PREVIEW Foam Magazine Issue #21 MERGE

winter 2009 / #21

www.foammagazine.nl

Broomberg & Chanarin Claerbout Tarkovsky Umbrico WĂĽhlstrand Freudenthal / Verhagen van Duijvenboden Hatakeyama

â‚Ź17,50

foam magazine #21 / merge webshop

Seven Stories This collecti ˜

on of small boo ks is a new stage in the practice of Frank who con tinually challen ges the limits of ph otography and film and strives to avoid repeatin g himself.’

Subscribe to Foam Magazine and get a free copy of this unique collection!* Go to foammagazine.nl/shop, select the ‘subscription with free book’ offer and include the promotion code FRANK in the form.

* Published by Steidl. Available while stock lasts.

foam magazine #21 / merge

editorial

Editorial

Marloes Krijnen, director Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

A striking characteristic of the way many young artists work today is that they are far less attached to one single discipline than artists in the past. There are visual artists who make use of all sorts of media to express themselves, depending totally on the content to be expressed.

This sometimes takes place within a specific oeuvre; sometimes different media are even used within one specific artwork. Photography is also being made use of by visual artists who do not define themselves as photographers. Concurrently, there are also photographers who are conscious of a photographic tradition and who feel at home within that tradition, but who likewise do not hesitate to undergo cross-fertilization with other media. Much of this work expresses a gratifying nonconformity, sometimes even a somewhat anarchistic air, by which the content dictates the form. Such a close relationship between photo­ graphy and other media often leads to new, unexpected manifestations, which shine a new light on the nature and substance of the medium and places known certainties under discussion. This bond of photography with other media is the focal point of this issue of Foam Magazine.

We have succeeded in putting together eight portfolios in which photography relates to another medium in a surprising, and hopefully also inspiring way. Penelope Umbrico uses the Internet as a fertile source for her images. Her series Broken Sets (eBay) consists of bordered shots of broken LCD screens which were offered for sale on eBay. The abstract and intriguing patterns on the screens recall modernist paintings. By collecting image material from Internet, processing it and placing it in a new context, Umbrico redefines the problem of authorship. Completely different is the work of Swedish artist Gunnel Wåhlstrand. With great care and precision, she makes large format paintings from photos which give an impression of her father’s early youth. The result of this time-consuming and concentrated way of working exhibits a fascinating tension between technical reproduction and handwork, and inspires questions about the nature of representation and perception.

At the foundation of the newest series by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a well-known 1979 photo of an execution in Iran during the Islamist Revolution. Broomberg and Chanarin use never-before-shown image material of this execution and turn the documentary into an ­autonomous work on the complexity of historical events, the ambiguity of the reality and the influence of icons on our collective memory.

In his series Scales, made in cooperation with the Canadian Centre for ­Architecture in Montreal, Hatakeyama worked with a large number of architectural models and created work that focuses on the tension between architectural and photographic space. How different are the Polaroids that Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky made in both Italy and Russia. The photos express longing, nostalgia and melancholy, but are at the same time a study for his film Nostalghia. David Claerbout makes films as well, with photographic material sometimes at their basis. In his work, Claerbout investigates the intriguing relationship between both media and focuses on the complex nature of our perception of time. The Dutch duo Freudenthal / Verhagen have worked with a large number of fashion designers and produced very diverse work. In the work shown here, they explore the borders between fashion photo­ graphy, art, sculpture and good taste. Finally, Nickel van ­Duijvenboden

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is responsible for the portfolio that may push the limits of photography to its very edge: a portfolio without images, consisting solely of text.

Loyal readers of Foam Magazine will already have understood that this issue consists of eight instead of the usual six portfolios. Starting with this issue, each Foam Magazine will now include this number of portfolios: more image material, more content and more unexpected connections. What remains the same are our regular features such as On My Mind…, the interview with a prominent person from the world of photography – in this case Fred Ritchin, director of Pixel Press – and our books section. +

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contents

Contents On My Mind...

images selected by

Laura Noble ~ Noel Rodo-Vankeulen ~

Bettina von Zwehl ~ David Levi Strauss ~

David Neuman ~ Monique van Heist

Pages 16 – 21

Interview

with Fred Ritchin by Brian Palmer

Awakening the Digital Pages 22 – 26

~

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin ~ Afterlife

35 – 54

Broomberg and Chanarin’s latest project, Afterlife, is an investigation and a deconstruction of an iconic image taken in 1979 that came to define a moment in both Iranian and photographic history.

Merge: Theme introduction

A Journey Through a Hybrid Universe

by Marcel Feil

Pages 27 – 34

Portfolio Overview: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin ~ Afterlife Text by David Evans Pages 35 – 54

David Claerbout ~ Dancing Couples Text by Lieze Eneman

Pages 55 – 74

Andrey Tarkovsky ~ Bright, Bright Day

Text by Aveek Sen

Pages 75 – 94

Penelope Umbrico ~ Broken Sets (eBay) Text by Lyle Rexer

David Claerbout ~ Dancing Couples

55 – 74

David Claerbout’s video work Dancing Couples, here presented as a series of stills, experiments with notions of temporality.

Pages 95 – 114

Gunnel Wåhlstrand ~ Untitled Text by Aaron Schuman Pages 115 – 134

Freudenthal / Verhagen ~ Holy House & Polyhedra Text by Susan Bright Pages 135 – 154

Nickel van Duijvenboden ~ The Grand Absence /Plateau

Text by Alex Klein

Pages 155 – 174

Naoya Hatakeyama ~ Scales Text by Hubertus von Amelunxen

Pages 175 – 194

~

Photobooks

by Sebastian Hau

Andrey Tarkovsky ~ Bright, Bright Day

75 – 90

Pages 196 – 199

Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam Exhibition Programme

Alexander Rodchenko ~ Revolution in Photography

Pages 201 – 216

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Andrey Tarkovsky took hundreds of Polaroids collecting material, scenes and moods for his film ­Nostalghia. As a viewer you immediately recognize the sublime light and dreamy atmosphere that distinguish his visual language and his film making.

PLATEAU (2008)

Excerpts from the first two chapters 379 She left no footprints. The snow was too compact. It crunched beneath her feet, unabsorbing, unresonating. The sound was so dry that the ice plateau seemed to be made of a massive bulk of felt. The fact that there was no wind that day, the sky shrouded in thick mist, reinforced this feeling.

Shapes were barely distinguishable, odours remained suspended in the cold air, fingertips were too frosted to feel anything, and the sounds of colliding ice islands were stifled before they reached the ear. She, alone, generated sound. The lining of her hood rustled continuously against her ears, her trouser-legs rubbed against each other with every step.

The tripod clicked as she placed the heavy camera body in the groove.

She could feel the coldness of the metal through her mittens. Her hands wavered, touching the equipment more often than necessary. She was not quite focused. The sequence was still illogical to her. She glanced at him nervously several times, but he showed no sign of helping her. Clumsily she attempted to loosen one of the tripod legs, but the adjustment ring scarcely gave way. The tripod had stood outside for months, anchored in the ice to ensure it always maintained the same viewpoint. The cold air had slowly crumbled the rubber grips. She had to take off her mitten to loosen the leg. Standing on tiptoe, she peered at the recessed spirit level on top of the camera body and rocked the tripod to and fro until it was plumb. She then turned it tight. Without saying anything, he handed her the lens, a heavy lump of glass that protruded through the lens board like an hourglass. She clamped it in the holder, expanded the bellows enough to have the lens project an image onto the focusing screen, and finally opened the shutter.

‘And now?’ she said, as she lowered her hands.

‘Focus.’

She pulled the black cloth over her head and rested the lead-weighted hem in a fold of the bellows.

‘Well?’ he inquired.

‘Shapes in a mist.’

He chuckled silently. ‘That is unavoidable today.’

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Penelope Umbrico ~ Broken Sets (eBay)

91 – 114

Penelope Umbrico collects her material from the Internet. This time she focused on broken LCD screens for sale on eBay. Abstract and beautiful, the patterns remind us of modernist paintings.

Gunnel Wåhlstrand ~ Untitled

115 – 134

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Nickel van Duijvenboden ~ The Grand Absence / Plateau

Naoya Hatakeyama ~ Scales Based on a series commissioned by the Canadian Architecture Centre, Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Scales is an attempt to investigate how architecture and three-dimensionality can be translated onto a flat surface.

135 – 154

With a humorous approach to daily life and a style undeniably all of their own, the Dutch duo of ­Freudenthal and Verhagen are using and abusing contemporary imagery and photographic techniques.

Ute and Lev did not know where they were. Not precisely. They had taken their last reading the day before yesterday: 84º10’N 121º37’W. On average they drifted one hundred and fifty metres per hour, and this would continue until they were spewed out by the melting pack ice in the vicinity of Greenland. They were familiar with the flow chart and the courses that the previous manned drifting stations had traversed. On the chart their coloured lines formed a whimsical pattern around the North Pole.

NP15, the camp established on the middle of the ice floe, comprised simple quarters in the form of a trailer, a laboratory with adjoining engine room housed in three connected tents, a small drilling rig and a radio tower. It all looked provisional; more attention had been paid to the instruments than the living accommodation. Except for the stars there were no reference points here: no hills, no mainland, no vegetation — nothing

155 – 174

Using fiction as a mean of visualization Nickel van Duijvenboden reflects in this entirely text-based portfolio on images and the boundaries of the medium of photography.

With black ink, water and great precision, Gunnel Wåhlstrand meticulously reconstructs the life of the father she never got a chance to know.

Freudenthal / Verhagen ~ Holy House & Polyhedra

‘So, a sharp mist,’ she understood. As she pressed the loupe against the focusing screen, her breathing created vapour on the ground glass.

She fumbled vainly with her right arm for the wheel at the end of the focusing stage.

‘Here,’ he said as he guided her hand. ‘Use the pieces of ice on the ground.’

As she moved the lens inwards with the wheel, the frozen ground appeared upside down at the top of the image. She focused on an almost imperceptible dark form, a curve that loomed up out of the whiteness. It pierced the fog like the bow of a ship in a miniature world.

‘What was it again, one stop overexposure?’

‘At least. You only have whites, you have to compensate.’

He handed her the light meter. A ribbed white slide was positioned in front of the selenium sensors to temper the incidence of light. She pointed the meter towards the landscape in front of her, pressed the switch on the side of the apparatus and took a reading. He nodded as he took the light meter and replaced it in his jacket pocket. She adjusted the aperture, attached the cable release, closed the shutter and pulled the lever to cock it.

She then stood behind the camera, took the black metal cassette from him and clamped it under the focusing screen. She pulled the slide sideways so that the film in the camera was uncovered and raised her hand with the cable release clasped in her fingers. This is how she envisaged herself and Lev, viewed from behind, standing in front of the white landscape, motionless, her hand raised. She peered over the camera at the Arctic Ocean hidden from view and listened to their breathing. Then she pressed the shutter release.

175 – 194

foam magazine #21 / merge Six well-known figures from the cultural world selected an image that has recently been on their minds...

On My Mind...

Catalan gentlemen, Barcelona 2008 © LIuís Artús, courtesy of Diemar/Noble Photography, London

Laura Noble When I first saw this photograph it stopped me in my tracks as a wonderful example of how good life can be. Here we have two men, brothers in fact, on the beach in Barcelona, tanned, happy and relaxed in their own skin. The absence of an airbrush and presence of wrinkles fills me with joy. This image proves that there is nothing wrong with getting older and we should celebrate the fact, not hide it.

When we exhibited Lluís Artús’ photographs in the gallery I looked forward to seeing them each day, greeting me with their confident and proud postures. It brought a smile to all who saw it, especially men who often commented on their own aspirations for old age on seeing the ‘Catalan gentlemen’. I felt as if I knew them and even referred them as ‘my favourite silver foxes’. The gentleman on the right is certainly more body-conscious than his brother. His stomach is held in with a status watch on his wrist and perfect teeth all display his attempts at holding back the tide of age. This is a wonderful, positive image of old age, a

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striking photographic portrait. It feels like a classic of the future. There is a familiarity to it that comes from their ease in front of the camera and the glorious imperfections of real life. Just as August Sander believed in photographing each person on their own terms, so does Artús, with glorious results. +

Laura Noble is an artist, writer and Director of Diemar/Noble Photography gallery, London. She lectures on photography worldwide, writes regularly for numerous publications and is the author of The Art of Collecting Photography (AVA Publishing, 2006).

Lluís Artús is born in 1965 and studied photography in the Institut d’Estudis ­Fotografics de Catalunya. After 10 years living and working in London he returned to his native Barcelona where he now works on his own projects.

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Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No. 4 June – September 2004 Saratoga Springs, New York; Middlesex, Vermont; Johnson, Vermont; Eden Mills, Vermont; Greensboro, North Carolina © Sharon Harper

Noel Rodo-Vankeulen I’ve always thought that it was a risky endeavor for a photographer to take the moon and stars as a subject. Not only are the heavens photographically polymorphic, that is, obsessive fodder for the amateur and specialist alike, but in their seductive combination they seem to be an apt representation of the contemporary medium’s disingenuous qualities. It is the pursuit of all that is wholly allegoric and sentimental in photography – the light in the darkness. However, for Sharon Harper, whose photograph Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No. 4, June – ­September 2004, which appears to embody many of these notions, her idea that photography can be a form of mediation with the hidden aspects of nature is something which attracts me greatly.

Looking at Harper’s work I get the feeling she is at odds with our longing to use the camera to archive or, specifically, to preserve subjects.

It is here, in our vain desire for nostalgic understanding, that the medium becomes underutilized and detached from its autogenic power. In a

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sense, No. 4 is our inability to see photographically. In its sublime expressionist pictorial it presents time, place and presence as an intangible truth. Of course it’s hard to imagine photographs of the moon without a sense of longing – longing for closeness to a universe so obviously inhuman and longing for the eye of a machine in tune with that time. Harper’s negotiation brings me closer to this mystery, where humanity’s cryptic lust for collective misunderstanding is so eloquently simple. + Noel Rodo-Vankeulen is a photographer and writer who lives and works in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. As well as exhibiting his work in Canada, the US and abroad, he writes the popular photography blog We Can’t Paint.

Sharon Harper lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is an assistant professor at Harvard University. Her work is represented by Galerie Roepke, Cologne and Rick Wester Fine Art, New York.

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Ultrasound scan at 20 weeks gestation, 2008

Bettina von Zwehl Last year a friend excitedly showed me this ultrasound scan of her unborn baby. I’d seen plenty of these scans before – my own included – but there was something about this particular one that struck me – that took my breath away.

The way we view the foetus, especially it seems in terms of how we visualize it, has undergone a profound and dramatic shift in recent years. Advances in high-res 3D ultrasound imaging have meant that the previously private, intimate world of the foetus can be scrutinized, cooed over and also worried about like never before.

The foetus can be imaged and seen by the outside world on a screen, moving about, sucking its thumb, swallowing, kicking. It can even be operated upon. And in the context of the level of detail that I know some scans are capable of producing, this image seems exceptionally humble, crude almost. And it’s maybe because of its basic-ness and extraordinary functionality that this picture somehow manages to retain a sense of privacy – both for the mother and for the baby.

As an artist fascinated by portraiture, I am particularly interested in the human profile at different stages of life. For me there is an uncanny quality to profile portraits, perhaps related to what remains unseen, or untold. Profiles are often characterized by a sense of coldness, a lack

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of intimacy, which often belies a subject’s true character or emotion.

Either because of this, or in spite of it, I have found working with a person’s profile a most compelling strategy to use in my own portrait work.

This picture – this tiny embryonic human being floating in a kind of grainy black photographic anti-matter has been on my mind for many reasons; for its iconic beauty, for the classical purity of its lines, for its intense black and white contrast, for the lack of projection of eyes and ears, and most of all for the fragility of its subject, its utter simplicity, and for the absolute and unknowable enormity of what it represents: the beginning of life. +

Bettina von Zwehl is a German artist based in London. She has built an international reputation for her subtle and unnerving photographic portraits.

Her photographs can be found in collections including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Rubell Family Collection. Steidl and Photoworks have recently co-published her first monograph. Bettina von Zwehl is a visiting lecturer in photography at the University of the Arts, London.

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© Robert Bergman, 1987, all rights reserved, courtesy of Robert Bergman

David Levi Strauss When my mother died, I was holding her face in my hands and looking into her eyes. I thought I should be able to save her, and I tried to hold her gaze, to hold her here, but the moment she died, her eyes went out, and I was left alone. In her last weeks, the skin of her face had pulled taut around her skull to create a face I had never seen before, though I’d known her all my life. It was her true face, and it was new, and it was the most beautiful face I have ever seen.

This is what I remembered when I first saw Robert Bergman’s ­photograph of an old woman in a lavender robe, with light on her hair and behind her eyes. It’s the first photograph in his extraordinary book, A Kind of Rapture, and it’s still the hardest one for me to look at.

Cartier-Bresson said that one of the most difficult things to do in photography is to make a portrait. It’s no problem, of course, to aim a camera and shoot someone, but to portray (literally, to draw forth or ­reveal) another is something else entirely. The faces in Robert ­Bergman’s photographs are all so penetrating that one must spend a good deal of time looking at them to begin to realize their scope. Finally, it is difficult to think of a human emotion that is not revealed in them.

The truth is, photography can only do a couple of things really well.

It can make visible the tracery of a relation, beginning with the relation

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between the photographer and his or her subject, and it can reflect on death. Neither of these effects is automatic, by any means, but they are possible. One would think that, out of the millions of photographs made of people over the last 170 years, these things would have happened more often, but in fact they are exceedingly rare.

Robert Bergman is a great portraitist. What’s going on in these images can’t be faked. We’ve never met, but based on these portraits, I trust him. I would even have trusted him with my mother’s face. +

David Levi Strauss’s books include ­Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography & Politics and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art & Politics, as well as, most recently, From Head to Hand: Art & The Manual. He received the Infinity Award for writing from the International Center of Photography in 2007 and is Chair of the graduate program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Robert Bergman is an American photographer. His work is currently e­ xhibited at P.S.1 in New York (until January 4, 2010) and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (until January 10, 2010).

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A different STATE of mind (No. 24), 2008-2009 © Amy Simon, courtesy Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York

David Neuman An image that speaks to you like the best novel. An image charged with simplicity. Most of us would not even stop to reflect. We are seeing this depiction of history from a human topography, more or less five to six feet from the ground. The grandiosity of a time long passed, the efficient solution of a newcomer (or a landlord?), with no passion or understanding for continuity or fairness. The open door of solid, quality wood leading us away to more of this. Cheap paint, hastily applied, full of chalk that would make our hands come off white if we were to touch the slightly cold, moist surface of the wall.

Ground that cannot be erased. Ground that contains so much refined information. Where are we? Why would I like to walk in this (apartment?) with bare feet, why would I like to add to or pick up the dirt from the tiles? How come I can hear the noise from outside? How come I can feel the heat and the humidity? How is it like in the rain or,

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even worse, in the cold? When it all gets unbearable, when I need to sleep… I would ever so gently push the door shut, close everything out and just listen to the internalized sounds of the room(s).

I would sleep well. I know I would. + David Neuman is the founding director of Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, a contemporary museum located in the old Free Port of Stockholm. David ­Neuman has curated numerous exhibitions and is the cofounder of the International Curator MA Program at Stockholm University, where he holds the position of affiliated professor.

Amy Simon is currently showing her work at the Venice Biennale (Arsenale) in the exhibition Making Worlds. She is also having a solo exhibition at ­Andrea ­Meislin Gallery, New York City, until December 19, 2009.

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Adrien Brody, published in Los Angeles Confidential, January 2009 Š Jeff Vespa, courtesy Los Angeles Confidential, Counter Photos

Monique van Heist I tore this photo of Adrien Brody out of the Los Angeles Confidential when I was in LA in January. It has been hanging above my computer for months now. He looks me in the eye when I am working. My first reaction to the picture was (of course): wow! This guy looks sexy! I want him! Which is easy to think of a very famous person who is out of your reach big time.

But, when you look closer, he seems to be saying: ok, alright, yes, it will be ok. Don’t worry. He almost starts nodding his head.

I keep waiting for him to start talking to me, telling me not to work too hard, telling me things will work out just fine. I stare him in the eyes, shameless, because I can. It gives me peace of mind, a quiet moment.

When I found this photo my heart was broken, trying to get over a

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love that never happened. Maybe Adrien helped me get over it. He made me stare at him, he did not mind.

Last week I fell in love. It makes me extremely happy, scares me a

lot, confuses me, and makes me smile all day. This time it is happening.

I told Adrien I might not be paying that much attention to him anymore, and thanked him for his help. He told me it was his pleasure. +

Monique van Heist is a fashion designer based in Rotterdam. Since 2004 she has had her own label, moniquevanheist. She was the winner of the MercedesBenz Dutch Fashion Awards in 2008.

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interview

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foam magazine #21 / merge

interview

Fred Ritchin Awakening the Digital Interview by Brian Palmer Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark Fred Ritchin is an educator and author of the recently published book, After Photography. He is also a longtime editor, formerly picture editor of The New York Times Magazine and executive editor of Camera Arts, and is director of PixelPress, an organization that has published an online Web site experimenting with documentary work online and has also collaborated with many human rights organizations on media campaigns.

He has witnessed and analyzed the development of photography, particularly photojournalism, for more than three decades. Ritchin spoke with Brian Palmer at New York University about the early years of the digital revolution, during which he believes many opportunities to shape the new technology to help build a more democratic media environment were lost, and about the present day, where digital continues to pose challenges – and offer tremendous opportunities – to imagemakers and the global community.

How did you first get involved in photography?

When I was in college I worked for the yearbook and they gave me use of a camera, a darkroom, and free paper. I would work all night, on my own, learning by trial and error. And when I entered publishing for my first job, I found that working with photographs was somehow safer than with words because editors were less sure how to deal with images. Photographs could be more subversive, with multiple meanings, ambiguous, somewhat outside the control of editors who would change nearly every word in a sentence. I felt sorry for the writers and better able to argue for the work of the photographers.

The first two sentences of your book After Photography are: ‘We have entered the digital age. And the digital age has entered us.’ Entered us how?

The concept is that all media change us. The media change us, we create new media, they change us – it’s dialectical – but it puts us on different pathways, so the fact that we created the telegraph machine or the camera then affects succeeding creations, and us.

The other issue is that the digital age is about an environment, it’s not just about tools. I think many people misperceive this revolution.

You can’t have a revolution solely of tools. It’s not the transition from the pistol to the submachine gun that we’re talking about. We’re talking about a whole new environment in which we are going to reconceive ourselves and the world, and so when we create these digital machines, tools and so on, what we’re actually doing is creating a new environment

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for ourselves. But it’s largely unconscious. So the digital age entering us is about the idea that being surrounded by digital media is accelerating a reconceptualization of a worldview.

What worldview are we now absorbing?

The digital age is offering us this sort of decentering. I may be wrong, but I think I’m the only one in the world who’s written about it this way: Quantum physics is about discrete energy packets and digital is about discrete segments: this is not an accident. A Newtonian worldview is about continuity and so is the analog worldview. The universe is both Newtonian and quantum. The universe is both analog and digital; they coexist. Light – and photography is about light – functions as wave and particle simultaneously. When you look at it, only then does it become one or the other, as one sees in the famous double slit experiment. The ambiguity is fantastic. In my view, what we’re doing is switching from a Newtonian to a quantum conception of the universe by entering the digital, and I find that both fascinating and exhilarating, if for the moment largely unconscious.

Hypertext and the Web are much closer to quantum physics than to the Newtonian – the ideas of nonlinearity and nonlocality. The Web is about nonlocality. If I had friend in Japan, I might be much more in contact with that person in the asynchronous Internet than I can be with my next-door neighbor, whom I almost never speak to. By going into this virtual, quantum universe, I’m now capable of thinking that time goes backwards, that there are parallel universes, that wave and particle ­coexist.

Photographers in the conventional analog sense have seen the medium functioning as cause and effect: the light comes down and the negative is exposed – that’s Newtonian; that’s billiard balls. But in the quantum universe, the digital universe, you have these discrete pixels, you have these zeros and ones. Each can be changed independently. My sense is that 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the world is going to wake up and say: My God, the digital revolution was largely about reconceiving the world as quantum! The code-based digital revolution was also about reconceiving the world in terms of genotype instead of phenotype! Phenotype is appearance, that’s what analog photography is about. Genotype is about code, which is essentially what digital media are about. It’s not an accident that the introduction of digital media coincides with the moment when we’ve reconceived ourselves as DNA. We’re a hell of a lot more complex than we thought we were. Looking at a Richard Avedon

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interview

portrait is wonderful, but it misses the code-based human in which you see our histories, our overlaps, and our futures.

What interests me as well is the reading of time in multiple dimensions, in multiple ways. We often say photography is capturing the present in order to see it as the past. In my book After Photography, I write about photographing the future – why can’t you do that for example as a way of pointing out what the world will look like if we do nothing about global warming? Instead of waiting for the apocalypse and photographing the result, why not use photography to help prevent it – show what scientists predict it would look like for part of New York City to be underwater as a way of asking people and governments to change their behavior.

I teach a course called the Future of Imaging, and I always think I’m talking about the present while people always say, ‘but you’re talking 10 or 20 years in the future’. You can feel code-based issues all around us; this idea of being transgendered, transhuman, post-human for example – these are code-based issues as well as sociological and psychological and political. I think it’s fascinating stuff, and I think that there’s a gigantic resistance in society to considering them. If you really have a revolution, it’s revolutionary. It’s not only using a word processor instead of a typewriter or a digital camera instead of film.

Using your 1990 book In Our Own Image as a benchmark, what were you thinking then about digital?

Actually even before that, in 1984, I wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine, called ‘Photography’s New Bag of Tricks’. At that time, digital imaging meant Scitex machines, these half-million dollar, million dollar machines with a trained technician who had to take a two-week fulltime course. Only major magazines and big corporations could afford them, not individual artists. And there was no Photoshop. That came five or six years later. I was concerned with issues of malleability, because in the fixed analog world the photograph is a recording of the visible. It’s certainly an interpretation, and what’s recorded may be either trivial or misleading, but we knew that it was a recording.

At that time, magazines started to go into digital production where you could do all the layouts on the screen. You didn’t need to do things in the old way with paper and paste and scissors and razors. You could transmit the publication immediately to the printer. So I knew that it would be irresistible – once images were in the digital format, why not change them? Why wouldn’t you change them?

You’re referring to the National Geographic cover?

The pyramids. I interviewed the editor of the Geographic and he called digitally squeezing the pyramids closer together to make a vertical image from a horizontal photograph a retroactive repositioning of the photographer a few feet to one side. It was no big deal to him. I was interested that he was somehow into time travel or even a quantum universe.

He didn’t mean it that way, but what he did seemed enormous to me.

I wanted to warn the journalistic media world that this stuff is coming and being smart people as we are, we should sit down and figure out what to do about it.

We can see 25 years later that the journalistic community has done little in terms of addressing issues of credibility, authenticity. Governments have done very little, aside from the attempt in France now in advertising photos – if the National Assembly passes it – to warn people that the image has been changed, particularly out of a concern about anorexia and ultra-thin models. There is a similar attempt in England.

But even that has taken a long time.

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After Photography is saying that that window of opportunity is ­closing on keeping a strong sense of photographic credibility, and so now the good thing to do is to really think about the new and exciting things you can do in digital, including coming up with forms of resistance to prevent those in power – governments, movie stars, advertisers – from messing around with people by staging photographs so that they appear to say one thing when actually something else is also going on.

I thought of this because when I worked briefly at Time magazine.

I researched the ‘Pictures of the Year’ feature in 1978. Pope John Paul II had gone to Auschwitz. He knelt by the eternal flame. I was very moved.

But when I looked at the outtakes, I saw all these images of dozens of journalists just a few meters away photographing him. So what we all saw as this unbelievably poetic, spiritual gesture of the Pope kneeling at the eternal flame was also a media event. No one else saw these other images except the magazine’s editors and researchers. And so in the digital environment, why not show that moment and then roll over that image with the mouse, the cursor, to show context? The readers can then judge for themselves.

Having photographed at the White House, I saw how its Office of Production works to set up photo ops. Don’t a lot of people have a lot invested in maintaining the illusion?

I agree. This exposure of the manipulation doesn’t cost anything to do but nobody does it. Publications too often share in the sometimes fake authority of the politicians and the governments and the celebrities.

They’re not always being honest.

How did we end up invading Iraq when there were no weapons of mass destruction there? How did we wind up basically kowtowing to those in power and photographing the invasion of Iraq as if it was a World War II rerun with a Mission Accomplished photo opportunity on top of it all? Journalists really have to be wondering, to what extent are we doing public relations or are we doing critical investigations? The idea of doing public relations is you’re in with the power. If you’re exploring things critically, then you’re always outside the power. It’s actually quite painful to position oneself outside the power. It takes a lot of personal strength to look at things, evaluate them, and report on them from a position of curiosity, of questioning as opposed to wanting to participate. It’s like going to a banquet. You don’t want to stand back and photograph it. You want to be part of it. You want to eat.

I think that photography, particularly photojournalism, lacks sufficient intellectual inquiry. It lacks intellectual frameworks. It gives prizes for all kinds of work that looks like other work but doesn’t really bring us somewhere else. At the end of the day what’s most important to me is the world, not photography. Often what happens in the business or the industry of photography is that photography usurps the world. The image itself becomes more important than the world. But we must ask, what’s the impact of the image? Did it change anything? Did it help the people being photographed?

These are the reasons I’ve written the books, these are the reasons I’ve been a picture editor, these are the reasons I’m a professor, to ask the question: does all this imagery help or hurt us in trying to make the world a better and more comprehensible place to live in?

You’ve spoken about the revolutionary potential of digital and the ­opportunities out there, but university photography programs, generally speaking, seem to be rather traditional and pointed toward the past.

How do you teach photography in an environment in which people are beguiled by digital but fundamentally afraid of how it’s changing the world they know?

Photography at its root means writing and drawing with light. It’s not about cameras. It’s not about tripods. It’s really about an attempt to describe and communicate what is important to the observer. In that sense,

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it’s not a mechanical age medium. It has the freedom of drawing, poetry, of meditation. It has as much freedom as the human spirit is capable of.

So if you start with the human spirit – photography is an intermediary and an amplifier, and often a limitation as well – then you’re starting in a place where anything is possible. In my book I describe David Rokeby, who uses a camera to make music. He’ll use the camera to observe gestures and so on. The software is written to output it as music. I’d love to be able to photograph a demonstration, a political demonstration, and output it as music. Outputting it as music is a form of writing with light. I’m not limited to one idea of what photography needs to be. So in that sense, I can say that most photographic programs are using a very small set of possibilities within the photographic potentials and that the students themselves, I find, are generally much more open. They themselves are sets of possibilities and potentials. If they then meet a photography that is there to work with, to collaborate with them in this giant set of potentials, then you’re not only worried about the f/64 movement and Edward Weston or Pictorialism. You’re not always looking backward to fit into a tradition, which can be very reassuring, but you’re saying, what does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to live on this planet? What does it mean to cohabit with the mammals? What do these things mean? And then photography at its best becomes, in a way, a song of the self and a song of the planet.

You give your students a story by Julio Cortázar, show them Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and give them Don DeLillo’s White Noise to read. Isn’t that kind of heterodox for a photography professor?

I don’t want students to say, oh, if I do it like Cartier-Bresson I’m a good photographer. I think what has to happen is that photographers understand, critically, that they’re able to read photographs and other media and ask questions like, what does it really do? What’s it about? How can it be interpreted differently? How can it be contextualized differently?

This will then affect their own work.

I’m trying to say to the students, look at these different approaches to photography, where is the authenticity? Where do you want to join in? If you’re going to be a commercial photographer in the sense that you’re going to commodify everything, well, what happened to Michel in ­Cortázar’s story was that he was able to better understand life and himself by interrogating the photographic process. So the act of photography is not one act. It’s not simply saying point the lens this way because that’s foolish. You don’t have to go to university to learn that. I can give anybody a camera and a 10-minute lesson and he’s a photographer.

By assigning White Noise, the Don DeLillo novel, I’m posing questions about the overlay of image on so many aspects of daily life and the ways in which that overlay of image becomes a simulation, a simulacrum, a distortion, a commodity that becomes as important as air and water to so many people, a thing which we need to live.

I often use an example from when I was a child. We went to the market and brought home tomatoes that were every shape and every color. They were bruised and marred but when you bit into one, it had an amazing taste and liquidity. It ran out of your mouth. You were in this place that the tomato brought you to – you were in the place of ‘tomato’.

Now you go the market and all the tomatoes are the same color. They’re perfect – no blemishes – but they’ve become almost plastic and they have no taste. The image of the tomato has triumphed over the tomato itself.And I think that, similarly, image has largely suppressed the potential for any meaningful politics, because you have to look a certain way, you have to talk a certain way, to be an effective politician. The actual issues are often avoided. Image reigns.

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So you’re essentially planting these seeds in students so that they ­develop tools and skills?

Students may think that they are entering this field and if they follow its traditions everything will be fine. Then you hear you’re at this extraordinary point in history where the possibilities and challenges have never been greater. It requires enormous confidence in your own intuitive abilities, your own belief in what’s authentic, to go and find pathways that are the most meaningful while knowing that we have all kinds of wonderful predecessors. But they are predecessors. You can’t necessarily do what other people did. You as an individual are going to have your own needs and aspirations.

I remember interviewing Henri Cartier-Bresson and he told me that there are four important books to read. One was Zen and the Art of ­Archery by Eugen Herrigel. With all the flaws of the book and all the criticism, what I took away was how you, more or less, hit the target when you’re not really trying to hit the target, because if you try to hit the target, it’s much harder than if you don’t try to hit it. How do you catch a butterfly? You can run after one with a net or you can open the net and let it come to you. If you open the net and let it come to you, it means that you’re open to the butterfly, ready for it. You’re ready for life, you’re ready for the world, you’re ready for the spirit. To me that is the ‘decisive moment’ that Henri was talking about.

What did we miss? What did I miss?

Simply put, I think that photography, writing with light, is about looking for a space of illumination. It’s not really about a camera. +

Fred Ritchin is professor of photography and imaging at New York University. Previously the picture editor of the New York Times Magazine, executive editor of Camera Arts magazine, and founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program at the International Center of Photography, Ritchin has written and lectured internationally on media for many years. The author of In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography, his essays have also appeared in books such as In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, Sahel: The End of the Road, and Under Fire; Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam.

He is also director of PixelPress (pixelpress.org) an organization that

works at the intersection of new media, documentary and human rights, collaborating with humanitarian organizations on campaigns, for instance to wipe out polio or to advance the Millennium Development Goals. He lives with his family in New York City.

Brian Palmer is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Palmer has written for publications including Mother Jones, The Huffington Post, Pixel Press.org and ColorLines. He is on the faculty of The School of Visual Arts’ MFA Photography, Video, & Related Media Program in New York City. From 2000 to 2002 Palmer was an on-air correspondent at CNN. Prior to that he was a staff writer at Fortune and Beijing Bureau Chief for US News & World Report. He began his career in journalism in 1988 at The Village Voice newspaper. In 2008 he produced Full Disclosure, a documentary based on his embeds in Iraq with a US Marine infantry unit, for which he received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Applied Research Center.

Mary Ellen Mark is an American photographer known for her documentary photography and her portraiture. She had has published 16 books and has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. She has received numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dr. Erich Salomon Preis Award, and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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from the series Waves From The Web, 2009 Š Anne de Vries

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~ A Journey Through a Hybrid Universe ~

by Marcel Feil ~ curator Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam An annual ritual to be marked in one’s diary far in advance is a visit to the graduate shows at the Netherlands’ various art academies. Although the Netherlands is a small country, it has no fewer than five academies which are worth a visit. The overall comparison of the work that the various academies produce, judging the level in respect to previous years, getting acquainted with the work of a new generation of photographers, conversations with individual students, teachers and colleagues – all of these activities typify a visit to a graduate show and make it rewarding.

And of course every year again there are great expectations: the hidden hope that this time an exceptional talent will be revealed, that there will be evidence of an unusually good year, full of stimulating, intriguing work.

In short, the hope of seeing work that is relevant because it is original and adds something new to what already exists. It goes without saying that such work is by definition much scarcer than work that surprises less or not at all: the amount of work that introduces nothing new, but validates, copies or quotes is far greater.

In recent visits to various graduate exhibitions, it became apparent that the work which appealed most to the imagination and which people talked about the most often diverged sharply from the traditional, framed or mounted prints fastened neatly to the wall. Most of this was work in which photography was intentionally shown in connection with other media, such as painting, video, sculpture or graphic design. This connection was sometimes so intimate that a unique fusion existed – this not only created a form all its own, but led to questioning the nature as well as the boundaries of a specific medium. And even though much of this work was still far from fully formed and from the point of view of quality there was still room for improvement, nevertheless, the work stood out from the rest as refreshing and stimulating.

A significant reason for this is that the work at once appears to relate to photographic traditions and a recognizable and established pho

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tographic vocabulary in a completely free and independent way. Many students yield to the temptation to express themselves in familiar visual language, usually in the hope of linking their own work to a certain tradition and charge it with an aura of originality. Their own contribution, however, is then often woefully thin. It is work that faces the past and has been shaped by the idea ‘that’s how photography has to be’. Much more interesting is work created with knowledge of its own history, but from the idea that ‘photography could also be like this’. This is work that explicitly questions certainties, even rejects them, and looks critically at traditions, dogmas and sacred cows. This obstinate and non-conformist stance certainly does not always lead to good work, but does attest to a mentality which is pleasantly refreshing – a mentality that is able to break open what has been stuck and to make room for new developments. More than the work itself, perhaps, was the mentality that made it appealing: the experimental and slightly anarchistic ‘do it yourself’ attitude expressed by the exhibited work. It was work that did not look back at the past, but forward to the future. And this is of great significance because photography, as well as society as a whole, is going through a process of change which is fundamentally altering how we regard ourselves and the world. An open view of the future and critical consideration of the fundamentals of both photography and our vision of the world are of particular importance in this present time of radical yet subtle transition. It may seem like a lot to say, but questions concerning representation, coding, communication, perception, falsification and authenticity are now more important than ever.

This searching, open mentality of young artists in particular, who don’t shy away from fusing photography with other media, can be directly or indirectly linked to the widespread digitalization of our society. The cause is thus far broader than just the digitalization of the medium of photography itself. Of course this also significantly affects working methods, the nature of photography and the applicability of image material, and this is

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Human Colour Wheel Fig. 24, 2009, part of the publication A Study on Colour Š Katja Mater

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Human Colour Wheel Fig. 03a, 2009, part of the publication A Study on Colour Š Katja Mater

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Silent Storm from the series Waves From The Web, 2009 Š Anne de Vries

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~ An increasing number of artists within the newest generation are no longer concerned about which label gets placed on them ~ naturally also reflected on by artists, but the primary issue is ultimately the set of instruments. It has to do with the means, the medium, and less with how this can be utilized in a much broader, societal connection.

Yet it is good to first carefully consider a few of the effects of the digitalization of photography. The process is not yet fully completed and is one aspect of much greater and more sweeping developments, namely the electronic revolution which began in the first half of the 20 th century and has had a strong influence on all segments of our society. Digitalization, including that of image and sound, can be seen as a following and possibly even a decisive phase in this radical development. A major consequence is the de-objectification of the photographic image.

Since the beginning of its history, the photographic image has always been inextricably linked to a material manifestation: a negative necessary for the exposure and a printing medium which uses chemicals influenced by light to induce the image and to fix it. This was an explicit, photochemical process in which cause and effect were clear. An essential aspect was that the photographic image was always inseparably linked to a physical carrier, to an object, namely the photo. The photographic print as object meant that a photo was always limited by time and space.

Regardless of the number of prints made from a specific exposure, all exist as physical manifestations of a certain place at a certain time.

Thus, these objects, the prints, can also be collected, something which has been done enthusiastically over roughly the last hundred years and is still being done today – a need which, as strong as it is, now seems nearly archaic.

The digitalization of image has fundamentally changed the physical nature of photography. Photographic imagery no longer corresponds to a unique object – instead an image can be invoked, processed, duplicated or transmitted to a very wide range of carriers. Image can now be viewed on screens of every sort: from LCD to plasma screens, on telephones, iPods, cameras and computer monitors. Image and carrier have long abandoned their convergence. Numerous media exist that also actually function as a medium, as a means of transmitting information, in this case image. The image itself has become immaterial, as it were. Minuscule electronic pulsations, voluminous data and difficult-to-fathom technological processes which are taken for granted lie at the foundation of such images. The image can ultimately be reduced to a quantity of pluses and minuses, to a specific code.

This de-objectification and coding of image has a number of important consequences. The existence of a code at the basis of the image also means that the code can be altered, by which the image too can be

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­ ltered relatively simply. Another significant fact is that theoretically a anyone can do this. With cameras on mobile phones and the availability of simple software, practically everyone in our Western society has the ability to take photos at any given moment, to manipulate them and to transmit them. The democratization and resulting circulation of images have made astonishing strides. By eliminating its character as object, many of photography’s physical limitations have also disappeared and a society has been created in which differences in time and space are no longer experienced as barriers to the distribution of and communication via images. Images function in a digital, virtual reality in which totally other rules apply than did in our old, analogue world. At the same time, this virtual reality cannot be separated from our familiar, analogue world.

Hence, virtual reality does not replace this world, but merges into a new, complex hybrid. In a moment, without being all too aware of it, people move from one reality to the other with surprising ease. Thus, at one moment they are people made of flesh and blood, bound by a number of fundamental laws of nature, and at the next virtual, self-created characters moving through a universe that has other possibilities and laws. A hybrid reality exists in which the analogue and the digital world (or as Fred Ritchin states in an interview elsewhere in this issue ‘the Newtonian and the quantum universe’) enter into a complex relationship – a relationship in which ambiguity and synchronicity are core values. Within this hybrid universe, concepts such as time and space, original and modification, appearance and reality are essential but rarely unequivocal.

It should come as no surprise that a great number of artists have responded to this new situation with extremely diverse work. A generation of Internet artists has been created who specifically concentrate on the vocabulary and opportunities provided by the Web, and many artists have also been forced to revise and expand the conventional definitions of the medium which they had been using. And where do the boundaries and so the singularity of a medium show themselves more clearly than where they touch upon another medium? In addition to fundamental investigation into the essential characteristics of a medium, in recent years we have seen, nearly as a counter-reaction, a large increase in hybrid forms of art. Thus, photography can be used by artists who do not consider themselves strictly as photographers, and traditionally educated photographers can combine photographic work with painting, video art, sculpture or installation, whether their own work or not. A result is that customary designations such as ‘painter’, ‘photographer’ or ‘sculptor’ are slowly but surely coming under pressure and increasingly seeming to belong to the past. An increasing number of artists within the newest generation are no longer concerned about which label gets placed on them, within which tradition they fit or with which conventions they should comply. They feel themselves to be artists first and foremost and they choose the medium they believe relates to their subject best and gives expression to their ideas. Apart from the consequences for art education, the result is a welcome sort of anarchy and non-conformity, as well as a clear-cut focus on subjects which are relevant for them at the time.

Examples of such work can be seen in the Photography - in reverse ­ xhibition, to be presented at Foam from at the end of November 2009. e The exhibition includes the work of five young artists who primarily consider photography as a medium and not as a preconceived end product.

It would, however, be going too far to consider their attitude or even their art as ‘investigation’ or ‘criticism’. That is an anachronism. It implies the possibility that they place themselves outside the discipline and approach reality from outside it. But it is more a question of a classical subject-object dichotomy in which the observer and the observed converge. They are not looking from the outside in; they already are inside and intentionally create discordant work based on their own, immediate

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experiences in the hybrid reality. In addition to the quality of their work, the relevance and necessity of showing it is found precisely in this fact.

All artists participating in the exhibition will mostly be presenting new works in which diverse disciplines are intermingled: photography and Internet, projections, film and spatial work. One example is the work of Constant Dullaart, who makes use of the Photoshop ‘clone stamp’ tool.

Of an entirely other order is ‘Density Drawing’ by Katja Mater, created by capturing various moments in the creation process of a drawing and by using multiple exposures to fuse these into one single negative. The final photo is a non-manipulated account of the process, though not an accurate visual rendering of the actual drawing. ‘The photograph in this context becomes a remarkably unreliable object: is it an image, a drawing, a sculpture, a performance, or a hybrid? Is it documentation or a primary object?’1 The tension between the time interval of a sequence and the immediacy of visual, photographic perception is also a major element in the work of Idris Khan. This still-young but already esteemed British artist makes use of musical notations, rudimentary texts, paintings and key works from photographic history, and transforms these into work that can be considered as a visual reflection on authorship and time. While both a music composition and a text require a specific span of time in order to unfold completely, a photo makes a direct, instant impression.

Just as Mater, Khan makes use of multiple exposures, for example, of every page of a certain score, and fuses these into one single image. Due to the multiple layers from which the image is composed, the separate music notes can scarcely be distinguished –if at all – and an amalgam of grey and black shades is created. The result indeed reflects the mood of the piece of music, but undermines the proper function of the score, namely to ‘read’ the music. A related fact of interest is that the score of course cannot be equated with the music itself: it is a musical notation, a way of noting that indeed refers to a specific musical work in an exact sense, but it is not the music itself. It is a form of indexing, of coding, which corresponds to the coding of an image in a digital environment.

By using digital techniques for stacking the multiple exposures and the desired nuancing of the shades of grey, the visual and musical codes merge and converge into a single image.

the necessity, for visitors to experience such a work for themselves, not only visually but with all the senses. One of the objectives of an installation is to transform a specific space and redefine it, and then to enable the visitor to relate to it in a personal way. The visitor moves physically through the installation, determines his or her own viewpoints, chooses a certain tempo, a period of time to remain within it. If it works, it can be a physical as well as an emotional experience, like a journey. Along with that comes the role of the factuality of an installation, it concreteness.

Other than is oftentimes the case with photos, it is less a matter of indexing, referring to a reality beyond the work. By contrast, many installations aspire to bring about a certain form of realism which is decisive for the relationship with the visitor. An installation is built with real building blocks, each with their own real properties; it occupies a truly measurable surface area and forms a discrete microcosm which relates to reality in a different way than two-dimensional work. All these essential features are completely lost in a photo of an installation.

We have chosen to include work that took on the familiar flat surface but of which the essence would be the least damaged by reproducing it in Foam Magazine. In the eight portfolios presented here, photography enters into a close relationship with film (Tarkovsky), Internet (Umbrico), fashion/sculpture (Freudenthal and Verhagen), painting (Wåhlstrand), text (van Duijvenboden), architecture (Hatakeyama), video (Claerbout) and finally with itself, through the transformation of documentary into autonomous work (Broomberg and Chanarin). Irrespective of the major differences between them, all are portfolios which not only give insight into the complex nature of photography and the fascinating position of images in our society which is determined by technology and media, but which also illustrate the fruitful transitional period in which photography now finds itself – a transition in which hybrids, unexpected marriages and unanticipated forms of collaboration ensure a boundless future. +

Notes: 1

Lauren Ptak, The Medium Formerly Known as Photography, published for the Photography – in reverse exhibition, 2009.

Anne de Vries (1977) creates new worlds, inspired by new media and our technical culture. De Vries departs from an abstract, technical concept which he explores by expressly working with extremely commonplace means. His work has an anarchist tone, adverse to conventions and good taste. Katja Mater (1979) often works with installations and focuses on the medium of photography itself: its technical characteristics and its limitations. Time and synchronicity, and di-

Although in the examples cited there is evidence of a fusion between two or more disciplines, the end result is nonetheless the classical, flat surface of a photo. How different it is if the final artwork is spatial, such as an installation where photography is a key element – a work by ­Christian Boltanski, for instance, as an example of such work from the recent past.

Or where sound, light and even film are a substantial part of the presentation and thus the experience of the visitor. How can justice be done to a multimedia artwork in a magazine that is itself also a medium? A medium that still comes from the old world: analogue, two-dimensional surfaces, produced with printers’ ink on paper and designed as a physical object according to the same time and space limitations as an oldfashioned photo was in the past. A possibility was to show the relevant spatial work purely as photographs of installations. But to do so would be to document it instead of the high-quality reproduction we normally do, the kind we, as magazine, pride ourselves on. It was a problem: to devote attention to the merging of photography and various other media by means of a medium that itself has many limitations. It was decided not to construct a portfolio from installation photos. That would not only go beyond the intention of this magazine, but above all would not do justice to the essential trait of a spatial installation – namely the opportunity, even

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mensionality are of great importance in her work.

Their work will be part of the exhibition Photography – in reverse, or-

ganized by Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and to be seen from 27th of November 2009 to 21st of February 2010. The exhibition focuses on work by a new generation of photographers who work with the medium of photography in a refreshingly uninhibited, unconventional and sometimes slightly anarchist way. Constructions within the space, projections, moving images and installations make up a significant part of the show, in addition to more conventional methods of exhibition. The exhibition also includes work from Jaap Scheeren (1979), Corriette Schoenaerts (1977) and Constant Dullaart (1979).

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Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin Afterlife

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Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

All images © Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, courtesy Goodman Gallery, Cape Town and Galerie Karsten Greve, Paris

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have collaborated for over a decade during which time they have exhibited widely and have ­produced six monographs which all test the limits of documentary photo­graphy: Trust; Ghetto; Mr Mkhize’s Portrait; Chicago; Fig and The Red House. Their next book, So This is Life, a collaboration with the writer John Berger, is to be published in the Spring of 2010.

Their latest project Afterlife, is an investigation and a de-­construction of an iconic image taken in 1979 that came to define a moment in both Iranian and photographic history.

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David Evans teaches the history and theory of photography at the Arts University College at Bournemouth, England. He is editor of the anthology Appropriation in the new series Documents of Contemporary Art, co-published by the Whitechapel Gallery (London) and the MIT Press (Cambridge, Mass) in 2009.

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Some Frames for Broomberg and Chanarin

by David Evans

When was the 20th Century? Everyone seems to agree that it started with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. But when did it end?

1989, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, with the opening of the Berlin Wall quickly leading on to the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the winding down of the Cold War, and the global hegemony of the United States.1968, for political theorist Antonio ‘Toni’ Negri, who wishes to emphasize the epochal significance of revolts in Paris and elsewhere that challenged the establishment (including the Old Left) and initiated a new era of radical pluralism. Hobsbawm’s century is short; Negri’s is even shorter; yet a case could also be made for the transition from the 20th to the 21st Century occurring outside of Europe in a year between 1968 and 1989: that is, 1979.

The pro-Western Shah of Iran was forced into exile, soon followed by the proclamation of an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian Revolution has preoccupied Western leaders and their military advisors ever since. Indeed, after the September attacks of 2001, preoccupation has often slipped into obsession, and the government of Tehran is regularly presented as a sinister hidden hand, encouraging

anti-Western jihad in a vast arc of crisis stretching from Somalia on the Horn of Africa, via the Middle East, to Afghanistan and Pakistan. This turbulent area (predominantly Muslim) has attracted many photographers, including Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Their recent work has dealt with Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan; their new project Afterlife samples photographs taken in Iran in 1979.

In early 2009 they met Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi in New York.

In 1979 he was in Sanandaj, North-West Iran, where he photographed a firing squad executing eleven blindfolded Kurds, accused of various counter-revolutionary offences. The image was globally distributed by United Press International and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1980. The reasons for its success in the West are fairly clear. As art, it has hints of famous paintings by masters like Goya and Manet; as photographic art it encapsulates the influential idea of the decisive moment; and as document, it appears to confirm the opinion – widespread in the West - that revolutionary upheaval inevitably leads to new forms of terror. Prudently, Razmi kept quiet about his responsibility for the famous photograph, and only acknowledged authorship in 2006 after he was contacted by Joshua Prager from the Wall Street Journal.

The recent meeting in New York took place in Prager’s home. During this meeting, Razmi revealed that the Pulitzer-prize winning shot was merely one of a number of photographs that he took during the executions, and Broomberg and Chanarin were given permission to work with all of this hitherto unseen material. In short, a scoop! One obvious project could have involved printing the complete sequence, accompanied by written commentary on how neighbouring frames alter our understanding of the famous image, similar to existing scholarship around, say, Migrant Mother (1936) by Dorothea Lange or Fallen Soldier (1936) by Robert Capa.

But Broomberg and Chanarin are innovative photographers, not photographic historians. So they have sidestepped the obvious, and have

Iran. August 27, 1979. After a short show-trial, 11 people charged as being ‘counterrevolutionary’ were executed at Sanandaj Airport. Nine of the eleven men in this photo were Kurds. This photo won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. The recipient was known as ‘anonymous’ until 2006 when Jahangir Razmi told the Wall Street Journal that he had taken it. © Jahangir Razmi, courtesy Magnum Photos

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made a series of montages in which details from the different frames have been cut out and re-combined.

They concentrate on the blindfolded victims – awaiting their fate, falling, or covered in blankets. The firing squad is significantly absent, though one montage deals with a chilling gunman who moves amongst the victims and delivers a final bullet to anyone still moving. The works are sandwiched between two sheets of glass, held together with the kind of lead strips used for stained glass windows in churches. The unconventional framing cannot be translated to the printed page, but it is an important dimension of Afterlife, hinting at a modern crucifixion, as well as alluding ironically to the familiar metaphor of the photograph as a window on the world. The idea of transparency is accentuated in the gallery situation by placing the works on shelves and having them leaning against walls.

Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk was in Tehran in 1979 and witnessed the occupation of the American Embassy. In his recent book The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (London, 2005) he recalls how students erected in the embassy forecourt a large painting inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of marines hoisting the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945: ‘in this case, however, Muslim revolutionaries had replaced the marines and they were struggling to raise a green Islamic flag, one end of which had miraculously turned into a hand strangling the Stars and Stripes.’ For Fisk, this intervention suddenly transformed the occupation into a form of theatre or carnival.

Fisk remembers a montage that seemed to encourage revolutionary euphoria; Razmi photographed revolutionary terror. Two contrasting

images, then, but neither can sum up a rupture as complex as the Iranian Revolution. Yet a small number of photographers did attempt to represent the plunge into the unknown. Kaveh Golestan, for instance, was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1979 for his extended coverage of the revolution, and samples are included in the 2007 monograph published by Hatje Cantz. And fellow Iranian Bahman Jalali produced the documentary book Days of Blood, Days of Fire, published twice in Tehran in 1979, then banned. The book is hard to find, but some inkling of Jalali’s achievement is conveyed in a very rich catalogue, edited by Catherine David, that was published to coincide with a retrospective exhibition held in Barcelona in 2007. Mention should also be made of Telex Iran (New York,1983) by Gilles Peress, a French member of Magnum who visited Tehran for five weeks in late 1979 and early 1980. Peress lacked the local knowledge of the two Iranian photographers and Jalali makes dismissive remarks about him in the Spanish catalogue. Nevertheless, Telex Iran is justly famous for its evocation of the fear and foreboding experienced by a dislocated photographer in a dislocated society.

Afterlife makes no attempt to criticize or supplement the important documentary work of figures like Golestan, Jalali and Peress. But it also has nothing to do with political photomontage in which two images from very different contexts are often harnessed together to generate a third meaning. That is, Broomberg and Chanarin are not interested in principles pioneered by John Heartfield; re-worked in recent decades by figures like Martha Rosler or Klaus Staeck and also evident in the appropriation by the Muslim revolutionaries of the photograph by Joe Rosenthal. Instead, their new work addresses a specific type of photograph that depicts violent death.

The first part of Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s book Historic Events 1839-1939 (London, 1960) shifts between photographs of the rulers of Europe and photographs that depict what happens when their rule is

Installation of Afterlife at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, 2009

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defied. Examples of the latter include an image by Felice Beato of the hanging of those involved in the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857; or an anonymous photograph from 1901 showing pith-helmeted Europeans posing behind Chinese ‘rebels’ who had engaged in the Boxer Rebellion.

Given the limitations of photographic reproduction and distribution at this time, it can be assumed that these photographs did not function primarily as deterrents. Rather, they offered reassurance to the lords of humankind that resistance to their domination was futile.

Across the 20th Century, the development of lightweight cameras with roll film allowed photojournalists to metaphorically shoot as others were being literally shot. Photographs like Eddie Adams’ image from 1968 of a General executing a Vietcong prisoner on the streets of ­Saigon (another winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography) became staple fare in newspapers and magazines. Barthes and others complained that the horror of such imagery was not the content, but the fact that it was vicariously consumed over breakfast, but these critiques have had limited influence on practising photojournalists.

In recent years, new technologies have offered new opportunities for the production and distribution of an iconography of violent death.

Contemporary jihadists have no problems reconciling a commitment to medieval theology with an enthusiasm for the latest digital gadgetry, and their websites abound with live video footage of the humiliation and killing of perceived enemies like the American journalist Daniel Pearl. Note also the hanging of Saddam in 2006. Recorded on a mobile phone, the execution footage quickly traversed the globe, to be deployed in multiple ways. At Guantanamo Bay, for instance, it was allegedly used to intimidate and mentally torture terror suspects, whilst in Britain it circulation

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became the latest craze in school playgrounds.

Afterlife is not meant to provide further light entertainment for schoolchildren. Instead it encourages critical reflection on the ­decisive moment. The concept is, of course, associated with Henri Cartier­Bresson. In 1952, his French book Images à la sauvette (literally translated, salvaged images) was simultaneously published in the United States with the different title The Decisive Moment, though both begin with an epigraph by Cardinal Retz: ‘There is nothing in this world without a decisive moment.’ For Cartier-Bresson, the challenge was to create a photograph in a fraction of a second that was both socially significant and compositionally satisfying, underpinned by a desire to clearly differentiate the domain of the still photographer from that of the filmmaker.

For some time, though, Cartier-Bresson’s once fresh idea has become the tired alibi of numerous photojournalists in war zones seeking out the ultimate decisive moment. Razmi produced a classic of this genre that gives the viewer the dubious pleasure of alternately identifying with the firing squad and their victims. In contrast, Afterlife makes any easy identification difficult. Instead, the edited fragments seek out detached and hesitant viewers who wish to discover new ways of representing our current crisis that go beyond the old formulae. +

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David Claerbout Dancing Couples

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David Claerbout

All images © David Claerbout, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London and Yvon Lambert, Paris New York

David Claerbout was born in 1969 in Kortrijk, Belgium. As a young man he studied painting at Sint-Lucas Visual Arts in Ghent. He studied for two years at the University College for Sciences and Arts in Antwerp, where he graduated in 1995. Claerbout switched to video art with his work Cat and Bird in Peace. In this simple video of a cat and a canary sitting motionless beside each other in a small space the interests that still dominate his work resonate. Worldwide exhibitions of his work ensures that Claerbout can look forward to increasing international appreciation in the coming years. His work has been shown at ­Lenbachhaus, ­Munich;

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Van ­Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Centre ­Pompidou, Paris; MIT LIST Visual Arts Center, ­Cambridge, United States and De Pont in Tilburg. David Claerbout lives and works in Antwerp.

Lieze Eneman studied art history at the Universities of Ghent and ­Amsterdam. She is currently working as a freelance art writer and researcher in Belgium and the Netherlands. She graduated on the subject of time and temporality in the work of David Claerbout.

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A Dance to the Music of Time

by Lieze Eneman

‘Wherever in the world I find myself, in essence I describe the first melancholy place that I ever saw.’1 With this statement Gabriel García ­Márquez expresses the dexterity of the writer to start a new story every time he picks up a subject again. This same virtuosity is encountered in visual artist David Claerbout. A quick glance at his work confirms that Claerbout is not an artist that cares for interruptions and sudden changes. Quite the opposite – each work carries elements of previous works and intimates future ones at the same time. For nearly fifteen years, Claerbout has been searching the interface between film and photography with a ceaseless desire to give expression to the phenomenon of time.

With his work Claerbout allows the vexing philosophical issue of time to reverberate in the image. His principal purpose is not to find a definition of time, but to explore how we perceive time and bring it about. Time is a plastic material in the hands of this artist. He gives form to what Douglas Gordon has called ‘sculpting time’, a concept that expresses that time can only appear to us if the artist actually applies it as material. This

concept also immediately allows Claerbout’s concept of time to link with the philosophy of time of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist who postulated that time is an environment which we can only access and understand by placing ourselves within it.2 In his quest to find out what triggers our perception of time, Claerbout has alternated and combined the use of film and photography. Since 1996 he explores the unique qualities of the two media and expands upon them. This investigation has today found synthesis in an autonomous, digital image system that moves back and forth continuously between those media, using their assets as the variables of this system.

This creates a dynamism in which meaningful interactions arise – and that we also can identify in Dancing Couples (after: Couples at square dance, McIntosh County, Oklahoma, 1939 or 1940).

The image shown in this video projection refers back to a series of photographs from the 1940s. In these photos by Russell Lee, young American couples are seen at a carefree dance evening, typical of the time. In Claerbout’s remake from 2009, the girls in their summer dresses snuggle affectionately with their dance partners in the same way as in those photos, their wrists resting in the clammy warmth of their partners’ shirts.

The men dominate the image; aware of the light of the camera, they half turn their bodies to the viewer, pulling the women out of view.

The image makes such a smoothly solid, unmoving impression that at first we cannot be sure the image is moving and that this is a video projection rather than a photo. It is the conspicuous gliding of the light, reflected in the mirrored panels at the back of the room, which first indicates that this photographic image is rotating very slowly on its axis.

The dynamism and the decisive character of the light proceeding in the

Long Goodbye, 2007 © David Claerbout, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London and Yvon Lambert, Paris New York

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background contrasts with the nearly imperceptible movement with which the figures on the dance floor circle before us for the next ten minutes. This period of time is insufficient for the couples to make a full turn, however. Moreover, during the last minutes of the projection the image reverses, through which each couple ultimately remains sheltered from the viewer’s eye and retains its intimacy.

Dancing Couples is not the first work created by David Claerbout that is based on principles of appropriation and reconstruction. Before he had already made various works founded on historical photographic material. This engagement in respect to existing photographic images derived from the conclusion that his painting education had gradually driven him away from what really interested him: looking at photography.3 Claerbout interacts with these images, determined to press for visibility of those images that had been passed down and have been what he calls orphaned. Thus, in Kindergarten Antonio Sant’ Elia, 1932, a work from 1998, he shows the wind blowing softly through the tops of a few young saplings in an image which is otherwise still, just as he simulates the slowly moving light in the landscape of a contemporary photo in Vietnam 1967, Near Duc Pho (Reconstruction After Hiromichi Mine) from 2001. The digital media he employs here make it possible to separate the various image dimensions which are normally merged. The image is thus no longer necessarily dominated by one movement or one rhythm. Consequently, in Dancing Couples Claerbout plays the movement of the light in the background against the movement of the couples on the dance floor, an

aspect that also links this work to Long Goodbye from 2007, in which the slow movement of a woman in the foreground serving coffee contrasts sharply with the quickly changing light in the background.

Aware of the risk that an image might burst under the weight of such intrusions, every interference and intervention has been carefully considered by the artist. The images often will tolerate no more than the lightest touch of their surface. In a certain sense Dancing Couples presses this consideration to its most extreme: in contrast to earlier works in which Claerbout himself brought a few elements, such as sunlight, to life in the image, in this remake he restages the entire image, for fear of otherwise pushing it too far.

That the complete image from the original photo is re-enacted is also the reason why it possesses such a unique dynamism, with a rhythm that lies somewhere between film and photographic image. The photographic reconstruction is in this case composed with the intention of bringing movement into the image. It is premeditated photography.

From this point of view, the image suddenly becomes directive.

The projection thus becomes involved in a process of concealment and revelation, and also the attitude of the male dance partners changes – they initially appeared to be passive, but now they seem to take the initiative. Perhaps because the curiosity that can be read in their gaze in the first image is redeemed when they finally turn and can look beyond the image. This changing dynamic rests on the identification of points in common with opposite powers and movements. With these coordinates, ­Claerbout creates an image that is immobile and leaps out at the same time. Dancing Couples shows that each moment continually springs forward precisely at the moment we would like to grab hold of it. That we go from one point to another is based on the outburst or disintegration of

Vietnam 1967, Near Duc Pho (Reconstruction After Hiromichi Mine), 2001 © David Claerbout, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London and Yvon Lambert, Paris New York

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one point, and each following point cannot come into existence until it has already begun to lose its substance. We are in an impending present; our gesture has hence already reached its goal.

Thus, in this work Claerbout plays with a kind of timelessness which he contrasts against a temporal situation.4 By presenting a relatively unchanging image in a medium in which observation and perception inevitably exist in time, Claerbout provokes a strong feeling of time and temporality. In principle, one single image is enough for us to grasp the situation in Dancing Couples, for instance, the image we are confronted with in our first glimpse of the projection or the image that we are shown a bit later, when the men are eye-to-eye with the camera, their bodies gleaming in the bright light.

And yet, given Claerbout’s intention to indicate temporality and to depict it, he refuses to portray the world as the sum of things and in the same way he refuses to consider time as the sum of completed moments. That is the reason Claerbout’s images do not allow themselves to be reduced to objects which are always completely visible, but are continually dynamic in time. In fact, Dancing Couples, as other works by this artist, is nothing other than the manifestation of time itself. It manifests itself as the synopsis of the observable world, which Merleau-Ponty considers a focal point for time, in the sense that nothing absolute exists, but that everything has a temporary nature. It is the perception of time that grants us access to the meaning of the image. It is only through the repetition and the gradual mutation of that which is shown that a sphere

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of visibility slowly develops. Conversely, a fully visible image would imply a completed observation, which takes no account of the non-existence of the elsewhere, the former and the future. This indicates that the intangible matter of time can only be employed as a plastic material when the artist operates through perception. Only by means of perception can the image, despite its stillness and quasi-unaltered integration in the work, burst open in an interplay of the forces of present, past and future.

Significantly, Dancing Couples echoes the interests that have dominated the work of Claerbout for a considerable length of time. Together with the evocation of quasi-imperceptible tensions, the play of the image’s rhythm, the patient observation and the prolonged camera registration, this continuous dancing on the thin boundary between stillness and motion expresses the essence of his perception of time. The tenacity with which each new work retains a precarious balance between understanding and doubt, between knowing and searching, proves to us Claerbout’s insight into his vast subject: a dance to the music of time. + Notes: 1

The title of this essay is derived from a work of the same name by British author Anthony Powell. From an a interview with Wim Kayzer for Dutch Television (Nauwgezet en Wanhopig, 1989)

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All references to M. Merleau-Ponty refer to the thematic study of the phenomenon of time which can be found in Phenomenogy of Perception.

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From an interview with Lynne Cooke for A Prior.

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From an interview with Bert Vandenbussche.

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Andrey Tarkovsky Bright, Bright Day

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Andrey Tarkovsky

All images © Andrey A. Tarkovsky, courtesy of The Tarkovsky Foundation

Andrey Tarkovsky was born in the village of Zavrazhie near the Volga in Russia in 1932. He studied Arabic at the Moscow Institute of Orien­ tal Languages between 1951 and 1954 before enrolling in the famous VGIK Moscow film school in 1959. Besides being a film maker he was a writer, film editor, film theorist and a opera director. He became one of the most influential film directors of the twentieth century. His films in­ clude Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979). He directed his first five movies in the Soviet Union but left Russia permanently in the early 1980s. His films are characterized by a lack of conventional narrative, long takes and metaphysical themes.

Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983) was made in Italy and reflects his constant longing for his family and homeland. He took hundreds of Polaroids in collecting material, scenes and moods for his film. A viewer

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immediately recognizes the sublime light and dreamy atmosphere that distinguish his visual language and his film making.

In 2008 White Space Gallery, in association with the Tarkovsky Foun­ dation, published the previously unseen Polaroids in the book Bright, Bright Day, edited by the photographer Stephen Gill, who also edited this portfolio.

Aveek Sen is senior assistant editor of the editorial pages of The Telegraph, Calcutta. He has studied and taught English literature at ­University Col­ lege and St Hilda’s College in Oxford and was awarded the 2009 ­Infinity Award for Writing on Photography by the International Center of Photo­ graphy, New York. He is currently working on a book on the intersections of photography, literature, cinema, and the other visual arts.

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The Inner Landscape of Love and Loss

by Aveek Sen

All that’s dear and seen and living / Makes the same flight as before / Once the angel of the lens / Has your world beneath his wing

– Arseniy Tarkovsky, Photography, 1957.

On 14th of August 1979, Andrey Tarkovsky remembered, in what he called his ‘Italian notebook’, that it was the day before the harvest festival began in Russia, marking the end of summer. He also wrote about wanting to take a few photographs. He had been in Italy for almost a month, travelling and working on the outlines for his next film, eventually called Nostalghia, being written in collaboration with the Italian writer, Tonino Guerra. Tarkovsky had started living in Bagno-Vignoni near Siena, and he felt that this little town would be an important location for the film.

So he ‘rang Tonino to ask him to buy me a Polaroid’. He wanted to take a few pictures from the window at different times of day, especially of the morning landscape at dawn. Tarkovsky felt immense affection for his Italian collaborator, a brilliant man of childlike forthrightness, who

also worked with Antonioni and Fellini. So, his asking Guerra to buy him the camera places the images that he made with it in a richly troubled relationship with everything that Guerra and his world stood for to this film-maker. Tarkovsky was then 47 years old, and had already made six major films; Nostalghia would be the penultimate film before his death in the winter of 1986 in Paris. Guerra connected Tarkovsky not only with Italy and his Italian peers in cinema, but also with the process of writing itself, particularly at the stage when a film starts taking shape in the mind of its maker.

‘How does a project mature?’ Tarkovsky asks in his journals. He then answers himself with the image of ‘the subconscious, crystallizing on the walls of the soul’. In this imperceptible process of crystallization, the new camera and the two typewriters, his own and Tonino’s, become essential presences, and the photographs, journal entries and sketches, together with the outlines and scaletti for the film in Russian and Italian, are crucial intermediate stages. The camera travels back and forth between Europe and Russia with Tarkovsky, and the photographs continue beyond Nostalghia until 1984, when he was writing the script of The Sacrifice, mostly in San Gregorio, Italy. Literature – especially the poetry of his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky – flows through the films like one of the voices in a fugue. But with the polaroids, the more submerged and intermittent presence of photography in the films quietly rises to the light, adding another element to his art of counterpoint. Jorge Luis Borges had called music a mysterious form of time. It is a phrase that goes to the heart of two of Tarkovsky’s films – Mirror, 1974, and Nostalghia, 1983. (The first script of Mirror was called Bright, Bright Day, which is a phrase from a poem by Arseniy Tarkovsky about childhood happiness).

In Mirror and Nostalghia, writing and photography (and indeed, music

From Bright, Bright Day © Andrey A. Tarkovsky, courtesy of The Tarkovsky Foundation

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too) converge with the moving image to create each film’s own form of time, or of ‘TIME within TIME’, as a journal entry puts it.

For Tarkovsky, nostalgia was a complex sentiment, both inscrutably private and part of a great tradition that was distinctively Russian. This tradition went back to Chekhov, Tolstoy and Pushkin and linked Tarkovsky with such iconic figures as Gorky, Prokofiev, Akhmatova and Stravinsky.

In them, Russia variously becomes a location, or even a dislocation, as well as a state of mind abstracted from or projected upon other terrains.

Nostalghia ‘mixes the love of your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away’, and Tarkovsky wanted his film to be about ‘the fatal attachment of Russians to their national roots, their past, their culture, their native places, their families and friends’. But in his polaroids, journals and films taken together, nostalgia becomes a more complex and ambiguous mix of identification and alienation than simply a longing for one’s homeland. Since his travels to Italy, Sweden, France, Germany and Britain from the late Seventies, leading to his announcement in July, 1984, in Milan that he would not return to the Soviet Union, a divide that had always existed in Tarkovsky’s life and sensibility started growing wider and more difficult to manage, inwardly and physically. It turned into what he began to perceive and depict as a tragic impasse, at once artistic, political and geographic. As he became famous in the West and his European collaborations began to materialize, he found himself spending his time in Russia battling the Soviet bureaucracy over funding and for permission to travel abroad, and his time in Europe trying in

vain to get his wife and son, Larissa and Andrey, to live with him there.

The Italian journals record how Tarkovsky starts to use the new camera in the midst of appears to be a Banquet of the Senses: the art of Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Leonardo unfolding in front of his eyes together with the beauty of the landscape and architecture, staying with Antonioni and looking at the moon through his telescope, visiting the Vatican and the Villa Adriana. But running through all this, like a refrain, are his expressions of anxious longing for Larissa, Andrey and Dak, their German Shepherd, and constant phone-calls to and from Moscow, even in the middle of dinner with Fellini and his wife in Rome.

Tarkovsky’s restlessness and desolation amidst the beauty of Italy make him resist or draw back from this beauty, as if to save his perceptions from being blunted by its spell. Yet, in Moscow or his country retreat in Myasnoe too, he is haunted by a sense of being reduced to nothing as an artist by the lack of freedom and recognition: ‘I don’t exist, I’m an empty space.’ ‘I am lost!’ he writes in Rome in May, 1983, ‘I cannot live in ­Russia, nor can I live here.’ So the photographs, whether made in ­Russia or in Italy, confound times and places and persons, releasing into the Italian countryside the feel of a Russian autumn, which becomes part of an inner landscape of love and loss. This is space liberated from physical location and imbued with the stillness and freedom of thought and feeling – liberated, but not abstracted or removed, from ‘all that’s dear and seen and living’. Photography thus becomes a means of moving towards a purity of vision, of keeping an inner distance from the overwhelming immediacy of the real.

At the same time, each photograph is ‘a clot of life’ that refuses to turn into a symbol. Tarkovsky’s metaphor conveys the sense of a congealed flow that can be made fluid again by a sort of healing-in-reverse.

From Bright, Bright Day © Andrey A. Tarkovsky, courtesy of The Tarkovsky Foundation

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And this transformation of something stilled into something that begins to move or flow again through a re-enactment of the past is precisely how photography becomes cinema in the films that are about the doubling of the past in the present. The whole of Mirror could be seen as emanating from one photograph, made by a close friend of his parents, Lev Gornung, in 1932. It is of Tarkovsky’s mother sitting and smoking on the bar of a fence wearing earrings, ploughed fields behind her and the evening sky above. The narrator’s childhood farmstead in Mirror is also resurrected from photographs. And Gornung’s other portrait of the mother holding a vase of berries, which glimmers among the shadows in one of the sequences in Mirror, is echoed in the polaroid of Larissa holding the roses in Moscow. Nostalghia’s final, almost still, shot of the Russian house inside the Italian cathedral is a constructed image of the protagonist’s state of being, made by building a model of the Russian house and landscape inside a real Italian ruin, just as the ‘Russian’ landscapes in the film are all shot in Italy.

Tarkovsky had wanted to illustrate his ‘cinema book’ with Uncle­ Lyova’s photographs, but Sculpting in Time ends up using his own film stills instead. Looking at the polaroids alongside these stills and ­Gornung’s photographs, one is struck by how they all belong to a single universe of images, yet how different they are from one another in their relationships with time, stillness and movement. While the film stills freeze time and motion, the photographs ‘keep’ time within them so that it can flow back later into the moving images of dreams, memory,

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­ riting and cinema. For Tarkovsky, to regard stillness not as the oppow site of, but as a potential for, movement, realized through the animating power of the gaze, is to place at the heart of his image-world the eye’s communion with the icon. An icon hangs behind him in the San ­Gregorio self-portrait as a reflection in the wardrobe mirror, while discovering a Vladimir ­Mother of God in an Italian cathedral strikes him as a miracle and enters his dreams. Yet, Tarkovsky’s cinema is also haunted by a terror of stillness – the stillness of marble, of death, and of losing his freedom of movement. The 18th-century serf-musician, Pavel Sosnovsky, who had come to study music in Italy and looms over Nostalghia as a semi-fictional alter ego, narrates a nightmare in a letter to his friend.

The musician is trapped in an opera being watched by his master, the Count, in which Sosnovsky has to play a statue, in the nude and made up with white paint, in a great park full of statues: ‘I felt the cold rising up through my feet planted on the cold marble of the pedestal, and at the same time autumn leaves landed on my shoulders, chest and outstretched arms... Gradually my body became numb from cold and the impossibility of movement... And when I gave up, and stirred on my tall and grandiose pedestal and understood that I was dead, I woke up.’ To be frozen in fear between his Master’s deathly gaze and his own ­nostalgia is to let the reality of life turn into the coldness of alien stone. But to sculpt in time, as Tarkovsky’s art aspired, is to make this stillness move again with the truth and the beauty of what he was not afraid to call the human soul. +

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Penelope Umbrico Broken Sets (eBay)

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Penelope Umbrico

All images © Penelope Umbrico, courtesy the artist and LMAKprojects, New York

Penelope Umbrico was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives and works in New York. She attended Ontario Collage of Art in Toronto and received her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has had several solo exhibitions at galleries including the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group shows at, for example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ansel Adams Center for Photography in California. Penelope Umbrico’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She is the recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Catalogue Project Grant, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant and a Harvestworks Scholar Fellowship. She is currently core faculty at the School of Visual Arts, MFA Photography and Related Media program in NYC and the Chair of MFA Photography at Bard College.

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Penelope Umbrico is a photographer who often re-uses published images from magazines, ads or internet. The overwhelming flow of imagery that surrounds us in daily life is her working tool. The series Broken Sets (eBay) are cropped images of broken LCD TV screens for sale on eBay. By employing conceptual and methodological approaches such as appropriation, multiple production, and the creation of systems to present day image production, Umbrico reveals underlying cultural longings that register current psycho-socio conditions and anxieties.

Lyle Rexer is an independent curator and author of numerous books and essays on art and photography, including titles that focus on ­Outsider Art. He has contributed feature articles to The New York Times, Art in America, Parkett, Art on Paper and Aperture. He curated The Edge of Vision for Aperture in 2009 on the rise of abstraction in contemporary photography, which featured work by Penelope Umbrico.

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The Empty Set

by Lyle Rexer

In the story Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius, (1940) Jorge Luis Borges proposes an alternative world, complete in every detail, even in its cosmology and philosophies, and their sects and disputes. Composed by the like-minded down through the centuries, its records are salted through the archives and encyclopedias of the past, where they work like a spell, soliciting newer and bolder contributions and more prominent placement, until the invented world begins to displace the actual world in the discourse of the present.

A proliferating empire of pure discourse, unmediated by actualities other than the physical channels of communication technology – it almost seems that Borges had a premonition of the internet. Our Orbis Tertius is flat, non-hierarchical, infinitely expanding (and disappearing), abstract even in its particularity, atemporal, placeless, dimensionless, bodiless, traversable across all formal boundaries (all boundaries within it are merely formal), overpopulated yet completely empty, the province of each individual alone, an autistic ocean.

Penelope Umbrico is a traveler in that flat landscape. It would be a mistake to call her a photographer or even an artist using photography, just as it would be a mistake to call Marcel Duchamp an appropriation artist or Andy Warhol a painter. In Orbis Tertius, genres do not exist. She is looking for traces of that other, formerly real world, the one being digitally superseded, looking for evidence of anterior life exposed on the internet

Honeymoon Suites, 2002–2005 © Penelope Umbrico, courtesy the artist and LMAKprojects, New York

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and beyond that of the forms of desire that animate that life. There is no romance involved in this quest, no discovery of secret places untouched by discourse, for what she finds is already mediated, clichéd, stereotypical. But not without pathos. Like a character from Borges, she uses this evidence to create works that can themselves be inserted back into the digital world, adding to its peculiar topography, confusing and supplementing its self-referentiality.

This description makes her approach sound more programmatic than it is. Even the series Broken Sets (eBay) (2009), her most theoretically expansive, is intuitive and empirical at heart. Her widely reproduced series Suns from Flickr (2006-7, ongoing) springs from a recognition provoked by cruising the internet about the prevalence of the sunset in vernacular imagery. Umbrico had already identified this field of sun-related imagery in online hotel and travel advertisements, which participated in the romantic vocabulary of boundless desire. For ­Honeymoon Suites (2002–2005) she extracted the element common to these advertisements, images of horizons at sunset, emphasized their strong horizon lines and lurid colors, and printed them as large fine prints and as postcards. Reference to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes, with their Zen-like attention and optimistic reverence for nature, is unavoidable, albeit misleading. These sunsets alluded to a poignant impossibility, an unattainable horizon that also implies the certainty of death. The irony of such a honeymoon ideal was concealed by the sentimentalized rhetoric of commodity experience, with its promise of sexual ecstasy (sunsets herald the erotic night). With the postcards, Umbrico chose a method of display that further emphasized the impossibility of gratification. She stacked them in two equal piles, in the style of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, but wrapped them in plastic, offering them and denying their availability at the same time.

Umbrico’s investigation of advertising imagery signals her participation in the critique of images that began in earnest with the artists of the so-called ‘Pictures Generation’, coined by critic Douglas Crimp in reference to works by Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and others in the

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1980s. But she is less concerned about the ubiquity of brands or media than about the psychic role of certain generalized types of imagery. At any given time, Umbrico will be archiving a wide variety of internet image groups, from home décor catalogue interiors to armoires from Craigslist.

Again, the process of selection seems to be intuitive, as it often takes time for the artist to decide how to intervene with the images, and what they mean. For Sale/TV’s from Craigslist (2008-09), for example, evolved out of a discovery that photographs of televisions for sale on the popular site often contain reflections of the rooms where they are photographed.

The empty, dead screens, which of course can tell nothing about the functionality of the set, nevertheless yielded ghostly traces of the situations they occupied, as if the televisions were no longer receiving but broadcasting. Umbrico cropped them to show only the screen, then experimented with combinations of prints and came up with the idea of displaying them in uniform frames in sizes proportional to the screens’ actual dimensions. Her closely packed wall installations have the look of an electronics store. Yet they comment just as incisively on the internet itself, where individuals are indeed broadcasting the details of their lives and reversing (at least apparently) the broadcast relation of image production and consumption. Umbrico underscored this by posting the prints on Craigslist as if they were themselves televisions, at prices corresponding to those of the original sets.

Suns from Flickr bypasses the intermediary framework of advertising for a more direct confrontation with the imagery of desire. Tracking the photo-sharing site for all images tagged with the word sunset, Umbrico has access to a constantly expanding repertoire of this primordial form. Each iteration of prints for exhibition is titled with the number of suns currently tagged at the time of printing. Like prototypical minimalist art, the suns illustrate a principle of same-but-different, or an infinity

of variations on a visual theme. Umbrico isolates the sun element, often little more than background information, from the images she searches and makes 4” x 6” Kodak prints of them. A grid of these suns such as that recently exhibited in Pingyao, China, has unusual optical properties (a pulsating rhythm) that lift it out of the realm of standard cultural critique, with its textureless, anti-object bias.

To what realm then? Surely not the classical sublime, in spite of the direct reference to the natural world, and definitely not the realm of neoconstructivist perceptual investigation. A better description might be the Disneyworld sublime or the second-hand sublime. The sheer number of sunset images shared on Flickr testifies to an inexhaustible fascination with the solar body, one that in a secular age has vanished from ritual but has resurfaced as autobiographical reflection, a generalized symbol of pleasure or longing for the primal state. In her various installations, Umbrico seems to be playing with magnitude. She won’t let us forget that the wholesale consumption of nature through the camera is a form of mass hysteria, which leeches memory and meaning from experience and turns our inner lives into inert things. And yet the wall-size scale of several versions, surprising but comprehensible, keeps the work in touch with a more persistent not to say primordial source of attraction to the form, something genetic, transhuman, original.

In texture, then, the recent series Broken Sets (eBay) lies at the opposite end of the cultural and historical spectrum, describing not a pre- but postmodern condition. It posits the emptying out of history via an inventory of failed utopian/technological aspirations. Broken Sets (eBay) are cropped images of broken LCD TV screens for sale on eBay. The sets themselves are not the main object of buyers’ attention but rather the parts these sets contain. The auction images – distorted, dispersed into scanning lines of various colors – are meant to demonstrate only that the sets are still operational and their components functional.

Like the artistic lineage they allude to, they are there to be cannibalized.

These abstract formal compositions conflate the breakdown and failure of new technology with the aesthetic formalism of utopian ­Modernist

Honeymoon Suites, 2002–2005 © Penelope Umbrico, courtesy the artist and LMAKprojects, New York

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­ bst­raction, specifically the geometric abstraction pioneered by the Rusa sian constructivists, the Bauhaus, and its later epigones in the concrete art of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. There are hints here as well of other aesthetic modes including color field painting, Op Art and animated cartoons. Umbrico makes explicit the connection between technological and cultural aspirations by printing the images as 30” x 40” landscapeoriented photographs, aesthetic objects to be hung like paintings. We are constantly aware that the beautiful images are in part electronic artifacts, and, formally speaking, artifacts of a dead language.

Dead but living still. This series takes the pulse precisely of abstract painting after the collapse of all paradigms for painting. In contemporary practice, the forms of the past, from Malevich to Ellsworth Kelly, recur with a shocking frequency and fidelity, but leeched of their historical content. The wheel is constantly being reinvented, as obsessional investigations of process, language or neurobiology. Such painters as Tori Begg in England and Tauba Auerbach in the United States show clearly how the visual innovations of Minimalism and Bauhaus formalism, to name just two avant gardes, are reconvened under new agendas.

But Umbrico’s works are not paintings. They are resolutely photographs, and they represent photography’s ability to assimilate everything to its surface, even the internet, or especially the internet. The internet is widely promoted for its dynamism and interactivity, for its ability to democratize content, reduce barriers, and bring people together in selfconvened arrangements (its thoroughly corporatized interfaces notwithstanding), but there is an equally vehement group of critics who decry what they see as its profoundly static, two-dimensional quality. They deplore its erosion of dialectical experience and direct, face to face social interaction, its responsibility for a decline in civility and a growing psychic investment in fantasy alternatives like Second Life. The disregard

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towards other minds and the importance of control and routine also suggest an autistic component to digital life. Stripped of its nostalgia and primitivism, the current critical arguments sound like something Adorno might have mounted.

No wonder Umbrico’s Broken Sets (eBay) is oddly melancholy in the face of this evolution of sensibility. Borges never suggests that the creators of Orbis Tertius imagined what would happen after the imaginary world took dominion everywhere. Umbrico’s series does. It appears thoroughly memorial and elegiac. It embodies an instant interment of a technological advance (the LCD television) and a spectacular celebration of decay. The photographs also seem to memorialize the enthusiasm for the internet itself as yet another version of the future that was. The future that is, the future that has arrived for us, is one in which the dream of perfect connection is replaced by a bazaar of damaged screen patterns and scrambled communication, scanned by scavengers who (like the artist) are sifting through the ruins of an economy based on consumption, exploitation, isolation and waste. +

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Gunnel W책hlstrand Untitled

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Gunnel Wåhlstrand

Works in order of appearance: Mother Blue, 2008/2009 Skrivbordet (The Desk), 2004 Sydhälsö, 2003 Vid fönstret (By The Window), 2003 Nyårsdagen (New Year’s Day), 2005 Långedrag, 2004 Institutet (The Institute), 2005 White Peacocks, 2007/2009 Mother Profile, 2009 Looking at Paintings, 2008 Tore, 2007 All images © Gunnel Wåhlstrand, courtesy the artist and AndréhnSchiptjenko, Stockholm Sydhälsö © Gunnel Wåhlstrand, courtesy the artist and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall

Gunnel Wåhlstrand was born in 1974 in Uppsala, Sweden and lives and works in Stockholm. She graduated in 2003 from the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm. With black ink, water and great precision, Wåhlstrand meticulously reconstructs the life of the father she never got the chance to know. She has recently begun to investigate the photo albums on her mother’s side of the family.

Wåhlstrand, who can work for months on a single painting, compares the time-consuming and cumbersome painting technique to the act of developing.

Her large scale paintings are part of several private and public collections. In 2003 she received a grant of the Maria Bonnier Dahlins Stiftelese, a prestigious award for young artists of promise. In 2006 she had a solo exhibition at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall and in 2008 completed a permanent commission in the entrance of the Court of

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Appeal of Skåne and Blekinge. Gunnel Wåhlstrand is represented by ­Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm, where she recently held her second solo ­exhibition.

Aaron Schuman Aaron Schuman is a photographer, writer, editor and curator. His photographic work has been exhibited internationally and he has ­contributed photographic and written work to Aperture, ArtReview, Modern ­Painters, HotShoe, British Journal of Photography, Foam Magazine, Creative ­Review, The Face, DayFour, The Guardian, The Observer and The Sunday Times. He is currently a research fellow and senior lecturer at the Arts ­University College Bournemouth, a lecturer at the University of Brighton and is the founder and editor of the online photography journal SeeSaw Magazine.

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Painting by Memory

by Aaron Schuman

In On Photography, Susan Sontag writes, ‘What defines the originality of photography is that, at the very moment in the long, increasingly secular history of painting when secularism is entirely triumphant, it revives… the primitive status of images. Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, or gaining control over it.’ Of course, ­Sontag was not the first to recognize the almost sanctified or supernatural regard for the photograph within the sphere of modern imagery, as well as its possessive, powerful and controlling nature in relation to both its subjects and its audience. Photography’s monopoly over the representational gradually grew to such an extent within the twentieth century that, by the 1950s, much of ‘fine art’, and in particular, painting – secular or not – had all but abandoned the image, instead hoping to derive a new sense of magic from the powers of abstraction. In his essay ‘Modernist Painting’, first published in 1960, Clement Greenberg surmised, ‘The Old

In Gunnel Wåhlstrand’s studio

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Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. The apparent contradiction involved was essential to the success of their art, as it is indeed to the success of all pictorial art. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, instead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains… To achieve autonomy, to exclude the representational or literary… painting has made itself abstract.’

Yet, throughout the decade and half that followed Greenberg’s summation and preceded the publication of On Photography in 1977, many visual artists – and again, painters in particular – began to rapidly shift away from pure abstraction in favour of a return to recognizable subject matter. And more specifically, having cleverly taking into account the shear influence and immediate effect of the photographic medium within the twentieth century, they conspicuously involved photography to do so.

From Rauschenberg and Warhol’s incorporation and appropriation of photographs within their canvases, to the painstakingly literal replication of photographs within the paintings of the Photo-Realists, artists aggressively sought strategies that would allow them to merge the two mediums, blur the line between evidence and homage, and reclaim the realm of the representational for themselves. In one sense they succeeded, in that they effectively exposed the subjective, ambiguous and contextually dependent nature of the photographic image, reminding us that like an Old Master the photograph is also simply a ‘vivid illusion’; but in another sense, they also relinquished the assumed importance and vested

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authority of imagery altogether, revealing that all visual representation – presented in whatever medium – is simply reference, and is therefore unworthy of unequivocal respect or blindly bestowed reverence.

That said, now that the roles, supporting myths and general assumptions of both photography and painting have been enthusiastically deconstructed for more than thirty years – and both mediums have been practically stripped bare of their former identities, meanings and purposes through a wide variety of calculated syntheses – a number of contemporary artists are today knowingly resurrecting what Sontag accurately refers to as photography’s ‘irrepressible’ mystical qualities, paradoxically through the medium of paint, resulting in unexpectedly powerful works of art. In her 2003 graduation exhibition at the Royal University College of Art in Stockholm, Gunnel Wåhlstrand exhibited a series of large-scale ink paintings that meticulously recreate photographs from her father’s early childhood. In one, a dapper boy, with hair precisely parted and wearing a smart blazer complete with insignia, sits quietly at his desk reading by daylight; in another, the same boy sits at a dinner table, smiling sweetly and looking out of the image, with a wine carafe and (one presumes) his father in the background. As photographs, neither image is particularly telling or specific apart from reflecting a number of common themes found in most middle-class family albums. But as imposing monochromatic paintings they suddenly gain a newfound immediacy, importance and haunting resonance. ‘Mainly, I see a photograph as a proof of existence,’ Wåhlstrand explains, ‘Before I started to work in this way I read

Roland Barthes, and he said something like, “No painter can make me feel that something has really happened in the way a photograph can.”

That provoked me, and I just felt that I wanted to go for that.’

This desire, to make paintings that convey the same ‘feeling’ that Barthes ascribes to photographs, perfectly illustrates the poignant role reversal that has occurred between the two mediums in recent history – one could easily argue that the photograph now ‘only represents and refers’, whereas the painting contains ‘something magical’ that allows control to be gained over the subject. It is important to note that Gunnel Wåhlstrand’s father died when she was two, so in many ways her early paintings not only provide evidence of his existence, but are the embodiment of his existence within her own life – quite literally, in Sontag’s words, they act as ‘an extension of [their] subject; and a potent means of acquiring it.’ ‘If my father were to step into this room’ Wåhlstrand says herself, ‘I think I would be surprised by the difference between the flat version of him and the moving one. I only have a two dimensional relationship with him.’

Her paintings’ strict fidelity to their source material seem to endow the photographs (and photography itself) with so much importance that it is all too easy to ignore the role that painting actually plays in these works; in fact, one might begin to wonder why she doesn’t simply exhibit the originals. ‘I am not at all interested in showing the photos themselves,’ she insists. ‘They belong to someone else. They are not yet my memories.’ As John Berger remarks in his essay, ‘Ways of Remembering’, ‘Before the invention of photography what served in its place?...

What served that function before photography was the faculty of memory.’ Yet in the case of the private pictures discovered by Wåhlstrand, the precise memories associated with the photographs – the original

Descension, 2009 © Gunnel Wåhlstrand, courtesy the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

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and primary ‘function’ of these images – have been forever lost. Like the viewer, Wåhlstrand’s initial experiences of them are ambiguous and confusing, despite her immediate relationship to their subjects and her connection to the memories that they once served. It is only through the act of rigorously painting the photographs that Wåhlstrand herself can inhabit, rehabilitate, take ownership of and imbue the pictures with new memories, meanings and understandings. ‘I first see the photos in the same way that the camera did – everything at the same time,’ she explains. ‘But when I start to paint them, I have to try to understand how everything pictured is constructed; this sense of understanding also becomes about compassion. I paint until I feel that I can trade places with the persons or details.’

Similarly, when the viewer is first confronted with Wåhlstrand’s works, they too see the subjects ‘in the same way that the camera did, everything at the same time’; if the images themselves – seemingly nondescript and insignificant, amateur snapshots – were to remain photographic, they could easily be ignored after an initial cursory glance. It is precisely through the recognition that these particular works are paintings that the viewer is tempted to enter the images, and is inspired to give them more thought, attention, consideration, and like Wåhlstrand, to search for understanding within the images, investigating them with an innate sense of compassion.

Recently, Wåhlstrand has expanded her source material to include photographs of her mother – who also tragically lost her father when she was quite young – as well as the family albums from the maternal

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side of her family. In one, her mother poses for a conventional 1960s studio portrait. Unremarkable as a photograph, the image provides little specific information about the young woman; yet as a tenderly and studiously crafted painting it pulls the eye towards the tiniest of details – the perfect elegance of her graceful profile, the dignified serenity of her steadfast expression, the silken curl of carefully preened hair gently grazing her cheek – allowing for revelry in the more generic associations such details raise. In another, a white peacock presents a strikingly similar profile, reassuringly confirming that Wåhlstrand’s own interests lie not only in the memories and personal family histories that such images might represent, but in the overall moods, emotions and connections that they evoke for both the artist and her audience as well.

In this respect, one of Wåhlstrand’s most effective works is again a portrait of her mother – still young but this time seen frontally, lit from below with lips slightly parted – peering mysteriously sideways, as if caught off guard. Like a classic Hitchcock heroine, complete with dark shadows looming above, her elaborately jewelled necklace further contributes to the cinematic archetype of the wealthy girl whose life, despite its protective comforts and sheltered beauty, might easily go awry any instant. Of course, as a piece of evidence or ‘extension of its subject’, the original photograph itself could have by no means born such weight, conveyed such meanings, or served such a purpose. Yet by enigmatically transforming the photograph into a lusciously seductive painting, Wåhlstrand has managed to merge the representational homage with the ‘originality of photography’ and its magically potent powers of acquisition and control; in doing so, she has once again reminded us of the value of ‘vivid illusions’, whatever the medium, and restored a sense of faith in the ‘primitive status of images’ altogether. +

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Freudenthal / Verhagen Holy House & Polyhedra

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Freudenthal/Verhagen

All images © Feudenthal / Verhagen

Carmen Freudenthal was born in 1965 in Utrecht, and Elle Verhagen in 1962 in Gemert, the Netherlands. They both attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1983 till 1988. Since 1989 they have worked as a creative team. With a humorous and undeniably unconventional approach they explore the boundaries of fashion photography – sometimes even literally – by working in three dimensions.

Their work has been published in i-D magazine, Dazed & Confused, Jalouse and Flash Art International. They have participated in exhibitions in Europe, the United States and Japan.

The works on these pages (and more) can be viewed from December 10th through December 20th at Kerkstraat 60 in Amsterdam Holy House, The Sequel – another total sensory experience. For more information, see: freudenthalverhagen.com

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Susan Bright is a curator and writer who has taught extensively and ­convened major conferences and seminars on many international ­aspects of art and photography. She was previously assistant curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Curator at the Association of Photographers, Acting Director for the MA Photography (Historic and Contemporary) at Sotheby’s Institute, London and an AHRC Fellow at the University of the Arts, London. Art Photography Now (2005) was published by Thames and Hudson, who will next year publish Auto Focus: Self ­Portraiture in Contemporary Photography.

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Physical Photographs

by Susan Bright

The Dutch duo of Carmen Freudenthal and Elle Verhagen are image makers whose work easily coalesces in fashion, design, fine art and advertising. Their work is inspired and inventive, unexpected and funny, and shows remarkable sophistication in understanding of the movement of cloth and the fluidity of the human body, two essential elements in creating fashion imagery that really works. Visual charge is often achieved through compelling juxtapositions of objects and shifts in scale which are intricately achieved through digital manipulation and post production. They took the bold step of creating Look Books for the designer Bernhard Willhelm which unfolded like surreal and comedic stories and created a cast of characters for each season that are so radically different every season and act more like beautiful quirky fine art books than a selling aid to PRs and Department Stores. They are in the enviable position of having pretty much free rein with much of their commercial work, and the brands that hire them want their offbeat and quirky humour. They produce magnificent 3D installations incorporating sound, fabric and photography. Although their work is diverse their continuity and signature style is not; strong bold women and a love of the fantastical are apparent throughout. In this interview Susan Bright finds out more about their working partnership and influences.

Can you tell me about your backgrounds and how you began working together?

We both studied at the Gerrit Rietveld academy in Amsterdam and graduated in 1988, Carmen in photography and Elle in Fashion Design. Whilst at the academy Carmen knew she wanted to be a fashion photographer and right after school started doing test-shoots. For one of the first shoots she visited Anne Greta Filtenborg, who at that time was a young and upcoming designer in Amsterdam, and Elle was Anne’s design-partner.

That was where we first met. Elle wanted to make a switch from fashion design to photo-styling and we decided to do the test shoot with the collection. The shoot was not very successful but the collaboration worked very well so we continued working together. The staged photographytrend at that time was quite inspiring and possibly influenced the direction of our work. Our first serious project was published in i-D magazine in 1989. Soon after we realized that we were mainly interested in creating a staged reality where fashion played a small role and actually not in straight-forward fashion photography. Between 1990 and 1995 we made three-dimensional works which integrated photography. Around 1995 we returned to editorial fashion photography, inspired by interesting Dutch fashion design of that period.

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Renée Copray, Protocol of Desires (2006) © Freudenthal/Verhagen

Who and what did you find interesting?

Concept-based and ground-breaking designers like Viktor & Rolf, ­Klavers and van Engelen, and Keupr/VanBenthm showed their first collections around that time. We were looking back a decade or two and were inspired by performance artists like Ulay and Abramovic and loved and still love the work of Pina Bausch. We started working with dancers as models for their creativity, body-consciousness and free spirit. The dance scene in Amsterdam was big and attracted a lot of international talent.

People are always fascinated by those who work together…by who does what and when. Do you have distinct roles in your working process or is it more fluid?

It’s very fluid. As we have different backgrounds we complement each other at an essential way, but we are both involved in every stage of each project and do everything together from the concept/sketching-stylingshoot through to post-production. We sit together behind the computer, or over a glass of beer, and talk about inspiring images, sketches, models and techniques. During the shoot we try to agree on things like light and composition.

Much of your work is digitally intricate. Do you storyboard out your ideas before you shoot?

Yes. Sometimes we do test-shoots and sketch with those before we do the real shoot. We usually try to decide upon backgrounds and certainly about poses etc before we shoot. But the shoot often develops differently and sometimes even though we have a storyboard and do the shoot accordingly, we find that in postproduction something completely different develops.

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You have done some really interesting work with KesselsKramer. Can you tell me about some of the projects?

Our favorite project was the citizen M facade, which was actually a commissioned art-piece, not an advertisement. It’s two huge screens on the exterior of the new concept-hotel at Schiphol airport. Our idea was to make still-life compositions with objects from the lost-and-found service point. We placed these objects in a box, which seems to be a gap in the building. Other nice projects were the citizen M brand imagery for the same hotel, the ABSOLUT LABEL T-shirt campaign and Ursus Roter.

ABSOLUT LABEL is a yearly, worldwide fashion collection from the Swedish vodka brand. We shot 12 totally different magazine covers showing the entire collection.

I love the work you have done in collaboration with Bernhard Wilhelm.

How did it start and why did it finish?

In 2000 we did an editorial for i-D magazine (My Home Is My Castle), which included a Bernhard Willhelm dress. Bernhard liked the editorial.

His fashion-show-stylist, Maarten Spruyt, is a friend of ours and he introduced us to do our first look book for the 2001 Spring/Summer collection. It was a hysterical, but fun, shooting 34 pictures in an hour and a half before the show. All our work seemed to complement each other so we continued to do look books and other projects. A few weeks before a show, we would usually get some background information about the collection and some loose ends like ‘something with computers’.

Then we would think of ideas for the look book and discuss these with ­Bernhard. Somehow everything would fall into place perfectly on the day of the shoot, which would be the first instance we would see the clothes and often the models. At first there were two shows each year.

When Bernhard started to show the men’s collection separately it became four look books per year.

Our collaboration came to a peak in 2004 when we edited and designed the 1999-2004 book. In that year we were busy with the label for eight months of the year. This was for us the time to step back and give more space to other work. It was super fun but it was too much. We never officially stopped. Funnily enough we all simultaneously felt the urge to do another look book this spring, resulting in the ceiling piece at the Holy House! exhibition in the Museum for ­Modern Art in Arnhem, earlier this year. In the future, we think we will keep on collaborating once in a while.

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From Bernhard Willhelm Look book (2007) © Freudenthal/Verhagen

I am really interested in Look Book photography as it can be pretty formulaic and not very creative… but yours for Bernhard Willhelm are far from generic, they are more like little art books with mysterious narratives. Was that your intention?

Yes, absolutely. It was all about creating an image to show our vision on the collection.

The purpose of a look book is to give a stylist/fashion editor a clear overview of a whole collection, giving each outfit a number so they can easily let the agency know which outfit they want to use for a fashion shoot. In our look books there were sometimes not even numbers. We didn’t make it very easy for them.

Holy House! was a fantastic installation. Can you talk about how you chose to mix all the media and create such a wonderful space for the audience?

The house-theme has re-appeared in our work over the years from the beginning. I think we maybe need a very normal, recognizable theme so the surreal layers we add remain subtle.

So the starting point was that the exhibition should be a total sensory experience, not just separate works. The exhibition was intended to be an art-piece in itself. Just as we create a world in each picture, we wanted the exhibition to be a wholly created world. That’s why we built the rooms and stairs inside the museum, so you have to physically wander through the small rooms and experience the space. The photographs become living things because they are three-dimensional, there were moving parts – projection, a breathing apparatus behind a stretching silk screen – and sound. The sheet on the bed spilt over the frame of the picture and lay draped on the floor like a real sheet. People visiting the

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exhibition had to stop themselves trying to brush off the photographic crumbs on the table cloth. The roses in front of the melancholic girl wearing Comme des Garçons are projected on the surface of the photographic print. The roses start as rosebuds. During a loop of two minutes, they come to full bloom and then die, to start over again.

You are obviously fashion photographers (or creatives), but also fine artists. Do you differentiate between the two?

We don’t differentiate between the two. We do think about the division because it is apparently an issue but not while we are working.

Do you sell work through galleries as well? If not, would you like to do so?

Not yet, but we would certainly like that. Having the total freedom to fill four big rooms in the museum in Arnhem, was fantastic (and terrifying, at the same time). We will definitely continue to make three-dimensional autonomous work. A gallery could give us the space and audience to exhibit work that doesn’t fit within the two dimensions and the limited size of the page of a magazine.

Which gives you more artistic freedom – fashion or art?

If there is a client we think seriously about the product or the world of the client, which influences the work but that is not necessarily a restriction to our feeling of artistic freedom.

And what do you call yourselves when somebody asks what you do?

In a bar I usually say I’m photographer, and Elle (depending on her mood) would say fashion-photographer or stylist. But in a more serious conversation with some explanation we would say we are image-makers.

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Many fashion and advertising photographers try without success to cross over into fine art and visa versa. The few that I can think of who have successfully inhabited both are rare and include Inez van ­Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Is it just a coincidence that you are Dutch?

We don’t really know. We are not only both Dutch, but also from the same generation. We have, like them, a background in fashion and photo­graphy and are a cooperating photographer-stylist team. Maybe the artistic climate in the Netherlands during the period in which we became interested in art, design and fashion, the artistic had its influence. There is also a typical Dutch humor.

You are indeed funny and sometimes irreverent about fashion, but you obviously love it too.

Right. In our work, the clothes are sometimes treasured and highlighted as if they were the most beautiful piece of art and this is the oneand-only outfit to tell the story. Sometimes clothes play a small part in a picture and sometimes it’s just there to get publicity! Elle can get very excited about a new brilliant concept of Maison Martin Margiela or Bless, Bernhard Willhelm’s never-ending imagination or red leather Hussein Chalayan fake marble corset. But on the other hand, the speed of the business, the adoration of the newest of the newest and the prices people pay for it, are ridiculous. Some are really addicted. All those people have few ideas for themselves and follow like lemmings.

All this makes us laugh.

Finally, is there anyone or any place that you would really like to work with or show your work?

We like cross-overs. Collaborating with people in other disciplines like performance, music and fashion. We would like to show to as many people as possible in as many cities as possible. For example, when we show Singing Girls, children of six years old can sit down and stay fascinated loop after loop for 10 or 20 minutes. The video is also loved by the audience of the Art & Antiques Fair in Hertogenbosch (Netherlands) or the visitors of the Bernhard Willhelm exhibition at the MoMu in Antwerp. +

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The Grand Absence A visualization

Plateau

Excerpts from the first two chapters

Nickel van Duijvenboden

THE GRAND ABSENCE (2003)

The day after my graduate show opened, my father rang me up from abroad. He asked what the opening had been like and how the exhibition was going.

‘It’s a shame you can’t be here’, was the first thing I said.

‘I am trying to visualize it from here. I was hoping you’d be able to feed me a few details’, he said cheerfully.

To visualize something. I was instantly reminded of his last article, which was coincidentally about this same subject. My father contended that ‘to visualize something’ actually means to place yourself in the role that you would have had in the situation you are trying to visualize; not just a simple, cerebral visualization or projection, but an actual ‘being present’ or role play, acting if you will, with the only limitation that you cannot be physically present. With age comes the skill to keep this to oneself; the subtle act of inner visualization.

I didn’t dare to tell my father that this conversation, during which he was making a visualization of my situation, was a perfect opportunity to test out his assertion. Was he really acting as if he was with me, inside himself?

After we had spoken, would he no longer have the need to come? If he only knew how much his presence would have meant to me, whether it was mental or physical.

I heard my father asking from the other side of the line if I could tell him about the last few days.

‘I had a conversation with Uncle Robert’, was the only thing I could think of.

‘So I heard. And?’ ‘He didn’t understand any of it.’

‘It depends of course on whether you are willing to explain your work and what tone of voice you use. From what I heard, you were rather condescending.’

‘Me? That was him, more likely. He kept repeating, “So you’ve been studying for four years to become an artist?” He really wondered what I’d been doing all that time.’

3

It was quiet on the other end of the line. No sign of instant understanding, as I had perhaps secretly hoped for.

‘He just didn’t look’, I went on. ‘Or, he looked, but he didn’t see. He considered my work from another level.’

‘On what level did he look, you think?’

‘He was looking for something beautiful. And found nothing, of course.’

‘He didn’t think your photos are beautiful?’

‘They aren’t.’

Again, silence.

‘No’, I asserted firmly, in order not to sound insecure. ‘It has no function.

Beauty has nothing to do with what I’m trying to say.’

‘What are you trying to say then?’

This is the Great Inescapable Question that nearly all artists are asked with every endeavour. We know the question inside and out, in all its forms; we know the precise moment at which it will be asked, can feel it coming flawlessly; we know the tone in which it will be asked, the look that accompanies the words. The only thing the artist doesn’t know is the clever retort.

Someone once said that the major difference between art and science consists in the ability to ‘vulgarize’ the findings of a scientific or artistic study. He explained that scientific findings (a theorem, a solution) can be simplified so that everyone or nearly everyone can understand them, but a work of art exists by the grace of its impossibility of simplification. Doing so would destroy the essence of what makes it art.1 Perhaps this is the reason artists don’t have a clever answer, and why, with those artists that do have one ready, the answer is usually much more interesting than their artwork. Perhaps it is also the reason people become artists: because they already suspect they are more likely to find their answers in a form other than the logical and verbal.

‘What are you trying to say?’ Everyone would ask this question, because they want to feel involved as soon as they are able to see what you have made. One of the first things you learn is that you can’t exclude anyone; you can’t simply say: you are not part of my audience. The louder you say that, the more people want to belong to that group, and the more adamantly they’ll insist that they do.

(1) Words to this effect were spoken by Jean-Baptiste Joly, director of Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart,

during the Artistic Research symposium in April 2003 in Maison Descartes in Amsterdam

4

‘What are you trying to say then?’

‘That’s the same thing Uncle Robert said.’

‘It is a totally valid and obvious question.’

‘Hasn’t it already occurred to you that the best answer I can give to that question is found in my work? That I didn’t study photography to learn how to talk?’

My father chuckled. ‘I know you. You’re evading the question. I know that you have absolutely no difficulty expressing yourself.’

‘Then perhaps the question is too abstract. As if I’m working on a microscopic level the whole time and suddenly I’m asked to give an overview of my work, to look up from the eyepiece and to place an infinite number of details, like a completed mosaic, within an all-encompassing framework of life and to survey the relationships with all sorts of vital questions at a single glance.’

‘Photos are so concrete, son’, said my father, still with the same derision in his voice. ‘Why can’t you be, too? All the photos that pass by in my visualization – also yours – have that concreteness. Describe a photo you’ve taken.’

‘For example, I’ve made a photograph about objectivity —’ ‘No’, he interrupted me, ‘Describe what that photo looks like. What would I see if I stood in front of that photo?’

‘A square. From a bird’s eye-view perspective.’

‘What kind of square?’

‘A square in a city. The houses are neither modern nor old-fashioned.

There is a small public garden, and some parked cars that don’t really stand out.’

‘People?’

‘No people.’

‘Okay. I can see it. Why a square? Why that square?’

‘I think it’s easy to get an overview of a square. That’s a characteristic of squares. Why that particular square … no idea. I didn’t know what else to photograph. I’m not concerned with specific features and certainly not with showing something extraordinary. What matters to me is the way of looking. The bird’s eye-view perspective is like the omniscient narrator.

The photo as omniscience. Because it looks out over everything, a certain objectivity prevails, but still, only one thing can be viewed at a time.

A choice has to be made, such as by our own gaze.’

‘How do I know it’s about that when I’m standing in front of the photo?’

‘I don’t know. But that’s how art is, Dad. The most you can do is 5

provide a small hint, for instance by hanging the photo with other photos that have the same characteristics or just the opposite, with very different ones, by varying the presentation. If need be, you can make up a title.’

When I started this graduation project, I wrote in my notebook: ‘A problem of art photography is that before it can communicate clearly, it first must take a position on theoretical questions about photography itself.’

To nuance that position a bit, afterwards I wrote the following paragraphs: ‘Often it determines its place in this theoretical spectrum with the help of style. The process connected to this is a question of convention.

A photo has a certain style, is associated with a movement in art history or on the contrary, with ignoring the question marks of its own origin, and only then does it communicate clearly. These steps are performed in a matter of seconds.

It can be seen immediately that a 4 x 6 inch photo of a sunset in no way refers to a theoretical photographic concept. With a large photo in a museological context, however, in which the photographer has not chosen a traditional, aesthetic form, the somewhat practiced viewer looks for signs of reference to a specific type of photography, in which this concept is significant.

You could express this more simply with the following question: if it’s not about showing something with an immediately clear meaning (aesthetically, historically, socially, etc.), what is it about?

The first reaction of the viewer is to explore choices of style and form, which provide insight into the way the photographer approached his or her subject. If the relationship of the photographer to the subject is not made clear through style or form, a communication problem ensues. In other words, if an art photographer must include the implicit message ‘this is art’ in his or her photo – which is generally expected by the viewer – he or she cannot make a small colour photograph of a sunset, no matter what the intention. This restriction is probably not limited to this specific case, and if one doesn’t comply with it, it prompts protest.

Allan Sekula’s photo series Fish Story was shown in 2002 at Documenta11, hanging in a central location and a large number of spaces. I and the other people with whom I viewed the photos couldn’t help but feel a form of indignation about the way the photos had been taken and presented. They looked like amateur photos (‘badly’ printed, incomprehensible or – conversely – too obvious framing) and were also presented like that (different-coloured mats, framed in reflective glass, 6

hung at slightly varying heights, two photos taken nearly simultaneously hanging next to each other).

After I got home, those facts started me thinking: why should a Documenta participant, a renowned artist and writer of critically acclaimed essays on photo theory, choose this form of presentation? It began to dawn on me that Sekula had very consciously chosen this style and presentation.

This suspicion was confirmed when I read the following passage in one of his essays: ‘The ills of photography are the ills of aestheticism. Aestheticism must be superseded, in its entirety, for a meaningful art, of any sort, to emerge’.2 It is clear that Sekula is consciously trying to change the conventional meaning mechanism of photography and with this knowledge, that he views aesthetics as an obstacle. In first viewing the presentation, I and other experienced viewers were not able to let go of the conventional way of viewing. The context (which kept me thinking about it once I got home) and what I read more or less cured me of these conventions.

And yet, what was hanging at Documenta did not communicate with me, because there was a discrepancy between the language of form and the content. More so, I didn’t even see the content; at least, I can’t remember it.’

To see nothing. This eclipse-like sensation must have been what my uncle felt. But is it then really true that art photography either presupposes prior knowledge by the viewer or requires a verbal explanation? Which in fact, if you think about it, amounts to the same thing, namely that art can only be understood with a textbook.

If that is true and, by being an artist, I have accepted this, then I could ask myself whether I make art with my father in mind as a potential viewer.

To be honest, I can’t imagine who else I make art for, other than for people such as he, who could understand it if they put their minds to it, and also for him personally, because he’s my father and I want nothing more than for him to be proud of me.

‘I can visualize something from what you’re saying’, says my father in reply to my explanation about generating meaning with a context. ‘But what is it that you want to make clear by placing the photos next to each other? What do they have in common?’

‘I think that they are all more about photography itself than the subject.

At least, that’s what I hope.’

(2) Allan Sekula, ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’ In: Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin Macmillan, 1982

7

Sooner or later, I imagine, a photographer will revolt against his camera. At one point he learned to operate it, then became fused with it, at its mercy […] – and suddenly the point has been reached that the most natural has become unbearable, because the camera is always aimed at something, it can never look the other way, through the eye, into consciousness.3 I am living proof that this impression by Dutch author Willem Jan Otten is accurate. That quality of photography he calls ‘the most natural’, I keep running into it. Now, too, in this very conversation.

‘It would be best if I had no subject at all’, I continued. ‘That’s also the reason I don’t know why I photographed that particular square. The square doesn’t interest me, and the way I photographed it probably ensured that it wouldn’t be interesting to you and Uncle Robert either. That is precisely what’s good about it. It’s a clue to something else, because there has to be a reason, after all, why that photo was made. Only, people are so used to photography being about beauty and the extraordinary that they give up as soon as there’s no evidence of that.’

‘I don’t know whether I’d give up’, my father sounds surprisingly earnest, as if he is talking to himself. ‘Probably. Because where’s the legitimacy of the image if it doesn’t serve as the convincing packaging of an idea?’

‘I think that’s a dangerous statement. It’s aesthetic packaging that keeps me looking at photos from the third world, completely without any feeling, because its beauty prevents me from seeing what’s going on. Beauty is a disguise. I may sound like a Calvinist, but aesthetics causes a split between what there is to see and what I mean. It would be the same as that article that you gave me a while ago, but then in a popular science style.’

‘We’re discussing an image, boy. That always has a pronounced aesthetic value, because the viewer has a first impression. Text doesn’t work that way.’

‘You’re right. But if my images were too dazzling to the eye people would walk right by. One of the tasks of art, in my eyes, is to be something other than entertainment, because what would remain if people could just absorb my images indiscriminately and walk on by without asking themselves even one single question?’

‘Maybe then I should ask: why do I have to see the images, now that you’ve explained this to me? What do the photos add?’

‘Exactly what I just said. You’re asking me, not the other way round. In the photos, I ask the question and you are challenged to answer for yourself.

It should be a learning process.’

(3) Willem Jan Otten, ‘The Art of Being There’ In: The Fourth Wall; Photography as Theatre Fragment, Amsterdam 1991

8

‘See, that doesn’t convince me. What makes me doubt the way you use photography is that you don’t want to do anything with it that can only be done with photography – it could be done with words as well. Besides, if it’s not about beauty, not about the exceptional and if the whole subject doesn’t even interest you, what then are the criteria for quality? Why should you choose one picture over the other if one says just as much about photography as the other?’

‘Those could be my words.’

‘But they are not the words of a photographer. I keep wondering what effect your thinking has on the act of making a photograph.’

‘Now, that is the only thing I still haven’t been able to reconcile’, I contemplated. ‘My thoughts on photography can never go beyond the act itself. It doesn’t seem to apply once I stand there with the camera in front of my... subject matter. I’m not able to transfer what we are talking about to the images.’

‘If everything you’ve just told me is in fact what you want to convey, why would I still need to come and see the photos?’

‘Well, it is still intriguing, at the very least, that we have only been able to have this conversation because we both know that the photos are actually hanging there. That in itself is a reason to come, right?’

‘But if all that you’ve said doesn’t account for what you’ve photographed, and if you can in no way explain why you set out with that heavy camera, stopped walking at a certain place and time, placed your camera and took the shot, then it sounds to me like an absurd project. Certainly after this discussion. Pointless.’

It was quiet for a while on the other side of the line. I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking or waiting for my reply. Then he said: ‘If I could come, then I’d only be coming to see what photos with nothing in them look like.’

‘If only that were true.’

‘What do you mean, that there was nothing in them, or that I could come?’

‘Both.’

9

PLATEAU (2008)

Excerpts from the first two chapters 379 She left no footprints. The snow was too compact. It crunched beneath her feet, unabsorbing, unresonating. The sound was so dry that the ice plateau seemed to be made of a massive bulk of felt. The fact that there was no wind that day, the sky shrouded in thick mist, reinforced this feeling.

Shapes were barely distinguishable, odours remained suspended in the cold air, fingertips were too frosted to feel anything, and the sounds of colliding ice islands were stifled before they reached the ear. She, alone, generated sound. The lining of her hood rustled continuously against her ears, her trouser-legs rubbed against each other with every step.

The tripod clicked as she placed the heavy camera body in the groove.

She could feel the coldness of the metal through her mittens. Her hands wavered, touching the equipment more often than necessary. She was not quite focused. The sequence was still illogical to her. She glanced at him nervously several times, but he showed no sign of helping her. Clumsily she attempted to loosen one of the tripod legs, but the adjustment ring scarcely gave way. The tripod had stood outside for months, anchored in the ice to ensure it always maintained the same viewpoint. The cold air had slowly crumbled the rubber grips. She had to take off her mitten to loosen the leg. Standing on tiptoe, she peered at the recessed spirit level on top of the camera body and rocked the tripod to and fro until it was plumb. She then turned it tight. Without saying anything, he handed her the lens, a heavy lump of glass that protruded through the lens board like an hourglass. She clamped it in the holder, expanded the bellows enough to have the lens project an image onto the focusing screen, and finally opened the shutter.

‘And now?’ she said, as she lowered her hands.

‘Focus.’

She pulled the black cloth over her head and rested the lead-weighted hem in a fold of the bellows.

‘Well?’ he inquired.

‘Shapes in a mist.’

He chuckled silently. ‘That is unavoidable today.’

10

‘So, a sharp mist,’ she understood. As she pressed the loupe against the focusing screen, her breathing created vapour on the ground glass.

She fumbled vainly with her right arm for the wheel at the end of the focusing stage.

‘Here,’ he said as he guided her hand. ‘Use the pieces of ice on the ground.’

As she moved the lens inwards with the wheel, the frozen ground appeared upside down at the top of the image. She focused on an almost imperceptible dark form, a curve that loomed up out of the whiteness. It pierced the fog like the bow of a ship in a miniature world.

‘What was it again, one stop overexposure?’

‘At least. You only have whites, you have to compensate.’

He handed her the light meter. A ribbed white slide was positioned in front of the selenium sensors to temper the incidence of light. She pointed the meter towards the landscape in front of her, pressed the switch on the side of the apparatus and took a reading. He nodded as he took the light meter and replaced it in his jacket pocket. She adjusted the aperture, attached the cable release, closed the shutter and pulled the lever to cock it.

She then stood behind the camera, took the black metal cassette from him and clamped it under the focusing screen. She pulled the slide sideways so that the film in the camera was uncovered and raised her hand with the cable release clasped in her fingers. This is how she envisaged herself and Lev, viewed from behind, standing in front of the white landscape, motionless, her hand raised. She peered over the camera at the Arctic Ocean hidden from view and listened to their breathing. Then she pressed the shutter release.

Ute and Lev did not know where they were. Not precisely. They had taken their last reading the day before yesterday: 84º10’N 121º37’W. On average they drifted one hundred and fifty metres per hour, and this would continue until they were spewed out by the melting pack ice in the vicinity of Greenland. They were familiar with the flow chart and the courses that the previous manned drifting stations had traversed. On the chart their coloured lines formed a whimsical pattern around the North Pole.

NP15, the camp established on the middle of the ice floe, comprised simple quarters in the form of a trailer, a laboratory with adjoining engine room housed in three connected tents, a small drilling rig and a radio tower. It all looked provisional; more attention had been paid to the instruments than the living accommodation. Except for the stars there were no reference points here: no hills, no mainland, no vegetation — nothing 11

that counterbalanced the uniform character of this frozen ocean landscape.

They were surrounded by ice-holes and masses of upwardly-compressed ice, crushed by the sluggish maelstrom.

‘So,’ said Lev when they had both stood up. He held the wooden case with the dismantled field camera in his hand. ‘Nothing to it, is there?’

Suppositions were his way of asking her questions.

‘No,’ she replied.

‘From now on you can do it too.’

‘No. It’s not my thing.’

She followed him as he started to walk back to the trailer.

‘Did you record anything at all?’

‘Hardly,’ she replied and then halted. In her mind, she reconstructed the image she had just photographed. She turned to look at the spot where the tripod stood. Lev also stood motionless.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just a second.’ She walked back to the tripod, peered into the fog, carried on walking and suddenly broke into a run. Lev shouted something at her, but it escaped her attention. She reached the spot where she had momentarily glimpsed the dark form on the focusing screen. She almost tripped over it, an object on the ice. Lev kept calling. Finally she heard his mumbling, the case thudding on the ice, footsteps approaching. It was a matter of seconds before he was beside her. His gloved hand grasped nervously at the fabric of her jacket and at the same moment he saw the object at her feet.

‘What is that?’

She crouched down. ‘Isn’t it one of our instruments?’

He gave no reply.

‘Lev.’ With a shake of her shoulder she shook herself free of his grip.

‘Yes. No,’ he added quickly.

She passed her hand over the object. The entire exterior was made of a copper-coloured metal. At first sight it looked like flotsam from a wreck, but now that she looked more carefully she saw that it was, to all intents and purposes, an intact capsule that had been dented at the spot where it had impacted the ice. As she looked beyond the object, she saw a parachute twisting into the fog.

‘A drop.’

Lev walked around the thing. ‘A drop? Unannounced? In this fog?’ He shook his head. ‘Did you hear an aircraft?’

She gave a shrug. ‘Perhaps, this morning.’

‘How did you know it was lying here?’

12

‘It’s on the photograph.’

He frowned.

‘From just now,’ she explained. ‘I saw something when I looked through the magnifying glass, but I thought it was nothing.’

He knelt down opposite her. ‘Look.’

She placed her hands on the surface of the object and bent over it. It had a hollow which was facing downwards.

‘Give me a hand,’ he said, digging away the snow around the rim with his gloves.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Turn it over. Look inside.’

‘You don’t even know what it is.’

Lev stopped digging. They looked at each other through the condensation of their breath. He pulled a face. ‘Look, this thing is sealed.

It’s safe. There’ll be no surprises. Just give me a hand.’

‘It’s already surprised us.’

They bent down at the same moment, their hoods rustling against each other. For a moment she could smell him, a strong body odour half concealed by the scent of his Soviet soap. The thing rolled over clumsily.

Now that the hole faced upwards they had a partial view of a solid black material to which the ropes of the parachute were attached. She pulled them aside and tapped against the plate that sealed the inside of the capsule. It sounded no different from the impenetrable ice.

381 Each morning she used the window by the table to frame the landscape in her pencil sketches. She sat at the head of the table, so that she was always seated at the same distance from the window. The weather had brightened.

Lev was reading the instruments to determine their position. Today a trail ran across the view. The window frame hid from sight both the spot where the object had landed and the winch with which they had dragged the thing back to camp. She had never felt the need to sketch more than the window frame revealed. The sharp point of her pencil made a grating sound as she recorded the horizon’s irregularities on paper in a deft movement.

She had fastened the sleeve of her thick, padded jacket with an elastic band around her lower arm so that she could move her right hand freely. The fingers of her left hand clasped the spine of the sketch pad. The edge of the bookbinder’s glue was by now largely exposed. It took a considerable effort not to shiver. Every morning Lev lit the gas heater early, so that it was less cold when she started drawing. If he could have, he would have converted 13

their accommodation, pole station or not, into a real studio.

The sketches formed a journal. In the first weeks she had sometimes written down events that she wanted to be able to remember, but the task had been impossible. Moreover, the days were so similar that they were barely distinguishable. It made more sense to review their stay as a total experience, in retrospect, whereby the extreme conditions were the only constant factors. After one year they had lost just about everything that was extraordinary about them. How they prepared their food, went to the toilet, how long it took to walk a hundred paces, this all became routine. One soon forgets the fact that, thanks to all sorts of inventions, man is able to edge his way through this inhospitable ice mass in reasonable comfort — as if it merely exists to be defied by icebreakers and aeroplanes.

She had learnt to embrace the sheer isolation. It was the same as learning to type on a broken typewriter: you adjusted to its quirks with the passage of time. You even conceivably become attached to its faulty keys.

This was certainly the case with her; she was not certain if Lev felt the same way. He did not show any signs of discomfort.

In the meantime, the capsule as they now called it, lay in one of the tents. The object held the same attraction for her as a black hole. As she was drawing, she wondered what it would be like if she added the dented capsule to the landscape — how her hand would coordinate the necessary movements in a direct translation from her memory. But the idea felt like the rewriting of history. It seemed better just to copy the trail in the sketch; after all, among the other monotonous sketches in her series, it would be just as irregular as the capsule in their daily reality. She merely replaced one irregularity with another, subtler one. She respected the boundaries that the window frame presented. The trail was sufficiently explicit. Her perception was unbounded, sometimes even out of control. Only by restricting herself rigidly to the visible did her drawing gain validity. Since the beginning of the expedition it had therefore become more mechanical. She took on the characteristics of one of the instruments on the floating island: obliging, consistent, precise. Nothing existed outside the parameters.

She heard him bump against the door. A gust of intensely cold air rushed at her from behind.

‘Look at this,’ he said, as he remained standing in the doorway. She cheered up on hearing his voice, the heavy Russian accent. As she watched him, he raised his arms. His clothes, which had become wet as he worked, were frozen stiff. He was encrusted in a crackleware pattern of ice. It cracked with each movement he made, falling in slivers to the floor. He shuffled to the electric heater and remained standing with his hands lifted.

14

He waited in silence as his clothes darkened in colour. A puddle of melting water formed on the floor.

‘Your sketch,’ he enquired optimistically.

She laughed. ‘My sketch what?’

He gave a shrug and turned his back to the heater.

‘Warm enough for you?’

‘Warm enough to survive,’ she replied and bowed her head. ‘Spasiba.’

‘Ne za shto, townie. Can’t take it?’

‘What do you mean? Berlin has a continental climate.’

‘You do have an enormous windbreak. Straight across the city.’

‘Ach so.’ She grinned ironically. ‘That’s protection against something completely different.’

‘Like what?’

‘Schlaraffenland.’

His clothes had become limp. He liberated his upper body from the wet shell, dried himself and put on his woollen jumper. His fur boots, stretched out at the foot of the radiator, resembled sleeping ferrets. He sat down at the table to put on his socks.

‘Anything remarkable?’ she inquired.

‘Nothing. We have drifted further southwards. Not much. We have probably made another little detour.’

She nodded and completed her last line. Without glancing at her work she carefully tore it out of the sketchbook. The view was no more than a handful of irregular horizontal lines. The decapitated tripod that stood ready at all times for the field camera and one of the tension wires of the large antenna were the only diagonals. She drew these in every morning in the indentations that the sketch from the day before had left behind on the underlying sheet. All choices were already taken, set down like the punch card of a pianola.

‘Finished,’ Lev assumed.

She swivelled round in her chair and handed him the sheet.

‘Sketch number 381,’ he said as he took it.

‘So many already?’

‘Don’t you count the days?’

She observed his movements as he walked towards the rack and removed one of the archive boxes. He opened it, put the box on the radio table and placed the sheet on top. He looked briefly at the sketch, then lifted one of the corners of the pile and flicked through the sheets with his thumb. Then he shut the box and carefully put it back in its place.

‘Why do you do that?’

15

‘What?’

‘Store things. Keep things.’

He looked at the rack and then back at her. ‘You are the one that draws.’

‘You are the one that puts things in order.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s nothing.’

‘The drawing, then.’

‘That drawing is the principal activity of NP15.’ He grinned uneasily.

She was silent.

‘Seriously. This legitimises the expedition for me.’

She shook her head decisively. ‘You take a photograph with the field camera every day for research purposes. I can’t match that.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘But still you continue. I can’t match that.’

16

foam magazine #21 / merge

portfolio text

Nickel van Duijvenboden

Translators: Sarah-Jane Jaeggi and Iris Maher

Publisher: Roma Publications

Nickel van Duijvenboden was born in 1981 in Amsterdam. He was educated as a photographer, but turned to writing after his studies. As a student he was preoccupied with questions of the nature of photography that could not be answered by photography alone.

His first collection of essays, The Grand Absence, was published in 2003. The title essay examines in the form of a dialogue the extent to which words can replace images: a photography graduate receives a phone call from his father and tries to help him visualize the images in his exhibition. Can a visualization undo his father’s absence? Can mental images replace physical ones? In reality, it was the images themselves that were absent. Nickel van Duijvenboden earned his degree in photography by reading The Grand Absence in an empty exhibition space.

He continued writing about photography and visual art without venturing too explicitly into the bordering fields of theory, criticism or literature. He gradually developed an autonomous working method and positioned himself as a visual artist working with text.

Using fiction as a visualization and an evocation, his texts reflect on images and engage in complex relations with them. Photography and

171

visual perception remain important motives in his work, as in, for example his novella Plateau, published in 2008. Two scientists stationed on the Arctic drift ice are researching the polar landscape. They gradually realize that their relationship towards nature is entirely mediated by mechanical and analog representation. The scientific dogma of objectivity makes it virtually impossible to make sense of their presence on a personal level.

A turn of events forces them to acknowledge that subjectivity cannot be shut out: in fact, it is indispensable. For information on the availability of publications by Nickel van Duijvenboden, please visit www.nickelvd.nl.

Alex Klein is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work was recently exhibited at Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York and The Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2009 she edited the volume Words Without Pictures. She is a founding member of Oslo Editions as well as the Ralph M. Parsons Curatorial Fellow in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a lecturer at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts.

foam magazine #21 / merge

portfolio text

Immaterial Substance

by Alex Klein

Perhaps we should begin with your transition from photography to words. At what moment did you decide to put down your camera and start writing? What was it about the photographs that you were taking that led to this decision?

Let me first say that I never quit or discarded photography. In the case of ‘The Grand Absence’, replacing photographs with text was a conceptual decision. I did actually produce photographs, but the writing took over, so to speak. Its reasoning finally demanded that the photographs remained invisible, as an ultimate consequence of what I had written.

That this would prompt a discussion about the principles of photography was strictly speaking a side effect, but not altogether unintentional: I thought, and still think, that the definition of photography is too narrow.

It needs to be thrown open.

For many people photography is an a priori, like a language one happens to speak. But this is too one-dimensional. I think photographers who take their medium for granted are overlooking something, an intriguing false bottom. Artists who consciously choose to use photography are more aware that in dealing with photography, one has to deal with certain preconditions. For one thing, it always refers to its own nature. It is the meta-medium par excellence. There also is an ethical dimension: the depiction of certain things is not necessarily exempt from morals.

That is why I think the use of photography warrants a certain hesitance and care.

You mentioned that you are ‘formerly a photographer’ – do you still make photographs?

Yes I do, I always have. But in the past years I have felt much more comfortable seeing myself as an amateur. I am now at a point where I can look back and reassess some of the things I did. For the first time I feel like I could make a very strict selection of images and publish them. But I wouldn’t do that without contextualizing through writing and choosing the right platform.

Coincidentally I spent yesterday afternoon interviewing a few of the original New Topographics photographers – Frank Gohlke, John Schott, and Henry Wessel – and they remarked that they wanted to make ­photographs precisely instead of writing because they wanted to say things that couldn’t be put into words. I think part of what they were

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saying is that writing can potentially be too demonstrative. This is not to take away from the inherent abstractness of language, but just to say that there is a way in which a photograph can be open to interpretation despite its specificity.

New Topographics is very dear and relevant to me. I can relate to their choice of photography instead of writing. I am also most intrigued by those photographs that I am not able to explain verbally. But words can also express things photography cannot. Photography and writing are not interchangeable. They need each other. I think conceptual photography, like that of the New Topographics, requires a verbal contextualization, if not a semantic system that is dependent on words. Similarly, I believe my writings presuppose the existence of images. I would not be able to write without photography.

In saying this, I want to make a clear distinction between writing as information and writing as art. It would be a mistake to consider New Topographics photographs as information, though for a photography ­illiterate that may be tempting. The same thing can be said about writing.

At first glance – a photographer’s glance perhaps – writing may seem demonstrative and descriptive, but I think there also is a more evocative potential.

In this respect I would like to mention Werner Herzog’s adage of ‘­ecstatic truth’. His ‘documentaries’ often contain staged scenes, because he is looking for a deeper layer in reality. Sticking to reality, he says, can only lead to a ‘bookkeeper’s truth’. I find this inspiring, because he proposes something that exceeds reality, that can actually introduce something new to reality. I think this is exactly the responsibility of art, as opposed to, for instance, journalism. So art is not information.

I also think there is a real danger in photography for language to be used as a kind of buttress or explanatory support. W. G. Sebald is an author that photographers were really talking about a few years ago, and I think it’s because he successfully managed to integrate photography into his narratives without it becoming illustrative. You mentioned that there has been a transition in your mode of inquiry from the time that you wrote ‘The Grand Absence’, which seems bound up in the experience of going through graduate school and wrestling with questions of interpretation, reception, and depiction, whereas in Plateau, you seem much

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more ­concerned with this idea of ‘evocation.’ The full title of ‘The Grand Absence’ is ‘The Grand Absence: A Visualization.’ Can you talk about the distinction you are making between ‘evocation’ and ‘visualization?’

The Grand Absence had to do with my emancipation from photography. To a certain degree, the quality of my writing was still dependent on criteria that applied to photography. It was like determining the ‘replacement value’ of photography in front of an insurance company run by fervent photographers. The following years, writing gradually broke away from just being non-photographic. It became autonomous. My stories became more personally motivated and started to involve topics that occupied me, like historical events and man’s relation to nature. Speaking of my relation to New Topographics...

I began to write more fiction. Fiction involved the creation of characters, settings, events to give a concrete significance to abstract concepts I was busy with. Like the duality of perception; how our view of the world revolves around seemingly opposed poles. Objectivity and subjectivity, mechanical and human observation, the natural and man-made, ­science and art, reality and meaning. These matters interest me from the viewpoint of my characters.

The two characters in Plateau are polar researchers, dropped onto the Arctic pack ice in the late sixties. This was long before the introduction of Google Earth, when the mapping of the world still had a connotation of painstaking knowledge-gathering and espionage. It was a different age, almost unimaginable now. But looking through the eyes of these characters, our world might be equally incredible.

So in answer to your question, Plateau is not merely a visualization, in terms of being a replacement for something visual. It is evocative in the sense that it implies the invention of things that lie outside the realm of the visible. Things that cannot be visualized, in other words.

Last year I was teaching an advanced photography seminar and framed the semester around the question ‘What is a photograph?’ I wanted to challenge the students to think through the idea of what we understand photography to be and whether we could make alliances in other media. Part of me was really hoping that the students would somehow call my bluff, that they would produce something really ‘out there’ that substantially challenged what we mean by photography and that would locate it beyond its physical parameters. I know you said that you are

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interested in a place between image and text. The image/text question is also something I am profoundly interested in. I think a lot about ­simultaneity in image and text, something in line with the doubling that Foucault writes about with regard to the calligram. I also think about Allen Ruppersberg’s early photoworks or an artist like Shannon Ebner, who has been trying to reconcile text and image more in line with something connected to sculpture, landscape, and poetry. But these kinds of strategies seem to be a bit of a tangent and slightly to the side of what you are doing. I wonder if you ever think of your writing as a kind of photograph, or if you are trying to investigate an in-between space or metalanguage?

I do believe that there can exist something like a third layer in between text and image. But it is a very intricate and therefore complicated affair.

How does one prevent that the one becomes subordinate to the other?

I don’t know of that many examples where this has been solved convincingly. I think it has to do with a certain openness: text and image need to be just wide enough apart to create a space for interpretation, but they need to be close enough to suggest that there might be a link. At the same time, they both need to be somehow unresolved.

I have ongoing collaborations with visual artists to investigate the working of this third layer. I work together with photographers on book projects where documentary photography is placed next to a fictional story in order to create a parallel reality. It is very important that both of these ingredients function autonomously – a mere catalogue text, for example, wouldn’t work. I also collaborate very closely with my partner, visual artist Gwenneth Boelens, under the name ‘Il faut’. I have written monologues for her art works and she has provided images for publications of mine, but essentially all our work goes through a filter of mutual agreement and conceptualization. This summer we recorded material for a new film about the analogue representation of nature. That film will be an amalgamation of both our practices.

In your writing there is obviously still a fetishization of photography or at least the act of making a photograph. It seems you are still holding on to, or longing for that particular physical and perceptual experience of photographing. I am thinking specifically here of the moment in Plateau when the scientist is shooting with the large format camera in the Arctic.

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I think this is something that most photographers could empathize with: lugging a monorail around, hiding under the dark cloth, squinting to see the upside down image, focusing, the feel of cold metal, the anxiety, and the satisfaction that comes as a result of the process.

It is certainly true that I use large format photography as a metaphor for the gaze in my stories. It is something I dwell on, because I think it is easily overlooked. I want to make a distinction between different modes of seeing. I am not talking about the fleeting glimpse, which seems to apply to snapshot photography. I am interested in photography as a way of consciously and deliberately looking at something, and blocking all other information. Like a meditation on something.

I am also interested in photography as a means to feign objectivity.

This is present in the character of the woman scientist in Plateau, who wants nothing more than to mediate a reality that she finds much more important than herself. That is an aspect of photography I feel drawn towards: the mechanism taking over at the expense of the author, like an act of self-effacement. It is a sort of hiding, which in turn focuses attention on the absence of the maker.

There is another passage in Plateau that stuck out to me. The moment when the woman scientist is thinking about information – that it only exists if recorded – seeing the act of recording as an ‘intervention.’ Is this the way you also think about photography? To think of the subject of photography as information has a certain kind of classic Conceptual ring to it – that is, approaching the photograph as a mechanical record rather than within a lineage of crafted, modernist photographic concerns. And of course there is the obvious connection between ‘information’, words on a page, and the kind of aesthetics of administration that Benjamin Buchloh ties to Conceptualism. So when I first heard about your work I guess I was expecting it to be located somewhere in this vein, something more procedural or abrupt. However, your words seem to be more tied to fiction and narrative.

Yes, I think of photography as an ‘intervention’. At the moment, I am reading a book called Images In Spite Of All by Georges Didi-Huberman, which is about four pictures taken in Auschwitz, the only photographic record known to date that depicts the actual perpetration of the holocaust. The ­Jewish Sonderkommando who took the images, intervened both literally and figuratively in the course of events. I truly think that the fact that

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these images exist, alters the way we perceive history and therefore history itself. History is a mental concept that is inseparably bound to questions of perception. It doesn’t exist without our gaze. The same goes for mental concepts to understand the world, like exact sciences.

I’d also like to talk a little bit about the choice to write with regard to the question of distribution and dissemination. I think many artists can empathize with the frustrations of the limitations of the gallery or feeling the pressure to produce objects, at least I do. While I am completely bound up in the pleasures of photography, there is something that distresses me about making something, framing it, and then shipping it off to hang on a wall when the inherent nature of photography is to circulate.

So one of the things I try to do in my own work is think about other forms or venues that can operate in tandem with my studio work – contributing to journals, public presentations, artist writings, events, etc. But this also has the effect of creating a practice that is more elusive or dispersed, which certainly has its pros and cons. Is this something that appeals to you now as a writer working within an art context?

I have the fortune of working together with a dedicated publisher, Roma Publications, which specializes in artist books that have an ambiguous nature. This way, my work is positioned in an existing discourse without having to compromise. But of course, the positioning of my work is problematic in a practical sense. Literature has its own system, which is difficult to access. The same goes for visual art and photography, fields that to this point have only shown interest in my work in so far as it is accessible to their particular audiences. The point is that I don’t want to comply too much with existing fields, because I think the conceptual integrity of my work will suffer from it. But I do visualize myself in the near future writing a novel for a conventional publishing house, while at the same time exhibiting visual work. What lies between will perhaps be the immaterial, but crucial substance of my practice. +

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Naoya Hatakeyama Scales

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Naoya Hatakeyama

List of works, in order of appearance New York / Window of the World #233, 2006 New York / Window of the World #123, 2006 New York / Window of the World #327, 2006 New York / Tobu World Square #0832, 2003 New York / Window of the World #321, 2006 New York / Window of the World #106, 2006 New York/ Tobu World Square #1131, 2004 New York / Window of the World #202, 2006 New York / Window of the World #323, 2006 New York/ Tobu World Square #1722, 2004 New York / Window of the World #116, 2006 New York / Window of the World #314, 2006 New York/ Tobu World Square #1835, 2004 All images Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © Naoya Hatakeyama

Naoya Hatakeyama was born in 1958 in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. He completed his graduate studies at Tsukuba University in 1984, since when he has been based in Tokyo, a city which continuously fuels his interest in the relationship between nature, the city and photography. His photographic works examine the city in a serial manner; it’s past, present and future. He employs the vocabulary of photography to reflect upon the relationship between humans and their environment. In 1997 ­Hatakeyama received the 22nd Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award.

In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, Hatakeyama’s photographs are found in the public collections of the National ­Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; ­Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; The Museum of Fine Arts, ­Houston; Yale Univeristy Art Gallery, New Haven; the Swiss Foundation for Photography, Winterthur; La Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Hatakeyama was invited to participate in Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2003 and 2009, and was short-listed for the Prix Pictet 2009.

Based on a series commissioned by the Canadian Architecture Centre, Scales is an attempt to investigate how architecture and threedimensionality can be translated onto a flat surface.

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Hubertus von Amelunxen is a professor in cultural studies, an author and independent curator. He lives in Berlin, Lübeck and Paris. Between 2001 and 2007 he was senior visiting curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal; during this period he worked with the exhibition series Tangent/e in which he invited among others Naoya ­Hatakeyama and commissioned the work Scales. From 2005 to 2009 he was appointed the Rector of the European School of Visual Arts/Ecole européenne supérieure de l’image in France. He is the author of numerous books and articles on literature, art and photography. He has edited books on media theory and post-structuralism, and curated several international exhibitions and catalogues, among them Photography after ­Photography, an exhibition which traveled in Europe and North America. The most recent show Notation. Kalkül und Form in den Künsten was curated together with Dieter Appelt and Peter Weibel for the Akademie der ­Künste, ­Berlin and the ZKM, Karlsruhe.

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Tangential Departures

by Hubertus von Amelunxen

Translation doesn’t envisage itself like poetry as plunged, so to speak, in the forest of language, but outside it, opposite the forest without entering it; it calls and penetrates the original in this unique place where the echo in its own language can resonate with a work in a foreign language.

Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator The Japanese artist Naoya Hatakeyama was one of four artists I had invited to work in the photographic archives of the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal between 2002 and 2007. The other artists were Alain Paiment, Dieter Appelt and Victor Burgin.* The initial idea was informed by the question of how to transform a historical collection of photography – certainly among the most exquisite in the world – into an archive of the future? How can we seize photography as a form of pictorial knowledge and how are images read through images? How does the intertwining of art and photography relate to the history and the contemporaneousness of architecture? How does photography serve our understanding of volumes, space-time dimensions, Euclidean and trans-Euclidean space? How does translation of a volume into another volume affect the bodies and their understanding? These were a few of the questions addressed through the exhibitions and books we made and published between 2003 and 2007, entitled Tangent.

Photography does not reproduce architectonic space but gives a specific impression of it in time. The act of photography, however, does involve contact with space that can be understood as musical intonation, related to the transcription of sound, the disordering of the gaze. Photography acts as a tangent that must touch a volume for it to be revealed to our gaze and the revealing of the volume becomes a tangential departure.

The special relationship between photography and architecture, between photography and space, is concentrated in this specific encounter, as the tangent touches the circle. Photography, as Erwin Panofsky had stated, uses visualization to take the world of bodies into a ‘sphere of fundamental otherness’.

The purpose was not a nostalgic or mimetic evocation of historic moments – not another project of re-photography, but a kind of photographic reference to selected works of the collection which have been displaced, a work of translation, as Walter Benjamin would have put it, translating towards an origin that in a certain sense still is to become.

The goal was not to capture a linear development of a photographic vision of architecture as the revelation of difference. It was a movement of translation, of the Tangent, in the words of Jean Laplanche, neither autocentric nor self-enclosed, nor does it reduce the other to the terms of that self, but rather a movement out towards the other.

During the period in which I invited Naoya Hatakeyama to the Tangent project at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal, he produced many works on architecture. He could surely have spent many years with the collection, wrapped up in his coat so as to withstand the cold temperatures demanded by conservation, and letting his eye slowly wander over the photographs. He was interested in everything, each shimmer of light which captured the world on paper. Then he chose several ­photographs of models which distractingly stage, mount or collage what

Tokyo/Mori Building #1, 2003, Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © Naoya Hatakeyama

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is built. A model equals photography in the sense that it simulates a perfect future.

Naoya Hatakeyama has this specific and rare talent to walk around and to breathe the light, feeling that light means time and life, forever linked to the time of becoming and decay. When he breathes out photography, then they are creations that take up and reverse the scale of the world as precisely as possible. The rock takes flight and the flying bird stands still. It seems as if he is scratching with light on the permanence of things, caring for and honoring their appearances and causing them to abscond. I know of few artists who make this close link between drawing and photographing, each time a touching, with the pen and with the light, the photons. Here, in the raster of the camera obscura, like in Albrecht Dürer’s famous etching of the perspectival grid, the pen draws the line from eye point to eye point, the view is divided into short lines, as if the drawn image was changing from positive to negative; there, the mountain hovers as if split from its base, excised by light. The world hangs on lines which form it and in the light which creates it.

Models are philosophical toys, as we know from Charles Baudelaire, or else strategic ordeals. With their help the world is pre-built, taken to ­limits, placed in scales which enable man, by exerting his powers of imagination, to project into reality what is captured in the small format.

Each model may well have a small element of the utopian, and even the naked eye, shielded by an apparatus, a telescope or a telescopic lens and without the obstruction of a frame, can look at the world as a model and can separate out the viewer as an observer or onlooker. Naoya ­Hatakeyama stated in the context of his Scales work, that as a child

he wondered about this experience we all have had, why people in the distance are so small, just as Alberto Giacometti, asked by his brother why he makes such small sculptures of men, said that he should just look down the boulevard to get the answer. Models are created as a conception of a possible design or building or as a true-to-scale copy of a real building, or the model corresponds to an idea that emerges at the moment of seeing, but is only describable, enunciable, without any materiality. The latter is undoubtedly the most important aspect, because it relates to a capacity by means of which we imagine the world so as to create it anew. The 18th and 19th century panoramas attempted to achieve the highest degree of illusion by placing man in a painted world from which he could no longer separate himself; no framework offered him a possibility of either flight or control. The model, however, achieves on a small scale what would either be incalculable or unmanageable on a large scale.

The models which Naoya Hatakeyama has photographed were based on scales which were created by the perspectival rastering of the field of vision, long before the photograph, but which had to be technically developed in the 19th century by photogrammetry before reliable data on the three-dimensionality of the object could be taken from a series of images. Today, the world is surveyed by flying scanners, criminally destroyed or depicted, in Google Earth, as a remote all-encompassing view. Surrounded by screens and billboards, modeled data have become the trompe l’oeil of our general perception and we ourselves have become the data for hitherto inconceivable manipulations.

Naoya Hatakeyama varies the scale of the world in three different series, two of which are reproduced here. In French the word for scale is ‘échelle’, which also means ladder. In early photographs, for example those of Fox Talbot, Charles Nègre or Hippolyte Bayard, we often see ladders casting short or long shadows, introduced to mark scale and depth. In Talbot’s Pencil of Nature there is the famous picture of an arch

Tokyo/Mori Building #4, 2003, Collection Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal © Naoya Hatakeyama

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in Lacock Abbey; there, the ladder creates many and multifold links between man, architecture and their photographic depiction. Optical scale is measured by the ladder, each rung offering the threshold to another window-view on the world. It is as if Jonathan Swift had sent Naoya ­Hatakeyama on the journey to Lilliput and Brobdingnag with Gulliver.

The human scale as axiomatic is questioned, things fall into or out of the world. The ladder is like a tangent, leaning against the volume of visible space, only to take another direction in the image. So Naoya is concerned not with representing the world, but with what is meant, which he translates, thus creates.

The city park in Shenzen, China, goes by the nice name of Window of the World and invites us to a playful view into the vertical box-world of New York. A city formed by accumulations of window openings, some of them inclined, others not quite adjusted, others with an out-of-place roof, models of a modernized view of the world where life has not moved in, yet which still appeals to all our powers of imagination to cooperate on a design for urban space. The pale, weather-beaten colors recall water paints running across and giving forms to the paper, out to the very edge of their possibilities. Naoya Hatakeyama was reminded of paintings by Paul Klee, rhythmic and chromatic notations of space. The buildings seem to dither in the uncertainty of their urban destiny, sinking into the ground here and there and the facades are gazing with hollow looks at the distant viewer. The city is uninhabited, it looks deserted and only the decay allows us to seize a time code. It may be a time to come or a time long passed. The photographs remind me on Georg Simmel’s essay on the ruins, where he emphasized on the essential contemporaneity of the ruins. Naoya Hatakeyama here seeks the present form of a past life.

Things are very different in the series on the theme park Tobu World Square, in Kinugawa, Tochigi, with its famous buildings from all over the world gathered into a big city in the astonishing scale of 1:25. The hyperrealism of the depiction, the precise proportions, the equipping of the city with figures, cars and trees, make this model city an extraordinary spectacle in which life seems to be frozen, as if, before Naoya started directing his light into it, the whole city got caught in the eye of the Gorgon.

At first sight we think of the classical black-and-white, 1920s-to-1950s photographs of New York, strictly orthogonal, in the perspectival raster of horizontals and verticals, with strong contrasts in the reflections of light on window facades. In fact, it is the light and the shadows that enhance the realism of these photographs. Like Gulliver, Naoya will have carefully placed himself into a horizontal position, and his gaze must have seemed to the figures like a double full moon, the lens like the eye of the Cyclops, who, for a second time, takes the life of the model’s shadow world. The conspicuous precision of the detail is frightening and the viewer of these images feels both admiration at the scrupulousness of the execution and fear of being himself only a model for one of these little figures. Each of these photographs is also a mise-en-abime of photography, an actual world of mirrors where life is disfigured by resemblance.

It is then that we notice how Naoya Hatakeyama finds for his images the gaze that lets life, conceived as a model or posited as a world, vibrate contrapuntally – no breath without breathing in and out. And be it a panorama, the River Series, or his very recent series Ciel tombé (2007) Naoya breathes with the voice of Echo, who warns Narcissus not to get too close to his likeness; he can only survive by remaining alien to himself. + * Four exhibitions and books were created and published during this time, made possible by the enduring support of Phyllis Lambert, the Founding Director of the CCA. The books are Tangent | e (I) Alain Paiement, Zürich/Montréal, Lars Müller publishers, 2003; Tangent | e (II) Dieter Appelt. Forth Bridge Cinema, Zürich/Montréal, Lars Müller publishers, 2005; Tangent | e (III) Victor Burgin, Voyage to Italy, Stuttgart, Hatje Cantz, 2006 and Tangent | e (IV) Naoya Hatakeyama, Scales, Los Angeles, Nazraeli Press, 2007.

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Foam Magazine’s choice of paper from ModoVanGelder Amsterdam

Broomberg & Chanarin are printed on Pioneer 110 g/m2

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PLATEAU (2008)

Excerpts from the first two chapters 379 She left no footprints. The snow was too compact. It crunched beneath her feet, unabsorbing, unresonating. The sound was so dry that the ice plateau seemed to be made of a massive bulk of felt. The fact that there was no wind that day, the sky shrouded in thick mist, reinforced this feeling.

Shapes were barely distinguishable, odours remained suspended in the cold air, fingertips were too frosted to feel anything, and the sounds of colliding ice islands were stifled before they reached the ear. She, alone, generated sound. The lining of her hood rustled continuously against her ears, her trouser-legs rubbed against each other with every step.

The tripod clicked as she placed the heavy camera body in the groove.

She could feel the coldness of the metal through her mittens. Her hands wavered, touching the equipment more often than necessary. She was not quite focused. The sequence was still illogical to her. She glanced at him nervously several times, but he showed no sign of helping her. Clumsily she attempted to loosen one of the tripod legs, but the adjustment ring scarcely gave way. The tripod had stood outside for months, anchored in the ice to ensure it always maintained the same viewpoint. The cold air had slowly crumbled the rubber grips. She had to take off her mitten to loosen the leg. Standing on tiptoe, she peered at the recessed spirit level on top of the camera body and rocked the tripod to and fro until it was plumb. She then turned it tight. Without saying anything, he handed her the lens, a heavy lump of glass that protruded through the lens board like an hourglass. She clamped it in the holder, expanded the bellows enough to have the lens project an image onto the focusing screen, and finally opened the shutter.

‘And now?’ she said, as she lowered her hands.

‘Focus.’

She pulled the black cloth over her head and rested the lead-weighted hem in a fold of the bellows.

‘Well?’ he inquired.

‘Shapes in a mist.’

He chuckled silently. ‘That is unavoidable today.’

‘So, a sharp mist,’ she understood. As she pressed the loupe against the focusing screen, her breathing created vapour on the ground glass.

She fumbled vainly with her right arm for the wheel at the end of the focusing stage.

‘Here,’ he said as he guided her hand. ‘Use the pieces of ice on the ground.’

As she moved the lens inwards with the wheel, the frozen ground appeared upside down at the top of the image. She focused on an almost imperceptible dark form, a curve that loomed up out of the whiteness. It pierced the fog like the bow of a ship in a miniature world.

‘What was it again, one stop overexposure?’

‘At least. You only have whites, you have to compensate.’

He handed her the light meter. A ribbed white slide was positioned in front of the selenium sensors to temper the incidence of light. She pointed the meter towards the landscape in front of her, pressed the switch on the side of the apparatus and took a reading. He nodded as he took the light meter and replaced it in his jacket pocket. She adjusted the aperture, attached the cable release, closed the shutter and pulled the lever to cock it.

She then stood behind the camera, took the black metal cassette from him and clamped it under the focusing screen. She pulled the slide sideways so that the film in the camera was uncovered and raised her hand with the cable release clasped in her fingers. This is how she envisaged herself and Lev, viewed from behind, standing in front of the white landscape, motionless, her hand raised. She peered over the camera at the Arctic Ocean hidden from view and listened to their breathing. Then she pressed the shutter release.

Ute and Lev did not know where they were. Not precisely. They had taken their last reading the day before yesterday: 84º10’N 121º37’W. On average they drifted one hundred and fifty metres per hour, and this would continue until they were spewed out by the melting pack ice in the vicinity of Greenland. They were familiar with the flow chart and the courses that the previous manned drifting stations had traversed. On the chart their coloured lines formed a whimsical pattern around the North Pole.

NP15, the camp established on the middle of the ice floe, comprised simple quarters in the form of a trailer, a laboratory with adjoining engine room housed in three connected tents, a small drilling rig and a radio tower. It all looked provisional; more attention had been paid to the instruments than the living accommodation. Except for the stars there were no reference points here: no hills, no mainland, no vegetation — nothing

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The paper used in this magazine was supplied by Amsterdam paper merchant ModoVanGelder. For more information please call +31 20 5605333 or email marketing@modovangelder.nl

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a company of

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books

1

Grégory Valton Dans la Neige Ellen Lupton Indie Publishing

The new French publisher Les Éditions Poursuite presented this small publication to me at the photography festival in

If it is true what insiders claim, that pub-

Arles. In no more than thirty pictures,

lic interest is shifting away from mass

the photographer tells the story of a trip

media to independent and small produc-

into the Pyrénées to the village where his

tions, then this book is both a good start

mother, who is now deceased, was born.

and a helpful guide for artists who are

Interior views of farm houses alternate

producing their own books. Developed

with evening or night-time walks during

by a team of students and professors, it

which the village, the mountains and the

gives readers both confidence and an

trees are closely observed. Whether we

overview of small publishing houses and

see darkness closing in on a path or a

artist books. It also explains necessities

wall of fog on a mountain slope, the

such as ISBNs and marketing in the

photographs are not symbolic. Instead,

book trade and describes in short steps

they evoke feelings, memories, and sad-

the use of InDesign and how to create

ness as well as the strange feeling one

hand-crafted artist books. And since this

has when encountering objects or places

Henry Frank Father Photographer

book itself originated from a workshop

that were once familiar. The photogra-

Two years ago in Japan a book was pub-

either remarkable or curious: an outing

on book design, every page is a pleasure

pher says good-bye but does so with

lished in which Ken Morisawa presented

on a frozen lake; a trip to the mountains;

to behold, and excellent visual solutions

great clarity throughout the book. With

photographs by his grandfather, a pro-

or his wife with a pram in Zurich under

are found for all types of difficulties. In

a photograph attached to the cover, a

fessional portrait photographer in rural

the roof of a street car stop. I find it dif-

recent years, niche products, at least on

short introduction by the photographer,

Japan who passionately captured his sur-

ficult not to like these photographs. They

the photobook market, have gained the

a literary afterword, and a drawing on

roundings on film. The pictures Robert

were taken with a deep understanding

trust of buyers and now command more

the backflap, this is a compelling, small

Frank chose of his father’s, which he had

of natural light, shadows and reflections

space on bookshop shelves. More and

soft-cover book. Les Éditions Poursuite

brought to the United States as glass

are cleverly used, and the ‘bon-vivant’

more, the independent nature of publica-

will be publishing more books this

plate negatives, are from approximately

Henry Frank is, as his son notes, a ‘won-

tions is inversely proportionate to the

autumn, and I am looking forward to

the same period, the twenties and thir-

derful storyteller’ of the good side of

size of their publishing house.

seeing what they offer.

ties, but were taken in Zurich. An ama-

middle-class life.

2

teur photographer, Henry Frank took

Princeton Architectural Press

Les Éditions Poursuite

pictures of his two sons, his wife, his

Steidl

ISBN: 9781568987606

ISBN: 9782952011884

friends, and scenes that appeared to him

ISBN: 9783865218148

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books

Mariken Wessels I Want To Eat In recent years it has mainly been women photographers who have expanded the spectrum of photobooks.

They have produced small publications, usually with stories from close to home.

Wolfgang Scheppe Migropolis

Photographs and documents are used in a variety of ways to serve the purposes

A workshop at the University of Venice

of the artist. Wiebke Loeper, Liza Nguyen,

studied working conditions and migra-

Wytske van Keulen, Bertien van Manen

tion in the city. These two volumes contain diagrams, interviews, stories and a

and Rinko Kawauchi all come to mind.

3

Mariken Wessels has self-published a

tions. The volumes present a complex

Fabio Barile Diary No 0 Things that do not happen

view of Venice, in which tourism and

I really enjoyed this small publication

cle around a female protagonist and

commerce play an equally significant

from Rome by a pupil of Guido Guidi.

which may come from a variety of

role. This publication is comparable to

The pictures tell us nothing about the

albums, is juxtaposed with a collection

the Rem Koolhaas books and the End-

author, who has photographed his

of letters and an odd, heart-rending, and

Commercial project; here too, photogra-

friends with great sensitivity. It is unim-

strangely melancholic story is spun

phy is used to avoid stereotypes about

portant to me whether the bright, clear

which could be true or false, imagined

urban life and to force us to take a closer

and slightly desaturated photographs

or created by the artist. The photographs

look at the city. The authors and students

reflect personal impressions or are play-

took the photographs themselves and

ful mannerisms as in the work of Mike

invited JĂśrg Koopmann to contribute a

Sack. The pictures play on photographic

niscent of Miroslav TichĂ˝ or Gerard

few impressions, including the picture

memories, somewhere between Stephen

Fieret. They tell the story of a family, or

on the cover. Harking back to Canaletto,

Shore, Rinko Kawauchi, and the masters

fragments from the life of a young

this image shows a gondola transporting

of Italian colour photography. This eco-

woman, and can only be understood

four street vendors with stuffed blue gar-

nomical, elegantly edited and at the same

with empathy and interest on the part of

bage bags.

time brave little book is a perfect recep-

the reader.

number of photographs. The photographs are afforded more space than usual and are more than mere illustra-

small gem about which Jeff Ladd was full of enthusiasm when he told me about it a few months ago. A collection of anonymous photographs, most of which cir-

appear to be from the seventies. They 4

have been enlarged and are thus remi-

tacle for these images.

Hatje Cantz ISBN: 9783775724852

197

Wessels 3/3

ISBN: 978-9081385916

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5

David Chickey Beaumont’s Kitchen A cookbook? No, this volume is more

who, in addition to being the first direc-

Jacqueline Hassink Car Girls Aperture

tor of the photography department at

This is the first time I have held in my

MoMA in the 1940s, appears to have

hands the smaller soft-cover version of

been an excellent cook for much of his

this book and I like it better than the

life. As a book, this publication is a subtle

larger edition. Working at international

ode to classicism and tradition, with

automotive trade fairs, Hassink has doc-

tipped-in black-and-white pictures by a

umented the performers who promote

range of photographers from Ansel

sales by acting as objects of desire along-

than that. Radius Books has published the best recipes of Beaumont Newhall

Adams to Edward Weston, with a refined variation of an old Baskerville type, and

side the vehicles on display. She has also 6

developed a taxonomy that allows us to

The stories told about this thoroughly

John Stezaker 3rd Person Archive

elitist circle of friends and the stimulat-

For more than thirty years, the British

taken to publish this book and it exerts

quite well on her website, but this little

ing recipes make the book an enjoyable

artist John Stezaker has collected photo-

a strange effect on the reader: the silhou-

book functions like a key to its virtual

volume with photographic and culinary

graphs and used them in collages. His

ettes of the passers-by and the streets

counterpart. In terms of design and

appeal. Overall, this production is a mas-

most recent book is a collection of a col-

bleed into one another, bodies disinte-

execution, it too is reminiscent of an

terly achievement in publishing. Whether

lection. Stezaker has taken a 1920s alma-

grate almost completely, and an arche-

item for sale. The photographer plays

he is discussing fundamentals or difficult

nac and cut out pictures of people,

typical walker appears before our eyes.

with the market; the book follows the

sauces, Beaumont Newhall has an ele-

mostly individuals walking. These pic-

Regardless of how we choose to under-

rules of the market and at the same time

gant, learned and concise style, which is

tures are sometimes smaller than a fin-

stand this work, I found its use of pho-

counteracts it. Concept and documenta-

the reason his essays on photography

gernail and never larger than the palm

tography and the solitary appearance of

tion come together in a relationship that

are so readable.

of one’s hand. On the left pages there is

the people extremely stimulating.

benefits both.

printed on heavy matte paper that has a creamy tint similar to recycled paper.

order these women according to vehicle type, trade fair city, colour of hair, and ethnic origin. This system actually works

a code that indicates the location of the

Radius Books

picture in Stezaker’s archive; on the right

Koenig Books

Aperture Travel Edition

ISBN: 9781934435069

is the picture. Great pains have been

ISBN: 9783865603715

ISBN: 9781597111065

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Magnum Georgischer Frühling

7

In the spring of this year, ten Magnum

Cat Tuong Nguyen Underdog Suite

photographers travelled to Georgia at

Time and again in catalogues and on the

the invitation of the Georgian Ministry

web, I have come across pictures by this

of Culture. Each photographer was given

artist, who was born in Vietnam but now

twenty pages in this book, which is large

lives in Switzerland. I am happy now to

enough for the reader to gain an impres-

be holding in my hands his first publica-

sion of their different approaches but

tion. Compared to the recently published

small enough to restrict the photogra-

The Great Unreal (Edition Patrick Frey)

Petra Stavast Libero

phers and enhance their powers of

by his fellow students TONK from

This story of a family spans over two

expression. Whether it is the dense and

Zurich, who use similar methods, this

continents. The photographer found

insightful pictures of Martine Franck or

book has a more formal appearance.

several pictures from a family album in

the cool and clear photography of Tho-

This is because the artist has used pho-

an abandoned house in Italy. She photo-

mas Dworzak, a smart selection has been

tography for the first time in order to

graphed the house and the pictures and

Sebastian Hau works in the specialized

made which reflects the various trends

determine his place in the world. His

made contact with the people in the pic-

photography bookshop Schaden.com

within this agency. Alec Soth and Anto-

trips, his encounters, many things are

tures, an Italian family that had lived in

in Cologne.

ine D’Agata responded with concepts

documented and later used in his col-

New York for several decades. The par-

He also writes for the German website

(the most beautiful woman in Georgia

lages. Small typologies such as street

ents had sent pictures of their children

www.fotokritik.de

and the Odyssey, respectively). Opening

altars in Vietnam, short photo essays,

to relatives still living in Italy. The son

with in-depth essays on the history of the

and bathers and kissers can all be found

and daughter, now grown up, were the

country and accompanied by a collection

here in addition to newspaper clippings

subject of portraits by the photographer.

Credits: all images are reproductions of

of tourist postcards and a selection of

and overpainting. Sculptures with great

The book has a sober layout and as an

book covers, unless numbered.

work by Magnum photographers from

presence, which are in turn the subject

object it rests well in the reader’s hands.

Credits for the numbered:

previous years, this publication – with its

of photographs, treat the subjects of

The direct approach taken leads to a

1 © Grégory Valton / Les Éditions

original and bold format and its intima-

death and destruction in strange dream-

straightforward story, and gaps are either

tions of propaganda – gives readers an

like games. Scheidegger & Spiess have

filled by interviews or left open. On the

2 © Henry Frank / Steidl

idea of the new face this agency is trying

made a soberly designed book that both

whole, this is a convincing and restrained

3, 4 © Fabio Barile / 3/3

to find.

orders and satisfies this complex art.

publication.

5 © Ralph Steiner / Radius Books

8

Text by Sebastian Hau

Poursuite

6 © John Stezaker / Koenig Books

Kehrer / Boot

Scheidegger & Spiess

Roma Publications

7 © Thomas Dworzak / Kehrer / Boot

ISBN: 9783868280869

ISBN: 9783858812377

ISBN: 9789077459386

8 © Petra Stavast / Roma Publications

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Malick Sidibé, La femme à carreaux, août 1971 50 × 50 cm, modern non editioned Gelatin Silver Print for € 1000,–

Foam Editions is proud to offer a limited selection of framed and matted exhibition prints authorised with a certificate by Malick Sidibé.

Also in Foam Editions: Daniëlle van Ark, Karl Blossfeldt, Kim Boske, Mitch Epstein, Marnix Goossens, Pieter Hugo, Marcus Koppen, Marrigje de Maar, Awoiska van der Molen, Daido Moriyama, James Nachtwey, Sanne Peper, Bart Julius Peters, August Sander, Jaap Scheeren and Raimond Wouda

Open Wednesdays – Fridays 1.00 pm – 6.00 pm Saturdays & Sundays 11.00 am – 6.00 pm and by appointment

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Foam Editions Keizersgracht 609 NL-1017 DS Amsterdam T +31 (0)20-5516500 W www.foam.nl E jacob@foam.nl

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Foam exhibits all genres of photography: fine art, documentary, applied, historical and contemporary, and is a museum with international allure. Along with large exhibitions of established world-famous photographers, Foam exhibits emerging young talent in smaller, shorter shows.

Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam tel +31 20 5516500 www.foam.nl Open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation and the BankGiro Loterij

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Lily Brik. Portrait for the Poster Knigi, 1924 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Alexander Rodchenko ~ Revolution in Photography ~

18 December 2009 – 17 March 2010

In December Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam presents a unique retrospective of the world-famous Russian avant-garde artist ­Alex­ander Rodchenko. The exhibition contains more than 200 vintage photographs, some of which have never been exhibited in the West before. Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) is one of the great innovators of twentiethcentury avant-garde art and one of its most versatile practitioners.

Having first gained international acclaim as a painter, sculptor and graphic designer, Rodchenko took up the practice of photography in the early 1920s, convinced that it would become the artistic medium of his era. Over the course of the following two decades he developed a bold new vocabulary of acute camera angles, extreme foreshortenings of perspective and close-ups of surprising details. In addition to introducing design as an integral element of photography, Rodchenko’s approach balanced formal concerns with an interest in documenting the social and political life of the Soviet Union. In the process, he helped to change the way people perceived not only photography but the role of the photographer.

Tracing the development of his photographic work over the course of two decades, Alexander Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography reveals the artist’s talent for experimentation as well as the extraordinary range of his work. From sharp-witted photomontage to documentary reportage in Moscow’s streets, from dynamic architectural studies to intimate

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portraits of his circle, Rodchenko’s photographic activity possessed a breath and scope matched by few artists of his day. Abandoning ‘pure’ art in favor of developing a visual language that could address a mass audience, Rodchenko applied himself as a photographer and designer to the production of posters, magazine and book design, advertisements for state-owned enterprises as well as photojournalism and other forms of documentary photography.

In presenting a comprehensive selection of his work, the exhibition in Foam offers a significant opportunity to re-evaluate Rodchenko’s achievements in photography and to reconsider the fertile and tumultuous time in which he worked – a period that stretched from the intellectually adventurous Lenin years to the repressive cultural regime initiated by Stalin. It also allows us to appreciate how fresh and daring his work still is today. Indeed, though more than half a century has passed since his death, his many significant accomplishments continue to influence a wide range of contemporary practitioners. +

The exhibition Alexander Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography is made in collaboration with the Moscow House of Photography Museum and curated by its director Olga Sviblova. Foam is sponsored by the BankGiroLoterij and the VandenEnde Foundation.

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People Gathering to Take Part in a Demonstration, 1928 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Portrait of the Artist's mother, 1924 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Races, 1935 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Vladimir Mayakovsky. Pro Eto cover ontwerp, 1923 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Stairs, 1930 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Girl with a Leica, 1934 Š A. Rodchenko - V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Fire Escape (with a man), 1925 Š A. Rodchenko, V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Real Tennis 05, 2008 © Elliott Wilcox

18 September – 9 December 2009

PRUNE ~ Abstracting Reality This exhibition concentrates on the complex yet intriguing relationship between reality and abstraction in contemporary photography.

PRUNE – Abstracting Reality gathers photographic work which though grounded in reality pushes toward abstraction. The show features work that is initially appreciated for its form, until the viewer realizes that there is a story behind the image, one revealed only by reading the ­caption. PRUNE – Abstracting Reality features work by Julian Faulhaber, Edgar Martins, Luke Gilford, Horacio Salinas, Roger Ballen, Broomberg & Chanarin and others. The exhibition is curated by Kathy Ryan, ­Director of Photography of The New York Times Magazine, in collaboration with Foam.

Venus, 2009 © Jan-Dirk van der Burg

10 November – 16 December 2009

Foam_3h: Jan-Dirk van der Burg ~ Sex Cinema Venus Sex Cinema Venus is a documentation of the oldest sex cinema in ­Amsterdam, soon to be closed down as part of the city council’s cleanup of the Red Light District. Dutch photographer Jan-Dirk van der Burg (1978) is fascinated by day-to-day life; after his series Office Culture (2004) and The Philatelist (2008) he photographed the series Sex Cinema Venus in 2009. The exhibition presents the last days of the cinema.

Laatste Loodjes, 2009 © Jan-Dirk van der Burg

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30 October – 13 December 2009

Sanne Sannes ~ Darkness & Light Sanne Sannes’ oeuvre occupies a unique place in Dutch photo history. His work was unknown to his contemporaries and remains unknown today.

Yet many see his photos as typical of the 1960s. Another unusual aspect of Sannes’ work is that his photos were created over a tumultuous career lasting only eight years, and covered only one subject: his obsession with the erotic power of women.

Sannes’ first photos were slightly dreamy, playful portraits but gradually became darker, forbidding, even sinister. The women he ­photographed, often nude, seem to be caught in intimate situations and moods, varying from ecstatic to flagrantly orgasmic. The intimacy of the photos is enhanced by the use of soft-focus and underexposure, often stemming from Sannes’ habit of using a hand-held camera and existing light. Sannes also seems to be extremely close to the women.

He was primarily interested in a particular atmosphere, a mood that he tried to invoke by double printing, burning in, manipulating glass plates, cutting up negatives and repositioning them and then fastening them back together, plus scratching and manipulating negatives and prints. The single, perfect image was decidedly not his goal - photography was a means of expression, useful for telling or suggesting something, preferably by presenting photos in relation to each other. Sannes died in a car accident on 23 March 1967, at the age of 30.

Sanne Sannes, Untitled 1962-1965 © Sanne Sannes, courtesy Kahmann Gallery, Amsterdam

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Fake Flowers In Full Colour, 2009 © Jaap Scheeren & Hans Gremmen, courtesy artists, Flatland gallery, Utrecht

27 November 2009 – 21 February 2010

Photography – in reverse In the fall of 2009 Foam exhibits work by a new generation of photographers who work in a refreshingly uninhibited, unconventional and sometimes slightly anarchist way. Five young Dutch photographers: Constant Dullaart, Katja Mater, Jaap Scheeren, Corriëtte Schoenaerts and Anne de Vries use photography as a medium rather than a self-evident end product. In the exhibition Photography – in reverse they present mostly new work in which they combine disciplines: photography and internet, projections, video and installations.

A major motive behind this group exhibition is the fundamental change the medium of photography has undergone in recent years.

Digitalization and the ever-expanding range of options it brings have had consequences for the photographer’s professional practice. These developments have raised questions about authenticity, originality and authorship; the photographic image itself has acquired a different status. The five photographers in this exhibition are part of a generation of photographers and artists who make use of and provide commentary on these developments.

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26 March – 16 June 2010

Paul Graham ~ a shimmer of possibility This exhibition shows works selected from the series Paul Graham published in twelve volumes as a shimmer of possibility (steidlMACK, 2007).

Each simple but structurally inventive series includes anywhere from one to more than ten pictures, providing vivid glimpses into the lives of people he encountered on his travels. A series showing a man mowing grass or someone waiting at a bus stop transcends its nominal subjects and describes aspects of ordinary life Graham imbues with affection and ­curiosity.

A shimmer of possibility is a call to pay attention to the brief, indefinite intervals of life. As Graham has said, ‘Perhaps instead of standing at the river’s edge scooping out water, it’s better to be in the current itself, to watch how the river comes up to you, flows smoothly around your presence, and reforms on the other side like you were never there.’

18 December 2009 – 20 January 2010

Foam_3h: Dieuwertje Komen & Elian Somers This exhibition combines the work of two Dutch photographers, Dieuwertje Komen and Elian Somers, who both photograph cities. Dieuwertje Komen’s work is the result of her walks through cities and urban areas. She uses photography to collect these different areas, to compare, order and redefine them. Her focus lies in visualizing her curiosity about livability. ­Somers’ work can be seen as a series of research-based projects, which interrogate urban space, particularly the dialectics of a changing city. The dual nature of the city both attracts and repels. Somers investigates the modern city in moments of transformation and focuses on elements and essences both hidden and revealed.

New Orleans, 2005, from the series a shimmer of possibility © Paul Graham, courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

Palermo, Exzen, 2008 © Elian Somers

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Missed an issue?

You can order back issues of Foam Magazine online.

The earliest editions of Foam Magazine doubled as exhibition catalogues.

Since the release of #3, Foam Magazine is no longer linked to the exhibition programme of the museum. Foam Magazine has become an ­exhibition space in itself. A timeless collectors-item, a source of inspiration and reflection, containing over a hundred pages of photography featuring a specific theme.

Collect them all and go to www.foammagazine.nl to see the latest offers!

foam magazine #11 / young Raimond Wouda / JR / Lauren Greenfield / Oliver Sieber / Viviane Sassen / Ryan McGinley

foam magazine #12 / talent Domingo Milella / Taryn Simon / Jiuliang Wang / Astrid Kruse Jensen / Mikhael Subotzky / Lieko Shiga

foam magazine #13 / searching Stephan Shore / Wolfgang Tillmans / Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin / Thomas Ruff / Philip Lorca diCorcia / Hans Aarsman

foam magazine #14 / meanwhile Clare Richardson / Bart Julius Peters, Risaku Suzuki / Thekla Ehling / Masao Yamamoto / Daniëlle van Ark

foam magazine #15 / construct Melanie Bonajo / Thomas Demand / Moira Ricci / Toshiko Okanoue / Martina Sauter / Myoung Ho Lee

foam magazine #16 / talent Ahmet Unver / Jacob Aue Sobol / Kenneth Bamberg / Pieter Hugo / Ulrich Gebert / Curtis Mann / Jehad Nga / Clémence de Limburg / Wayne Liu / Sarah Pickering / Adrien Missika / Philipp Ebeling

foam magazine #17 / portrait Samuel Fosso / Franziska von Stenglin / Bill Sullivan / De Wilde, Stark & Bolander / Koos Breukel / Schels & Lakotta

foam magazine #18 / young Henk Wildschut / Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen / Jim Goldberg / Juul Hondius / Dana Popa

foam magazine #19 / wonder Jaap Scheeren / Jessica Backhaus / Syoin Kajii / Koen Hauser / Madi Ju & Patrick Tsai / Sanna Kannisto

foam magazine #20 / talent Asfar / Bergantini / Castilho / Faulhaber / Fritz / Gerats / Gronsky / Klos / Koyama / Kruithof / Leong / Lundgren / Monteleone / Naudé / Purchas / Schuman / Van Agtmael / Wilcox

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colophon

Colophon Foam Magazine International Photography Magazine Issue #21, Winter 2009–2010 December 2009

Binding Binderij Hexspoor Ladonkseweg 7 5281 RN Boxtel – NL www.hexspoor.nl

Editorial Advisers Kathy Ryan, photo editor The New York Times Magazine / Markus Schaden

Paper

Editor-in-chief Marloes Krijnen

The production of Foam Magazine has been made ­possible thanks to the generous support of Drukkerij Slinger, Binderij Hexspoor and ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam.

Creative Director Pjotr de Jong Editors Marcel Feil / Pjotr de Jong / Marloes Krijnen / Sara Despres Managing Editor Sara Despres Magazine Manager Isabel Butzelaar Communication Intern Heather East Concept, Art Direction & Design Vandejong, Amsterdam – Pjotr de Jong / Marcel de Vries Hamid Sallali / Claudia Doms Typography Karl-Henrik Mattsson, Marcel de Vries Contributing Photographers Naoya Hatakeyama / Andrey Tarkovsky / David Claerbout / Penelope Umbrico / Adam Broomberg / Oliver Chanarin / Elle Freudenthal / Carmen Verhagen / Gunnel Wåhlstrand

Editorial Address Foam Magazine Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 5516500 F +31 20 5516501 editors@foammagazine.nl www.foammagazine.nl Advertising Isabel Butzelaar Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 isabel@foammagazine.nl Subscriptions Bruil & van de Staaij PO Box 75 7940 AB Meppel – NL T +31 522 261303 F +31 522 257827 contact@foammagazine.nl Subscriptions include 4 issues per year e 70,– excluding VAT and postage Students and Club Foam members receive 20% discount

Cover Photograph Mother Profile, 2009 © Gunnel Wåhlstrand Contributing Writers Marcel Feil / Sebastian Hau / Hubertus von Amelunxen / Aveek Sen / Lieze Eneman / Lyle Rexer / David Evans / Susan Bright / Aaron Schuman / Alex Klein Copy Editor Pittwater Literary Services, Amsterdam – Rowan Hewison Translation

Iris Maher / Paul Christensen Lithography & Printing Drukkerij Slinger Strooijonkerstraat 7 1812 PJ Alkmaar – NL www.drukkerijslinger.nl

218

ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam Postbus 49000 1009 CG Amsterdam – NL www.modovangelder.nl

Single issues e 17,50 Back issues e 12,50 Excluding VAT and postage Foam Magazine #1 is out of print

Publisher Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 contact@foammagazine.nl www.foammagazine.nl ISSN 1570-4874 ISBN: 978-90-70516-16-1 © photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2009.

All photographs and illustration material is the copyright property of the photographers and/or their estates, and the publications in which they have been published.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders.

Any copyright holders we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact the publishers at contact@foammagazine.nl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. Although the highest care is taken to make the information contained in Foam Magazine as accurate as possible, neither the publishers nor the authors can accept any responsibility for damage, of any nature, resulting from the use of this information.

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