book is telling a very long story. You can’t read in it. You have to observe it.
Why did you start working with the material peat and the topic butterflies?
Just creating something without thinking ‘That needs to look nice.’ or ‘I need to show my talent.’ When you remove that thinking you won’t have any problem. You shouldn’t think. That’s the most important thing
How much do you intervene in the drying process of peat? How far do you let the material work itself? When drying, I am working with the four elements. I start with the earth, within it is the water and I dry with fire and air. When working with nature you always work with the fundamental elements. When I am applying a thick layer the peat will crack a lot more than when I’m applying a thin layer. So I can already imagine how it will turn out when modeling. And I can intervene later of course. Apply again, plunge, cut… as I see fit or necessary. But I also observe. Just like I observe the butterflies and caterpillars I observe what the material does and react to the material.
As an Asian growing up on Aruba that would always, well mostly always, mean that your parents have their own business. This would always be a supermarket. So my parents have their own business. It’s not your typical 21 st century supermarket where you enter and walk through aisles picking out your products, and then going to the checkout counter. This is an old school supermarket slash bar. An L-shape counter barricades the place. As you enter the store you would stand at the counter and ask for what you need or want. On the other side of the counter, my parents would attend to your needs. Also, as I mentioned it’s also a bar. Workers would come by and have a drink in the afternoon and my parents would serve them beer if they asked for it. Now that you have my parents’ supermarket slash bar image in your head, I could start telling you about my cheese story. I’m a big fan of cheese. I love cheese. I’d put cheese on anything if I could. I can’t go a week without cheese. I need it, I crave it, I want it, I love it. For me cheese makes everything taste so much better. Since my parents’ business is a supermarket, they would have to have cheese to sell. At the store there’s this big walk in refrigerator they would use to store produce, like fruits and cheese. In this walk in refrigerator the cheese isn’t a small piece of cheese you would see in the supermarket diary aisle, no, this cheese is a cheese wheel! The cheese wheel would be as big or a little bit bigger than a large pizza. My parents would cut the cheese wheel in four quarters. They would use the cut quarters of cheese to sell as slices or blocks.
77 WORD ON THE STREET
COLUMN
PEOPLE HAVE MORE STORIES TO TELL THEN THEY MIGHT INITIANALLY THINK. TO PROVOKE THEM FURTHER WE ASK THEM FOR ONE, WITH NOTHING BUT A RANDOM KEYWORD. EXPERIENCING A RANDOM MEMORY FROM A RANDOM PERSON.
When I was little, I think I was about seven or eight years old, I would sneak into the walk in refrigerator and dig out pieces of cheese from the cut quarter of cheese wheel with my finger. I did this several times without my parents finding out. Until one day I’ve dug out too much of cheese and they’ve noticed. My mom found out, because she went to get a cut quarter of the cheese wheel and saw the dug out pieces. My mom came out and called out to my dad. As a kid you’d be curious what is happening. So I stood at the corner of the fridge trying to eavesdrop. I heard my mom telling my dad: “Oh my god! I think we have a rat in the fridge! Look at the cheese!!”. She actually thought that there was a rat, but my dad wouldn't believe it, so he said: “No, it can’t be. Rat bite-marks don’t look like this at all!”. Then both of them were like: “What can it be then??” And a light bulb came on, they’ve caught on that is was me. They saw me and asked if it was I who dug out pieces of cheese? I only smiled back while trying to put on an innocent look. From this day on my parents gave me the nickname 'Mouse'.
story told by Mae
81 PREVIEW BAGRAD BADALIAN the belgian photogapher is telling colorful stories with his strong pictures
IMPACT CHRISTINE SPENGLER
IN THE NEXT ISSUE
A story isn't a story without having any impact on the reader, viewer or listener. Emotions are central topic in the next issue of Unfold. On the one side the expression and comunication of emotions and on the other side the consuming feeling of getting overtaken and totally lost in them. With a careful selection of stories we are discussing the impact of emotions on our lifestories.
the well renowned war photographer is talking about the impact of her work, the impact of war on her and about her latest project remembering deceased family members.
DEJA VU A true short story about a deja vu that literally changed the life of a man and his family.
An intriguing short story shows how a dĂŠjĂ vu literally changed the life of the writer. Bagrad Badalian captures emotional states in an innovative, creative and crazy way. The expression and emotions within this gallery will take you away to a new photographical world. War photographer Christine Spengler has captured and provoke many strong motions with her pictures. She is telling how a special way of mourning helped her overcoming the death of her brother. And about the rest? Well, you will see that in out next issue!
MODELS Now and Then - Phoebe, Isabel Fritsch, Sandra Yuen Skin Stories - Michael, Fanny, Rebecka, Dana, Tanja
CREATED
Inside Out - Brenda Perez Espinoza
at the FH Vorarlberg, University of Applied Science, InterMedia
THANKS TO
2016 – Dornbirn
CONCEPT & DESIGN
to the cosmetician Andreas Baumgaertner at Style-4-Life, Konstanz
Sandra Yuen, Sabine Grohe, Babs Hessing
to Museum Morsbroich
PRINT Druckhaus Gössler GmbH, Dornbirn
I M P R E S S U M
to our mentoring teachers Alexander Rufenach & Matthias Weissengruber
PHOTOGRAPHY Now and Then - Sabine Grohe Skin Stories - Babs Hessing Still Lifes - Vera Mercer Inside Out - Sandra Yuen Overpainted - Gerhard Richter. Butterf lies - Yuen, Grohe, Hessing Word on Street - Yuen, Grohe, Hessing
ARTWORK Overpainted - Gerhard Richter. Butterf lies - Max Schmelcher
to Max Schmelcher to the storyteller on the street Weng Mee Tang
€ 30,- $ 33,- £ 24,2 8 19 9 19 25