PREVIEW Foam Magazine Issue #30 Micro

#30 Micro Spring 2012 â‚Ź19,50

Stephen Gill / Corinne May Botz Rineke Dijkstra / Joris Jansen Christian Patterson / Harold Strak Masao Mochizuki / Boris Mikhailov

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Stephen Gill / Corinne May Botz / Rineke Dijkstra Joris Jansen / Christian Patterson / Harold Strak Masao Mochizuki / Boris Mikhailov

3 Editorial

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4 Portfolio Overview 6 On My Mind Arnon Grunberg, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gu Zheng, Erwin Olaf, Timothy Persons and Whitney Johnson

Portfolios 29 Stephen Gill Outside In text by Sophie Wright

49 Corinne May Botz The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death text by Karen Irvine

12 Interview Sophie Calle: A Sense of Mystery

69 Rineke Dijkstra The Krazyhouse

by Michel Guerrin

text by Hripsimé Visser

19 Theme introduction Scaling-down the Bigger Picture

89 Joris Jansen Kosmos

by Marcel Feil

text by Lyle Rexer

109 Christian Patterson Redheaded Peckerwood text by Adam Bell

129 Harold Strak Arthropoda text by Flip Bool

149 Masao Mochizuki Television 1975 – 1976 text by Marc Feustel

169 Boris Mikhailov The Wedding text by Helen Petrovsky

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190 Photobooks

by Sebastian Hau

195 Foam A ­ msterdam Exhibition Programme 216 Colophon

Editorial

Besides work by big names such as Boris Mikhailov and Rineke Dijkstra, we are publishing work by the young Dutch photographer Joris Jansen. And we are proud to present a project by Stephen Gill that might be viewed as the next chapter of the Hackney epos that he has been working on steadily for years, a more historically oriented but still extremely topical portfolio from the Japanese artist Masao Mochizuki, a selection from the intriguing images that Harold Strak has created with his large, self-constructed cameras, recent work by the American photographer Christian Patterson and a fascinating excursion into the criminal world by Corinne May Botz.

by Marloes Krijnen Editor-in-chief

Finally, we are proud to present an extensive interview with French artist Sophie Calle. Her work is inseparably linked to her own private life, and she rarely gives interviews. We are grateful that she was generous with her time in speaking with us. You can thus enjoy fantastic photography as well as top-quality text.

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The first issue of Foam Magazine for 2012 comes with an attractive new look: a fully redesigned cover.

The content remains the same, with our familiar features plus eight expansive portfolios of remarkable, high-quality photography. The photography in Foam Magazine must be seen and appreciated in the most advantageous way, without inappropriate additions or interference. To that end we have redesigned the cover.

editorial

We always place a photo on the cover, but some text is unavoidable. It is, after all, essential to communicate the name of the magazine, to indicate what theme has been chosen and which photographers’ work is included. To remain faithful to our devotion to the photographic image and to bolster Foam Magazine’s unique identity, the cover is now made up of two parts, one with typography listing all the necessary information about the issue, and one without any text at all. By folding the first cover inwards the reader can consider the cover photo without accretions. And to make that easy, we have opted for a loose spine.

These adaptations enhance the object-character of the magazine, emphasising more than ever before the fact that Foam Magazine is a physical object, with tactile qualities, a specific weight and a determination to make the best possible use of high-quality printing.

The editors are convinced that a freeing up of the magazine’s potential will ensure that it remains a great way to present a large amount of excellent photography.

And if you add the fascinating opportunities offered by e-readers and apps specially designed for photography, a publication such as Foam Magazine will seem an even greater necessity. It cannot be translated into a digital medium without damage to its very essence.

That essence is and will remain photography in all its forms, varying from work by young, up-and-coming talent to that of renowned masters. We are extraordinarily happy to be able once more to present eight new portfolios, this time on the theme of Micro, each of which throws its own individual light on that theme.

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Portfolio Overview

Stephen Gill Outside In

Corinne May Botz The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Out-of-focus views of Brighton are combined with small found objects placed inside the body of the camera and directly on the film emulsion. Remaining unseen through the lens, Stephen Gill’s record of this place is mediated by and seen through the layer of found materials. Embracing imperfection and chance, the effect of Gill’s multi-layered photographs is fragmentary and dreamlike.

In her project The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death Corinne May Botz photographs miniature rooms built by Chicago heiress and criminologist Frances Glessner Lee in the 1930s and ’40s as tools to help train police detectives. Like a police photographer, Botz points her camera at the obvious evidence as well as at the seemingly untouched elements, as if to methodically catalogue every detail of the space for a detective.

Rineke Dijkstra The Krazyhouse

Joris Jansen Kosmos

The portfolio combines stills from the video work The Krazyhouse with a few earlier portraits of disco girls in Liverpool. Dijkstra filmed five adolescents against a white backdrop while they were dancing to their own chosen ­music. An extraordinary relationship with the camera develops, since the young people seem to alternate between awareness of the camera and, just as frequently, forgetting it’s there.

The microphotographs of Joris Jansen’s Kosmos series are abstract, and not. They contain no objects of available ­recognition, although all of them refer directly to an ­object, the analogue photograph that Joris Jansen selected to rephoto­graph. But looking at Kosmos, with its tendentious title, no one can miss the emphasis on its collective context: the images nearly all of us carry in our heads. Pictures from beyond, from unseeable regions.

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Harold Strak Arthropoda

In Redheaded Peckerwood, Christian Patterson has assembled his own idiosyncratic and mysterious crime dossier of a murder case in Nebraska in 1958. Patterson retraced the killers’ steps and put together this project by using his own images and incorporated found artefacts and ephemera. Rather than follow a narrative or documentary trajectory, the work leaps from one synecdochical fragment to the next and becomes an enigmatic dossier of jumbled facts and cryptic clues.

Harold Strak positioned found remains of insects in front of a technical camera. Barely discernible with the naked eye, if at all, in enlargement they are surrounded by dust particles that resemble stars in the heavens. He has a perfect mastery of the technique and his work displays a close concentration on subjects normally hidden from our view and only reveal their secrets on closer inspection.

Masao Mochizuki Television 1975 – 1976

Boris Mikhailov The Wedding

Television 1975–1976 consists of a series of photographic grids made up of multiple images of a television screen.

To create these montages, Masao Mochizuki developed a specific process by drawing a grid on the focusing screen of his twin-lens reflex camera. By choosing to include the edges of the multiple screens and the characteristic blur of their surface, Mochizuki emphasizes the act of watching a particular event on television, rather than simply focusing on the subject matter of the event itself.

Two homeless people, a man and a woman, are shown in their natural surroundings, including a run-down apartment. Mostly they fool around, half-naked, in imitation of a wedding celebration. The Wedding seems a sharp critique of consumer society whose members consume tons of reified images, including those of affect. But, as always, Mikhailov’s camera comes across something strictly irreducible.

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portfolio overview

Christian Patterson Redheaded Peckerwood

On My Mind

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Six well-known figures from the cultural world ­selected an image that has recently been on their minds...

Ali Hamid, a village north of Baghdad, Spring 2008 © Arnon Grunberg

Arnon Grunberg This picture was taken in Ali Hamid, a village north of Baghdad, in the late spring of 2008. We had just eaten lunch with the village sheikh, Hussein Ali-Hamid alLehebi. In a dispatch sent in during my time as embedded journalist with the U.S. Army in Iraq, I wrote: ‘They feed us kebab, Iraqi pickles, tomato salad and a kind of pita bread. The mess-hall food can’t hold a candle to it. The soldiers tuck in.’

The men belong to Lt. Kaness’s squadron. The six Iraqi soldiers in the picture illustrate the successful cooperation between American and Iraqi soldiers – or rather, they illustrate the way that successful cooperation was seen as a sign of the progress being made in Iraq. In comparison with 2006, everyone said, progress really was being made. It was my first visit to Iraq. The afternoon temperatures were above 40 degrees Centigrade. There were moments when I thought I’d never get out alive.

What about the sheikh of Ali Hamid? Is he still alive? Is Lt. Kaness still in the army? I look at this picture fairly often. Never without realizing that I felt that day as though war were the gateway to a life grand and compelling.

The naïveté. The wistfulness.

• Arnon Grunberg (b. 1971, The Netherlands) is a celebrated Dutch novelist who resides in New York. He writes on widely divergent subjects in the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad and is also a columnist for periodicals such as de Volkskrant, Vrij Nederland and Humo.

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Super Earth 3 David Aguliar © Dimitar Sasselov

There is this extraordinary website edited by John Brockman – anyone interested in the nexus of the humanities and natural sciences will be able to quench their intellectual thirst there. At any rate, it was Brockman who drew my attention to Dimitar Sasselov, a brilliant Bulgarian astronomer. For some time, Sasselov has been something of a cult figure for many artists, philosophers, and architects.

According to his own account, one of the reasons he became an astronomer is that he is incapable of working early in the morning. So he had to find a nocturnal occupation. It is worth noting, incidentally, that the artists Wolfgang Tillmans and Thomas Ruff also once wanted to become astronomers. Tillmans, for example, began photographing the stars as a young boy.

Soon Sasselov's new book will be published, called The Life of Super Earths. It is a sort of summary of his current research. Sasselov is convinced that 2012 will be the year in which several planets resembling Earth will be discovered – hence the name super earths. To date, Sasselov and his colleagues have identified 706 possible candidates, i.e. planets whose geochemical characteristics closely match the Earth's. We didn't even know they existed until recently. Our perception is now undergoing a change, writes Sasselov. According to him, there are probably millions of earth-like planets in the universe, and this naturally increases the odds of one of them harboring life. The ultimate goal, of course, would be to discover an actual twin planet which is identical to our Earth. This would actually be good for us because our sun will go extinct some day. That will not happen for a few hundred million years, but at that point life on earth will definitely come to an end.

• Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Switzerland) is a contemporary art curator, critic and historian of art. He is currently Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

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on my mind

Hans Ulrich Obrist

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Silent Shanghai #64, 2005 © Zhu Hao

Gu Zheng In Silent Shanghai Series Shanghai-based photographer Zhu Hao takes details often unnoticed within contemporary China’s urban landscape as his subject, employing exquisite colours and precise photographic depiction to highlight the visual enchantment of urban spaces as chaotic, organic living organisms. Every scene in Zhu Hao’s photos is of familiar urban spaces, framed in his unique way.

Scenes and objects often ignored suddenly appear unfamiliar. When Zhu Hao sets and transforms scenery and space on film, and defines reality, he bestows time and space with new meanings. Under his gaze scenery gains autonomy, and space becomes a historical vessel in which time, desire, imagination and memory are concentrated.

Through photography Zhu Hao takes in the enchantment of reality. He is not merely an observer who plunders scenes around him; he openly engages reality in a direct dialogue. In his encounters and joyful dialogues with reality, Zhu opens up, turning himself into a medium for reality’s entry into the lens, absorbing everything before his eyes. By switching between them, his photography becomes a medium where subject and object accept each other, exchange places with each other and enter into each other. The disappearance of the photographer facilitates the self-presentation of reality. And then reality finally unfolds before us in full. • Gu Zheng (b. 1959, China) is a photography critic and Professor in the School of Journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai. He has published numerous books on photography, and in 2001 received the Chinese Photography Golden Figure Prize in Theory and Criticism. Gu Zheng has curated several group exhibitions of Chinese photography for venues all over the world.

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Erwin Olaf I recently wrote a few words of introduction for the photo book Seconds Out – Faces of Boxing. Portraits of boxers, sweaty and reviving themselves in the corner of the ring after their efforts, photographed at their most vulnerable moment by Piek, my former and very first real assistant.

Many of the portraits made an impression on me; tough hunks of flesh and muscles captured at the moment they had been changed into little boys, often weary and beaten. In every portrait Piek’s character is reflected, just the way I’d become acquainted with her: an unassuming but tenacious woman, who sought out the soft side of the hard world of men with a great deal of compassion. It was not the harsh blow that particularly interested her, but the moment of transformation, from man to boy.

One of the images that has stayed with me the most is a close-up of an exhausted face being pushed back by a man’s hefty hand, to stop his nose bleeding.

Breathing through his open mouth, his finely focused brown eyes gaze to the left.

His cheeks are pushed together by his tightly fastened, red-leather head-guard.

Emptiness is the main emotion showing in the man’s face. He’s no longer sweating. And that’s what I find so fascinating about this image – the lack of sweat and emotion give me all the room I need to make up my own story.

• Erwin Olaf (b. 1959, The Netherlands) is a Dutch fine art photographer. Recently Olaf won the prestigious Dutch State price of the Arts, Johannes Vermeer Award 2011 for his entire body of work. He has also earned several Silver Lions for his commercial work, which is increasingly sought after by magazines such as the New York Times Magazine and London Sunday Times.

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on my mind

Aydin Umut, 2011 from the series Seconds Out - Faces of Boxing © Piek

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Olympia (White), 1996 © Katarzyna Kozyra, Courtesy ZAK | Branicka

Timothy Persons Several years ago, while visiting an exhibition at the National Gallery in Krakow, Poland, I discovered by chance the artist Katarzyna Kozyra’s Olympia series. Kozyra was 22 years old when she took these photographs of herself during chemotherapy for leukemia. There is one photograph in particular that still haunts me. It was inspired by an Edouard Manet painting depicting a naked, blank faced girl reclining on a bed wearing only a ribbon around her neck and a flower behind her ear.

Somehow she captures my spirit as she reaches inside herself to find her own.

Katarzyna Kozyra has worked throughout her career to challenge the mores of our society and the position of the individual within it. She creates stereotypical situations as a means of self-transformation. Unlike any of her other works Olympia goes beyond the staged and into real time. Here Kozyra uses her own afflicted body as a mirror on the sensitivity that works as a tool to shape our perception of femininity. Katarzyna Kozyra conjures her weakness into a strength that rejects the notion of herself as a victim. It represents a small victory for any individual seeking a voice of her or his own, even if it’s only a whisper.

• Timothy Persons (b. 1954, Norway) is the curator of Gallery TAIK and along that Director of Professional Studies Program and a Senior lecturer at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland.

Persons is the principle architect and leader of the Helsinki School.

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Whitney Johnson This photograph is often on my mind, as it graces the wall of my crowded city living room – and even more so since the tragic death of Tim Hetherington in Libya last year. There is no doubt, to anyone who knew him and many who didn’t, that he was extremely talented, not only as a photographer but as a filmmaker, activist, artist and thinker. He walked the front lines of documentary practice, exploring the boundaries between still and moving images, photojournalism and conceptual work – utterly unafraid to question the practices of his colleagues, or his own.

But for me, what resonates the most is that Tim looked beyond the chaos of conflict, capturing the intimate, the messy, the emotions of everyday life: a young girl lingers at a wedding in Monrovia; two women, one with a baby strapped to her back, deliver rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition to a disarmament checkpoint; lovers exchange a look, which could be their last. By valuing these complexities, he conveyed stories that were honest and uniquely his own.

• Whitney Johnson (b.1979, United States) is the Director of Photography at The New Yorker where she is responsible for the photographic vision of the magazine, with its signature mix of politics, culture, and humor. She also writes for the magazine's photography blog, Photo Booth, and teaches photojournalism at New York University and Columbia University.

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on my mind

LIBERIA. Monrovia. June 25th, 2003 © Tim Hetherington, Magnum Photos A member of the AA (Anti-Aircraft) brigade exchanges a brief tender word with his girlfriend during a heavy fighting in the capital Monrovia.

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From her life, what she sees and what she reads, Sophie Calle extracts juicy narratives with photos and text, following a very strictly ordered protocol. She has become one of the most important artists of our time, exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Venice Biennale, and Paris’s own Centre Pompidou. Her projects are legion.

interview with

by Michel Guerrin

A Sense of Mystery photography by Alexandra Catiere

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interview

Sophie Calle

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Sophie Calle’s artistic life began on the first of January 1979, when, aged 26, after multiple professions and many travels, she decided to follow a stranger down the street, and keep following him. She would end up telling the story of shadowing him, using text and images. Dozens of works in the same spirit followed: using text and photographs to tell ­stories.

She observed strangers sleeping in her bed, got hired as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel in order to photograph and describe clients’ personal effects without their knowledge, scripted her break-ups, and drew 16,000 people to the top of the Eiffel Tower at night to tell her stories to keep her from falling asleep. After a boyfriend announced in an e-mail he was breaking up with her, ending it with ‘Take care of yourself’, she presented an exhibition with the same title at the 2007 Venice Biennale, in which she asked 104 women (as well as a parrot and two marionettes) to interpret and ­comment upon this letter. One, a corporate head-hunter, saluted this man’s ‘admirable capacity for firing people’.

Currently she is getting ready to publish a book with her ­father as publisher, and another book about her mother. She has exhibits planned in Helsinki and Colombia. For the summer of 2012, she is preparing an exhibit in Avignon and another in Arles. Her Histoires Vraies (‘true stories’) is in the bookstores in an expanded edition. Aveugles (‘blind people’) is a heartbreaking book that opens with a work from 1986, triptych portraits of twenty-three people blind from birth: portraits of them, their answers to the question ‘What is the image of beauty for you?’, and photographs of their answers – the sea, a blond man, sheep, Alain Delon’s face…

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lation and the colour of the carpet. But the day we finished hanging it, I ‘saw’ everything, especially the video, and I burst into tears.

Are all your stories therapeutic for you?

No. Most of them aren’t about me. But, besides the two stories I just mentioned, my book Des Histoires Vraies started with a kind of therapy. I was 30 years old and my father thought that I had bad breath, and sent me to a psychoanalyst to talk about it. I told the therapist that there had to be a misunderstanding, that I had no reason to be there. He asked me, ‘Do you always do what your father tells you to do?’. I asked him to give me a good reason to keep seeing him. He answered ‘Because you’ll enjoy it.’ I didn’t stay long, maybe a dozen sessions, but I had to feed the doctor stories of my experiences. I called on my memory, and that’s how my ‘True stories’ started.

Detail seems to be an important part of your stories, and your photos too.

When you invent a story, using text and images, is it sometimes to get closer to people?

It can be to get closer to them, or farther away. I’m thinking of two recent works. The aim of one was to ‘kill’ my love for a man who had just left me; the other was to bring my mother back to life. These two stories sound like opposites, but they shared a purpose: to ease my suffering due to a loss. Take Care of Yourself allowed me to take some distance from a romantic break-up. Talking about it all the time, having other people, whom I photographed and filmed, interpret the letter dozens of times, all that allowed me to concentrate on the idea of breaking up, rather than on the person who left me. This way I got farther away from him.

The project around the death of my mother ­allowed me to say goodbye while putting the accent on her absence. During preparations for the exhibition about her at the Palais de Tokyo in 2010, I said her name aloud all the time, I gazed at her portraits, and I’m still talking to you about it now, I’m working on a book about her... All that allowed me to remain with my mother in the everyday. It was like she was still alive. It’s also a way of trivialising the painful event. While we were hanging the exhibition, especially during the film showing her agony up until her last breath, some people were crying, while I only talked about the instal-

I describe, I’m not saying what I think, I don’t deduce anything.

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interview

I love details. I get into stories by means of the details, much more than by generalities. I describe, I’m not saying what I think, I don’t deduce anything. Recently a journalist asked me what I’d like to ask the man I love. I answered, ‘Today, right now, I’d ask him to go fetch the bread.’ When I invite men to sleep in my bed and get photographed, I know almost ­nothing about them, only details. Do they sleep on their left, side, right side, curled up, on their back … When I photograph the personal effects of the clients at a hotel in Venice, I write under one colour picture that a client brought his wife’s nightgown with him, and that another brought a hammer and loads of cleaning products. When I asked a Turkish man what the last thing he saw was before he went blind, I wasn’t asking him what he was feeling, but for a description.

What counts is the idea of the last image, by means of the details provided. There was one who described the man who shot him, mentioning that the four top buttons of his shirt were open. I was a thousand times more astounded by that than anything else.

I also describe coolly and economically when I write. I think I arouse more emotion this way than if I make the feelings flow. Putting the accent on the details also gives more space for the viewer to make the story his own, to continue it, to identify with it. All those people who cried watching the video about my mother’s death weren’t mourning my mother. They appropriated this death for themselves.

During the opening of the exhibition at Whitechapel in London, I saw a 50-year-old woman glued to the screen

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for two hours. She couldn’t leave. I had to help her out of the room, she was so shattered. Who was she thinking about?

When I follow a man in the street and photograph him, I’m not saying anything about this man. It’s not the man that’s important, it’s the fact that I’m tailing him, it’s me. If I’d been following Mick Jagger, it wouldn’t have worked. After all, focusing on a detail and not an ensemble allows me to maintain a sense of mystery.

Without mystery, my work doesn’t work! When I photograph graves with names cut into the stone, not actual names but the words ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, people ask questions. Why these words? I could have done a survey to answer that, but it wouldn’t have been relevant.

galleries in Geneva, some photo­graphers expressed their dissatisfaction. That’s not really important. The photo sans ritual isn’t my territory. I really don’t take photos outside of my projects. I don’t keep a camera at the bottom of my bag, I don’t take portraits of my friends. I grab the camera only to make an idea manifest. And then, only then, do I know that the photograph is justified, even if it isn’t good.

When it’s complicated technically, for example when I wanted the image to show a room in a museum from which a Rembrandt or a Vermeer had been stolen, to evoke its absence and its presence, to make tangible the ‘void’ it leaves, I delegate the shooting to a professional, because the result has to be perfect. I’ve also used press agency images.

And I’ve made progress in photography. I’ve become more attached to the images. My relationship to photo­graphy has really changed since Take Care of Yourself. With this project, it wasn’t so much about my writing, since it’s the people interviewed who are doing the telling. So I had to take charge of the pictures. I took all the portraits of these women talking. I really applied myself to it. I think they’re better than usual. I love almost all of these portraits, which I took with a mediumformat camera I can’t remember the name of.

But when I see the technique of the young artists showing at Paris Photo, those absolutely perfect pictures, I wonder how they do it. That said, the photos that amazed me the most at Paris Photo last November didn’t have technical perfection as their strong point. They were by Sigmar Polke. I asked how much they cost, because I buy a lot of photos. If I remember right they said 800,000 euros for the series. Not for me.

Focusing on a detail and not an ensemble allows me to maintain a sense of mystery.

Do you know what makes a good photograph?

In your opinion, does a good photograph have a harmonious composition?

I can’t answer that question.

It’s not what I’m concerned with. In my project La Dernière Image (‘the last picture’), there are two portraits that I adore.

But I don’t feel like telling you why. That they’re better than the others isn’t the problem.

When a portrait could be better, it’s up to the text to help it be better. And vice versa, because what’s important is that the three elements support each other – the story, the text, the image. That’s it, that’s my style.

Have you evolved in your photography?

Putting the accent on the details also gives more space for the viewer to make the story his own, to continue it, to identify with it.

You received the Hasselblad Award in 2010. Was that a surprise?

When the award was handed out, the president began his speech with ‘Why Sophie Calle?’ Yes, it was a surprise.

It was awarded after my Take Care of Yourself project, and I think I couldn’t have gotten it before then. I know I’m no Cartier-Bresson, but I think that Hasselblad wanted to extend the spectrum of their winners. It was the first time they awarded a prize to someone for whom photography wasn’t central to their work. And the next year they chose the

When I was starting in the late 1970s, I signed up for a photography course. I stayed for one day. I didn’t think it was interesting. My first photos – people sleeping in my bed – were technically mediocre and had no aesthetic interest. When I presented them to the Canon

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interview

From the start I know it can end up on an exhibition wall if the story is good, if it carries a story, a poetic quality, an emotion. I also know at what point my text, which I’m continually cutting, is good. But I don’t really know when the photo is good. Anyway, I don’t know what I expect from a picture until I take it. I take it because it’s part of a story.

Lebanese artist Walid Raad, who isn’t a photo­grapher either, in the classical sense of the term.

Sophie Calle (b. 1953, France) lives and works in Malakoff, France. She began to exhibit internationally from 1980. In 1991 ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris organised her solo show entitled A Suivre. In April 2001 she showed Vingt ans après at Galerie Perrotin that re-enacted the project La Filature (1981).

In 2003 Sophie Calle had a large personal exhibition, M’as-tu vue, at Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) and at Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst (Aachen, Germany). Calle represented France at the Venice Art Biennale in 2007 with Prenez soin de vous / Take Care of Yourself.

Many international museums and institutions have shown Take Care of Yourself since then of which Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu, Paris; Centre d’art Contemporain DHC/ART, Montreal; SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo; Museum of Modern Art, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; De Pont, Tilburg, the Netherlands; Tallinna Kunstihoone, Estonia. In 2010, the same year she received the prestigious Hasselblad Award, the exhibition Rachel, Monique took place at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, evoking the figure and the absence of her mother. In 2012 the following solo shows are scheduled: Take Care of Yourself at Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki, Finland (2 March – 10 June); Historias de pared at Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellin, Colombia (21 March – 3 June) and Banco de Republica, Bogota, Colombia (15 June – 22 September); Rachel, Monique, at Festival d’Avignon, (7 – 28 July) and Pour la dernière et la première fois at Rencontres d’Arles, (2 July – 16 September) and at Galerie Perrotin, Paris (8 September – 3 November).

Sophie Calle is represented by Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

Did you buy a Hasselblad with the 90,000 euro prize money?

I wanted to, because this camera takes clear, precise, stunning pictures, but it cost 40,000 euros. I love photo­graphy, but not enough to pay that… When I got started and when I was broke, I printed my pictures myself in a lab I installed in my house [she shows us; it’s become a storage closet]. This is where I printed the black-and-white pictures for my first two projects: Les Dormeurs and Suite Vénitienne, in the late 1970s.

I had taken printing courses with Laurence Sudre. I loved being shut in the darkroom for hours, listening to music. I’ve kept hundreds of prints from those two series in cardboard boxes. Then I quickly went to large format and later to colour. Then I couldn’t do my own printing any longer. And I’ve distanced myself…

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Besides your work, do you have a dream?

To open a bistro in Paris. It was my father’s dream…

It’s late for him, he’s 91, so I’ve stolen his dream.

Or rather, I inherited his dream.

Michel Guerrin (b.1957, France) is the editor of the supplement Culture & Idées of the French daily Le Monde. As photography critic and specialist, he has written numerous essays for artist monographs. Several of his books are Exhibit A: Guy Bourdin (2001), Raymond Depardon (2006) and Henri CartierBresson et Le Monde (2008).

Alexandra Catiere (b. 1978) is a Belarus-born photographer based in Paris. After her studies at Minsk State Linguistic University she moved to New York in 2003 and completed a certificate program at the International Center of Photography.

She assisted at the studios of Irving Penn and Yuri Kuper and received the Silver Camera Award from Moscow House of Photography in 2006. Catiere has done commissioned work for The New Yorker, The New York Times T Magazine, Gentlewoman and Crash. Her most recent work will be exhibited as part of the Rencontres d’Arles 2012. It results from her residency at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-surSaône, supported by BMW France.

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theme introduction

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The mechanism of enclosing and excluding is inherent to photography. A sincere, concentrated focus on a limited and clearly delineated element ultimately causes a loss of the surroundings. A zoomed-in focus on the photographic subject is comparable to looking through a microscope: while losing sight of your surroundings, you become immersed in an unknown world suddenly revealed to you.

Less than a decade ago the ‘global village’ was a very popular term, often used to indicate the biotope in which contemporary humans found themselves. It usually meant that modern communication and transport have made it possible to be in continual and intensive contact with the remotest places on the planet.

Distances which were previously unbridgeable had shrunk to become scarcely of consequence. In principle, everyone could connect with everyone else, creating a community of world citizens, spanning the globe yet remaining small and manageable. It was somewhat of a paradox: the processes taking place within this modern village were extremely complex and dynamic – and thus difficult to disentangle – while when we think of a village, we mainly think of simplicity, peacefulness, clarity and manageability. Distance and time, cause and effect, were no longer considered linear, since they had found a place in hybrid networks, ever-changing in appearance, in which everything had an influence on everything else. Classical Cartesian philosophy had made way for a reality where the focus was on synchronicity, ambiguity and an entirely new perception of time and space. ›

by Marcel Feil

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Scaling-down the Bigger Picture

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Nowadays any reference to the global village has become noticeably less common. As is often the case with fashionable language usage, it soon came to feel dated. It’s old-fashioned, unhip and ‘so 2001’. For many people the global village is now simply a fact, a fully accepted reality. More important is how to deal with the new reality. Adapting, getting used to new techniques and customs, and coping with the 24-hour economy are for most of us standard demands of the way we live now. Anyone who keeps up to date in any sense is continually online, makes use of an extensive range of social media and belongs to countless communities, whether intentionally or not. Our lives have been expanded by an online dimension that at times demands more time and energy and for some is more influential than real life. Quiet, simplicity, an ability to keep track of the whole, authenticity and sincere human relations lasting longer than a few seconds appear further away than ever.

But a sincere, concentrated focus on a limited and clearly delineated element ultimately causes a loss of the surroundings, of the rest, if you will, which falls literally, as it is intended, outside our range of vision. Such a concentrated, zoomed-in focus could be compared with looking through a microscope. At the moment you lean over and look through the microscope, you lose sight of your surroundings and become immersed in an unknown world suddenly revealed to you. Separated from its surroundings, the fragment reveals itself as an entire world of its own, offering infinite discoveries.

It should then not come as a surprise that this online expansion has caused a backlash. For some time now, a growing number of people have been turning their backs on the hectic, and in their opinion superficial, existence of the global village. They are trying to escape the frenzied dynamic of more, faster, bigger and want to return to the matters that in their judgement are of real importance to the quality of life. The ways to accomplish this and the degree to which it is achieved differ sharply. There are the true die-hards, who literally withdraw to small and often isolated communities, tucked away in a desert or deep in the mountains, and at the other extreme cooking clubs using authentic, organic, locally grown products.

This development manifests itself in all walks of society. One example is the rise of local citizens’ groups who organise politically to counterbalance national political parties, as has recently become noticeable in the Netherlands, and the pressure those local parties exert on national self-interest. But no matter how different all these manifestations may be, what they have in common is a leaning towards the past, towards a smaller scale, individuality, identity and traditional values. Fear of the big, unfamiliar world has resulted in an escape to a smaller, familiar world. The global village has pushed many into the mentality and scale of a real village.

Separated from its surroundings, the fragment reveals itself as an entire world of its own, offering infinite discoveries.

The tendency of society to withdraw to a manageable, small-scale and limited territory and its consonance with photography were recently explored in a project by the Dutch photographer Anne Geene titled Perceel nr. 235. Encyclopedie van een Volkstuin [Parcel nr. 235. Encyclopaedia of an Allotment Garden].

For one year Anne Geene looked around the 245 square metres of land she rented from a Rotterdam allotment complex located in one of the most builtup areas of the urban Netherlands. The parcel of land contained not much more than a simple garden house, some grass, tiles, shrubbery and a few planks of wood. But Geene saw more, much more.

Methodically and with limitless patience, she recorded everything she encountered in the garden. She dug a hole to document the cocoon of a death's-head moth.

Polarity is a recurring rhetorical theme: global versus local, profit-seeking versus altruistic, artificiality versus authenticity, mass production versus craftsmanship, depth versus superficiality – but also us versus them and good versus evil. The list is endless. Enclosing and excluding are inextricably linked to all this and are in a sense basic concepts – who or what will be admitted to the carefully guarded experiential world? Who belongs and who does not? What is of value and what is not? What is permissible and what is not? What is a threat and what is not?

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A mechanism of enclosing and excluding, of setting boundaries, and the fact that the thing enclosed is always a fragment of an unseen larger whole, is inherent to photography. Photos are by definition fragments.

Whether one zooms in on the subject or zooms out, the image can never escape the borders of the frame.

Each photo is like a puzzle piece, which can sometimes be fitted into another piece but can never lead to a finished and complete image. Framing is also of great importance: what will you allow in, what will you keep out, what will you reveal and what will you keep hidden? To determine the framing is to make choices, and the more you zoom in – and thus the more context you lose – the sharper those choices must be.

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She collected autumn leaves and photographed their shapes against a white background. She laid earthworms on a handkerchief in the sun and kept track of how quickly they dried out. A green frog in the duckweed – you would never have noticed him had not Anne Geene fished him out and recorded him apart from his natural background. And so it goes on.

In every crack, in every crevice, Anne Geene saw a subject. Jet vapour trails in the sky, raindrops, dogs passing by. Geene created a photographic laboratory in a small shed where she steadily worked on visually reporting everything she encountered, using microphotography and dazzling salt printing. And finally there was the book, a poetic, taxonomic study divided into three sections. The first section focuses on a geographical orientation in which Geene, with the help of Google Maps and photo collages, traced the physical contours of her garden and garden house.

The second part, ‘Observations’, is the most voluminous and forms the heart of the study. Geene used a quasi-scientific method to show all she discovered on block number 235, laid out on the dissecting table and meticulously photographed and indexed. In the last section a subtle shift was made in tone and method, as Geene created groups on the basis of forms, colours, patterns, tracks and behaviour. The slightly humorous tone is more pronounced at the end of the book.

Geene took a variety of measurements and used them to determine the amount of sunlight available by making salt prints of various types of leaves. She calculated the speed of a duck swimming and compared different kinds of frog camouflage.

such an ambition. No matter how long we look, how much we isolate and how deeply we zoom in on the details, we are ultimately still very far from gaining a better view of the big picture. A reality that consists of the sum of the indexed fragments seems to keep escaping us. Coherence, an overall view, one all-encompassing whole – these appear to exist only beyond sensory perception, as mental constructs that everyone builds from an endless range of fragments. Accordingly, the method used by Geene is more a producer of reality than a reproducer.

Joris Jansen, a contemporary of Geene, also makes use of a quasi-scientific method in his effort to create an encyclopaedic overview of everything connected to a single analogue photo. Exactly which photo is not made clear anywhere in his project, but that is not the crux of the matter. He is more concerned with researching and documenting in words and images all the information contained in an analogue photo. It is explored, encircled and held up to the light, examined as in a forensic investigation to gradually gain a glimpse of its true nature. The photo has an immaterial significance, but it is also an object with a distinct and unique materiality. And here, too, the true object of his investigation quickly disappears from sight because the research methods used reveal new, previously unknown worlds, each with its own unique complexity and beauty. Unexpected associations intrude and countless questions rob our insight of any possible final answer. One method used is microphotography.

By zooming in closely on the surface of the old photo, the grain and photochemical components are magnified one hundred times. The structure and texture of the photo are translated into an abstract world with an unprecedented aesthetic quality. There are cosmic constellations, star nebulae, the rings of Saturn. In Jansen’s project, the micro-world of analogue photography takes on a cosmic dimension.

No matter how long we look, how much we isolate and how deeply we zoom in on the details, we are ultimately still very far from gaining a better view of the big picture.

With a theme such as ‘Micro’, it is natural to think of a reality that has become visible through the use of technological aids such as microscopes and even the nanoscope. Such tools allow us to zoom in much more deeply than is possible with the naked eye, and to summon images that would otherwise remain invisible and unknown. One particular attraction of such microscopic images lies in their combination of a beauty previously unknown to many and a reality which is difficult to identify, in part due to the lack of a clarifying visual context. Microscopic images by definition show an extremely limited, deliberately framed fragment and are thus perfect examples of fine detail.

Perceel nr. 235. Encyclopedie van een Volkstuin is a superb and unique book, agile and pensive. The encyclopaedic element of the project suggests the pretention of comprehensiveness. Everything had to be recorded, nothing could remain unobserved. Efforts to index the sky and the clouds and the silhouettes of pigeons flying overhead subtly indicate the absurdity and impossibility of

Rather than bringing out a microscopically small and unknown reality, another expected interpretation of the theme would be shrinking down a known reality to a different, much smaller scale, as exemplified by scale models and their routine use in photography. Manipulation of the scale, perception, assumptions, and reliability

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of the medium as a means of representation has led to countless works in which scale models have been central.

An exceptional offshoot is The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by the American photographer Corinne May Botz – because the artist had no involvement in the creation of the scale models used that were originally meant for a completely different function.

The models can best be compared with small, finely detailed dollhouse rooms, and they were made in the 1940s and 50s by Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), who grew up in a wealthy family and only discovered her true calling late in life. She established the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University when she was already well into her fifties; it was the first course of study for forensic pathology to be offered in the United States. Glessner Lee constructed scale models of the scenes of crimes to exercise and improve the observation skills of investigators. Her perfectionism is astonishing and borders on the obsessive: kitchen utensils, soft furnishings, food, clothing, decorations and knickknacks were all depicted and constructed in an extremely realistic way. This made sense, since the models were intended to be studied in painstaking detail by her students of forensic investigation. Corinne Botz discovered the models in Baltimore, Maryland, and decided to photograph them, not to make direct reproductions or representations but by deliberately zooming in on ambiguous, psychologically loaded details. The photos have a cinematographic element as well as a disturbing tension between the doll-like quality of the handiwork and the palpable aggressive intensity that lies beneath the surface. Like the forensic investigators, we too can scan the image, examine the details, snippets and fragments, and look for clues till the puzzle pieces fit together.

a razor and reveals the damaged morality of a country in abject confusion.

For The Wedding, instead of focusing on the bomzhes as a class of social outcasts, Mikhailov limits himself to just two homeless people, a man and a woman. The series shows their simulated wedding taking place in their own surroundings, characterized by painful, absurdist staging, tragic situations, shameless lust, despair and lunacy. No other people are to be seen in the entire series. It is as though the outside world has long ago disappeared from view, as though no one else is left. These two remain as the last survivors, at one another’s mercy. The universe has shrunk to fit between the edges of the photographer’s frame. The absurdity of existence is reflected in the interplay between man and woman, and the greater picture rendered by a tiny slice of life.

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All images © Anne Geene Anne Geene (b. 1983, The Netherlands) recently graduated at the AKV St. Joost Arts Academy in Breda (Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography) and at the University of Leiden (Master of Arts in Photographic Studies).

She was quickly recognized for her extraordinary graduation project Parcel nr. 235 / Encyclopedia of an Allotment Garden (2010) which she published as a book too, and because of that was nationally nominated for various awards and prizes. Her work has been exhibited at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and at the FotoGrafia. Festival Internazionale di Roma (X Edition), MACRO Testaccio, Rome.

The Wedding by Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov is of an entirely different order. This series from 2005 – 2006 can be seen as a sequel to the provocative series Case History in which Mikhailov portrayed the bomzhes in his birthplace Kharkov, a new class of homeless people that appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union. Because of Mikhailov’s firm conviction that traditional documentary photography always tells an extremely limited part of the story and has scarcely any credibility left these days, he sought new methods of visualising the life of the bomzhes in Case History.

He found the solution in a perceptible interaction with the people he portrayed. They responded to the photographer, displayed emotion and went along with his requests, through which they came to life and were shown first and foremost as people, thereby reducing the distance between the viewer and the homeless to the minimum. Mikhailov asked them to strike specific poses and sometimes to partially or completely disrobe. The result is extremely moving, shocking and at times even repellent. At the same time, these are photos which, once seen, can never be forgotten. Mikhailov cuts through questions on humanity and inhumanity, visibility and invisibility, dignity and social justice with

Parcel nr. 235 is a complete visual representation of everything that grows, blossoms, swims by or flies over the artificially defined biotope of an allotment garden in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Through extensive photographic research Anne Geene is able to offer insight into the surprising richness of plant and animal life on an allotment garden in the most urbanized area in the Netherlands.

The project was inspired by the language of science, but has no scientific pretensions.

At the base are very personal observations, although they have been selected and defined with scientific precision and a sense for detail. The idea though is not so much about the perceived but rather about the art of observation and the relationship between photography and science.

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Stephen Gill Outside In

Stephen Gill

portfolio text

Piecing Together a Sense of Place

by Sophie Wright ‘Photography is good at turning things inside out, and this is the opposite: bringing the outside in.’

Stephen Gill Stephen Gill’s Outside In proposes a different approach to documentary. In contrast to the close scrutiny or hyperreality made available by contemporary camera technology, Gill’s approach is refreshingly low-fi and idiosyncratic. Out of focus views of his subject, the seaside town of Brighton, taken with cameras in

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which small found objects, plant life and creatures are placed inside and directly on the film emulsion. Embracing imperfection and chance, the effect of Gill’s multi-layered photographs is fragmentary and dreamlike. Outside In portrays a more ambiguous yet intimate experience of place.

Outside In resulted from a commission to photograph Brighton for Martin Parr’s 2010 curation of the Brighton Photo Biennial. Parr chose Alec Soth,

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Rinko Kawauchi and Gill to produce three new commissions, exhibited in the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery during the festival, because of their position as mid-career practitioners using documentary photography in a more conceptual way. With only time and Brighton as the determining factors for the work, Gill chose to develop techniques already adopted in his ongoing exploration of his home borough of Hackney in London.

Entirely analogue, much of Gill’s work to date has been produced within the framework of a simple concept, with the photographic process, or a reaction against it, often taking the lead in defining its appearance. He is happy to step back to allow chance to take a creative role, a playful approach recognisable in earlier projects such as Hackney Wick (2003). In this series he used a plastic camera, bought at the market that is the subject of the work. The resulting quality of the final colour photographs was restricted by the limitations of the basic 50 pence machine. In Buried (2006) Gill experimented with the effect of burying photographs taken in Hackney in the ground. The final images, presented in his book of the same name, incorporate the effects of rain and soil on the prints surface as he ‘saw this process as a collaboration with place’. In Brighton, Gill used home-modified Rolleiflex cameras to which he added a further layer of intervention between the subject and the final image. Following on from his experiments with the effects of limited technology, weather and the environment on his photographs, Outside In allows the environment to intervene in the image at the time of its taking. Remaining unseen through the lens, organic and manmade material (including live insects and crabs) were placed by Gill inside the body of the camera, on the film emulsion, like in camera photograms. His record of Brighton is mediated by, and seen through, that layer by at the same time revealing and obscuring.

Gill’s work has always expressed an interest in nature. One need only look at his ongoing series on birds or Hackney Flowers (2006) in which the photographer collected flowers, seeds, berries and other objects from various locations in Hackney, which he then pressed in his studio and incorporated into his

photographs. In Outside In the detritus scooped by Gill from Brighton’s streets sits on the surface of the photographs like an elementary nature table. Organic matter such as seed heads, dead leaves, petals, grass, seaweed, twigs and in one image a fish tail (from a fish caught and eaten by Gill), mixes with the man made: the pull top off a can, plastic, glass and wire. These aren’t just black silhouettes rather the reds and pinks of petals and plastic and the squidgy greens of organic matter, transformed by the actions of light through the lens and glowing with colourful opacity. Although already details, some surface shapes also hint at further minutiae: cells, the building blocks of nature, viewed on a Petri dish under the microscope's lens.

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↖ → Untitled from the series Buried, 2006 © Stephen Gill

Gill very rarely uses captions to provide context but there is a strong sense of place in much of his work – it’s incredibly English in choice of subject and often, more specifically, East-Londonbased in location. In Brighton he finds a quintessential English seaside town, and in the background layer of Outside In, muted, blurry photographs depict sun shining on pastel streetscapes, faded scruffiness and lanes of dog parsley and long grass. These are atmospheric but mundane scenes of nowhere in particular, devoid of recognisable landmarks and more akin to the everyday experience of being there. What elevates them from being unremarkable is the combination of subject matter on either side of Gill’s lens, Brighton being both inside as well as in front of the camera.

Small objects within the camera cover but also highlight certain elements within the photographs. In one striking image, a red-coated woman catches our eye.

Sitting at a bus stop, her outward gaze, semi-obscured at the picture’s centre, still holds our attention. The shapes of silhouetted matter on the photograph’s surface curve and gesture towards her face. This is one of the rare instances where the order of seeing reverts to the picture behind the layer inside the camera, as if the subject’s gaze has burned through it. In another photograph it is an item within the camera that is the star. An ant, placed while alive into the camera crawled across Gill’s film and is frozen, as if in aspic, moving up the picture plane. However, most of these images don’t have such a sense of focus.

Outside In’s topsy-turvy world brings related but odd combinations together: seaweed curls over a seaside scene, gravel scattered in the camera appears to come from the building work in the picture behind, but the eye hops between foreground details and background scenes with no clear hierarchy of subject suggested by the composition. These surreal shifts in scale suggest the jumbled memories of a place, as our mind flits from one thought to another, fragments of images combine without order.

The layer of material within the camera makes manifest the barrier between the photographer and the world, both actual and psychological. With the subject of the photographs on both sides of the lens,

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It’s a glancing into the mind of the photographer or placing of ourselves in the mindset of the individual exploring the environment.

In contrast to the precision of the manmade in Man Ray’s black and white rayographs or the poetic, naturalism of Susan Derges’ contemporary colour work, Gill’s photograms create a textural layer. An apparently randomly placed jumble of organic and man-made matter exuberantly explodes into abstracted form on the picture surface, the viewer glimpsing Brighton as if through a car windscreen in a gale or a dirty net curtain. In some cases foreground shapes and background images are so blurred and obscured in the final photograph as to remain completely ambiguous.

This is Brighton as abstract expressionist canvas rather than straightforward documentary.

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its separating presence is felt if not seen.

What is recorded inside the camera is an up close exploration of place. It’s scale is intimate, the act of looking at it introspective, a glancing into the mind of the photographer or placing of ourselves in the mindset of the individual exploring the environment.

With such an emphasis on process, meaning within Gill’s work can sometimes remain obscured. The multilayered photography of this project is aesthetically seductive. It is prettily coloured, textural and sensory. The photographer’s hands free approach to certain elements of the production process emphasises the creative alchemy at the heart of all photography. However, the work does not create itself – Gill is not guileless. He defines the parameters for its creation and one can be sure he carefully edits it. With Outside In he captures a distinct atmosphere. Like the childhood souvenirs of seaside town wanderings, the layers of flowers, grit, seaweed and fishtails, over out of focus scenery, evoke half remembered sun soaked holidays and the smell of salt in the air. By bringing the outside into the camera, Gill has found an effective way to capture the essence or spirit of the place.

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All images © Stephen Gill Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood along with his interest in insects, animals and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope. Gill has emerged as a major force in British photography, exhibiting his photographic work at many international galleries and museums including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Photographers’ Gallery, Victoria Miro Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts, Leighton House Museum, Haus Der Kunst, Gun Gallery, The Sprengel Museum and has had solo shows in festivals including – Les Recontres d’Arles, The Toronto photography festival and PHotoEspaña. Gill has gained special recognition for his numerous original and beautiful photo books such as Invisible, Hackney Wick, Warming Down, A Series of Disappointments, Archaeology in Reverse, Hackney Flowers, Buried, Off Ground, Coming up for Air, B-Sides, Trinidad 44 Photographs, A Book of Birds, Outside In and more.

Sophie Wright (b.1974, Belfast) is Cultural and Print Room Director at Magnum Photos, London, where she has worked since 2003, curating and coordinating touring exhibitions in the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Australasia. Prior to that she was deputy editor of PLUK magazine and co-curated exhibitions at PLUK’s gallery. She regularly lectures and writes on photography.

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Corinne May Botz The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Corinne May Botz

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Finding Truth in a Nutshell

by Karen Irvine Murder, arson, asphyxiation, robbery and suicide are not themes generally associated with child’s play. Really, no two ideas are more incompatible than childhood and murder, and presumably they intersect only in the realm of the evil and contemptible. In her project The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (2004), however, Corinne May Botz photographs the gruesome within the charming, creating images of grisly miniature rooms built by Chicago heiress and criminologist Frances Glessner

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Lee in the 1930s and ’40s. Intended as tools to help train police detectives, the miniature rooms present idealized, cosy domestic interiors that contain evidence of violent struggle and murder – bloodstains, overturned furniture, dollhouse figures presented as corpses. Blending the sweetness of a dollhouse with signs of terrifying violence, the Nutshell Studies send off a harrowing charge.

When Botz first heard about the Nutshell Studies she was immediately intrigued,

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and upon seeing them for herself she was instantly captivated, explaining that she felt ‘strangely at home’ and ‘drawn into this macabre universe, like a child lost in a book of fairytales.’ The miniatures are rich material indeed, and Botz recognized their extraordinary potential, suspecting the scenes would become even more compelling when transformed into photographs. As she started photographing she became equally gripped by the cultural history of the studies and thoroughly researched the history of crime photography, the medical gaze, and Lee’s fascinating life story.

Born in 1878, Lee was the only daughter of Frances Macbeth and John J. Glessner, the cofounder and vice president of International Harvester. The family was wealthy, and Lee’s parents were influential figures in Chicago’s business, cultural, and civic communities. By most accounts an unconventional woman, Lee had a complex relationship with the cultural and domestic expectations placed on the women of her time. She spent the first half of her life largely doing what was typical for a woman of her position – she married young, gave birth to three children, and practiced the knitting, embroidery, and other domestic skills she had learned from her mother.

Always regretting that she did not go to college, she occupied herself through patronage of the arts, and the first miniature she constructed, in 1913, was a detailed model of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in concert. She gave it to her mother as a birthday present.

↗ Abandoned House, Frankfort, Maine from the series Haunted Houses, 2010 © Corinne May Botz → La Posada Hotel, Winslow, Arizona from the series Haunted Houses, 2010 © Corinne May Botz

A friendship with her brother’s colleague from Harvard medical school, George Burgess Magrath, a medical student who eventually became Boston’s medical examiner, changed Lee’s life. In the 1930s Magrath inspired her to dabble in criminology, at a time when forensics was not very methodical or scientifically based. Lee eventually became so passionate about the need for the United States to adopt a scientific coroner system that she endowed the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine and set up the department’s library. As she became actively involved at the school and gained authority in the field of forensics, Lee had a happier life – her daughter-inlaw once said that Lee did not begin to live until her fifties. She began to work as a criminologist and was appointed the first female honorary police captain in the United States, in New Hampshire State, in 1943.

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Taking care to avoid showing the edges of the rooms, she enhances the illusion of being able to enter the space and confuses the sense of scale.

Movement, the Glessners had decorated their home impeccably. The ornate, perfectly appointed rooms had matching fabrics and wallpapers, and many of the furnishings were unique pieces handcrafted by artisans. Lee’s Nutshell Studies are similarly designed, with harmonious colours and thoughtful combinations of materials. Lee also paid extreme attention to every detail, often hiring carpenters to build tiny furniture and using her own needlecraft and other skills to create realistic details like hand-crocheted stockings and slippers for the figurines, functional pencils and mousetraps, and countless other miniature items.

Despite these very feminine elements, the miniature rooms serve to probe romantic notions of the domestic realm and the role of women at the time. It is notable that most of the Nutshell Study victims are women, some of the female figurines seem to have killed themselves, and many of the crimes contain elements of sexual or violent conflict.

The home, Lee demonstrates, can be a place of sanctuary and pride but also disempowerment and sorrow, abuse and aggression. Perhaps traditional femininity was a masquerade. As Beverly Gordon has discussed in her article ‘Woman’s Domestic Body’, the conflation between women’s bodies and domestic interiors reached a pinnacle during the Victorian age. The home was seen as an extension or impersonation of the woman who occupied it, who was also considered its ultimate ornament. Neither beautiful nor conventionally feminine, Lee may have been a misfit in both her parents’ and her own home.

Through her extensive research, Botz felt increasingly connected to Lee. ‘Her ghost has haunted me since the day I began to photograph the models, and, at moments, I felt sure she was creeping about inside them, daring me to find her one instant and demanding I leave the next,’ she explains. In making her photographs Botz sought to reveal Lee’s obsessive character and pay homage to her meticulousness, and to explore the gendered nature of her work. She also wanted to bring the studies alive.

Photographing the miniature rooms became an exercise in re-creating the absorption a child feels when playing with a dollhouse, the sense of being so immersed in the small space that one’s physical surroundings and time seem to melt away. Botz’s first challenge was to figure out how to best photograph these small studies, most of them boxed into narrow Plexiglas-fronted display cases and unevenly lit.

Using an unwieldy large-format camera in a very tight space offered only a limited number of vantage points, but the largeformat camera rendered the exact effects she wanted. The camera could capture the fine details of Lee’s handiwork and allowed Botz to use a shallow depth-offield to make the images look more lifelike. Taking care to avoid showing the edges of the rooms, she enhances the illusion of being able to enter the space and confuses the sense of scale. Botz has said that she wants to ‘disrupt the sense of distance, control and containment evoked by the real Nutshells’ and allow viewers to feel instead that they can inhabit the miniatures. Her images are very cinematic, reminiscent of stage

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Lee created the Nutshell Studies as a tool for the department of legal medicine she helped to establish at Harvard and named them after the police slogan ‘Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.’ Issues of confidentiality and practicality made hands-on training for the analysis of violent crime unfeasible for student groups, so Lee’s models were a good substitute for assessing visual evidence. Designed to lead the policemen through a controlled series of deductions, the models are a compilation of different crime stories, as Lee didn’t want the cases to be familiar to the detectives-in-training. The models perfectly mirror the extremes of Lee’s background and interests. They reflect her aristocratic upbringing and her proclivity for the feminine traditions of miniatures and handicrafts and in many ways resemble the home she grew up in – a sprawling fortress-like mansion designed by architect H. H. Richardson located on Chicago’s South Prairie Avenue, known then as Millionaire’s Row. Fascinated by the Arts and Crafts

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sets for stop-motion animation. She uses colour film to capture the largely pastel and warm-toned palette, and allows long exposures to diffuse the light streaming out of miniature light fixtures and windows. Like Lee, Botz heightens the sense of agreeable comfort and beauty of the scene, a strategy that counterbalances its ghastly content.

Lee based her studies partly on police photographs, and Botz’s work transforms them back into objects akin to their source of inspiration. In some ways Botz approaches Lee’s models as though she, too, is an investigator, recording a scene and evidence of the aftermath of violent actions from varying perspectives and distances. Like a police photographer, she points her camera at the obvious evidence as well as at the seemingly untouched elements, as if to methodically catalogue every detail of the space for a detective. To that end, Botz focuses on details such as a hat, a pile of papers, and a painting that may or may not contain any evidence of a crime, reflecting the tension between the banal normality of the scenes and the violent histories they profess to contain. The mix of disturbing and placid images also reveals the power of images to affect one another, as even the benign images become psychologically intensified by association.

Interested in the ambiguity of representation, Botz uses photography to transport the Nutshell Studies out of their current circumstance and into the space of our imaginations. In doing so she confronts us with our perverse attraction to horror by presenting them, as Lee did before her, in an aesthetically palatable form. Crime unsettles our fundamental notions of humanity and control, and the allure of Botz’s photographs demonstrates how much currency crime has, whether past or present, real or imaginary. But perhaps her photographs also reassure us in some way, either through their imaginary remove or the demonstration of control exerted over the topic by both Lee and Botz. Clearly, our anxieties about crime are irrational enough to be tapped even through heavy mediation and obvious artifice, and thus, perhaps, Botz’s photographs tell us that the most frightening crimes are the ones that we cannot solve, the ones that cannot be explained away, the ones that exist solely in our minds.

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By transforming the three-dimensional miniature spaces into selections of two-dimensional images, Botz greatly abstracts the scenes, fracturing them into singular, disparate viewpoints. She therefore makes pictures that both acknowledge and entice the viewer, who is unable to read any full scene, as the detectives-in-training would have done.

Although cameras have long been considered highly effective tools for law enforcement – photography is widely considered an infallible way of identifying criminals and garnering evidence – Botz’s work illustrates the unreliability of photographic evidence and the narrow, totally subjective perspective that the camera usually offers. By photographing and mixing together images from a variety of rooms, Botz discourages us from being able to piece together cohesive narratives. This strategy activates our engagement with the images by inviting us to imagine narrative, not deduce predetermined conclusions.

All images © Corinne May Botz Corinne May Botz (b. 1977, United States) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In her work she investigates the perception of space and our emotional connections to architecture and objects.

Her photographs have been exhibited at, among others, Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany; Bellwether Gallery in New York and The Center for Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland. She is the author of Haunted Houses (The Monacelli Press, 2010) and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (The Monacelli Press, 2004). Botz received a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and an M.F.A. from Bard College. She teaches photography at the International Center of Photography and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Karen Irvine (b. 1968, United States) is Curator and Associate Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She recently organized the exhibition Crime Unseen, featuring the work of Corinne May Botz and Christian Patterson, among others. Irvine has written essays for numerous artist monographs and publications. She received an MFA in photography from FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic, and an MA in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Rineke Dijkstra The Krazyhouse

Rineke Dijkstra

portfolio text

Pose and Let Go

by HripsimĂŠ Visser A darkened room. Screens have been attached to the four walls. First comes the music and then after a few seconds, on one of the screens, a girl starts to dance.

Megan has long blonde hair. She’s wearing denim shorts and a white sleeveless T-shirt with pink bra straps peeping out under it. Her movements are hesitant, uneasy, her gestures studied. When the music stops and the screen goes dark, a projector lights up a second screen.

Simon plays air guitar and dances, headbanging, with improbably rangy limbs.

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His long dark hair hangs in front of his face almost throughout, until the music stops and he looks into the camera for a moment with a shy winning smile. The third dancer is Nicky, chubby in a tight sexy dress, seductive and self-assured. Philip, a small boy with a tattoo and a pierced eyebrow, on the fourth of the screens, remains in view the longest. He is indisputably the most fanatical dancer. The speed and control with which he moves to the techno music are fascinating.

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They seem to be part of our world yet nevertheless at a distance because of that uncompromising white background.

When he finishes he is clearly exhausted, his face expressionless. The sequence of projections of five quite different dance styles lasts more than half an hour and ends with Dee, a slight girl in jeans with an outsized belt who dances on the first screen, initially uncertain and shy but soon as supple as a snake and completely at one with her song.

The five dancers have been filmed against a white backdrop; there’s nothing to distract us from their facial expressions and movements. The camera has a fixed point of view. It sometimes zooms in on a face, often at the point when the dancer sings silently along to the music, but usually the focus is on the total image, and the relationship between the viewer in the room and the dancers on screen is entirely natural.

They seem to be part of our world yet nevertheless at a distance because of that uncompromising white background and the rectangular frame within which the dancing takes place. The viewer stands in the room, the succession of projections making him or her turn to face a different wall each time.

It’s February 2012 and this is the third time I’ve seen the installation. The premiere was more than two years ago in the Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. In that huge old industrial space, three boxes had been built, one of them for The Krazyhouse. What struck me then was a kind of hardness, an extreme sharpness, a merciless precision. The technique was clearly different from that of ­earlier videos, due to better cameras. The portraits hanging on the outside walls were sharper too, more clear-cut than earlier photographs. The installation in the Hallen in Haarlem in late 2010 was more intimate, since it concentrated on The Krazyhouse alone, along with a few earlier portraits of disco girls in Liverpool. Now the video is ­being presented as part of Rineke Dijkstra’s first American retrospective, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it inevitably gives rise to comparisons with earlier work.

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↖ The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK, March 3, 1995 © Rineke Dijkstra, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York → View of the video installation The Krazyhouse at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Over a decade ago, in 1996 – 97, Rineke Dijkstra created The Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK / Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL. That video installation is also about young people dancing in a closed-off studio space, but there the similarities largely end. The Buzz Club / Mysteryworld consists of two screens next to each ­other on a wall on which sometimes one, sometimes two people are projected, either in turn or at the same time. First very young English girls, just entering puberty, sexily dressed, slow-dancing, smoking, chewing gum and drinking.

Then Dutch clubbers, tough, angular and macho. The montage of images, filmed in a studio space next to the actual disco, in combination with the music, with its fast and slow rhythms, suggested a narrative, the course of an evening, a night in which drink and drugs leave visible traces. So viewers generally sit down, the frontal nature of the projection inviting them to adopt just one position.

The Buzz Club / Mysteryworld and The Krazyhouse are about music and portraiture, the two central themes of Rineke Dijkstra’s work from the very start of her career. Both installations feature young people, adolescents, the age group chosen almost exclusively by Dijkstra in her photography. In her ‘beach portraits’, her first completed series from the first half of the 1990s, she concentrated on the moment at which teenagers adopt a pose or indeed let go of it during the lengthy process involved in taking pictures with an old-fashioned large format camera.

In later series she turned her attention to psychologically charged moments, to mothers who had just given birth to their first child, or bullfighters immediately after a performance in the arena. Changes over the course of time and the influence of experiences on a person’s appearance were her focus in the series she made across several years about refugee girl Almerisa and about Olivier, a soldier with the French Foreign Legion.

The use of flash gives her images their sharpness, allowing full attention to be paid to details of the clothing, posture and facial expressions.

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In fact the majority of her large photographs were made in a neutral studio or some other relatively inexpressive space (except for the park photographs taken in Berlin and Amsterdam, which are inevitably more suggestive, presenting more of a sense of narrative). The use of flash gives her images their sharpness, allowing full attention to be paid to details of the clothing, posture and facial expressions. The almost exclusive use of frontal points of view, in combination with the slowness of the particular technique Dijkstra deploys, creates a paradoxical and utterly engrossing combination of extreme realism and emphatic pose, of apparent naturalness and carefully considered stagecraft.

Video, of course, introduces time and with it the opportunity to give a portrait an additional dimension (something that many artists, from Andy Warhol to Fiona Tan, have explored and continue to explore). The Buzz Club / Mysteryworld arose from Rineke Dijkstra’s desire to capture the atmosphere of music, the experience of a night at the disco, which would be impossible in a static portrait.

The Krazyhouse, although also named after a discotheque, actually has more in common with a video from 1997 in which thirteen-year-old Annemiek, rather stiff and serious, mimes a song by the Backstreet Boys, completely ­engrossed in her favourite music. We see only her face, as she listens and sings along with utmost concentration. For The Krazyhouse too, Rineke Dijkstra asked adolescents to bring their own music, but this time to dance to it. As in the Annemiek video, an extraordinary relationship with the camera develops, since the young people seem to alternate between being aware of the camera and, no less often, forgetting it’s there.

And again, as ever, it is at the edge, on the borderline of this thoroughly photographic voyeurism, that Rineke Dijkstra succeeds in evoking empathy and poignancy. And because of her extremely precise awareness of form, she does so in a way that is both transparent and utterly unsentimental.

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All images © Rineke Dijkstra The portfolio is designed by Linda van Deursen (Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam).

Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959, the Netherlands) has acquired international fame for her portrait series. She trained in photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (1981 – 1986).

Her first solo exhibition was in 1984 at de Moor in Amsterdam. Since then her work has appeared in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1997 and 2001 Venice Biennales; New Photography 13 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997; Cruel and Tender.

The real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph at Tate Modern, London, 2003; the 1998 Bienal de São Paulo, Turin’s Biennale Internationale di Fotografia in 1999, and the 2003 International Center for Photography’s Triennial of Photography and Video in New York.

In 2005 her solo exhibition Rineke Dijkstra – Portraits (curated by Hripsimé Visser) was shown at Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Fundació la Caixa d’Estalvis Pensions, Barcelona; and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. She has received many awards, including the Werner Mantz Award (1994) and the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize (1998). Her retrospective has just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (February 18 – May 28), and it will soon travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (June 29 – October 3). Rineke Dijkstra is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and Galerie Jan Mot in Bruxelles.

Hripsimé Visser (b. 1954, The Netherlands) is Curator of Photography at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam since 1990.

She has (co-)curated various exhibitions, among which Thomas Struth (1998), Sam Taylor-Wood (2002), Rineke Dijkstra (2004 ) and Mapping the City (2007). She has contributed texts to various books, including the artist monographs Thomas Struth (1997) and Rineke Dijkstra (2004), and has written for magazines and journals.

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Joris Jansen Kosmos

Joris Jansen

portfolio text

Non-disclosure Agreements

by Lyle Rexer So close – the infinitesimal and the ­infinite.

But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The un­ believably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet – like the closing of a ­g igantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver ­tapestry spread across the night. And in that ­moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite.

Scott Carey in The Incredible Shrinking Man

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The character Scott Carey approaches dissolution through structure, descending into a micro world which is increasing artefact, intricate, threatening, beautiful. Soon he will reach a limit, below the ­molecular level, the atomic, and beyond, ultimate emptiness, ultimate consciousness. What is the threshold of perceptible structure? What is the limit of its detail? When does vision fail? We feel with the poet William Blake that structure and order are infinitely perspicuous, everywhere and at every level.

The universe in a grain of sand. But what of our pictures of order? Can we investigate them as if they were infinitely deep? I keep thinking of photographers today who do not trust the intimations of order in their own photo­graphs, or want instead to uncover other structures of perception and control inside the visible, as if their cameras were godlike, eyes without bodies, as Moholy-Nagy put it.

Photographers examining their pictures for disclosures unavailable to mere sight: William Henry Fox Talbot would have been the first, poring over the tiny slips of silver-stained, light-impregnated paper from his so-called mousetrap cameras.

The negatives were too weak to make positive prints, but for Talbot they retained the direct impress of a world in miniature, mouse-perspective, Scott Carey perspective.

Likewise Wilson Bentley, who first photo­ graphed a snowflake in 1880. He said, ‘The day I developed the first negative by this method and found it good, I felt almost like falling on my knees beside that apparatus and worshipping it!’ But the snowflake, although tiny, was actual, tangible, not at all temporary provided the temperature was low enough. The corres­ pondence between image and thing was infrangible – that was the godlike beauty of the photograph, and we could substitute a bacillus for the snowflake, a cancer cell dividing, a fragment of viral DNA. The first picture of a charmed quark would be another story altogether. Streaks were left in a bubble chamber at Fermilab in 1976 after atoms were smashed – evidence of a tentative, highly interpretable sort, a kind of nothing coaxed into (retrospective) being by theory, a borderland between perception and representation, an epistemological DMZ.

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In a sense, Jansen has written a moving elegy for chemical photographs.

↙ → Rainbow, 2009 © Joris Jansen

joris jansen

What was it that Joris Jansen saw in a photograph he had already taken that sent him back to its surface, as if it were new territory, a new planet in the solar system? Perhaps, good post-modern that he is, nothing. Knowing already that a photograph is a purely analogical representation without a code (according to Barthes), Jansen may simply have said, ‘Let’s have an end to this idea of “reading” a photograph.’ So he anatomized its forms, subverted its ideology, just by looking too closely, by rephotographing various regions of the original image at high magnification. That, procedurally at least, was the source of his series Kosmos. In other words, do precisely the opposite of Fox Talbot, or the ­scientists at Fermilab, and renounce the search for evidence of things unseen, latencies within the image (and within the world). By the same token, refuse the role of David Hemmings’ character in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, photographer-as-detective.

The microphotographs would seem to carry Sherrie Levine’s logic of appropriation to the absurd endpoint: Steal your own work. Never allow the viewer to leave the surface of the image, or to forget that it is a surface. Keep the quotation marks around the image, and never refer back to an original, a first photograph, a reality antecedent to the pictures at hand. To that end, Jansen’s compromising of information is habitual, instinctive. In his oeuvre we find photographs reduced to pixels with no possibility of resolution, photographs collaged to depict that banal subject, a rainbow, and photographs with monochromatic rectangular centres whose colours – shades of gray, green and brown – seem to reiterate, or reinforce, the tones of the surrounding image. One photograph on Jansen’s website shows a particularly engrossing image from Kosmos framed as a computer screengrab, with all the toolbars and a tag for its metadata. Others show photographs

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apparently taped to a wall or scattered on a table. The denial of transcendence is unequivocal.

Or is it? We need to consider this idea of metadata. The metadata in this case are not contained or digitally coded within Joris Jansen’s images. They are of a different type. They supplement what is seen because they are what we bring to the images and invest in them, in their simultaneous strangeness and familiarity. Our expectations and associations are the metadata, and those expectations constitute the ultimate appeal of Kosmos. This is a point we will return to, and one that should foreclose the notion that Jansen is some sort of formalist aesthete.

All the microphotographs of the series are abstract, and not. That is, they contain no objects of available recognition, although all of them refer directly to an object, the photograph that Joris

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Jansen selected to rephotograph but has declined to show in its entirety. We recognize this strategy of withholding the referent as the latest example in a long lineage of photographic practice. In part it is the unavoidable consequence of analogue photography’s flattening, abstracting, decontextualizing character, its inherent potential for ambiguity.

Talbot explored and even reveled in it – see his ‘photogenic drawing’ of spruce needles. Man Ray’s Dust Breeding was a faux landscape, Minor White’s street ice a vehicle for spiritual extasis, in the American grain. James Welling’s crumpled tinfoil was a Wittgensteinian duck-rabbit. Closer in age and attitude would be Marco Breuer’s distressed photographic papers and Walead Beshty’s folded paper photographs, colourful topographies that the artist refuses to label abstract. For political reasons, Beshty denies any projections of authorial intention and discourages any inclination on the part of the viewer to free-associate. No referents withheld: what you see is what you get, and nothing more.

a violent eruption of colour and light; a banded, intercellular membrane and its boundary events; a diaphanous aurora; the dark fragment of a lunar landscape.

My equivalents are unavoidable and, with their intimations of the sublime, misleading. Conditioned to seek a ­beyond, we are suspended not only between micro and macro universes but also between disclosure and its denial.

We come face to face with our desire for transcendental recognition, and that desire has a name: photography.

In a sense, Jansen has written a moving elegy for chemical photographs.

No meaning inheres in the print nor any trace of the artist’s hand. Instead his digital project conveys the spectacle of a process arrested at an instant of generation or dissolution, impossible to tell which. Is it a tragedy or a new beginning? Probably best to follow Einstein: photography knows no death, only transformation.

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No metadata. But looking at the rephotographs of Kosmos, with its tendentious title, no one can miss the emphasis on its collective context: the images nearly all of us carry in our heads.

Pictures from beyond, from unseeable regions. As a result of human technological projection into deep space, the limit has an image: something galactic, gaseous, monumental in space and time, inconceivable in terms of scale, origin or implication. The images from Voyager, Galileo, the Hubble telescope seem to lead us further and further into reality.

Yet they are somehow sourceless, detached from human agency. No wonder that they have obsessed Thomas Ruff.

But like the infinitesimal journey of Scott Carey, they point us ultimately toward an elsewhere that can yield no images, a terminus ad quem where limit and origin become one. Knowledge at the quantum level achieves a degree of abstraction that excludes analogy. Like mystical descriptions of the godhead, comprehension can be expressed only as a series of negations.

All images © Joris Jansen Joris Jansen (b. 1980, NL) is a Dutch photographer and cook, based in Amsterdam. After graduating in 2009 at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague (KABK) he won the prestigious Steenbergen Stipendium, a Dutch grant for the best graduation project in photography with his projects Rainbows and Flock. He has exhibited nationally at Nederlands Fotomuseum in 2009, CBK Rotterdam in 2009, CBK Den Bosch in 2010 and Galerie van Kranendonk, The Hague in 2009 among others. Kosmos was shown as a small solo exhibition at Foam in 2011, the same year that the publication Meekijken over de schouder van… was published by FOTODOK written by Joris Jansen and Theo Baart. The publication was followed by the exhibition Snow is White curated for FOTODOK

by Joris Jansen and Kim Knoppers.

Lyle Rexer (b. 1951, United States) is a critic, curator, scholar and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (2009) for which he received the 2008-9 award from the Arts Writers Grant Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation. Lyle Rexer contributes regularly to The New York Times, Art in America, Aperture, Modern Painters, Parkett, Raw Vision, and Tate Etc. He also teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

We are held at the surface of these hypnotic images: an uncentered, all-over night sky; vast multihued tidal washes;

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Christian Patterson Redheaded Peckerwood

Christian Patterson

portfolio text

Red Blood Snow

by Adam Bell Reconstructing a crime is never merely a matter of finding the culprit, but is an attempt to untangle the scattered array of clues and the fragmentary remnants of an unlawful act to arrive at a proof, a reassurance of guilt and perhaps a motive.

Sometimes those motives become clear and the evidence and reasons match.

Other times the logic, facts and evidence offer no clear solution. Or an individual’s guilt is clear, but the evidentiary path is blurred, the logic is murky or non-existent, and remains tangled with obscure

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motives. The facts and details, however close at hand and well scrutinized, often fall out of focus and lead us further astray the longer we look. In the end, we are forced to piece together the facts – clouded as they may be with our own and other’s biases, desires and fears.

In the late 1950s eighteen-yearold Charles Starkweather met Caril Ann Fugate, who was just fourteen.

Starkweather was a high-school dropout with a rebellious streak. He began

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to court her, taught her to drive and quickly provoked the dislike of the girl’s parents, who wanted him out of Caril Ann’s life. Chronically unemployed, angry and desperate for money, Charlie shot and robbed a gas station attendant in Lincoln, Nebraska, in December 1957. While his motive seems to have been money, the attendant had refused to sell him a stuffed animal he wanted to buy on credit to give to his girlfriend.

His first murder set in motion a brutal course of events. Even though she knew about the murder Caril Ann stayed with Charlie. While he managed to elude the law, things took a turn for the worse in early 1958. Starkweather went to visit the Fugate home, found that the girl was out and quickly got into an argument with her parents and ended up killing the entire family. The couple holed up in the house for several days, watching TV, eating junk food and having sex.

When neighbours and family became suspicious the couple fled Lincoln and embarked on a killing spree across Nebraska and into Wyoming. In the end, at least ten people were dead.

The tragic events caused a media sensation and shocked the nation. Like Bonnie and Clyde, and other notorious criminals, Starkweather and Fugate immediately captured the public’s attention.

While their story has been explored in various films and songs over the years, the couple was most notably immortalized in filmmaker Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Christian Patterson was drawn to the story behind the film and seduced

by Malick’s beautiful portrayal of the

tragic crimes. Over the course of several years, Patterson made numerous trips to Nebraska to retrace the killer’s path.

Along the way, he visited people and places touched by the murders, explored public archives, and investigated the events. In a few cases, he even discovered new evidence. In Redheaded Peckerwood, Patterson has assembled his own idiosyncratic and mysterious crime dossier, and offers a new and startlingly evocative take on the crimes and their lingering effects.

At its heart this work is a radical inquiry into the slippery and deceptive realm of photographic representation.

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Patterson’s work dances around his subject, weaving a complex web of visual clues and allusions. Rather than follow a narrative or documentary trajectory, the work leaps from one synecdochical fragment to the next. An illuminated house at night with a Dead End sign in the background, bottle caps strewn across a linoleum floor, a tree set ablaze in a field and a spent shotgun shell all suggest both real and imagined events.

Patterson employs a strategy increas-

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Both the book and portfolio here open with an image in negative of an abandoned storm cellar, the dark recesses of the space hidden from view. Descending into this space, we are led down a rabbit hole and into a hauntingly disorienting world. From the image of a rusty jackknife planted in a scarred wall to a pornographic pinup pasted on the wall, the images capture the naïveté, juvenile rage, rebellion and misplaced longing and romance at the heart of the crimes. Although seemingly disparate, Patterson’s carefully collected images offer us a variety of perspectives on the events and crime – alternating between the imagined perspective of the killers, the victims and the contemporary viewer, who, like Patterson, acts as detective.

ingly popular among photographers of mixing genres. Whereas most attempts of this kind feel inappropriate or derivative, or rely on obtuse intellectual acro­ batics, Patterson’s approach succeeds because the content and form feel perfectly matched. Forensic imagery, traditional documentary, appropriated and staged photographs are blended to form a volatile mix – an enigmatic dossier of jumbled facts and cryptic clues.

As Patterson retraced the killers’ steps and put together the project he both created his own images and incorporated found artifacts and ephemera. His book and installation include a map, a confessional letter, personal notes belonging to the murderers and their victims as well as evidence uncovered by the detectives who worked the case and, in a few cases, by Patterson himself. He also presents photographed still-lifes, and their relevant objects. In one particularly poignant example, not included here, Patterson recovered the soiled tealcoloured stuffed poodle that triggered the first murder, left behind by Fugate at one of the crime scenes and untouched for years. In Patterson’s image of the toy the poodle forlornly faces a fuchsia backdrop, its face turned away.

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↖ Cinder Block Streamers, 2003 from the series Sound Affects © Christian Patterson ← Cozy Corner Lights, 2004 from the series Sound Affects © Christian Patterson

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Although not immediately obvious, Patterson purposely includes both archival and staged photographs, as well as images of artifacts. The mix of fact and fiction forces us to struggle to decipher all the clues, forge associative links between them and helps trigger our own imaginative response to the murders. As Luc Sante wrote in his essay for Patterson’s book, ‘murder charges everything it touches.’ Looking through the images, it is hard to avoid murder’s electric charge. The work forces us to look closely, to scrutinize each piece of evidence or seeming red herring as we form our own connections and build our own case. Each seemingly disparate photograph resonates and points obliquely to the known – or imagined – facts from the case, but also build upon each other, creating a sense of doom.

proven guilt, but an effort to deconstruct the evidence and residual aftermath of the events. Instead of a reassuring conclusion we are offered a casebook torn asunder and cast into doubt. Like a beleaguered detective, the viewer is left to comb through the ashes and bloody snow, struggling to piece together the motives of a crime committed long ago.

In the end, it is not a matter of solving the crime. Patterson’s work asks deeper questions about our personal relationship with violence – where it comes from, how it shapes our lives and the shocking indelible marks it leaves on our lives, imagination and the landscape around us. Plumbing the depths of the American psyche, Patterson has emerged with something dark, brooding, complex and wholly engaging.

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Understanding photographs, much like deciphering clues and evidence, requires us to contextualize their meaning, history and creation within a larger framework of subjective and objective truth. Regardless of the circumstances, photographs tell a knotty yet highly particular version of the truth. At its heart this work is a radical inquiry into the slippery and deceptive realm of photographic representation. In taking creative liberties with the events and assumed truth, Patterson creates a subtly disarming rupture that is particularly chilling because it unearths some of our deepest fears about the porous boundaries between truth, lies, guilt and innocence.

The work even includes images with intentional photographic mistakes, like double exposures and light leaks, further underscoring the mercurial nature of photographic truth and evidence. In questioning the facts and untangling the evidentiary links, Patterson’s work reopens the tragic events and offers an oblique and mysterious exploration of desire, anger, hopelessness and despair.

All images © Christian Patterson Christian Patterson (b.1972, United States) lives in Brooklyn, New York. He was nominated for the 2007 Santa Fe Prize for Photography and the 2009 Baum Award for American Photographers, and he was a 2010 Light Work Artist-In-Residence.

His first monograph, Sound Affects, was published in 2008.

His second monograph, Redheaded Peckerwood, was published by MACK in 2011 and named one of the best books of 2011 by numerous international photography critics. His work is exhibited, collected and published internationally. Redheaded Peckerwood will be shown in 2012 at Robert Morat Gallery (Hamburg/Berlin) and Rose Gallery (Santa Monica).

How does one make sense of events that have no rhyme or reason? Why reopen a closed case only to scatter the clues and cast further doubt? Starkweather confessed and was executed at Nebraska State Penitentiary. Fugate was sentenced to life in prison but was eventually paroled. For Patterson, the motive to reconstruct the crime was not principally a means of confirming or overturning

Adam Bell (b. 1976, United States) is a photographer and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2004. He is the co-editor and co-author of The Education of a Photographer (Allworth Press, 2006). His writing and reviews have appeared in Foam Magazine, Lay Flat, Photoeye, Ahorn Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He is currently on staff and faculty at the School of Visual Arts' MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department.

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Harold Strak Arthropoda

Harold Strak

portfolio text

Strak’s Pencil of Nature

by Flip Bool The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) appeared in six instalments between 1844 and 1846, a publication that is generally regarded as the first book to be illustrated with original photographic prints and intended for a broad readership. The title and the photographic process developed by Talbot have the requisite relevance to the work of Harold Strak, who was born 159 years later. This might seem far-fetched, but in Harold Strak’s work the present and the past are closely linked.

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Thanks to the French government’s acquisition of the process developed

by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), which was endowed to the whole world on 19 August 1839 during a solemn gathering of the Académie des Sciences, this pioneer stands as the founding father of photography.

However, the technique that he helped to perfect produced a one-off image on a silver-coated sheet of copper, while Talbot laid the foundations for the negative-positive process that would

to a large degree determine the further ­development of analogue photography.

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In the nineteenth century, the arts and sciences were realms of knowledge that were extensions of one another. The introduction of the medium of photo­ graphy was itself the product of substantial expertise in the fields of physics and chemistry. For various protagonists, the significance and potential applications of photography lay first and foremost in the sphere of documentation – scientific or otherwise – rather than in its artistic use.

As one of the most fervent advocates of the French government’s procurement of the rights to the medium, in 1839 the physicist and politician François Arago underscored the potential documentary applications in diverse spheres, from physics, astronomy, the fine arts and Egyptology to portraiture and the landscape. The poet Charles Baudelaire regarded photography primarily as a medium for lazy painters and a threat to the powers of the imagination, but in his renowned 1859 text ‘On Photography’ he emphasized the possibilities that were to the benefit of the sciences and the arts – albeit as a humble servant.

He mentioned the natural historian and the possibility of recording animals in pinpoint-sharp microscopic images as an example.

and study photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1992. A 1993 exhibition of work by the Amsterdam-based photographic pioneer Pieter Oosterhuis (1816-1885) at the Amsterdam City Archives and the accompanying book

by Anneke van Veen fanned his latent photo-historical interest and inspired him to construct a 33 x 44 cm wooden plate camera with a bellows taken from a repro camera. This entailed intensive study into nineteenth-century photography and printing techniques. Moreover, he had to learn how to prepare glass negatives himself. Some of the images that he captured with this camera were published together with photographs of Amsterdam by Georges Hendrik Breitner in the booklet In Jehoshaphat’s Valley (Linde series no. 3; Amsterdam: Basalt Publishers, 1996). Strak became increasingly absorbed in traditional photographic processes and the production of prints from historical glass negatives became one of his specialisms.

There are few other contemporary photo­graphers who are as acutely aware of the chemical, technical and artistic development of photography since its official introduction as Harold Strak.

This interest was kindled by his father, a chemical analyst and a passionate amateur photographer. Harold Strak developed his technical knowledge further through his study of mechanical engineering at Delft University of Technology, pursuing specializations in industrial organization and fibrereinforced plastics. He started to take photographs himself on completion of his studies in mechanical engineering, but initially nothing indicated his pursuing a career as a photographer. This perspective gradually opened up while he was working as a personnel planner for the Transavia airline company as a fresh graduate. Several courses at the De Moor photography centre in Amsterdam helped crystallize his decision to go

It looks like a form of scientific photography that is as objective as possible, but on closer inspection there is a whole realm of meanings ehind it.

↖ Saturnia Pavonia, 2000 © Harold Strak, silver print ↗ Celine’s Zus, 1998 © Harold Strak, made on a glass negative from 1941

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This is demonstrated by the blackand-white prints that he produced t­ogether with Jasper Wiedeman for the booklet Tumbleweed (Linde series no. 4, Amsterdam: Basalt Publishers, 1998) ­using negatives by Leendert Blok.

Around this same time he started to take photographs using glass negatives that were decades old but had not been exposed. Time and transience thus became central themes in his work.

The world of the Arthropoda, the ­phylum of invertebrates with jointed limbs, is the most important theme in Harold Strak’s non-commissioned work. Not in the way they surround us in countless numbers, but in various states of decomposition after their relatively short lives.

Photography means writing with light and without light taking photographs is inconceivable. The same light possesses a magical attraction for insects, but often leads to their demise. The insects that Strak selected for his black-and-white series share a common origin: the photographer’s own studio. Together they present an inventory of the various arthropods that once visited or populated his workspace when alive. Like the use of analogue black-and-white photography, which has now almost been consigned to

harold strak

Harold Strak remained actively involved with the Gerrit Rietveld Academy after completing his studies there. A pivotal moment was the study trip he made to India in early 2000 as guest lecturer for a group of academy students. In his luggage he carried a few sheets of lightsensitive paper that he had prepared himself. In the spirit of Fox Talbot he used these to produce one-off photographic images by mounting a flower or a piece of textile on these sheets and exposing them in the sun. Besides these contact negatives, Strak returned home with the cocoon of a butterfly, which emerged about five months later – it turned out to have wings with a span of about 18 cm (7 inches). Like a true naturalist, Strak used his technical camera to document the short life of this exotic insect, which flapped itself to death in a fortnight. Around the same time he used this camera to take a photo of a bluebottle that he had sliced in half with a tennis racket in his darkroom. By degrees, insects came to fascinate him more and more. the annals of history, this urge to ­collect natural historical artefacts is a longstanding tradition.

The practice of amassing collections of every possible object that provided evidence of the ‘world in miniature’ emerged in Europe during the Renaissance, as a reflection of a globe which had still scarcely been explored.

In the Netherlands this tradition can be traced back to the collection of naturalia that was begun in 1585 by Bernardus Paudanus from Enkhuizen.

The first public collections were ­established during the Enlightenment.

In 1759 the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities initiated the Haarlem Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, which was officially opened to the public in 1772, but closed in 1866. This

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was followed by the 1784 opening of the Teylers Museum in the same city, a Cabinet of Art and Curiosities with a public function and now the oldest existing museum in the Netherlands. All of this came about shortly after the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus published the first edition of his Systema Naturae in Leiden in 1735, establishing the basis for the nomenclature that we still employ for flora and fauna today.

The book Voyage Botanique, which Paul den Hollander published autonomously in 1997 with his photographs of various botanical collections and quotes from the work of Linnaeus, attests to the importance attached to Linnaeus’s work, even by modern-day photographers. Collecting, classification and identification play an important part

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in contemporary visual arts and photo­ graphy in various other ways. An example that springs to mind is the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who used a technical camera to build up an oeuvre of typological series of photographs of industrial buildings and objects that are in danger of disappearing. Strak used a similar type of camera to take macro shots of the insects that met their fate in his studio.

emulsion seems to converge with the fragile abdomens, wings or legs of the ‘immortalized’ insects. A chemical and optical miracle thus unveils the marvellous world of the countless arthropods.

In that sense Harold Strak’s work is a highly personal, modern-day sequel to The Pencil of Nature by William Henry Fox Talbot and constitutes an oeuvre that Linnaeus and Baudelaire would certainly have relished were they still alive today.

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After clamping the found remains of insects between two glass slides, they are meticulously lit and positioned in front of the technical camera, which is fitted with a 50 mm ‘standard’ lens. Extending the bellows of the camera to between 30 and 40 cm results in an optical magnification factor of 8, or in terms of surface area a factor of 64. The visual result was a surprise even for Strak, owing to dust and more minuscule features of the photographed insect ultimately playing an important but unpredictable visual role. Barely discernible with the naked eye, if at all, in the eventual enlargement these dust particles resemble stars in the heavens and produce a markedly spatial effect. In the knowledge that life has its origins in exploding stars, the prints evoke fascinating connotations between life and death. The tactility and transparency of the gossamer-thin bodies of the insects seem to betray Strak’s earlier specialization in fibre-reinforced plastics.

All images © Harold Strak, Courtesy Van Zoetendaal Gallery, Amsterdam The full article is published in the book Harold Strak – Arthropoda, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, Amsterdam 2011.

(Translation Andrew May)

Transience is a pivotal theme for Harold Strak, yet he is a stranger to sentimentality and consistently succeeds in treading a path that leads to novel images. The Arthropoda series looks like a form of scientific photography that is as objective as possible, but on closer inspection there is a whole realm of meanings behind it. This might be fittingly described as Spurensicherung – ‘securement of traces’ – to borrow the title of Günter Metken’s book (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1977) about several ‘traceseeking’ artists active in the early 1970s.

Strak is similarly aiming for something more than the creation of aesthetically convincing images in his work.

Displaying an optimum mastery of technique, in his work one finds an utmost concentration on subjects that are normally hidden from our gaze and divulge their secrets only on closer inspection. In the Arthropoda series the photographic

Harold Strak (b. 1959, Mozambique) is an Amsterdam-based photographer and print room specialist. He studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam between 1992 and 1996.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been on show at Spaarnestad, Haarlem (1998), Gallery van Kranendonk, The Hague (2000), Van Zoetendaal Collections, Amsterdam (2000, 2002 and 2005).

Internationally his work has been part of various group shows of which Cadres Revisites at Institut Néerlandais, Paris, Dutch Insight at the Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul and the Daejeon Museum, all in 2005 and Netherlands Now, at Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris (2006). Arthropoda was published as a numbered and signed photobook by Van Zoetendaal Gallery in 2011. Harold Strak is represented by Van Zoetendaal Collections.

Flip Bool (b. 1947, the Netherlands) is Senior Curator Collections and Research at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam as well as Lecturer in Photography at AKV | St.Joost, Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda. He was director of the Nederlands Fotoarchief in Rotterdam from 1989 to 2005, taught modern art and photography at the University of Leiden and before that was Chief Curator of the Modern Art Department at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. He is a connoisseur of Dutch photography and has produced many publications and exhibitions in the field of fine arts, graphic design and photography.

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Masao Mochizuki Television 1975 – 1976

Masao Mochizuki

portfolio text

A Window Into the World

by Marc Feustel [Television] is used as a window into the world. For many it is the world and not even a surrogate one.

John Baldessari By the late 1960s television had become one of the pillars of consumerist capitalism around the world, both as a communication medium and as one of the essential appliances, which had come to symbolise the newly consumerist and wealthy Japan. Television entered into the holy trinity of the ‘Three Cs’

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(a colour television, a car and a ‘cooler’ [air conditioner]), a tongue-in-cheek phrase that was coined in reference to the Three Sacred Treasures of the Japanese emperor. It was in the context of this newfound importance as a symbol of affluence, but also as an increasingly dominant medium, that Masao Mochizuki made television his subject for from May 1975 to the end of 1976.

Television 1975 – 1976 consists of a ­series of photographic grids made up of multiple images of a television screen.

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To create these montages Mochizuki developed a specific process by drawing a grid consisting of five columns and seven rows on the focusing screen of his twin-lens reflex camera. This ­customized camera was set up in a darkroom where the television was the only source of light. He would then align the screen of his television in one of the squares of his focusing screen grid and take a picture. The camera was moved to the next cell in the grid (from top to bottom and then from left to right) to make each subsequent exposure. Each finished 6x6” plate contains 35 images combined into a seamless grid of tele­ vision screens. Over a two-year period Mochizuki used this process to make 200 of these plates consisting of a total of 7,000 exposures.

The complexity and fastidiousness of Mochizuki’s television montages begs the question of why he did not simply take individual exposures of his tele­ vision screen and assemble them into grids subsequently? His method gives importance to the screen itself and its significance as a window onto the world.

By choosing to include the edges of the multiple screens and the characteristic blur of their surface, Mochizuki emphasizes the act of watching a particular

event on television, rather than simply focusing on the subject matter of the event itself. UFO is less about UFOs themselves than the ways in which tele­ vision seeks to dramatise them. The characteristic edge of the screens and their accumulation into grids also serves to underline the distance between the viewer and the subject. These are not images of Solzhenitsyn being interviewed or of a baseball game, but images of TV’s interpretation of these events.

Mochizuki was not the only photo­ grapher to use the television screen as a subject. As television reached a position of dominance within the media and became a universal household appliance, many artists began to create bodies of work using the TV screen. Much of this work focused on the specific aesthetic that results from photographing a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen. In his Perpetual Photos series (1982 – 1989), Allan McCollum took photographs of television scenes where picture frames appeared in the background. He would then enlarge theses images photographically, cropping each image to represent a detail of the framed picture. The result is a series of abstract images of pure form that are virtually impossible to connect to the artworks from which they derived.

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Mochizuki’s grids emphasize the proliferation and constant flow of images that emanate from television.

↖ “Cette nuit, l’autre nuit n’importe quelle nuit” from the series Version Originale, 1978 (Les Forbans de la nuit (1950) directed

by Jules Dassin) © Colette Portal, courtesy Edith Bizot Consultants ↗ “Je me fiche de ce que pensent les autres” from the series Version Originale, 1978 (Eve (1950) directed by Joseph Mankiewicz) © Colette Portal, courtesy Edith Bizot Consultants

While Mochizuki’s pieces also replicate the TV screen’s specific aesthetic qualities, he is less interested in exploring these than in giving a photographic form to the medium’s inherent characteristics. His grids emphasize the proliferation and constant flow of images that emanate from television. As opposed to Pfahl’s Video Landscapes or McCollum’s Perpetual Photos, which freeze television’s incessant rhythm into a single image, Mochizuki’s method subordinates the individual image to the collection and mirrors TV’s perpetual motion. Most other artists who chose to use television as their raw visual material tended to drastically recontextualise this stolen or borrowed imagery. In Version Originale (1978), the French artist Colette Portal collected individual images from subtitled films ‘every time that the subtitles and the image combined to set off a

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mechanism of seduction.’ In his Blasted Allegories series from the same year, John Baldessari sampled random images from commercial television, overlaying them with colour filters and associating each of them with a different word in order to assemble a literal dictionary of photographs. These artists used televised images by removing them either partially or entirely from their original context in order to create a new system of their own making.

Mochizuki, on the other hand, remained faithful to his source material. Each piece is strictly devoted to a single programme: if he had not made sufficient exposures to fill a grid before a programme had ended, he would fill the rest of the grid with images of the snowy pattern caused by electronic noise. The programmes that he chose to photograph reflect the breadth of television as a medium for the coverage of major events. The works in Television 1975 – 1976 span domestic news (a 300-million-yen robbery), ­global current affairs (the appointment of Jimmy Carter to the Presidency of the United States, the docking of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft), major sporting events (the Indy 500 race, the Ali vs. Frazier heavyweight title fight), art (a documentary on Salvador Dali, Akira

masao mochizuki

Other artists such as Harry Callahan and John Pfahl (Video Landscapes, 1981) – who generally worked in a more ‘­classic’ photographic vein focused on creating the most refined and detailed image possible – also made use of the cheap look of the CRT screen, which contrasted so drastically with the ­perfection which they sought in their photographs of the ‘real’ world.

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Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) science (a documentary on volcanoes) as well as more entertaining stories (Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Tokyo, a documentary on a set of quintuplets).

Although Mochizuki chose to explore many different subjects in the series, he did not wander into television’s less salubrious neighbourhoods. Television 1975 – 1976 contains no signs of the vast swathes of the trashy soap opera and game shows of day-time television or of the dingy back alleys of night-time horror and pornography. In his book TV Junkie ‘83 (Tokyo: Byakuya shobo, 1983), a fascinating companion piece to Mochizuki’s work, the Japanese photographer Mutsuko Yoshida revels in the crassness of the televisual language.

The book is presented chronologically as a single day of television beginning at 6am and finishing in the early hours of the following morning.While Mochizuki explores television at its most ­serious, Yoshida focuses on its underbelly, ­emphasizing television’s tendency to collapse the space between information and cheap entertainment.

as the dominant media, this work was published as its reign was coming to an end. Just as television replaced photo­ graphy as the primary filter for major events, it has in turn been overtaken by the Internet. Today we experience these events in a fragmented way, through a variety of media: TV news, websites, blogs, social networks, amateur video, camera phone photographs...

In a piece written in 1988, the critic Andy Grundberg suggested that, ‘More than an environment for today’s artists, television is a site for the image-making process and a fertile source of its images.’ When television became ubiquitous, the infinite number of possible images that it offered gave artists the opportunity to explore it as an alternative reality. In the current new media cycle, the sense of infiniteness of online imagery is even more pronounced than with TV

In his choice of subjects, Mochizuki seems to have been interested in exploring the notion – popular at the time – that television was a tool, which would allow us to witness history before our own eyes. By the 1970s, television’s ubiquity meant that most people’s memories of major events were created through the filter of its screen. With ­television’s newfound dominance of the media, the function of photography had been relegated to rendering ‘visual confirmation of what we had already seen on television.’ Mochizuki’s grids reflect this new paradigm. Although they are made up entirely of photographs, they reflect the nature of the medium from which they are derived. By combining these images of major events, they function as visual representations of the universal collective memory that television was creating, forming a shared visual history of a specific period.

and this same artistic approach is taking hold. Artists such as Michael Wolf and Jon Rafman have used Google Street View technology to wander through its virtual streets acting as street photographers looking for a specific moment. For a recent and ongoing project, Penelope Umbrico collected hundreds of thousands of pictures of sunsets on the image hosting website, Flickr, cropping the suns from these images to create a grid of 4x6” prints entitled Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr. She describes this project in much the same terms as were used for television 40 years ago, referring to the Internet as an ‘infinite (...), cool electronic space,’ ‘a virtual window onto the natural world.’ This exploration of the infinite nature of the Internet and the fascination with its function as a ‘window into the world’ illustrates why Mochizuki’s approach remains as relevant as ever.

All images © Masao Mochizuki, Courtesy Sage Paris In order of appearance Apollo-Soyuz Docking, July 17, 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Docking, July 17, 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Docking, July 17, 1975 “Hiroshima” Gains its 1st Pennant, October 15, 1975 The Mummy from Peru, July 10, 1975 UFO, n. d.

Ali vs Frazier, October 1, 1975 The World of Salvador Dali, December 19, 1975 The World of Salvador Dali, December 19, 1975 The Volcanos, n.d.

Solzhenitsyn Speaks, March 21, 1976 Queen Elizabeth in Tokyo, May 7, 1975 Grand Sumo Autumn Tournament, September 28, 1975 Masao Mochizuki (b. 1939, Japan) graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1963. In 1999 he received the Society of Photography Award by the Tokyo-based Society of Photography (Shashin no Kai) for outstanding work in photography. Television 1975 – 1976 was exhibited at SAGE Paris (2012), at Cohen Amador Gallery, New York (2008) and at Photo Gallery International, Tokyo (1998). It was published in book form in 2001 by Snap-sha, Mochizuki’s own pub­ lishing house. Television 1975 – 1976 is part of the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Masao Mochizuki is represented by SAGE Paris.

Interestingly Mochizuki’s images were seldom shown until they were published 25 years later in the book Television 1975 – 1976 (Tokyo: Snap-sha, 2001).

Whereas the series was made at a time when television was newly crowned

Marc Feustel (b.1978, London) is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. He has curated several exhibitions as creative director of Studio Equis. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: a self-portrait, photographs 1945 – 1964 (Paris: Flammarion, 2004). His writings appear regularly on his blog eyecurious.com.

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Boris Mikhailov The Wedding

Boris Mikhailov

portfolio text

Back to the Basics

by Helen Petrovsky The Wedding by Boris Mikhailov is clearly part of a larger series. I am tempted to point to a line of continuity between Mikhailov’s The Wedding and his Case History, an extensive and often shocking study of the life of the first homeless to appear in the turmoil immediately following the demise of the Soviet Union.

Any fragment such as The Wedding necessarily correlates with some greater photographic series, whereas the series in question is by itself incomplete. In other words, these pictures should not

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be seen as a finished story, but rather as examples of a specific photographic gaze that has nothing sentimental or moralizing about it.

Boris Mikhailov is a great photographer of the Soviet. Not the Soviet project or the Soviet regime, but precisely the Soviet; he has always been a documentary artist, but in a very peculiar sense.

His pictures conform to neither the classical nor even contemporary definitions of art, yet he is an artist of renown.

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What is it in and about Mikhailov’s work that has earned him such unanimous ­acclaim? In my opinion, it is his cap­acity to stretch the limits of representation, even to surpass them altogether. What the pictures show is banal, and we learn nothing new, positive or instructive from them. Indeed, one could find more convincing cultural and ethnographic evidence related to a period of history that would be willingly appropriated by the archive. Mikhailov’s undertaking is both more subtle and more daring. He doesn’t record any important historical events and therefore has no story to tell.

Instead, he focuses on what might be called the private aspect of existence, if by private we understand something essentially random and purposeless, as exemplified in play. Hence Mikhailov’s preference for staged scenes and for ­enactment in general.

What escapes representation is experience possessing a certain emotional tone.

In the Soviet era play was not merely purposeless, it could be seen as subversive for existing outside the normative functioning of a huge ideological machine. Play was meaningless, private and therefore redundant. There was something indecent about it, a feeling Mikhailov lays out in his brilliant Unfinished Dissertation. Presented on yellowed sheets of paper, the reverse of somebody’s discarded thesis, the series consists of bleak black-and-white snapshots accompanied by copious scribble.

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The work is resolutely unspectacular, depicting scenes of private life in a town with no characteristic features at all. It opens with the words ‘Everything is grey now, a dream transformed into kitsch’, words attributed, perhaps playfully, to Walter Benjamin. Indeed, grey is the dominant colour of the series as well as the general mood of the decade (the piece dates back to the 1980s, the period of stagnation). But that is not all. It is as if in the deep recesses of the era itself there existed something like a shared emotion, a shared feeling related to that time. Grey may not be the ideal formula for its expression, although it’s a clue supplied by the photographer himself. I would claim that this intangible substance, whatever it is called, is what gives meaning to the photographs, what makes them recognizable as coherent pictures in the first place.

Mikhailov has registered a painful ­moment of historical transition in at least three of his series: Case History, By the Ground (1991) and At Dusk (1993).

I would suggest that all three of them, though especially the last two works, are instances of bare life, a violent reduction of social being to its biological foundation, an aspect normally excluded or repressed. This is best seen in the pictures of the homeless lying on the ground: it is impossible to say whether they are dead or alive; if still alive, their slumber is heavy and deathlike.

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boris mikhailov

If my claim is correct, we will have to admit that there is something here that is not represented directly. Yet that something, which conditions and inhabits the representation, is not entirely foreign to it. Paradoxically, it cannot be seen. It has however to be referenced or read into the photograph so that the image can become legible or documentary. What escapes representation is experience possessing a certain emotional tone. When I say that Mikhailov is a photographer of the Soviet I am referring precisely to his capacity for depicting what remains essentially invisible and yet triggers recognition even on the part of the unknowing. Far from being a wilful recollection, it is a form of collective memory that descends upon the viewer. I think it has much to do with what might be called spectral historicity in the sense that this experience of the past does not organize itself into a narrative, although it does haunt the living by penetrating their own experience. Such would be the remembrance of a collective trauma, to take the most dramatic possible case.

Only if life is stripped to the core, divested of its codes, its rituals and cultural grammar, can we gain a glimpse of what is truly human.

← ↘ At Dusk, 1993 © Boris Mikhailov

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These pictures can be viewed as a powerful social critique of the emerging capitalist order in the former Soviet Union. It should be stressed, however, that these degraded people show no trace of animality. They are just like us, and Mikhailov’s camera insists on that likeness. What the homeless do display, though obliquely of course, is a kind of initial connectedness, a being-together that persists even in the most dire conditions. It may be a being-together in hunger or pain, but in itself it is absolutely irreplaceable.

While not as harsh as his other series, The Wedding cannot be discussed without considering Mikhailov’s lifelong project.

Speaking of the homeless, or bomzhes, who had previously posed for him, Mikhailov remarks: ‘While posing a man tries to be different: beautiful, strong etc.

Here the models didn’t perform in such a theatre. At least, they were given the role of “who they are in reality”. And presenting themselves, they didn’t pose; it was like “life itself”.’ Indeed, the alternative is simple: either you pose (present yourself) or you drop out of sight altogether.

The homeless, Mikhailov is trying to tell us, were not forced into this unusual form of cooperation. They did as they wished, and they were free to reject any of the photographer’s suggestions. But what does it mean to be like life itself, especially for the bomzhes? The homeless do not perform in the traditional theatre­of appearances. They do not try to pass themselves off as anybody else. In the social landscape they remain invisible, a group barely discernible on the margins of society, creatures possessing no individual traits. Mikhailov’s staging is for once stunningly minimalistic: the bomzhes are asked to perform their very humanity. It is only through that ‘artistic device’ that they are made visible at all.

What message is a mock wedding cere­ mony supposed to convey? It is clear that these people are not bound by any social obligations whatsoever. In fact, they are defiantly beyond the social norm. But there is good reason to believe that in their simplified existence there is room for affection, care, even joy. Mikhailov seems to be saying: those are the basic forms of human interaction, but we, the ‘normal’ people, have forgotten all about them. Only if life is stripped to the core, divested of its codes, its rituals and cultural grammar, can we gain a glimpse of what is truly human.

TheWedding is a sharp critique of consumer society whose members consume tons of reified images, including those of affect.

As always, however, Mikhailov’s camera comes across something strictly irreducible. I would compare it to what Roland Barthes, commenting on a photo of a boy pressing a newborn puppy to his cheek and retaining ‘within himself his love and his fear’, chose to call Pity, no matter how old-fashioned it may sound.

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All images © Boris Mikhailov Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Ukraine) is acclaimed as the most important photographer to have emerged from the former Soviet Union. Trained as a technical engineer, his experience of being fired from his factory job when the KGB discovered nude photographs he had taken of his wife convinced him to take up photography as his lifetime’s pursuit. Major solo exhibitions at ICA Boston, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Saatchi Gallery, Tate Modern in London and last year at MoMA, New York as well as international photography awards like the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2000 and the Citybank Photography Prize in 2001 have brought him public acclaim. The Wedding shot in 2005 to 2006, was published as photobook by Mörel Books in 2011. Currently the big overview exhibition Time is out of joint. Photography 1966 – 2011 is on show at The Berlinische Galerie in Berlin ( – 28 May 2012). Boris Mikhailov is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.

The same holds true of The Wedding. Two homeless people, a man and a woman, are shown in their natural surroundings, which include a run-down apartment.

On one occasion they are accompanied by a friend holding the bride’s veil which seems to be made of a curtain, another time by a placid dog on a leash.

Mostly they fool around, half-naked, in imitation of a wedding celebration.

And they are definitely having fun. Now what does this impersonation stand for?

Helen Petrovsky (b. 1962, USSR) is Acting Head of the Department of Aesthetics at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her major fields of interest are contemporary philosophy, philosophy of literature and art, and visual studies.

She is author of Part of the World (1995), Eye’s Delight (1997), The Unapparent. Essays on the Philosophy of Photography (2002), Anti-photography (2003), and Theory of the Image (2010).

She has written extensively on Boris Mikhailov’s work.

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Foam enables people all over the world to experience and ­enjoy photography, whether it’s at our museum in Amsterdam, on the ­website, via our internationally ­distributed magazine or in our ­Editions department.

The heart of Foam is located in the centre of Amsterdam, in the museum on the ­Keizersgracht. Here we schedule a varied programme of exhibitions including world-famous photographers as well as young or undiscovered talent.

Large-scale exhibitions alternate with small, quickly changing shows. We also organise a dynamic programme of lectures, discussions, guided tours, workshops and special events.

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Musician Maya Arulpragasam (M.I.A). From Maya Take to the Streets, published May 30, 2010 © Ryan McGinley

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New York Times Magazine Photographs 23 March – 30 May 2012

The exhibition is co-curated by Kathy Ryan, longtime Photo Editor of the Magazine, and Lesley A. Martin, Publisher at Aperture Books. The Aperture-produced exhibition comprises eleven individual modules, each of which focuses on a notable project or series of projects that have been presented in the pages of the Magazine.

The featured projects reflect the Magazine’s eclecticism, presenting seminal ­examples of reportage and portraiture, as well as fine art photography. Using visual materials drawn from different stages of the commissioning process – shot lists, work prints and contact sheets, videos, tear sheets, and framed prints – the magazine’s collaborative methodology is revealed all the way from initial idea to the published page. In some cases it continues beyond magazine publication, when an exploration that began as an assignment becomes part of a photo­ grapher’s ongoing work. In sum, these layers reveal the magazine’s unique position as a venue for visual storytelling and a unique forum for the cross-pollination of photographic genres.

The exhibition includes 500 images by 140 photographers, amongst whom: Lillian Bassman, Chuck Close, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Demand, Rineke Dijkstra, Mitch Epstein, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Jeff Koons, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Annie Leibovitz, Ryan McGinley, Hellen van Meene, Jeff Mermelstein, Simon Norfolk, Paolo Pellegrin, Gilles Peress, Sebastião Salgado, Andres Serrano and Malick Sidibé.

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For over thirty years, the New York Times Magazine has presented the myriad possibilities and applications of photography. The New York Times Magazine Photographs is an exhibition that reflects upon and interrogates the very nature of both photography and print magazines at this pivotal moment in their history and evolution.

Bertien van Manen Let’s sit down before we go 19 March – 24 June 2012

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This spring Foam will present the solo exhibition Let’s sit down before we go by Bertien van Manen (b.1942, the Netherlands). More than 60 photos will be on show, created between 1991 and 2009. During that time, Van Manen, carrying a small 35mm camera, travelled regularly and extensively through Russia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Tatarstan and Georgia. She stayed for long periods with the people she befriended on her travels, learned their language, all of which resulted in sincere, intimate and sometimes tender photos. In Bertien van Manen’s humanistic approach photographer and subject are equals, and the mutual respect is palpable.

The title of the exhibition, Let’s sit down before we go, refers to an old Russian custom: before you leave on a journey, take a moment to think about where you come from, where you are going and why. Bertien van Manen took that advice.

Since 2010, she has travelled far less due to her personal circumstances. So she took time to look back on her projects and travels. Together with English photographer Stephen Gill, she sorted through more than 15,000 negatives. She was surprised to see that time had nearly stood still: her photos showed that life outside the big cities had hardly changed at all.

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Vlada in the Kitchen, Kazan, 1992 © Bertien van Manen

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Foam 3h: Stéphanie Solinas Sans Titre (Monsieur Bertillon)

23 March – 9 May 2012 Stéphanie Solinas (b. 1978, France) explores identity using a social approach. At the core of her work is the examination of how contemporary notions of identity were invented by photography.

In Sans Titre (Monsieur Bertillon), Solinas explores the identification system developed in 1891 by Alphonse Bertillon (1853 – 1914), the French police officer who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements.

Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals.

Before its introduction, criminals could be identified based only on unreliable eyewitness accounts. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting, but Bertillon’s other contributions, the mug shot and the systematization of crimescene photography, remain in use to this day.

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Sans Titre (Monsieur Bertillon), No. 3, 2011 © Stéphanie Solinas

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Album Beauty, 2012 © Erik Kessels

Erik Kessels Album Beauty

29 June - 14 October 2012 Album Beauty is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album. Once commonplace in every home, the photo album has been replaced in the digital age by the storage of ­images online and on hard drives. These visual narratives are testament to the once-universal appeal of documenting and displaying the mundane.

Commonly a repository of family history, they usually represented a manufactured family as edited for display. Albums spoke of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship. Numerous anonymous stories from all over the world will be told through the Erik Kessels collection.

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Colophon Issue #30, Spring 2012

Editor-in-chief Marloes Krijnen

Creative Director Pjotr de Jong (Vandejong)

Editors Caroline von Courten, Marcel Feil, Pjotr de Jong, Marloes Krijnen

Managing Editor Caroline von Courten

Magazine Manager Niek van Lonkhuijzen

Project Management Betty Man, Femke Papma

foam magazine # 30 micro

Communication Intern Rosiane Kuijper

Art Director Hamid Sallali (Vandejong)

Design & Layout Hamid Sallali, E ­ steban Berrios Vargas (Vandejong)

Typography Esteban Berrios ­Vargas, Kalle Mattsson (Vandejong) Contributing Photographers and Artists Corinne May Botz, Alexandra Catiere, Rineke Dijkstra, Stephen Gill, Joris Jansen, Boris Mikhailov, Masao Mochizuki, Christian Patterson, Harold Strak

Cover Photograph Nicky, Liverpool, England, January 19, 2009 © Rineke Dijkstra, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Lithography & Printing Lecturis Kalverstraat 72 5642 CJ Eindhoven -NL

Binding Binderij Hexspoor Ladonkseweg 7 5281 RN Boxtel – NL

Paper Igepa Nederland B.V. De Geer 10 4004 LT Tiel - NL

Editorial Address Foam Magazine Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 551 65 00 F +31 20 551 65 01 editors@foam.org

Advertising Lauralouise Hendrix Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 462 20 62 F +31 20 462 20 60 advertising@vandejong.nl

Subscriptions Hexspoor Support Center Ladonkseweg 9 5281 RN Boxtel – NL T +31 41 163 34 71 subscription@foam.org Subscriptions include 4 issues per year € 70,– excluding postage Students and Club Foam members receive 20% discount Single issue € 19,50 Back issues (# 2 – 29) € 12,50 Excluding postage Foam Magazine # 1 is out of print www.foam.org / webshop

Contributing Writers Adam Bell, Flip Bool, Marcel Feil, Marc Feustel, Michel Guerrin, Karen Irvine, Helen Petrovsky, Lyle Rexer, Hripsimé Visser, Sophie Wright

Copy Editor Pittwater Literary Services: ­Rowan Hewison

Translation Sam Garrett, Anne Hodgkinson, Iris Maher, Andrew May, Marion Schnelle, Liz Waters

216

Publisher Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL magazine@foam.org ISSN 1570-4874 ISBN 978-90-70516-25-3 © photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2012.

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 con­ tact copyright holders. Any copy­ right holders we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact the publishers at magazine@foam.org All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copy, 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.

Distribution The Netherlands Betapress BV T + 31 16 145 78 00 Great Britain Central Books magazine@centralbooks.com

THE SPRINGTIME EVENT FOR MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART 10 Chancery Lane Gallery (Hong-Kong) - 313 Art Project (Seoul)* - A&B Gallery (Seoul / Karlsruhe)* - A. Galerie (Paris) - A2Z Art Gallery (Ivry-sur-Seine) - Acte2 galerie (Paris) - AD Galerie (Béziers) - Galerie Albrecht (Berlin)* - Louise Alexander Gallery (Porto Cervo) – A.L.F.A. Galerie (Paris)* - Analix Forever (Geneva) - Arts d’Australie Stéphane Jacob (Paris)* - Galerie Albert Baumgarten (Fribourg) - Galerie Albert Benamou, Véronique Maxé & Albert Koski (Paris) Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès (Paris) - Bourouina (Berlin)* - Galerie Jean Brolly (Paris) - Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Luxembourg / Paris/ Saint-Etienne) - Galerie Pierre Alain Challier (Paris) - Galerie Michèle Chomette (Paris)* - °Clair Galerie (Munich) - Galerie Claude Bernard (Paris) - Confluence (France)* - De Primi Fine Art (Lugano) – Delaive Gallery (Amsterdam)* - Dovin (Budapest)* - Galerie Dukan Hourdequin (Paris)* - Eidos Immagini Contemporanea (Asti)* Erdesz Gallery (Budapest)* - Erika Deak Gallery (Budapest)* - Espace Beaumont (Luxembourg)* - Fabbrica Eos (Milan)* - Faur Zsófi Gallery (Budapest)* - Les Filles Du Calvaire (Paris)* - Flatland (Utrecht)* - Galerie Forsblom (Helsinki)* - Gagliardi Art System (Turin)* - Galerie Claire Gastaud (Clermont-Ferrand) - Galerie Bertrand Gillig (Strasbourg)* - Gimpel Müller (Paris/London)* - Galerie Laurent Godin (Paris)* - Galerie Bertrand Grimont (Paris)* Galerie Guillaume (Paris) - Gallery H.A.N. (Seoul)* - Galerie Kashya Hildebrand (Zürich) - Galerie Ernst Hilger (Vienna) - Galerie Catherine Houard (Paris) - Galerie Catherine et André Hug (Paris) - IFA Gallery (Shanghai) - Ilan Engel Gallery (France) - Galerie Imane Farès (Paris)* - Inception Gallery (Paris)* - Inda Gallery (Budapest) - Galerie Catherine Issert (Saint-Paul de Vence) - J. Bastien Art (Bruxelles) - Galerie Jacques Elbaz (Paris)* - Galerie Jean Fournier (Paris)* - JGM Galerie (Paris)* - Anna Klinkhammer Gallery (Dusseldorf)* - Konzett Gallery (Vienna)*- Galerie Koulinsky / Cellule 516 (Marseille)* - La Galerie Particulière (Paris)* - Galerie Lahumière (Paris) - Baudoin Lebon (Paris) - Galerie Lelong (Paris) – Galerie Levy (Berlin / Hambourg)* - Galerie Linz (Paris) - Magnum Gallery (Paris)* - Kalman Maklary Fine Arts (Budapest)* - Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art (Vienna)* - Galerie Martine et Thibault De La Châtre (Paris)* - Galerie Matignon (France)* - Mayoral Galeria D’art (Barcelona) - Galerie Alice Mogabgab (Liban) - Galerie Lélia Mordoch (Paris) - Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris / Brussels) - Oniris (Rennes) - Galerie Orel Art (Paris) - Galerie Paris-Beijing (France) - Galerie Priska Pasquer (Cologne)* - Pente 10 (Lisbonne)* - Galerie Jérôme Poggi (Paris)* - Polka Galerie (Paris) - Catherine Putman (Paris)* - Rabouan Moussion (Paris) - Galerie Richard (Paris/New York)* - J. P. Ritsch-Fisch Galerie (Strasbourg) - Galerie Brigitte Schenk (Cologne)* - Sémiose (Paris) – Shuim Gallery (Seoul / Paris)* - Galerie Slott (Paris)* - Galerie Véronique Smagghe (Paris) - Galerie Stefan Roepke (Cologne)* - Galerie Rive Gauche Marcel Strouk (Paris) - Galerie Taïss (Paris) - Galerie Tamenaga (Paris) - Galerie Daniel Templon (Paris) - Galerie Toxic (Luxembourg) - Trait Noir-Aroya Galerie (Toulouse)* - Galerie Patrice Trigano (Paris)* - Galerie Vanessa Quang (Paris)* - Venice Projects (Venice) - Galerie Vieille Du Temple (Paris) - Galerie Vintage (Paris)* - VIPArt Galerie (Marseille) Virag Judit Contemporary Gallery (Budapest)* - Galerie VU’ (Paris) - Galerie Olivier Waltman (Paris) - White Moon Gallery (Paris)* - Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Paris)* - Young Gallery (Brussels)* - Espace Meyer Zafra (Paris) – Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill (Graz)* - Galerie Zürcher (Paris / New York)*

* new participant (list updated on January 27th, 2012)