PREVIEW Foam Magazine Issue #23 City Life

a: ai tr Ex g h al a n ci S h sp e

summer 2010 / #23

www.foammagazine.nl

Mohamed Bourouissa Takashi Homma Nontsikelelo Veleko JH EngstrĂśm Otto Snoek Bertrand Fleuret Reinier Gerritsen Joel Sternfeld

â‚Ź17,50

foam magazine #23 / city life

upcoming issue

Don’t miss #24, the Talent issue

Out in September 2010

18 portfolios of young t­ alented photographers, each searching and ­exploring their own style. From ­documentary to fine art.

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foam magazine #23 / city life

editorial

Editorial

Marloes Krijnen, director Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

On Saturday 1 May the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai opened its doors to the public. With over 190 countries participating, more than fifty international organizations signing up to take part and a festival terrain measuring some 5.3 square kilometres, this World Expo is the biggest and broadest ever by a considerable margin. The chosen theme, ‘Better City, Better Life’, underlines Shanghai’s recently acquired status as the ‘newest and most important major world city’. At the same time it indicates that the Chinese government, instead of watching the rapidly advancing global process of urbanization with alarm, experiences it as a challenge to create a better life. This contrasts with the attitude in many Western countries, where urbanization and the recent emergence of megacities tend to be regarded as developments that have brought many unforeseen problems with them.

The contemporary life of the city-dweller is central to this issue of Foam Magazine. What characterizes city life in the early years of the new century? How do people live, work and spend their leisure time? How does the individual relate to the often overwhelming scale of the everyday environment? What are the social processes at work in our cities and what kind of relationships do we have with one another? These are big questions, and the editors certainly don’t pretend to come to any final judgements. We do believe, however, that the eight portfolios we have brought together under the title ‘City Life’ not only throw a revealing light on facets of the life of the city-dweller but show how a number of very different photographers find inspiration in city life. We are exceptionally pleased to be able to present in this issue new, previously unpublished work by JH Engström and Joel Sternfeld, along with a specially compiled portfolio of recent work by the French photographer Bertrand Fleuret. The portraits by young South African photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko demonstrate convincingly that fashionable, selfconscious young people with a strong sense of style and fashion are no longer confined to Western cities. Mohamed Bourouissa focuses his camera on the complex and thoroughly distinctive social dynamic that exists between young people in the suburbs of French cities. Dutch photo­grapher Otto Snoek presents a quite different reality, that of visitors drawn to a new pheno­menon, the Millionaire Fair. The unification of Europe has been a source of inspiration for Reinier Gerritsen, who has recorded groups of residents packed tightly together in the streets of European capital cities. Finally, Takashi Homma captures the life of his young daughter, set against the backdrop of Tokyo.

You will probably have noticed that this issue is accompanied by a special supplement. In connection with World Expo 2010, Foam Magazine has entered into an extraordinary collaboration with Outlook Magazine in China. Outlook is China’s most important lifestyle magazine, and it is highly influential in the lives of Chinese people for whom creativity, art and culture, fashion and design, along with individuality, authenticity and originality are important values. Since its founding in 2002, Outlook Magazine has won several national and international prizes. In this collaborative supplement, two photographers – one Dutch, one Chinese – each present a vision of life in Shanghai. The result is a photographic duet in which two outlooks and two cultures, taken together, offer a unique picture of this intriguing metropolis. The Dutch photographer is Jaap Scheeren and the Chinese photographer is Qing Tou Yi. Their work

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is utterly different but complementary, and together they provide a picture that does justice to the diversity and contrasts of contemporary Shanghai. The supplement will be included with the June issue of Outlook Magazine and distributed widely in China.

Finally we should mention that we are particularly proud of the wide-ranging interview with Raymond Depardon by Michel Guerrin in which, naturally, attention is also paid to the consequences of advancing urbanization.

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contents

Contents On My Mind Pages 16 – 21

images selected by Tim Barber ~ Roger Ballen ~ Devika Daulet Singh ~ Hripsimé Visser ~ Michal Chelbin ~ Doug Rickard Interview

Mohamed Bourouissa ~ Périphéries

35 – 54

Pages 22 – 26

Raymond Depardon: under the spell of the city.

by Michel Guerrin

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City Life:

Périphéries focuses on the suburbs of Paris. Bourouissa quickly gained recognition for his filmic photographs – carefully staged studies of the tension and power relations afflicting young people in the suburbs.

Theme introduction Pages 27 – 34

Whose City?

By Marcel Feil Portfolio overview Pages 35 – 54

Mohamed Bourouissa ~ Périphéries Text by Val Williams Pages 55 – 74

Takashi Homma ~ Tokyo and My Daughter Text by Marc Feustel Pages 75 – 94

Nontsikelelo Veleko ~ Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder Text by Mark Sealy Pages 95 – 114

JH Engström ~ La Résidence Text by Nan Goldin

Takashi Homma ~ Tokyo and my Daughter

55 – 74

With Tokyo and my Daughter, Homma interweaves ­pictures of his studio, his dog and of himself with fragments of a young girl’s life in the city.

Pages 115 – 134

Otto Snoek ~ Millionaire Text by Aaron Schuman Pages 135 – 154

Bertrand Fleuret ~ Landmasses and Railways Text by Adam Bell Pages 155 – 174

Reinier Gerritsen ~ The Europeans Text by Jörg Colberg Pages 175 – 194

Joel Sternfeld ~ iDubai Text by Chris Wiley

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Photobooks Pages 196 – 199

Texts by Sebastian Hau Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam Exhibition programme Pages 203 – 216

Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin ~ Pretty Much Everything Photographs 1985-2010

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Nontsikelelo Veleko ~ Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

75 – 94

In the last couple of years Veleko has been attracting a great deal of attention with her striking work entitled Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder, a depiction of South African street style. Defying the clichés of what life can be like in South Africa, Veleko captures young people dressed in unique outfits, often with handmade e ­ lements.

JH Engström ~ La Résidence

95 – 114

During two separate stays in Brussels, the Swedish ­photographer JH Engström captured the inhabitants, the loneliness and the special atmosphere of the city.

Otto Snoek ~ Millionaire

115 – 134

135 – 154

Landmasses and Railways is a fictional journey without text through a retro-futuristic city with medieval ­elements, inspired by the visual world of Tarkovsky, Chris Marker and the atmos­phere of the novels of Kafka.

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155 – 174

In 2005 Gerritsen began his long-term project The Europeans, travelling in 25 European countries, observing and photographing the anonymous masses on the streets.

Snoek has lately been focusing on the identity of European citizens. For the series Millionaire, he has been travelling to millionaire fairs around Europe, catching the very peculiar and tense atmosphere of these parties.

Bertrand Fleuret ~ Landmasses and Railways

Reinier Gerritsen ~ The Europeans

Joel Sternfeld ~ iDubai

175 – 194

iDubai investigates consumerism and capitalism plus the theoretical implications of the proliferation of mobile phone cameras around the globe. In Dubai, Joel Sternfeld used his iPhone camera to get beyond mass-media ­images of the Emirate.

foam magazine #23 / city life On My Mind...

Brooding: self portrait, c.1928, L’Holme, Simla, India © Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, courtesy: The Estate of Umrao Singh-Sher-Gil

Devika Daulet-Singh In 2007, 53 years after Umrao Singh Sher-Gil’s death, a retrospective of his self-portraits and family portraits was exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. While working on the exhibition with his grandson, the artist Vivan Sundaram, I often wondered whether Umrao Singh intended them for such scrutiny or public display. An amateur photographer, Singh (b.1870) was a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian and had an abiding interest in astronomy. As I looked at hundreds of delicate vintage prints, I could only marvel at the performative nature of the photographs in the archive. The self-portraits, made between 1889 and the late 1940s offer fascinating accounts of intense self-reflection that remain unparalleled. One photograph that suggests a palpable tension is posthumously titled, Brooding. Today we are used to seeing photographs

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that demonstrate the pain of others. Clearly an early pioneer, Umrao Singh staged many self-portraits in his lifetime tinged with melancholia and sadness. It is this construction of pain in a photograph, no doubt deeply felt, that compels me to look, and look again. With a gentle tilt of the head and a disheveled beard, Umrao Singh heightens the pensive mood of the image by deliberately refusing to confront his camera. I wonder what recognition of thought and feeling might have awakened in him when he printed this negative. Did he want to be reminded? Or was it just an experiment with the Self? + Devika Daulet-Singh is the Director of Photography at Photoink, an agency, publisher and gallery based in New Delhi.

foam magazine #23 / city life On My Mind...

Pink Dress, from the series Bewohner, 1996 © Jitka Hanzlová

Hripsimé Visser The colour of the dress is the first thing that catches your attention: that bright pink in the mostly green and cream-coloured surrounding. When you look carefully the image turns out to be full of contrasts, and not only in the use of colour. The dress has a close-fitting bodice and a frilly skirt with three layers of ruffles. That delicate princess-like elegance finds its counterpoint in the sturdy knee protectors right under the dress, in bright yellow, black and purple. The same sort of contradiction is also found in the girl’s stance: her gaze, directed at the photographer, is somewhat standoffish and shy, but because she’s holding her hands on her hips, her plump childish arms also have a look of toughness.

The girl stands on a grassy field, nearly full-length, bordered by a pair of ordinary German flats. Between the drab, white apartment com

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plexes with their horizontal, evenly proportioned windows and the girl are a pair of trees sprouting new growth.

In fact, the photo has a classic form: the gaily coloured young figure is located just slightly left of centre and the rest of the picture contains a number of clear diagonals. This type of composition is very inviting; the viewer is automatically drawn in. It’s not easy to forget it, for the simple reason that this strict, traditional form is unmistakably a portrait of a specific moment and at the same time a moving portrait. This is thanks to Jitka Hanzlová’s slightly cautious approach to a girl from her own neighbourhood and the subtle poetry of colour, position and the play of lines.

+ Hripsimé Visser is Photography curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

foam magazine #23 / city life On My Mind...

Young Farmers © August Sander, courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; Pictoright, Amsterdam, 2010.

Michal Chelbin Young Farmers is a very simple image. Three men, wearing their best suits and holding walking sticks, are standing on what seems to be a country road. They look at the camera so we can see their eyes. The black and white photograph has beautiful contrast, and the three figures are popping out against the background. As the title suggests, these are indeed three farmers on their way to a dance. Nothing is hidden or mysterious.

But is it really so?

The country road which they are standing on seems like a rugged path, a country trail, where you might expect to find farmers on their way to work, not to a dance. The path, narrow and unpaved, doesn’t seem to be in good condition, which suggests a remote country location. In contrast to the surroundings, the three men look jubilant and festive, as if they almost don’t fit into their surroundings.

But are they men? A closer look will reveal their young faces, that these are boys or very young men. Holding walking sticks suddenly seem to be an attempt to look older, more important, more self assured. But if we look at their expressions, they seem insecure, as if

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caught putting a costume, pretending to be what they are not. They are mature but young, cocky and unconfident at the same time. Their gaze suggests they were caught on camera, unprepared and with no masks.

But knowing Sander’s work, we know that the portrait was staged. It is beautiful example of how to achieve casualness in a staged portrait. The image, which appears simple at first glance, unfolds to show a scene of contrast where youth meets manhood and glamour meets the everyday.

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Michal Chelbin’s work has been widely shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her critically acclaimed Monograph Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes and other Traveling Troupes was published by Aperture in 2008 and was awarded PDN’s Photo Annual Book Award in 2009. Her next monograph entitled The Black Eye will be published in June 2010 by Twin Palms Publishers, with solo exhibitions in October 2010 at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York and M+B gallery in LA.

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~ Whose City? ~

by Marcel Feil ~ curator Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam all images by Hans Eijkelboom

By the time you read this the total world population, as calculated by the United Nations, will be in excess of 6.82 billion. The number of people in the world has been growing ever since the Black Death of the fourteenth century, so this is obviously a record. An even more astonishing record, set roughly a few years ago, represents an unparalleled historical milestone. For the first time ever, more than fifty per cent of the inhabitants of the earth live in urban areas, and that proportion is steadily rising. In a relatively short period, human beings, who have always been mostly rural dwellers, have developed into a predominantly urban species.

If prognoses for the composition of the global population are to be believed, this process is set to continue. One indication is the growth of megacities. A city with ten million or more inhabitants qualifies as a megacity. In 1950 there were only two: New York and Tokyo. The total has since risen to nineteen and within ten years there will be more than thirty, between them accounting for over two thirds of the human population. If the city is a world created by humanity, then it is also the world in which humanity is condemned to live. This raises questions: Do human beings create cities or do cities create human beings? Now that the city is increasingly our ‘natural’ habitat, what should we expect of big-city surroundings? In what respects are the lives of individuals shaped by an urban environment whose size exceeds anything we have ever experienced before? Is it possible to gain an impression of what our future will look like?

These question are simpler to ask than to answer. In fact there is probably no way to come up with unambiguous answers. In explaining recent urban developments, it may help to place them in a historical perspective, if only from a bird’s eye perspective. The ancient Greeks had a city called Megalopolis, founded in about 370 BC by Epaminondas of Thebes.

The name leaves no room for doubt that to them it was an extraordinarily large settlement, with its nine-kilometre-long city wall and a population that peaked at some 40,000 souls. More than anything else, however, the name testifies to the ambition of its founder, since a few generations earlier the population of Athens had reached almost 300,000.

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Rome was of course a different and far more serious story. It can be seen as a dress rehearsal for what cities would eventually become. Rome was the first major city in world history, with estimates of its population ranging from three quarters of a million to a million and a half, depending whether or not slaves are included. Either way, it was extra­ordinarily large, much larger than any city before it or any other city for the next seven hundred years. Its magnitude forced the municipal authorities to set up an ingenious system of food distribution, to guarantee supplies of drinking water and invent complex waste treatment methods, even to introduce traffic rules.

Another seventeen centuries passed before a city developed to rival Rome in size. By the early nineteenth century London had grown to become the biggest city the world had ever known, and it was then that its population began to increase with dizzying speed: from a million in 1811 to 2.3 million in 1851, before doubling again to 4.5 million by 1901.

This introduces a problem of definition that arises every time we try to determine the extent and population of cities. How do we specify what we are talking about? Where does the city stop? What are its boundaries? A far better definition of London would be what is known administratively as Greater London. This produces different figures, which suggest that by the end of the nineteenth century London had no fewer than 6.5 million inhabitants – more than Paris and over three times the population of New York. This situation did not last for long. In about the same period, New York began to grow at an unprecedented rate that can fairly be described as explosive. Its population roughly doubled every twenty-five years, so that in 1875 it was the third largest city in the world, in 1900 the second largest. By 1925 it had attained first place in the league table and in 1940, at the start of the Second World War, it was home to around 7.45 million people.

Extremely rapid urban expansion is therefore not without precedent, but the sheer number of cities experiencing this kind of growth in the second half of the twentieth century and since certainly is. In the early 1900s there were only sixteen cities in the world with more than a million in-

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habitants and only seven per cent of the world’s population could truly be described as urban. Currently more than five hundred cities are home to over a million people and the largest among them, places like Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mumbai and Shanghai, have populations in excess of twenty million. In their wake a great many cities with more than ten million inhabitants have emerged, especially in developing countries. For decades Western scientists tended to explain this phenomenon as the result of an unchecked influx from rural areas to the city. They pointed to the masses of illiterate and hungry peasants settling in slums on the edges of cities that were not in a position to support them, where the infrastructure could not cope with the pressure of newcomers. These were seen as cities in which all forms of order and cohesion had been lost, places on the verge of ecological and social collapse. In Rio de Janeiro with its ubiquitous, lawless favelas, in Mexico City or Lagos, so people in the West sometimes claimed, a nightmarish reality lurked ­beneath a thin veneer of civilization and sooner or later that reality would inevitably rise to the surface.

Many Western analysts, concentrating on the apparent depopu­ lation of many historic European city centres and the accompanying need to transform them into tourist attractions, paid little attention to a very different and much more far-reaching development, namely the astonishing growth of cities on the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean, which began roughly speaking in the 1980s and has continued to this day. In just a few decades, cities such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Guanzhou, Jakarta, Singapore, Shanghai and a dozen others have seen a complete transformation, developing into the new economic and metropolitan ­engines of the world. This new spectrum of megacities seems to some to have grown up almost out of nowhere. In China especially, megacities have arisen from nothing with such astonishing speed that they can barely be found on maps. This development has been fuelled not by ­relentless economic decline or desperate poverty but by improbable economic growth year after year, as high as seven per cent per annum in some cases. The worker who arrived from the countryside found a job in the city that rendered up more than he could ever have expected.

From making shoes and shirts he graduated to manufacturing simple plastic objects, then to assembling electronic products, before ending up building cars and computers. In a nutshell, this is the developmental process of both the worker/resident and the city itself. The next phase was reached fifteen years ago in Tokyo and Singapore, and it amounted to an assault on economic spheres in which the West imagined itself to hold a monopoly, from financial services to cultural sectors like the ­fashion industry.

If we look more closely it becomes apparent that the development of these new Asian cities is not a completely new phenomenon. In almost every respect it mirrors the accelerated growth that the industrial cities of northwest Europe and the east coast of the United States went through in the late nineteenth century. Just like Manchester, Glasgow and Chicago around 1880, in the years around 1980 the populations of Bangkok and Guanzhou doubled within a generation. Here too cities ­developed an astonishing dynamism that transformed a once poor rural population into an urban proletariat that began to grow relatively wealthy. Cities act as magnets to the ambitious of the world, quickly generating money that is invested in buildings that reflect the towering ambitions of the new rich. With an eye to further growth, cities pour re­ sources into large infrastructure projects, into new power stations and electricity networks, roads and airports. Universities are founded and museums and shopping centres opened. Despite fluctuations in the

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global economy and the overconfidence of a few, these developments cannot be compared to the uncontrolled and aimless growth of cities like Mexico City or Lagos. Their rapid expansion is a sign of the birth of a new economic order and a shifting of the economic centre of gravity of a Eurocentric world towards Asia. A sign on the wall is the fervent desire of California and Australia to be part of this new ‘Pacific century’, and the sudden realization by Australia that Indonesia and Japan do not belong to the ‘Far East’ as was always thought, but rather to the ‘Near North’.

Despite similarities and justifiable comparisons between today’s developments and those of some 150 years ago, current global urbanization is in many respects unique. Today’s recently created megacities are ­urban organisms whose size, geography, form and institutional composition are such that they have no predecessors in the history of human experience. This means we need to devise new means of analyzing them and will have to develop new ways of living in them.

~ Life in the city has never, in fact, been stable. ~ It has always been difficult to determine the precise identity of a city.

How do you define a conurbation on the immense scale of today’s mega­cities? Are they delineated by political boundaries? In practice we often find there is a great difference between the definitions provided by poli­tical bodies that have grown up based on electoral constituencies, for example, such as municipal councils, and the ways in which a city actually functions. Take a place like Los Angeles, which has many gover­ning bodies, hardly any of which coincide with the city as a whole.

They appear to have little to do with each other. LA is made up of three distinct cities, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Los Angeles itself, not to mention five different counties, innumerable school districts, water districts and so on. What do the residents of LA have in common? What unites them? What symbol or mental map do they all carry around in their heads? Disney? The Getty? Their city’s ‘grid’ as seen from the viewpoint in Griffith Park? The Marlboro Man on Sunset Boulevard? In the absence of shared experiences and assumptions it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine precisely who actually lives in the city itself and who should be seen as a resident of one of its suburbs. Perhaps it would therefore be better to let go of the traditional notion of a city. Would it not be more realistic to think in terms of a cohesive agglomeration of more or less diffuse clusters of city centres, suburbs, linked urban districts and ­satellite towns that form a single whole, physically and practically, ­perhaps more so than they do politically?

This might have the effect of throwing new light on the supposed emptying out of traditional inner cities, a process many regard with concern, especially in the historic cities of Europe. It often turns out that there has simply been a redistribution of both functions and residents; the city as a whole, as a larger complex made up of constituent parts, is rarely found to have shrunk. Although the physical structure of many centuries-old European inner cities is still largely intact, it is clear that the uses to which many of the buildings are put have changed fundamentally. Market halls, banks, department stores and station buildings may remain physically present, but few still fulfil their original functions.

The services they once provided have been spread out across other

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parts of the conurbation and grouped together in new financial centres and shopping areas, with sufficient parking spaces and routes in and out for residents who have dispersed to the periphery of the old city and are more dependent than ever on efficient means of transport. The city is becoming an extensive, intricately woven fabric, with intersections at strategic locations where compatible functions are brought together.

But those age-old structures and buildings fulfilled a symbolic purpose as well. They were the reference points, the shared distinguishing marks that gave the city its identity and significance. Both that identity and that significance are now under fire. What can provide a permanent and durable sense of identification with an individual city enclosed by a formless urban landscape? What feelings and interests are shared by all those who live in such places? And what concrete steps can a city, or its municipal authorities, take to create that sense of identity and identi­ fication that is so important for social cohesion and therefore, ultimately, for the survival of the city? How great is the danger of a balkanization of megacities, with one part competing or even coming into conflict with another? How great is the danger that a megacity, for lack of identification with shared interests, will fall apart, divided along social, economic and racial lines?

Now that Europe is to a great extent urbanized, the successors to the rural populations that moved to nineteenth century London and Paris, to Tokyo shortly after the Second World War or to Los Angeles after 1970 come from other parts of the world. They are from peasant villages in India, Pakistan, Turkey or Somalia. They are wealthy refugees from Iran, boat people from Vietnam, poor Mexicans, or Russian adventurers. They are the advance guard of a thorough restructuring no less dramatic than the changes that occurred in Manhattan when ships full of Europeans arrived there around a hundred years ago. The New York experienced by a Haitian or Korean immigrant is a totally different city from that of the retired British banker who has opted for domicile in the Upper West Side, or of a Jewish-American New Yorker living on the Upper East Side.

Greater London is likewise a collection of reference points each of which has a specific significance for an individual resident, whether a member of a middle class family in Clapham, a Bangladeshi immigrant in Southall, or a child of the East End who now lives in Essex. An essential characteristic of an authentic metropolis is that it supports this kind of complexand diverse aggregate of meanings in a completely natural way – meanings that in the end create as many variations on a single city as there are residents. +

Hans Eijkelboom (born 1949, Arnhem, Holland) began his career in 1971 with an installation that was part of a group show with Joseph Beuys, Ed Ruscha, and Douglas Huebler. Since then, he has produced over twenty-five books, gaining re-

Life in the city has never, in fact, been stable. If we look at the extraordinarily rapid changes undergone by people and households in cities, it is possible to claim that an urban community is a symbolic notion rather than a physical reality. Urban communities, presented as homogenous and static entities, are really nothing of the kind. The depopulation of the countryside and the often astounding speed at which cities grow are grounded in the attractiveness of exactly that social mobility offered by city life. Families rise and fall on the social ladder. Family interests and occupations change. Each child goes its own way. The boundaries of the street, the neighbourhood and the city present no obstacle to residents in pursuing their new or old ambitions and carving out paths for themselves. In a city there is literally a great deal of coming and going, a continual process of disintegration and regrouping. The population of a city is always in flux, whether because of immigration or as a result of economic prosperity or decline. The trek of huge numbers of city residents from the centre to the suburbs amounts to yet more evidence that the traditional idea of an urban community barely, if at all, reflects reality. If the preservation of new-found prosperity and personal happiness demands it, then people will leave. Cities are unsettled places, characterized by huge fluctuations. The mercurial nature of modern city life is underlined by the fact that the average house-owner in the United States moves every four years, in Britain every six.

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nown in Europe for self-publishing many of them. His work has been widely exhibited internationally; venues include the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, and the Provincial Museum of Photography in Antwerp, Belgium. His work has also been shown at Foam_Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam in 2007 and at the Aperture Gallery in New York. Eijkelboom lives and works in Amsterdam.

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portfolio

Mohamed Bourouissa PĂŠriphĂŠries

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portfolio text

Mohamed Bourouissa

Works in order of appearance: La rencontre, 2005 Le miroir, 2006 Le groupe, 2007 Le téléphone, 2006 La république, 2006 Périphérique, 2007; Le hall, 2007 L’impasse, 2007 Le dos, 2008 All images © Mohamed Bourouissa, courtesy Les filles du calvaire, Paris and Yossi Milo, New York

Mohamed Bourouissa was born in 1978 in Blida, Algeria. He lives and works in Paris.

In 2006 Bourouissa graduated from École Nationale des Arts ­Déco­ratifs. The same year he started his long-term project, Périphéries, that focused on the suburbs of Paris. He quickly gained recognition for his filmic photographs – carefully staged studies of the tension and power relations afflicting young people in the suburbs. The imagined scenarios explore the social and economic issues of the area in which the artist grew up, while questioning stereotypes about life in the ­suburban terri­tories of Paris.

His work has been exhibited in France, Galerie du Château d’Eau, Toulouse, Cité de L’Immigration, Paris, and at the Finnish Museum of Photography, 2009; FotoRio, Rio de Janeiro, 2009; New Museum, New York, 2009 and he was represented the same year at the Bamako Encounters, Mali.

He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Le Fresnoy, where he has enlarged his artistic

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practice to film-making and video, as well as other plastic media such as sculpture.

In 2010 Mohamed Bourouissa will participate in several important artistic events; The Berlin Biennial and The Brighton Biennial. He will be part of the group exhibition Dynasty at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, the Palais de Tokyo and have his first solo exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

Val Williams is a curator and writer, based in London. She is Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the University of the Arts London, Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre and one of the Editors of the Journal of Photography and Culture.

Her projects have included How We Are at Tate Britain, and Martin Parr: Photographs, at the Barbican Art Gallery and Phaidon. She is ­currently researching the work of the photographer Daniel Meadows for a book which will be published by Photoworks in 2011.

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The Casting of the Real

By Val Williams

It could be said that Mohamed Bourouissa’s photographic series Périphéries, created from 2006 to 2008, has been centrally informed by a methodology of critical documentary photography dominant in the USA and Europe since the mid-1980s. Critical documentary has been parti­ cularly clearly expressed in the work of, among many others, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Corinne Day and Paul Graham. It was a key component of an independent photography movement that emerged in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and that challenged the orthodoxies of photojournalism, art direction and the editorial market place. Critical documentary invested the primary components of photojournalism – narrative, event, topicality and social concern – with a personal dynamic that produced a cluster of compelling photo series that included Martin Parr’s The Last Resort, (1986) Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring (1984 – 1985) and Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986).

But critical documentary, whatever the stance or vision of individual photographers, was rooted in the idea of the real. What casting there was amounted to photographers being acutely aware of the kind of people and situations they wanted to photograph, anticipating them and

encapsulating them in photography. Given the aesthetic, social and personal investment made by the critical documentarists who became so prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, it was surely just a small step from the previsualization of scenes and narratives by documentary photo­ graphers to the casting of documentary, the re-making of the real into the super-real.

The casting of the real had of course been a constant and success­ ful methodology in commercial photography since its beginning. But it was only as photographic historiography progressed that the choreo­ graphed nature of traditional reportage became apparent, notably but not exclusively, by the discovery in the 1990s that Robert Doisneau’s Kiss by the Hotel de Ville (1950), one of Europe’s most celebrated reportage photographs, was every bit as choreographed as a fashion shoot.

By the end of the 1950s the notion that the real world could be ren­ dered in photography as effectively (or even more so) by a carefully con­ structed facsimile of reality was entrenched. The US photographer / artist Jeff Wall, active since the early 1980s as a maker of constructed reali­ ties, came to prominence through his remarkable tableaux Dead Troops Talk (1992), which explored the role of Soviet troops during their occu­ pation of Afghanistan. Similarly, the US photographer Philip Lorca diCorcia’s constructed tableaux of everyday life began to propel a whole generation of photographers emerging in the early 1990s towards the re-making and dramatisation of the real world.

It is against this background that we can explore the photographs of Mohamed Bourouissa’s series Périphéries, made in the Paris suburbs between 2006 and 2008. The 2005 riots in the socially deprived suburbs

La fenêtre, 2005 © Mohamed Bourouissa, courtesy Les filles du calvaire, Paris and Yossi Milo, New York

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generated a massive volume of photojournalism and press photography, much of which Bourouissa would have noted, as a trained photographer and one who had already been experimenting with ways of making photo­ graphs of his fellow Parisians, such as Posers of Chatelet les Halles in 2002–2003 and Face to Face from 2004–2005. As Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin and John Cornu remarked in 2008:

‘We can already see forerunners of his series Périphéries in the earlier works’ preoccupation with the confrontation of gazes – here, that of the artist meets those of his models at the moment the picture was taken.’ (Mohamed Bourouissa, True Fictions, February 2008 published by Château d’Eau.)

According to an undated interview with Bourouissa after the 2005 unrest, he began make photographs ‘with people from the suburbs in 2003…[but] I began to do staged photographs in 2005.’ Clearly, then, Bourouissa’s interest in the area in which he grew up as an Algerian ­im­mi­grant was rooted in a sense of neighbourhood, and of belonging, but also, one feels in a sense of dissonance and a need to express that unease through particular photographic methods. Magali Jauffret quotes Bourouissa in her 2007 essay: ‘I deal with the problematics of power relations and I raise the question of the mechanics of power.’

(Portfolio Magazine No 46, November 2007). The quote is a telling one; for ­Bourouissa, the mechanics of the real are a carefully balanced set of components, combining actuality, local knowledge and artistry, to

make constructions which explain not only the how and when, but also a whole politic.

Interestingly, in the course of his conversation with Jauffret Bourouissa frequently uses the language of both critical documentary and photoreportage. His interest in the problematics of power forms the centre of his critical documentary methodology (see Anna Fox’s series Workstations (1998) and Tina Barney’s 1991 Friends and Relations for examples). His insistence is very much the voice of the photojournalist: ‘What I am after is that tenth of a second when the tension is at its most extreme. We have all known these imperceptible moments when the tension seems more violent than the confrontation with the other. At that extreme point, anything could happen.’

Périphéries is a remarkable series of photographs not for its newness – this methodology of the constructed photograph is long-established – but rather for the way that it comments on many kinds of photography.

It is a carefully crafted and minutely observed distillation of a recent photographic and cultural history, combining a fascination with youth culture and fashion with the construction of documentary. This kind of photography has customarily been somewhat aloof. One cannot feel, for instance, that Philip Lorca diCorcia portrays worlds that are in any way his own. Bourouissa, on the other hand, is at home and his photographs clearly transmit a kind of magical familiarity which, back in the early 1990s, could be seen in Barney’s Friends and Relations and in Richard Billingham’s iconic Ray’s a Laugh (1996). In La morsure (2007), one man sets a dog upon another and the everyday, banal violence forms the centre of the photograph. There is almost no anger, virtually no fear, as

La morsure, 2007 © Mohamed Bourouissa, courtesy Les filles du calvaire, Paris and Yossi Milo, New York

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each character plays his appointed part in this familiar drama of urban life. Other recognizable characters are ranged around the edges of the photo­graph; the heavy who drives the car, the drinker in the corner, all seemingly disassociated from each other, yet each intimately involved in a dance for which everyone knows the steps.

In another 2007 image, Le couloir (Metro), Bourouissa has choreo­ graphed a meeting in the Paris metro. Two groups of men, their act of passing each other interrupted by an interrogatory gesture, gaze back at a boy, at whom another man is pointing. There is an intense mystery in this scenario. Who knows who? What are their relationships? What is the matter? Is this a confrontation or merely an interval of drifting time?

It is as if Bourouissa himself has halted time, has become the ­arbiter of events who can choose whether this incident is one of ­muttering and walking away, or whether it will produce violence and male combustion. Bourouissa shows us that there is no before or after the photograph, merely an assembling in allotted places and the ­improvisation of known gestures.

Bourouissa’s photographs are imbued with a sense of waiting; every­ thing is photographed at the moment just before it happens. There is a sublime sense of inactivity, as young men drift and lope and point and lounge. Both interiors and exteriors are suffused with a golden light, which brings to mind an older kind of art altogether, the glimmering ­canvasses of old Dutch masters rather than the bleakness of a suburban daylight.

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It could be suggested that Mohamed Bourouissa is the ultimate heir to a vast photographic estate, taking and adapting methods and ­practices of reportage, documentary and the constructed narrative that have been the cornerstones of photography since the 1970s. But he is also a new kind of artist photographer who has the social and creative equipment to produce work that satisfies many of our needs when we look at photo­ graphs. Unfulfilled by the beautiful, Bourouissa offers us the sublime encased by social awareness and the insider’s eye. He gives us docu­ mentary photographs which are every bit as carefully constructed as the best advertising campaign. But his work also reminds us of past photo­ graphy, of those first 1980s forays into the postmodernist arena, of photo­graphy’s tortuous climb to status in the art world. Périphéries will remain a classic of a period in which photography gained its full confi­ dence, as both witness and dramatist of the real world.

In his 2007 photograph Le toit Bourouissa constructed a strange scene. Four young men stand near the edge of a towerblock roof. One stands on a wooden box. Three of the men gaze over the edge. Below them are a fenced enclosure and an expanse of grass. It is a photograph which cannot be explained and as such is almost comedic. The banal monumentality of the surroundings, the suburb as castle and meadow (towerblock and scuffed grass), the insistence of its central characters, their downwards gaze and their intensity are as mysterious as a crime thriller’s clues. We watch, and wait, and anticipate. +

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Takashi Homma Tokyo and my Daughter

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Takashi Homma

All images from the series Tokyo and my Daughter © Takashi Homma

Takashi Homma was born in 1962 in Tokyo. He studied photography at the College of Art, Nihon University, but left in 1984 to take up a job as an inhouse photographer at a Tokyo advertising agency.

In the early 1990s Homma lived in London, where he worked for i-D.On his return to Japan he worked in many different genres within photo­graphy, including magazines and advertisements. In 1999 he ­received the 24th Kimura Ihei Photography Award for his series Tokyo Suburbia, in which he focused his gaze on suburban residential areas in and around Tokyo.

His photographic style is quiet, influenced by William Eggleston’s colour photography. Homma strives to eliminate any exaggeration or dramatization, giving a result often characterized as honest.

In 2004 he published the collection of the traditional photographer Takuma Nakahira, titled Kiwamete Yoi Fuukei: Short Hope: Takuma Nakahira and supervised a video by the same name. Two years later the Swiss publisher Nieves brought out the short and intimate Tokyo and my Daughter; 32 colour images of a young girl from birth to the age of six, intertwined with images from the city.

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In 2008, already widely published in Japan, Homma became the first Japanese contemporary artist to be published by Aperture, his first international retrospect.

In recent years Homma has left the urban centre to turn his lens towards nature. In New Waves – photographs taken at the North Shore in Hawaii – he captures the calm and changing appearances of the waves. In Trails he catches the traces of deer-hunting in the deep, snowy mountains.

Starting next year, the first retrospective of Homma’s work will tour museums in Japan for two years, presenting the entire scope of his oeuvre.

Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: a self-portrait, photographs 1945-1964 (Flammarion, 2004) and has curated several exhibitions as creative director of Studio Equis (www.studioequis.net) including Tokyo Stories, Kultur­huset, Stockholm and Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory, Japanisches Kulturinstitut, Cologne. He blogs at www.eyecurious.com

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Adrift in the city of superflat

by Marc Feustel

During the extraordinarily turbulent and dynamic post-war period1, Tokyo became a great photographic city: a city with a distinctive, immediately recognizable photographic aesthetic. Just as Paris’s visual identity became intrinsically linked to the humanist photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau and the sprawl of Los Angeles typified by the large format colour cityscapes of Stephen Shore, Tokyo became characterized by an intense and gritty are, bure, boke (rough, blurry, out of focus) aesthetic which emphasized the turbulent nature of the capital’s post-war growth. This imagery is commonly associated with the short-lived but hugely influential magazine Provoke, founded by Koji Taki, Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada and Yutaka Takanashi in 1968.

Although he only joined Provoke for its second issue, Daido Moriyama has emerged as its most widely recognized proponent. Their images have a visceral power which flows from the deep engagement of these photo­ graphers with the world around them and their desire to convey their personal experience of the rage, rebellion and despair of these times.

They sent shockwaves through the Japanese photographic community, and set the framework for photography for the years to come.

Less than twenty years later, Tokyo underwent another, radically different period of reconstruction. With the economic bubble of the 1980s, Japan experienced unparalleled growth which transformed the face of the city, not only by an explosion of ambitious hyper-modern

architectural projects, but also by the massive expansion and standard­ ized modernization of its suburbs. It is in this context that Takashi Homma has emerged as one of the most observant and astute chroniclers of contemporary Tokyo. As he noted in 1999, ‘No matter how many photo­ graphs I take every day, the actual landscape keeps moving faster than what is in my head.’ The city was no longer characterized by the dark, labyrinthine back streets of Shinjuku, but by its skyscrapers and its seemingly featureless suburban sprawl. For a new generation of photo­ graphers it was necessary to find a different photographic voca­bulary to explore this new face of their city.

Homma burst onto the Japanese photographic scene with his 1998 book, Tokyo Suburbia, a phonebook-sized tome of colour landscape photo­graphs of Tokyo’s sprawling, anonymous suburbs with thick card pages like those of a children’s book. With Tokyo Suburbia Homma was not only shifting the focus away from the city to its periphery, but his distant, cool (even cold), deadpan style stood in stark opposition to the gritty snapshots of Moriyama, Araki or Kitajima.

Homma’s Tokyo bears virtually no traces of the old. His early work combines highly formal images of empty suburban spaces with portraits of their moody and sometimes awkward teenage inhabitants, revealing traces of his beginnings as a fashion and advertising photographer in the early 1990s. With his suburban landscapes Homma chose a subject that is both universally familiar and routinely ignored. These featureless housing complexes and parking lots epitomize the banality of the every­ day. To borrow a term coined by the curator Koichi Wada, they can be described as ‘commonscapes’. By making them his subject, Homma gener­ates an unsettling feeling in the viewer, as our gaze searches in vain for something extra-ordinary to latch on to. Inevitably these photo­ graphs create a feeling of emptiness as they depict those supremely unremarkable spaces that we have taught ourselves to ignore.

In a cryptic, but revealing essay in Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers, Homma writes: ‘We are standing on a burned field – the

From the series Tokyo Suburbia © Takashi Homma

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earth extends far past the horizon – nothing can be seen beyond that.’

In this text Homma flicks rapidly through the pages of Japanese post-war photographic history. With the metaphor of the burned field – referencing the landscapes of the immediate post-war years – Homma seemingly acknowledges that the increasingly extreme photographic explorations of the 1960s and 1970s have run their course and that there may be no new avenues to explore. ‘As a generation, we have missed the boat.’

And yet in this essay, Homma hints at an important influence on his photographic approach and a potential guide for navigating the landscape of this burned field: Takuma Nakahira’s 1973 book, Naze, Shokubutsu Zukanka (Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?). In this work Nakahira criticized his own black-and-white work of the Provoke period, arguing instead for the use of colour photography to ‘treat things as things’ and ‘look at the world as it is’. As the political radicalism and rebellion of the 1960s began to wane, Nakahira saw the need to replace the lyricism and radical symbolism of black-and-white post-war photo­ graphy with the dispassionate realism of colour. These ideas are evident in Homma’s subtle use of colour to capture the true nature of the everyday. His use of muted tones avoids the romanticization of his subjects and heightens their ordinary and banal qualities.

Homma’s interest in the commonscapes of Tokyo’s outskirts, his de­tached, almost mechanical photographic approach and his rejection of preexisting photographic forms, are also linked to two highly influential exhibitions that were held in the United States in the late 1960s and mid-1970s: Contemporary Photographers: Towards a New Social Landscape (1966) and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered ­Landscape (1975). Together these exhibitions represented a departure from preexisting photographic conventions in their attempt to provide a

new conception of both the social and physical landscape by emphasizing neutrality, composition and a focus on the seemingly random moments of daily life. The influence of this period in Western photography on Homma’s work often imbues his images with the sense of an outsider looking in. Although he is a child of Tokyo’s suburbs, when he picks up his camera Homma does not betray his personal relationship to these spaces.

In a radical departure from the generation before him, the presence of the photographer is almost entirely absent from Homma’s early images. Whereas Moriyama or Araki dragged the viewer into the intensity of their personal experiences, Homma’s highly formalistic landscapes reveal nothing of himself. His style is architectural, scientific even, as he turns the camera into an instrument for recording reality. This formalism creates a sense of detachment and distance in the viewer, tingeing these images with a delicate sadness, a slightly despondent feeling at the flatness and emptiness of these spaces. As the Japanese economic bubble burst to give way to the ‘lost decade’, the younger generation found itself adrift with a deeply uncertain future, and their listlessness is echoed in Homma’s empty spaces.

Over time, however, Homma has allowed traces of the personal to appear in his work. With Tokyo and my Daughter, Homma interweaves pictures of his studio, his dog and of himself with fragments of a young girl’s life in the city. With this series Homma has also shifted his attention somewhat from the emptiness of suburban landscapes to the closeness of interior space. This intimate, although fictional (the girl in the series is not Homma’s daughter but a friend’s) portrait of a father and daughter’s life in the city retains the sense of distance and melancholy of his earlier work, while suffusing it with a delicate warmth and affection. To understand this ambivalent relationship with the city, it is useful to consider Homma’s work within the context of the superflat art movement.

Homma belongs to a group of artists, including Takashi Murakami, Yoshimoto Nara and Chiho Aoshima, associated with ‘superflat’, a term

From the series Tokyo Suburbia © Takashi Homma

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coined by Murakami to refer to the post-modern merging of high and low art as well as to a distinct set of stylistic characteristics. The superflat style involves certain two-dimensional forms that appear in Japanese graphic art, anime and manga, and which ignore Western perspective techniques. Beyond these formal properties, however, the term also refers to the ‘shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture’. This culture emerged through the phenomenal economic growth of the 1980s which led to an expansion in personal wealth in both urban and rural areas, a flattening of class distinctions and a great surge in mass consumerism.

Superflat is not designed to be a simple critique of the shallow nature of Japan’s consumerist culture; on the contrary it celebrates the creativity that this consumption has generated. This phenomenon is mirrored in the shift in tone that has taken place in Homma’s Tokyo work over the past decade. Although his style remains highly formal, in Tokyo and my Daughter the coldness and distance of his earlier work gives way to a certain warmth and affection in the portraits of his ‘daughter’. This warmth can also be sensed in the evolution of Homma’s cityscapes and architectural photographs. The series collapses the distinction between the city and its suburbs by juxtaposing Homma’s trademark suburban commonscapes with glowing images of cutting edge architecture.

His emphasis has shifted from the cold, impersonal face of modern landscapes to highlighting the beauty of their individual architectural details.

Interestingly this evolution in the tone of Homma’s work has given it a more childlike quality. Indeed, his Tokyo is populated almost entirely by children. In the portraits in this series, the girl stares directly into the camera, her gaze suggesting that she is aware that we are trespassing into her world. In one image she appears wearing the same t-shirt as

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Homma, who is relegated to the background, his presence seemingly peripheral. However, this isn’t a world of joyful insouciance. Homma’s ‘daughter’ seems concerned, puzzled, perhaps bored but never playful or bounding with energy. In one diptych of the girl taking a picture with her disposable camera, her expression seems to reflect the photo­ grapher’s struggle to find the best way of capturing an image.

Even without the children Homma’s images retain this childlike quality. His photographs of contemporary houses built by superstar architects SANAA or Atelier Bow Wow, bring out the cute, dollhouse ­quality of these constructions and his use of flattened cityscapes shrinks them to the size of scale models. A photograph of Homma’s studio re­ veals a bright room littered with CDs, DVDs and art-toys including a Yoshimoto Nara dog. This could be the room of a teenager. In case there was any doubt as to whose world this is, in one nighttime exposure of a Tokyo Street, the backlit words ‘Kiddy Land’ are pictured glowing through the trees.

This childishness is an important feature of modern life in Japan as people increasingly seek refuge from reality in the fantasy worlds of manga, anime or the online world. Homma’s ‘daughter’ could be ­con­sidered to be a symbol of the young Japanese generation’s experience of life in Tokyo. Her expression conveys a concerned but determined acceptance of the confusion of modern life. While the future may be uncertain, there are some bright and beautiful moments to illuminate it along the way. +

References: 1

Definitions of the end of the ‘post-war’ period vary from the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 to the economic explosion of the 1980s. For the purposes of this essay I will use the latter, broader definition.

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Nontsikelelo Veleko Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

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Nontsikelelo Veleko

Nontsikelelo Veleko was born in 1977 in Bodibe, South Africa, and lives and works in Johannesburg. She was brought up in Cape Town and studied photography between 1999 and 2003 at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown precinct in Johannesburg, an initiative co-founded by veteran photographer David Goldblatt. In the last couple of years Veleko has been attracting a great deal of attention with her striking work entitled Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder, a depiction of South African street style. Defying the clichés of what life can be like in South Africa, Veleko captures young people dressed in unique outfits, often with handmade elements.

Nontsikelelo Veleko was a nominee and finalist of the MTN New Contemporary Artists in 2003 and has since participated in prominent local and international exhibitions. In 2006 her photographs were

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­ xhibited in the landmark exhibition Snap Judgements: New Positions e in Contemporary African Photography at the International Center of Photo­graphy in New York and in Personae Scenarios – the new African Photo­graphy, Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea in Rome. She has taken part in such well-publicized shows as 7th Recontres Africaines de la Photographie exhibition – Bamako 2007 and 2009 and was represented at the Armory Show in 2009 and most recently she held a solo exhibition Welcome to Paradise curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose for Casa Africa, Las Palmas, Spain.

Nontsikelelo Veleko is represented by Goodman Gallery in Cape Town.

Mark Sealy is the Director of Autograph ABP.

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The Canvases of Representation & The Photographs of Nontsikelelo Veleko

by Mark Sealy

‘In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift, a more human face.’ – Steve Biko It’s now evident that curatorial work in the field of photography across the continent of Africa has, especially in the last 20 years or so produced some intriguing interpretations of what constitutes good ‘African photography’. Some exhibitions have been truly innovative and in time have proved to be historically important moments, particularly Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, New York in 1991, the 24th Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles 1993 and the first Rencontres de Bamako in 1994 were exceptional moments in the presentation of contemporary African photography. Its true that many exhibitions have done good work in allowing its audiences to discover African photographers but others have simply served to expose a deep-seated conservative approach to contextualizing, presenting and exploiting the complex nature of photography produced by indigenous African photographers.

An obvious and recent example of an inherently conservative approach to working with African photographers was the restaging in March 2005 of Samuel Fosso’s photograph Le Chef as a live performance which saw the artist himself displayed in the main shop window of one of London’s most fashionable department stores, Selfridges on Oxford Street.

This event, though satirical in nature not only restaged one of Fosso’s

most celebrated photographs but also recreated the violence of colonial capture, display and invention of the African subject. Fosso’s illconceived project, menacingly echoed the large-scale temporary events that took place at the Great Exhibitions held in cosmopolitan centres such Paris and London at the turn of the 19th century. Events that saw the colonized subjects of imperial Europe put on display for the entertainment of millions of Europeans; a violent form of cultural ridicule.

When dealing with African cultures in Europe one has to be critically aware of the impact that these historically and culturally biased encounters have had on our understanding of Africa. If Europe insists on inventing Africa for popular Eurocentric consumption then, critically, those of us who are now working with images from Africa should be asking for what cultural purpose our work is intended. Africa, with a landmass that covers 20.4% of the total land area of the earth and 47 countries containing a myriad of different cultural formations that seamlessly slide across borders cannot possibly be reduced or framed as one historical moment, one big idea. The very idea of an African photography is therefore a deeply problematic conception that needs unravelling and rethinking.

There is no doubt that a rich photographic tradition has existed all across the continent since the invention of the medium. We therefore have to recognize that the history of photography on the continent of Africa has not yet been fully written, especially whilst it continues to be presented as an adjunct of the medium’s growth.

This continued invention of Africa in Europe is a recurring cultural nightmare that constitutes an invitation that perpetuates an undercurrent of uncontrollable desires that forces us to keep Africa at a distance.

The danger of a continued cultural distancing brought on by objectifying the African subject affects our capacity in Europe to engage with and respond to the humanity of the African Other. Each time we objectify the African body it reignites the historical horror of African anonymity, cultural erasure and fantastic inventions of our own imaginary African place.

Observing how African photography has been pulled from the margins towards the cultural centre is an interesting exercise in postcolonial engagement that resonates with the funk of cultural imperial-

Lesego © Nontsikelelo Veleko, courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

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ism and the aesthetic management of the Other. The legal actions over ‘Who Owns Seydou Keïeta’ that saw two European collectors fighting in court over ‘ownership’ of Seydou Keïta’s archive and prints1 2006 and the Golden Lion award for Malick Sidibé at the Venice Biennale in 2007 are contrasting, defining moments in the history of photography and on the landscape of western visual culture. Both situations raise questions about the place of African photography, its position within the art market, the construction of canonical figures, the intentionality of the photographer and, critically, the reception of an image once removed from its original field of perception, reception and its use.

The tension of representational politics, even if one desires not to be caught within these frames of reference, simply won’t go away, especially when photographic works produced by artists in Africa are judged from the perspective of European, ethnocentric, institutional concerns.

At present African photography can be read as an impossible science.

It’s meaning is always open to re-invention. Therefore the globalization process of African visual culture through the international museum and art gallery networks has the capacity to render local concerns, the specific moments of interest or nuances of expression invisible, lost in translation. Large group shows that collect and display African artists are clearly susceptible to reconstructing an experience that is not unlike the cultural work that was done by the Great Exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The current size and scale of museums in the West now, as they increase in capacity and compete for globally trans-fluid audiences are seriously in danger of turning the art-object encounter into a theme-park experience in which the role of curator functions like that of the circus ringmaster. This was certainly the case for the last big African art fair in London, part of which was Africa Remix, an exhibition that featured more than 60 artists from 25 countries which caused Jonathan Jones, the Guardian art critic to give up trying to present criticism of the work for fear of causing offense, ‘In the end, this is a subject I probably shouldn’t

even be writing about. What do I know? Racism is limitless.’ 2 Jones’s position is interesting as it’s a clear example of critical judgment being suspended by the overbearing weight of trying to read individual artists works through prism of an incredibly diverse geo-politically complex continent.

The reception of African photography is shrouded in discursive debates concerning African modernity, ‘and with it a great number of current paradigmatic oppositions have developed: traditional versus modern; oral versus written and printed; agrarian and customary communities versus urban and industrialized civilization; subsistence economies versus highly productive economies,’ 3 exotic versus violent, famine versus war, local versus global. Cyclical debates concerning African modernity have become the norm in which we read the art produced across Africa. The quest for the Afro-Modern moment or the proof of Afro cosmopolitanism says more about us in Europe than it does about the subject in focus.

‘Naturally, the institutional rise of Orientalism must – at least in England and France be associated with the huge expansion of colonialism and other forms of domination over Asia and Africa taking place at the same time. Not only was a systematic understanding of non-European peoples and their spoken languages needed to control these peoples but a knowledge of their civilizations, by seizing and categorizing their cultures, ensured that the natives themselves could only learn about their own civilizations only through European scholarship’. 4 It’s through the prism of these debates that the photographs of Nontsikelelo Veleko have to perform their epistemological work. Her photographs have to rub against the grain of historical visual knowledge concerning how Africa and in particular South Africa, has been systematically constructed for Eurocentric consumption over time. Her photographs have to work against the historical theoretical inventions of an imagined Africa. This invented Africa has created a fantastic temporally distant and pessimistic African vision that has come to dominate how and when we see the African subject today.

Veleko’s photography turns away from the core tradition of Afro-pessi­ mistic history so prevalent in the turbulent or melancholic visualizations

Nkosana © Nontsikelelo Veleko, courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

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of African societies. Her work is an active engagement with the nowgeneration of fashionable people who are not throbbing with the hangover of Apartheid. Her found-subjects demand to be considered as subjects living in the moment, a claim common across the worlds’ youth cultures.

Veleko’s work oscillates between several photographic traditions. It embraces the style photography made popular by magazines in the UK such as Dazed and Confused and iD-Magazine, magazines in which street fashion is the dominant semiotic register. Veleko’s models serve as representatives of a people with a shared social formation and cultural identity of those who aspire to be identified beyond the burden categorization. The subjects’ desire is to be seen and their willingness to be photographed offer readers of these photographs a visual comment on the post-apartheid condition at work, a condition that isn’t trapped by despair and dysfunctional political parties. In this context, as in all fashion photography, there is a sense of contemporary social anthro­po­logy at work in which the more exotic figures and moments are brought into focus for visual pleasure. The point being made by Veleko here is that these individual forms of expression, through fashion, lay claim to a new kind of assertive cultural pattern that reclaims the street in a manner that is more akin to historical and political exuberance of black dandyism in Harlem in the 1920s, a moment in history that represented a growing social confidence and new forms of black self-invention. As Henry Louis Gates noted, when discussing the concept of the ‘New Negro’ movement in America, he states that, ‘negroes are called or call themselves new at what might be considered moments of crisis or times of strange, interesting, and often arresting opportunity. Used to describe an African recently ­arrived in eighteenth-century England, a newly emancipated slave in the 1870s, or variably, a political radical or poet in the Harlem of the 1920s, the term “new Negro” carries with it an eighteenth-century vision of utopia with a nineteenth-century idea of progress to form a black end-of-the-century dream of an unbroken, unhabituated, ­neological self.’ 5

But we would be mistaken to read Veleko’s photography as simply a ­meditation on the current state of street fashion in Johannesburg. Having studied at the Market Photo Workshop, a centre that ‘has played an integral role in the training and growth of South Africa’s photographers for twenty years; ensuring that visual literacy reaches those in neglected and marginalized parts of our society’ 6 it’s not surprising that there is a latent sense of political urgency and defiance about her work that wants to look forward into a place of unhinged freedoms; to be really free one has to have the capacity to imagine or explore what one’s life is ­actually like, not be told what one’s place is and not be held or fixed within a scopic regime over which one has no control. The camera in the hands of Veleko, is really a simple tool with which to carry out the investigations of a life without boundaries with categorizations and obsessions with race.

Like Harlem in the 1920s the subjects of Veleko’s photographs are ‘not only emphasizing their differences in the way they look and move, but also insist that they have a right to the streets and that the milestones in their collective past are part of the city’s history.’ 7 Veleko’s portraits are therefore a mighty step forward towards the profound gift anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko dared to imagine in 1978 the year after Veleko was born, the gift of a new and human face for South Africa. +

References: 1

www.nytimes.com accessed 7 May 2010

2

www.arts.guardian.co.uk Accessed 7 May 2010

3

MuDimbe.V.Y. The Invention of Africa. p4. Indiana University Press, 1988.

4

Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 vol.1: Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. p236. Rutgers University Press, 2006.

5

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. From his essay, ‘ The trope of the new negro and the reconstruction of the image of black.’ Published in Representations number 24, University of California, 1988.

6

www.marketphotoworkshop.co accessed 10 May 2010

7

Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion, p199. Duke University, 2009.

Works in order of appearance: Kepi V, 2003 Cindy and Nkuli, 2003 Untitled Thabo III, 2003 – 2006 Sibu IV, 2003-2006 Hloni, 2004 Manthe Ribae, Miriam Makeba Street, Newtown, Johannesburg, 2007 (from the series Wonderland) Vuyelwa, 2003-2004 Thabo Chicks, 2004 Nonkululeko, 2003 Sibu II, 2003 Thulani, 2003 Kepi I All images © Nontsikelelo Veleko, courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

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JH EngstrĂśm La RĂŠsidence

27.07.2003 I’ve tried to put my feelings and thoughts about Brussels into words. One phrase keeps re­ curring: city of passage.

07.03.2006 I’ve never had any regrets about what has been. On the contrary, I am so intent on moving forward I have trouble with the present.

But I can get nostalgic, in the true sense of the word.

09.06.2003 Today I walked around the Muslim neighborhood; a huge market was on. The place was alive and teeming with energy. I thought: What the hell would Europe be without all this?

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JH Engström

All images © JH Engström, courtesy of Galerie VU, Paris, and GUN Gallery, Stockholm

JH Engström was born in Karlstad, Värmland, in Sweden 1969. He moved to Paris with his parents at the age of 10. At the age of 13, he moved back to Sweden, but spend a lot of his adolescence in Paris.

He worked first as an assistant to fashion photographer Mario Testino and later to documentary photographer Anders Petersen.

In 1997, he graduated from the photography and film department at Gothenburg University and published his first book; Shelter (Bok­ förlaget DN). A year later he moved to Brooklyn, New York and started to work on the Trying to Dance-project, which later was published by Journal (2004). This book was followed by Haunts in 2006 (Steidl).

In 2008 Steidl released the book CDG/JHE. In 2009 he was awarded with The Best photobook of the year at the Arles Photofestival together with Anders Petersen for the book From Back Home (Max Ström).

He has received numerous grants and awards since 1994 and has exhibited widely troughout Europe. He is represented in collections both in Europe and the US. He has also made an one-hour documentary about his friend and colleague Anders Petersen for the Swedish television, and leads workshops regularly.

JH Engström lives and works between his native region Värmland and Paris.

His seventh book La Résidence will be released by Journal in spring 2010. The book is a result of two artist in residencies in Brussels, the first in 2003 and the second in 2006. JH Engström was invited by Contretype Photo centre to reflect upon his own work as well as the city of Brussels. The raw images – always made with warmth are exposing the loneliness and the absurdity of the human condition.

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The book is carefully designed by Greger Ulf Nilsson. The portfolio hereby is a selection based on the book.

JH Engström is represented by Galerie VU in Paris and by GUN Gallery in Stockholm.

Nan Goldin began taking photos as a teenager in Boston, MA. Her earliest works, black-and-white images of drag queens, were celebrations of the subcultural lifestyle of the community to which she belonged. ­During a period of study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she began displaying her work in the format of a slide-show, a constantly­ evolving project that acquired the title (appropriated from The ­Three­penny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1981. This collection of images had a loose thematic structure and was usually shown with an accompanying sound-track, first in the clubs where many of the images were taken and then within gallery spaces. In the 1990s Goldin continued to produce portraits of drag queens, but also made images of friends who were dying of AIDS and recorded her experiences travelling in Asia. The latter resulted in a book and exhibition, Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994, a collaboration with the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. In this collection of portraits Goldin found a strong equivalent for her Western community in the East. In 1995 she worked with the British filmmaker Edmund Coulthard to create a film about her life and work, I’ll Be Your Mirror (London, Blast! Films for BBC-TV, 1995). In 1996 Goldin’s reputation was further enhanced by a highly influential ­retrospective, centred around The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, at the Whitney Museum, New York.

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In Between Moments

By Nan Goldin

‘This place, if I could describe this place, portray it, I’ve tried, I feel no place, no place around me, there’s no end to me, I don’t know what it is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end…’ – Samuel Beckett, Molloy JH Engström is never an easy read. I usually have a facility for perceiving a photographer’s intentions through viewing the work, but with JH it’s about learning a new language.

The intensity of each moment one experiences with him is seductive, inspiring – and he’s always struggling to be more alive. He hovers, restless, questioning, circling.

In his photographs he gives us clues. There is no explication, but he takes us with him on his journey. He reveals the peculiar details he observes, the odd moment between moments, but we have to unravel the mystery ourselves. In following him on his trip, we try to relate it to our own experiences – we join him in the risks he takes – his curiosity is infectious.

Curiosity is a rare quality nowadays. So much useless information is so easily accessible, but JH strives to understand deeper realities.

We’re excited by the risk that we may get lost in unfamiliar territory. JH himself needs to feel grounded. He questions if he can find safety in the unfamiliar. There never seems to be an arrival at a finite point. At the same time as he steadfastly insists that photography is objective by its nature, the work reveals the subjective through the framing, what is given importance, and all the other choices a photographer makes. The photo­ grapher is in fact curating life. When he turns his subtle eye to the familiar, JH reveals the significance in the banal.

This portfolio, an excerpt from his new book, seems to be a perfect example of the complexity of the connections he makes. JH lands in Brussels. Goes there twice, in fact, invited on artist grants; but it’s strange to be an artist in a strange city – first you need to get your bearings to find where, what, and how you want to express yourself.

Where is the artist without his art? He’s nowhere. JH seems to be inside his room, isolated, and not consumed by his usual fire. He starts to photo­graph his state of mind. He reaches inertia – the lace curtains drawn closed – but the outdoors begins to show through. The window is

Triptych from the series La Résidence © JH Engström

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closed and only a flash is reflected in the glass – another barrier between him and what he wants – the outside world he wants to see, to touch, but can’t. The plants growing through the sidewalk, the hand touching one delicate branch: intangible, ephemeral. A cord leads somewhere he doesn’t show. He follows, he hits the road.

He shows the ease of this fake intimacy. Here the exaggerated tales re­ peat endlessly. He belongs – he has his own barstool.

He writes ‘I am where’ – now that he has written it and created safety in a phrase describing all his anxieties, he can go out. He follows different roads and ends up at his safe house – the bar. It’s familiar, it’s home, it’s easy. The genius of this project lies in the juxtaposition of his displacement, his unease in the normal environment he finds so banal and the comfort and familiarity he feels in the tedium of bar life. All roads lead to the bar.

My first connection with JH was at a midsummer party at the home he shared with his family. I was surprised by the sun, then by his enjoyment sharing and discussing his work with me and others. It was so unfamiliar to me to witness photographers discussing their work. I’ve seen him in Paris, in Stockholm, in deep discussion with his mentor, Anders Petersen, and other friends and arguing about the medium with colleagues. Most of the artists and photographers I know outside of Sweden – especially in NYC – talk about their galleries and the market, but very rarely about the intentions of their work. I’ve experienced lots of jealousy and fear of being copied in New York, but the atmosphere in Sweden is very different.

Here, he has an identity. He finds friends, but in the form of belonging that is common there. The relationships are fuelled by the disinhibition brought on by the alcohol. At the bar, everything is permissible – the girl with the black eye isn’t questioned, the black eye is accepted as another detail of her outside life. He portrays this clearly and with no judgment.

I’ve had a special feeling about Swedish photographers for years. It was at the 1987 Fotofest in Houston, Texas, which an old friend was curating, that I first saw Anders’ work. I felt like I’d finally found my own photo­ graphers in the work of Christer Stromholm and Anders Petersen – their fearless exploration of emotion, the darkness in Christer’s work, the great

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extremities in love and pain in Anders’. JH is in this lineage, but he has gone in his own direction – less deeply emotionally revealing, more cerebral. Though there are photos of deep emotion, they are treated more cerebrally, which is, in itself, just as revealing. His use of the medium is unique. Depending on what he is photographing, he uses everything from small cameras to 4 × 5, colour film, black and white, and makes collages with old family photos.

I learned about overexposure from him. His results are strange, mystical.

JH is almost always in his photos, grids and collages, which indicates even more his connection to his work. He has portrayed himself as both beautiful and far from it. +

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Otto Snoek Millionaire

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Otto Snoek

All images from the series Millionaire © Otto Snoek

Otto Snoek was born in 1966 in Rotterdam. He began his professional career as a photographer in 1992.

His main interest during the 1990s was the rapidly changing population and atmosphere in his hometown. He has been focused for years on the mix of the 174 cultures that co-exist in Rotterdam, where big-city contradictions and developments are omnipresent. After more than ten years of study he produced two monographs, Rotterdam, published by Witte de With and Why Not, published by Episode Publishers, both released the same day.

Snoek has lately been focusing on the identity of European citizens.

For the series Millionaire, he has been travelling to millionaire fairs around Europe, catching the very special and tense atmosphere of these parties. For more information visit www.ottosnoek.com

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Aaron Shuman is an American photographer, editor, writer and curator based in the United Kingdom. He has exhibited his photographic work internationally and contributed photography, articles, essays and inter­ views to publications including Foam Magazine, Aperture, ArtReview, Modern Painters, HotShoe International, Photoworks, The British Journal of Photography, Creative Review, The Guardian, The Observer and The Sunday Times. Schuman is currently a Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Arts University College at Bournemouth, a Lecturer at the University of Brighton and the founder and editor of the online photo­ graphy journal SeeSaw Magazine (www.seesawmagazine.com). For more information please visit www.aaronschuman.com

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Money Drunk: Otto Snoek’s Millionaire

By Aaron Schuman

In 1735 the English artist William Hogarth published eight evocative engravings entitled The Rake’s Progress. The series tracks the tragic decline of a young heir from the moment that he inherits his father’s fortune and begins to squander it on fashions, luxuries, whores and gam­bling, through to his gradual descent into financial ruin, debtors’ prison and eventually, disease-ridden madness. The images are generally interpreted as a moral tale, intended to graphically expose the waste and foolishness of the idle rich. Yet, they also provide the artist and his audience with an opportunity to both revel in and critique the decadence, delinquency and ultimate destruction they depict. As Hogarth remarked, ‘The reasons which induced me to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both writers and painters had…totally overlooked that intermediate species of subject, which may be placed between the sublime and grotesque.’

In his series, Millionaire, the photographer Otto Snoek also invites us into the intermediate realm between the sublime and the grotesque, again instigated by excessive wealth and waste, but in a more contemporary guise. This portfolio investigates the ‘millionaire fairs’ that take place throughout Europe, where phenomenally expensive luxury goods are exhibited, admired and acquired by the rich and those who aspire to be counted amongst them. Snoek himself was born and raised in

From the series Millionaire © Otto Snoek

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Rotterdam when it was, as he describes it, ‘a traditional working-class harbour town’, and many of his previous bodies of work have subtly interrogated the rapid transformation and commercialization of his homecity in recent decades, as it has sought to reposition itself as a centre of commerce and leisure, rather than one of industry. Snoek has generally cast an ambivalent eye on this so-called ‘growth’, and has cunningly questioned the true value of such ‘success’ in terms of its social and cultural rather than its purely financial ramifications. Despite the cele­bratory environments in which many of his early photographs are set – parties, parades, festivals, and so on – the individuals that Snoek picks out from the crowd often convey a distinct air of boredom, indifference, dissatisfaction and disillusion, as if the choreographed promise of fun that surrounds them has, in fact, spoiled their fun altogether.

Millionaire delves into even more explicit arenas of exaggerated consumerism, and Snoek manages to find a similar mood simmering within the crowd: in one striking image, more than ten individuals are caught within the frame, all of them glancing apathetically in different directions, each seemingly intent on interacting with no one else. But amongst this disaffected coterie of the modern moneyed, Snoek often uncovers a sudden spark of exaggerated giddiness, as if, at least for some, the sheer excitement of such a saturation of wealth has heightened a glorified yet nevertheless banal shopping experience into something explosive. Just to the right of a young couple posing for a con­ventional smiley snap, a woman peers down at an approaching grey-­haired man, her cartoon-like eyes and breasts both bulging, as if they are about to spontaneously burst right out of her body; beside a pair of brunettes casually chit-chatting on a white leather bench, a man hovers over two heavily made-up blondes, cast as a predator who’s ready to pounce; whilst a poised doll-like redhead gracefully glides through the dance floor, a man and a woman both smile knowingly as, over the loud music, they shout intimacies indiscreetly into their friends’ ears. Snoek’s remarkably consistent incorporation of such contrasting actions – cool

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composure caught next to forced frenzy – cleverly heightens both behaviours, pushing them towards the Hogarthian boundaries of the sublime and the grotesque. Yet the viewer is positioned precisely between them, caught together within the single frame, and is allowed to observe the scene all at once from a very middle ground.

Snoek’s assumed strategic approach throughout Millionaire could quite neatly be traced back to the work of pioneering photojournalist Erich Salomon, who throughout the 1920s and 1930s infiltrated various international conferences, political summits, society events and industrial meetings with his camera, eventually publishing Famous Con­­tem­ poraries in Unguarded Moments in 1931. Salomon’s pictures candidly captured notable figures unaware, and were some of the earli­est images to reveal to the public not only the rich and powerful caught off-guard, but the richness and power of photography itself to turn casual behaviour – and particularly that of individuals who were acutely practiced in presenting a poised public image – into extraordinary social commentary and psychological insight. Deemed ‘the king of the indiscreet’ by one high-ranking subject, Salomon was one of the first journalists to pierce the veil of discretion and formality that the privileged so often hide behind. But unlike both Hogarth and Snoek, Salomon’s resulting images remained relatively flattering – rather than cause ridicule, they tended to endear the subjects to the viewer, exposing their normality, their idiosyncrasies, and ultimately, their underlying humanity.

Aesthetically, Snoek’s talent for collecting and then collapsing a multitude of indirectly related moments together into a single photo­ graph more closely resembles the enigmatic photographic forays of the ‘visual athlete’, Garry Winogrand. Discussing one particularly astonishing image from Winogrand’s series, Public Relations, the writer and photo­

From the series Millionaire © Otto Snoek

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grapher Leo Rubinfien once noted, ‘While it would be false to say that this picture has no center of attention…nothing escapes our notice. [I]t is as if one had gotten drunk at this party: not blind drunk, but drunk enough so that one could not keep pace with the dense conversation, and found oneself turning repeatedly to the trivial details of the surrounding crush.’ Snoek’s images, like Winogrand’s, are, as Rubinfien says, ‘doubly crammed with detail’, and however trivial such details might seem in their own right – a puff of cigar smoke, a flick of a wrist, a nose turned upwards, a sideways glance – they all add up to produce a strikingly saturated social commentary. Yet whilst Winogrand’s intoxi­cated photographs of society parties, art openings and gala events generally remained dizzyingly tipsy with the excitement of it all, Snoek’s stumble further into a more desperate sense of drunkenness; they are more bitter, more barbed and more angry. Just at the instant when it seems that a scene is about to fall apart and become a spinning blur, Snoek pulls a collection of little details into clear focus for just long enough to pro­duce a clever, cutting and occasionally cruel jibe – in the spirit of Hogarth – at the expense of his subjects, and to the benefit and delight of his audience.

It is important to note that, although Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress first appeared as a collection of paintings, the images were originally marketed as a series of engravings, available through subscription. In fact, the paintings themselves were only intended as advertisements for the engravings, and were initially displayed in Hogarth’s studio simply to tempt potential subscribers to buy an edition of the set of prints for a mere guinea and a half. Using a medium capable of mass reproduction, Hogarth capitalized on the burgeoning expansion of the middle-classes of his time, offering the bourgeoisie an opportunity to buy his images at a reasonable price, and to invest in a moral tale that specifically warned them of the perils of wealth.

Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, photo­ graphy gradually merged with and then overtook engravings as the mass

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medium of choice – particularly within newspapers and magazines – and was often used to put forth similar social observations, and to pose moral questions. For example, Jacob Riis’s series, How the Other Half Lives, was originally published in the New York Sun in 1888, then a year later in Scribner’s Magazine and finally as a book in 1890 as engravings based on his own photographs. His intentions were neither artistic nor aesthetic, but to employ the new medium simply to express his humanistic concerns as accessibly as possible. ‘I came to take up photography... not exactly as a pastime. It was never that for me. I had to use it, and beyond that I never went.’

Yet, when Riis’s negatives were pulled from the archives in the ­mid-1940s and resurrected as finely crafted photographic prints by photo­grapher Alexander Alland, they became celebrated for both their ethical content and their formal singularity, inspiring Ansel Adams to remark, ‘I have thought much about this intense, living quality in Riis’s work; I think I have an explanation of its compelling power. It is because in viewing those prints I find myself identified with the people photographed.’

Today many would argue that, like the discipline of painting in the past, much of contemporary photography has become overly aestheticized, academicized and potentially elitist, in that its content is now often overshadowed by more formal or conceptual concerns. Like Hogarth, photo­graphers like Snoek have responded with an attempt to reintroduce social, moral, and political questions into their medium, by becoming more accessible. They have tried to return what was once a seen as a ‘democratic’ medium to its content-driven origins, and at the same time use it to question the voracious greed, rampant commercialism and aggressive capitalism that democracy itself has so often

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spawned. Of course, as is evident in the work of Riis and others, such a mission has always lain at the heart of documentary photography. As Garry Winogrand asserted in 1963: ‘Photography, photographers, photo­ graphs deal with facts. Since WWII we have seen the spread of afflu­ ence…[but] our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty…I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves…I cannot accept my ­conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation ­further and deeper. This is my project.’ +

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Bertrand Fleuret Landmasses and Railways

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Bertrand Fleuret

All images: From Landmasses and Railways © Bertrand Fleuret

Bertrand Fleuret was born in Versailles, France, in 1969. He studied photo­graphy and graphic-design at École des Beaux-Arts de Versailles and London College of Printing. His first book, The Risk of an Early Spring was published by Artimo in 2004, his new book Landmasses and Railways was published by J&L books in 2009. Both books can be downloaded in pdf format from his website www.bertrandfeuret.com. Fleuret lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Landmasses and Railways is a fictional journey through a retro futuristic city with medieval elements, inspired by the visual world of

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Andrey Tarkovsky, Chris Marker and the atmosphere of the novels of Kafka. The book is divided within several chapters. The portfolio hereby is inspired by the chapter Inside the Walls.

We have asked Adam Bell to write a poetic prose piece loosely based upon the portfolio and on Bertrand Fleuret’s imagery.

Adam Bell is a photographer and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the co-author and co-editor of The Education of A Photographer, and his work has been exhibited internationally.

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information. He wonders how people live here and starts to take notes – looking for the past, the present, any way out.

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Notes for an eponymous city guide

by Adam Bell

The city tends to keep its past buried beneath its modern veneer. There are still remnants of the old capital, but they are hard to find. Walled gardens and towering monoliths punctuate the landscape, but there are also theatres, aquariums and grand engineering feats. Mazes lead through plazas and reveal the remains of palatial homes squatting at the ends of cobblestone streets. Crumbling palisades mark the limits of the ancient town. Elegant medieval monuments of fright and security are papered with the rotating demands of politicians. Watches, handbags and blinking toys. Merchants huddle at the base – amid the rocks.

He starts in the northeast and moves south.

The city is generally safe, but he knows even adventurous travellers should avoid the edges. Dogs roam the streets… He left home at night.

After a few days travel – train, boat and foot – he arrives at dawn.

Concentric walls line the city and keep out the violent winds – but they are best avoided inside and underground. Thick dust descends from the hills – burrowing, settling under his clothes. The intimacy of Earth is inescapable. A metallic buzz infects the air – the wind and machines overhead. Yet even under these conditions, the metropolis continues to grow. The majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave. Instead, it grows in fits and starts of convulsive expansion. Electric veins sew the city together shooting pulses of light and data. Communication, power and

Dug from the hard bedrock, the arcades are their own city. Shelter, ­shopping and entertainment, they offer a respite from the dust and wind.

Rhizomatic tangles of shafts and tunnels lead downward into the ­expansive territories below. Part of what used to be a natural cave ­system, there are few remnants of the original caves intact. Long prized for their labyrinthine passageways, spiralling formations and towering chambers, they were once a major attraction for the region. Over the years, they have been paved, patched and repurposed to fit new needs.

He speaks with an old man and asks him what it is like to work there – 100 feet below the surface. You take a train into a hill and the sky ­vanishes – replaced with endless white, gray and rock. Walls, pillars and floor. Roaming underground, he discovers a path obscured by rocks.

From Landmasses and Railways © Bertrand Fleuret

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Around a ­corner, behind a door, he uncovers telephone exchanges, bunkers and control centres. Small fragments of the war, buried, pulsing below the skin of the metropolis. Guards usher him out – a foreigner rebuffed. He returns to the light above.

He writes letters to her describing this place – to bear witness, to collect evidence, to explain. Epistles and fragmental thoughts.

High-rise buildings and vacant lots dominate the districts to the South.

Tall looming buildings house thousands, but are mute and appear ­vacant. Staring at the concrete and sealed windows, he remembers a story he read in a tattered newspaper on the boat that brought him here. A young man discovered a church hidden below the floorboards of his home. Drunk and bored, an errant tug at an air grate revealed a stone church below his feet. A narrow staircase by the altar brought him back and out his cupboard. Circling, prodding - the buildings are impenetrable. He stands in their shadow. Apartments, closed doors and hallways. There is no grate. No visible means of ascent. He is being watched.

Around a corner, a thin dog – eyes through a crack. The dog follows him, cautious, as he moves away from the skyscrapers and out towards the

factories. Weaving through the broken buildings, he notices the dog is gone. He is left alone. Skyscraper, ruins, a park. The prairie has since invaded the gaps. Wildflowers, trees and weeds grow on the roof and through the windows of the abandoned buildings. The hoots and calls of birds echo through the cavernous shells and add to the smell of ­rotten leaves. The humming tone of wind blowing across telephone wires f­ ollows him.

Navigating the boulevards and market-strewn streets, he makes his way out of the brownfields and factories, and moves back north to the centre.

Neighbourhoods unfold to reveal archipelagos of commerce and obscure industry. Each new road unlocks a new world that quickly vanishes with a turn. He is somewhere new. The shops look identical. He is told that the same companies that own the stores also control the nightclubs, brothels and theatres that line the narrow alleys. The language sounds familiar, but the soft lilt of the merchants’ accents shifts. The city is ­dynamic, buoyant. He is pushed to follow its rhythm. He walks into a store and is greeted by orange robots. Let us show you the way, they chime. Young girls take pictures with the machines and laugh. They ­disappear around the corner and do not return.

Walking further, he enters the city centre. He wonders why he left and how he can get back home. Get somewhere else. Terraced marble walkways line the domed interior of the city’s municipal buildings. Harried tourists orbit above, looking down and then up to the vaulted roof spiralling overhead. Pale businessmen carry paper to distant offices and disappear

From Landmasses and Railways © Bertrand Fleuret

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­ ehind narrow doors. Despite the activity, whole wings appear closed b – dormant. Cobwebs, dry rot and paper. There are offices in every closet, down every hallway.

Sitting in a café, a suited man reading a paper tells him that scientists have discovered a bacterial mat the size of Greece in the tropics. ­Ghostly tendrils of protozoic hair in the dark. Millions of microbes. Growing and dying in a hypnotic underwater cycle, the whole system regenerates every 10 weeks. He writes this down. The suited man returns to his paper and then leaves.

He has spent the day wandering.

By dusk, the metropolis breaks down into a collection of villages. ­Municipalities awaken to find their own rhythm. The city is a bustle of invisible activity. Crisscrossing trains carry weary workers home at night.

Up and down, the trains weave through the urban landscape. Resting, immobility, fragments of sleep. He rides the trains alone. Crepuscular shafts of light illuminate the concrete canyons and break through the heavy clouds and dust that weigh heavy on the sky. By dawn, he has circled the city.

Moving around the outskirts and along the paths it is easy to get lost.

The streets are a hypnotic maze of circumambulating paths and eddies.

Byzantine alleys lead to skeletal lifts that carry him upwards above the pre-dawn haze. Looking down from above, the listless blinking lights become stars – beckoning him outwards and beyond. +

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Reinier Gerritsen The Europeans

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Reinier Gerritsen

Works in order of appearance: Riga, Satekleslela, 060826, 15:37 Riga, Satekleslela, 060826, 15:57 Poznan, Kralowey Jawigi, 060623, 16:14 Riga, Satekleslela, 060826, 15:18 Sofia, Ivan Denkoglov, 060930, 13:14 Wien, Schottentor, 070608, 14:01 Madrid, Puerto del Sol, 050603, 18:01 Olso, Fred, Olsen Gade, 050705, 16:10 Paris, Boulevard Sebastopol, 050712, 15:10 London, Bishopsgate, 050623, 17:36 All images © Reinier Gerritsen

Reinier Gerritsen is an Amsterdam-based photographer in his fifties. He studied at the Vrije Academie and the Fotoschool in the Hague.

In 1992 he was awarded the prestigious Rijksmuseum-NRC assignment, together with his colleague Luuk Kramer, to document the company culture in the Netherlands, a project which resulted in a book and a solo exhibition in the Rijksmuseum.

In 2002 his project Matti, about the new generation of students in the outskirts of Amsterdam, generated much discussion and the resulting book, designed by René Put, won the best-book award the following year.

In 2005 Gerritsen began his long-term project The Europeans, travelling in 25 European countries, observing and photographing the anonymous masses on the streets. He found that wearing a fluorescent safety jacket changes him from appearing to be merely a curious photographer into someone who looks like a land surveyor – Gerritsen paradoxically melted into the crowd and was able to work unnoticed.

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Back in his studio he uses Photoshop to merge two shots of the same situation into one picture and to enhance the sharpness and create a panorama effect. He isolates the individuals, and creates a fascinating spectacle of human choreography and personal expression. Even though each city has a clear identity, Gerritsen’s photos, seen as cultural and sociological documents, form a typology of the multicultural society within the European unification process.

For his latest project Gerritsen went to New York to give his view on the financial crisis. He intensified the style he developed in his European project, and his fifth book Wall Street Stop will be published

by Hatje Cantz in the spring of 2010, followed by a solo exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum. The Wall Street Stop pictures were on display during the Armory Week exhibition Dutch Art Now in New York.

Jörg Colberg is the founder and editor of the blog Conscientious about Fine Art Photography (www.jmcolberg.com / weblog).

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Who are the Europeans?

by Jörg Colberg

It was Henry Kissinger who famously expressed the essence of Europe with a somewhat exasperated question: ‘If I want to call Europe, who do I call?’ Europe is just so hard to define. Who are the Europeans? It is probably easier to say what they are, namely a quarrelsome bunch, who revel in disagreeing with each other. That, of course, makes it hard to deal with them – if you look at things from the perspective of someone in power in, say, Washington. Not that things are much easier for the various ­politicians in London or Paris, in Prague or Berlin, in Warsaw or Rome.

But concealed beneath the uncertainty about the political and ­economic Europe are the Europeans, the people who live in the ­countries that are part of Europe, many of them part of the European Union and many of those sharing the Euro currency.

As far as I can tell from my visits, Europeans themselves do not seem to be concerned about who they are or what they are. And why would they? For the most part, they seem to be happy to be English or French or German or Dutch or whatever else, and European at the same time. They will quarrel with someone from another European country about soccer or food or money, but they will be happy to tell the

9.03 AM 22.01.09 from the series Wall Street Stop © Reinier Gerritsen

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non-Europeans about their continent. Of course, I am seeing all this as someone who thinks of himself as a European first, and then a German, and then as someone who has been living in the United States for more than ten years.

Europe without its mirror image across the Atlantic would be ­different. But take away the superficial, mostly political differences, and things start looking surprisingly similar. Europe now is a melting pot just like the United States, facing the same struggles and uncertainties over immigration, religion and jobs. Why is it that what is seen as a genuine strength of the United States – the ability to bring people together to create something bigger and better – is considered to be a problem for Europe? Or am I being too optimistic? But shouldn’t we be optimistic?

The year 2009 witnessed the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans, a body of work initially rejected by ­critics, but now one of the 20th Century’s photographic masterpieces.

The Americans – that is a loaded and big term. How could one possibly portray the people of the United States in just one book? Frank’s solution was simple. He did a series of road trips, to take photographs along the way. He explored the country, by looking at its different parts and people, and the images he got he published as The Americans. That’s what artists do: They don’t worry too much about whether what they do will satisfy everybody, they just create something and put it out there.

Reinier Gerritsen’s The Europeans is as ambitious as Frank’s book, even though, of course, it differs in pretty much every detail. Yet just like its famous precursor, it pursues an ambitious and equally impossible goal, to portray the Europeans. For Gerritsen, there is no impossible, and the best way to deal with the challenge is to simply go for it

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– the famous American can-do approach. After having worked in 15 countries, he secured funding from the Anna Cornelis Foundation; by now he has taken photographs in 25 countries.

If there is one big difference between Americans and Europeans it is that the former are very individualistic, whereas the latter place a stronger focus on the whole. Interestingly enough, The Europeans mirrors this property by showing photographs of groups. This choice is the artist’s. In an email to the author, Gerritsen wrote that ‘I am fond of looking at people, and when I have a group it’s a lot of people. [...] When I have a group portrait of ten people I see ten struggles for life, ten love lives, their jobs, their fun, and their disappointments. And I am satisfied with the picture if I make these things visible, when I see the diversity and the richness of us all.’

Diversity, the richness of us all, again these are words Americans are very familiar with, and the artist applies them effortlessly to the European melting pot.

To produce these photographs, Gerritsen places himself at locations where he is sure to come across large numbers of people. He then waits for the right moment, which is presented by the composition, the combi­ nation of characters, their clothing and the way and the direction they look. It is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, where street photo­ graphy meets the more formal aspects of classical group portraiture.

The artist decides about the final outcome; chance encounters become formal compositions.

6.20PM 10.06.09 from the series Wall Street Stop © Reinier Gerritsen

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Reinier Gerritsen is a cunning man: To be invisible, the photographer wears a fluorescent safety jacket – surely nobody expects someone standing out so clearly to take sneaky photographs. It is as if he was shouting ‘Look at me, I am taking photographs,’ and nobody actually believed it. People mind their own business – this in a day and age when we have become suspicious of strangers taking our photographs (while not minding too much getting caught on ever more ‘security’ and surveil­ lance cameras – what a truly brave new world!)

For each group, in a second or two, Gerritsen takes a series of photo­ graphs, making sure to get images of the characters he needs, all in ­focus. He then digitally constructs the final result on a computer, moving beyond the simple ideas of regular street photography. The results look effortlessly real, yet somehow also slightly unsettling. We are not used to seeing groups portrayed in this way, with sharp focus everywhere, and with no obvious relationships between many of the individuals.

We are also not used to, well, staring so openly at strangers in the street. Here, we can: They might look back at us from the photographs, but of course, they can’t see anything. Only we, the viewers, can see.

The Europeans clearly reflects not only photographic history, but also the evolution of photography itself. Strictly speaking, the photo­ graphs in The Europeans are what people call photo illustrations – they are not real. But then, The Europeans shows how such terms ultimately are useless: They cling to an idea of photography that simply is not valid any longer. Even if constructed, The Europeans is documentary photo­graphy, or maybe we might call it post-documentary photography.

Debates about whether the images in The Europeans are photographs or photo illustrations might serve a purpose, but nevertheless they miss the point: The images speak to us about the people in them, the

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Europeans, and they tell us about our modern, crowded lives, about the human condition. They comment on how we are being watched, usually without our explicit consent (but we never register our disapproval of our modern surveillance societies, even if crimes never are really prevented, but only may be solved a bit more quickly, and where we are all treated as proto-criminals).

Just like The Americans, The Europeans portrays a group of people living in a specific geographic zone on this planet, Europe. You have to look at the photographs carefully to see where they were taken. Make-up or dress codes might give away a little bit about their locations, but maybe these kinds of conclusions only make sense after the fact, once we know the locations of the photographs.

Crucially, what we do see is how similar we all are, how the crowded public space transforms us all into actors, who know how to behave, what to do, how to move, where to look and where not to look given the constraints. If Europe is a big melting pot, being in a crowded public space enforces the melting even more: Our private spaces shrink to the few centimetres around our bodies, and we are all turned into a big group – the group that Reinier Gerritsen loves looking at so much.

In The Europeans, he has turned what we could call his voyeurism into ours – and into a form of art, that teaches us about who we are – as individuals and as members of the various groups we belong to. +

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Joel Sternfeld iDubai

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Joel Sternfeld

All images from the series iDubai Š Joel Sternfeld, courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York

Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944. He has a BA from Dartmouth College, and started to experiment with colour photography in the 1970s. He is now considered to be one of the major figures in the world of photography. In 1987 Sternfeld published one of his most famous series, American Prospects, a result of many road trips around America, during which he explored landscapes that had been altered by human activity and made his photographs with a great eye for detail and a strong sense of colour.

Sternfeld is the author of twelve books including Hart Island (1988), Stranger Passing (2001), Sweet Earth (2006), When It Changed (2007) and Oxbow Archive (2008).

He has received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome (2004) and the Citibank Photography Award.

In recent years he has developed a strong interest in global warming and the destructive forces faced by our society. His most recent

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project iDubai – to be published by Steidl in May 2010 - investigates consumerism and capitalism plus the theoretical implications of the proliferation of mobile phone cameras around the globe. In Dubai, Joel Sternfeld used his iPhone camera to get beyond mass-media images of the Emirate.

Joel Sternfeld is represented by Luhring Augustine, New York.

Chris Wiley is an artist, writer, and curator based in Brooklyn, New York.

He is a regular contributor to Kaleidoscope, and his writing has also appeared in Abitare, Cabinet, Art Press, and other publications. He has also previously worked on curatorial projects at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and is currently working as part of the curatorial team of the 8th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. For more information visit: www.chriswiley.net

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Castles Built on Sand: Joel Sternfeld’s iDubai

by Chris Wiley

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn; or A Vision in a Dream In October 1956, construction was completed on what is perhaps the most influential piece of architecture built in the second half of the 20th century: the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota. This may sound like hyperbolic praise, a designation more befitting Philip Johnson’s Glass House or Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building than a retail complex erected in a small Twin Cites suburb, but no single mid-century architectural masterpiece laid the ground work for such a thorough and irrevocable alteration of both the physical and psychic character of the world landscape than Southdale, which holds the distinction of being

the world’s first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. Designed by Viennese émigré Victor Gruen and members of his architectural firm Victor Gruen Associates (VGA), Southdale was built as both a retail paradise – it boasted, among other attractions, a tropical garden court equipped with a twenty-one foot tall cage filled with exotic birds – and as a prototype of new kind of town centre for the suburbanized post-war era, designed to host a variety of civic events, exhibitions, and lectures.

But as Gruen’s architectural model proliferated, his original intention for the mall to function as a social crystallization point was jettisoned to create a more streamlined architectural product, which is now familiar to almost everyone: a hermetically sealed non-place, whose every detail is designed to serve a single end – consumption. Thus divested of its encumbering frills, thousands of Southdale-like clones began popping up across the United States, and, eventually, across the face of the entire globe. As the century wore on, the enclosed mall began to rival the skyscraper as America’s most prominent architectural export.

If this worldwide dispersal of Gruen’s architectural progeny could be said to have a centre – a somewhat ironic designation when dealing with such a fundamentally decentering architectural space as the mall, which, like the airport, is one of those quintessential spatial products of globalization where one gets the feeling they are somehow everywhere and nowhere all at once – it can no longer be said to be in America, whose retail landscape is now dominated by warehouse-like big box stores like those of the much-maligned retailer Wal-Mart. In the 21st century, the centre of the shopping mall diaspora is undoubtedly Dubai, that mirage-like emirate whose hypertrophic growth and outlandish displays of opulence over the course of the past decade have made an indelible impression on the global imagination, casting it as both a model post modern fantasy land, and an exemplar of the follies of ­unbridled decadence. Home to more than five dozen malls, including the world’s largest, the Dubai Mall, which clocks in at over twelve million square feet, and another mall, the Mall of the Emirates, that famously sports a sixty-seven thousand square foot indoor ski slope, Dubai has taken up Gruen’s project with an unmatched fervour that seems to border on hysteria.

Summer Interns Having Lunch, Wall Street, New York, August 1987 © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York

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It is no surprise, then, that when Joel Sternfeld sought to create a new body of work that would critically address the global culture of consumerism, he would head to Dubai to document its seemingly endless acres of air-conditioned retail space. What is surprising, particularly in light of his extensive photographic career using an 8 ×10 inch view camera, is that he would choose to create this new body of work using only the camera on his iPhone, which lends the project its faux-technological title, iDubai.

It is hard to imagine a more drastic change of pace in terms of photographic working method. Unlike the cell phone camera, which is ubiquitous, cheap, and designed to make casual images on the fly, the 8 ×10 inch view camera is unwieldy, exacting, and extremely expensive, which drastically limits both the spontaneity of the images it produces, and the number of pictures that can reasonably be made with it (during the making of Sternfeld’s seminal book American Prospects (1987) the cost of film and processing capped the number of pictures he could make per day at two, even with generous funding from a Guggenheim Fellow­ship). But, as Sternfeld explained to me when I sat down with him in his loft in New York, the choice to put aside the tool with which he has worked for decades was largely a conceptual one. ‘For me,’ Sternfeld explained, ‘it was about the marriage of form and content – using one of the most visible contemporary consumer fetish-objects to create an image of global consumption.’

Admittedly, there is something almost too satisfying in this tidy twist of conceptual legerdemain, something that, in the hands of a lesser photographer, might render the pictures themselves moot – mere visual trimming on a conceptual tree. However, even behind a camera phone, Sternfeld puts his adroit visual faculties to work, creating a group of images that not only stand out from his conceptual framework, but also make a convincing argument that the camera phone may well have been a better choice to document Dubai’s consumer excess on an aesthetic

level as well. For if Sternfeld had lugged his 8 ×10 out to the desert to document Dubai’s great pleasure domes, the sumptuousness of the resultant pictures’ tonality and grain, that almost hyper real quality that 8 ×10 inch negatives impart to prints, would have surely seemed like a visual capitulation to the malls’ slick surfaces and ornately adorned interiors. In the camera phone image, this seduction is short-circuited: in some images, the quality is afflicted with the familiar muted haze of the low-res, while in others, the colours take on an amped up digital crunch that seems sucked straight out of a video game – everything comes off looking both materially and spiritually cheap. Even a Mercedes SLR fully plated in white gold that Sternfeld captured parked outside the Mall of the Emirates (presumably not left unattended) seems to have only a muted luster, as if it was just a gaudy child’s plaything rather than a multi-million dollar paean to conspicuous consumption that would have Thorstein Veblen doing back flips in his grave.

One of the things that the cell phone camera cannot achieve, of course, is the kind of magisterial heft that has marked much of Sternfeld’s previous work. But if no single image in iDubai has the weight of some of Sternfeld’s most well known photographs, it is because they were not designed to. ‘The very nature of the photographic act has changed,’ Sternfeld told me, ‘from a kind of privileged, discreet act to something more continuous and generic. I’ve always felt that the individual image can’t present a truth, but cumulatively, a group of images might. And, in fact, I mean [iDubai] to be a marker on that road from the single image to the multiplicity of images, as well as from the analog image to the digital image. What matters now I think is ideas, groupings of images, books and the development of ideas across a lifetime.’ Indeed, iDubai works best as just such a grouping of images – the book, which is forthcoming from Steidl in June features approximately two hundred and fifty of them – that cumulatively coalesce into an visual synecdoche designed to indict the global culture of consumerism as a whole. But the full significance of iDubai cannot be understood, as Sternfeld himself implies, without taking into consideration the broader arc of his work as a whole.

Most immediately relevant in terms of this broader personal narrative are Sternfeld’s three most recent books, Sweet Earth: Experimental

Wet'n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida, September 1980 © Joel Sternfeld, courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York

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Utopias in America (2006), When It Changed (2008) and Oxbow Archive (2008). Together they form a kind of trilogy, to which iDubai could be seen as a pessimistic coda. The first, Sweet Earth, was an archive / source book of American utopian communities, both failed and thriving, sincere and cynical, that was designed to serve as photographic barometer of American’s attempts, on a communitarian scale, to alter the nature of society and interpersonal relations (Sternfeld, it should be noted, had previously documented attempts to facilitate social change on a macro­ cosmic level in his book Treading On Kings (2003), for which he photo­ graphed protestors at the G8 convention in Genoa). The second book, When It Changed, took a more despondent turn, collecting portraits of the perturbed and frustrated faces of various politicians, NGO activists, and climatologists in attendance at the eleventh United Nation’s conference on climate change, interspersing them with teletype-style dispatches detailing scientists’ grim prognostications for our global future, as well as a host of environmental and ecological disasters that have already come to pass as a likely result of man-made climate change. The third, and most subtle, of these books, Oxbow Archive, is an extended photo­ graphic meditation on a single unremarkable field in Massachusetts that imbues it with a poignant mix of romanticism and elegiac feeling, conveying a sense of both the inestimable value of even the most humble corners of the natural world, and the devastating spiritual and ecological price we will pay for driving it to ruin.

Together, these three books track the vicissitudes of Sternfeld’s world view over the past five years, which has moved from the provisional optimism of Sweet Earth, through the sense of crisis and urgency evinced in When It Changed, to the feeling of tragic and perhaps inevitable loss that is palpably present in Oxbow Archive. Seen as an addendum to these books, iDubai marks a descent into a deeper kind of pessimism. Gone is the sweet sting of the melancholic, in favour of a feeling that we now live in a world gone mad, which Sternfeld conveyed powerfully in our discus­

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sion. ‘I don’t believe we can solve climate change,’ he asserts. ‘It’s way too late for that. But even if we could solve climate change, it would simply allow us consume the world in some other way, which is what I wanted to address with iDubai. Ultimately, I think that whole world is organized wrongly.’

However, despite these sentiments, this is not to say that iDubai is filled only with vitriol and pessimism directed at the world’s out-ofcontrol consumer culture. There are also hints, among the people who find themselves adrift in Dubai’s mallscape, of all that is worth saving.

Scattered among the images of bored-looking sybarites and parodically lavish food courts selling Starbucks coffee, are images of people ­attempting to reclaim the alienating space of the mall in order to fashion it into a semblance of public space, as Victor Gruen had originally ­envisioned: a family playing cards, teenage boys laughing convivially, a hooded hawk brought in as part of a Ramadan festival. Most touchingly, Sternfeld also made it a point to search out tender images of fatherhood, which exist in opposition to the West’s predominate view of the Middle Eastern male as a threatening entity. These images of fathers are the iDubai’s most empathetic, perhaps owing to the fact that Sternfeld has recently become a father himself.

Empathy for the people who are subsumed within the ideology of consumer culture, of course, does not translate into empathy for the ideology itself. Many of Sternfeld’s subjects, even the ones who receive his empathetic gaze, seem hopelessly lost in malls’ spectacularized envi­ ronments, which are designed more for distraction, an endless perceptual slippage across the surface of things, than for anything approaching habitability. At its heart iDubai remains, despite flashes of human feeling, an indictment of the inhumanity of both the literal and figurative architecture of consumer capitalism, which, when viewed in light of the economic collapse of 2008 and the looming crisis in the European Union, would seem to be a castle constructed on sand. +

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extra

Foam Magazine & The Outlook Magazine proudly present:

Shanghai special

A photographic portrayal of this intriguing Asian metropolis as experienced by two young photographers.

A Qing Magic City on the Sea

& Jaap Scheeren All of a sudden everything made sense

foam magazine #23 / city life

books

1

5

Katja Stuke Lonely Planet For Katja Stuke the camera is never just a machine for depicting reality. It is instead a problematic instrument for coping with worlds of images, which explains why her new small publication 2

is a guidebook, an ironic commentary 4

and a low-key artist’s book in the tradi­

Laura Bielau Color Lab Club Scud

John Gossage HERE

As we have come to expect from Leipzig

This extensive catalogue by John Gossage

Internet companies such as Facebook,

productions, this publication has an ex­­

began as a newspaper supplement about

Google and Yahoo, Stuke has produced

cellent design: a leporello and a maga­

an exhibition of photographs commis­

a slim soft-cover book with black-and-

zine in a jacket to which a descriptive text

sioned by the city of Rochester and pre­

white photographs and short texts. In

has been stapled, combining two series

sents a surprising number of portraits

addition to the pictures Stuke made in

by this young photographer. Scud shows

and small photographic metaphors of

Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, there are

the interiors of nuclear power plants,

life in the suburbs. Handles, supports,

images extracted from the Internet:

greyish subterranean rooms for storage

clamps, fasteners and small makeshift

portraits of Google employees, exterior

or maintenance, whose dimensions are

defences against the powers of disinte­

views of the headquarters of the major

gration all become elements in a series

players, simulated pictures from The

featuring the buildings and streets of

Sims 2 and satellite images. The reader

Rochester. The sequence of pictures in

gradually learns more about these pic­

difficult to make out, which alternate with photographs of stuffed and

3

mounted animals, portraits of dead crea­

tion of Ed Ruscha’s self-published books.

Marshalling generic and generated images to examine the invisibility of

tures, in which the taxidermist’s needles

and the processes that lead to the fin­

many of Gossage’s books and series

tures, their sources and their content

are still in place to fasten the skin. Color

ished photograph, taxidermy procedures

traces his themes in which one can walk

through subheadings and information

Lab Club shows portraits of strippers in

and rooms and halls in the basements

and drive with the photographer in the

provided about locations and the indi­

half-hearted poses in the artist’s dark­

of nuclear power plants. This book is a

style of Eggleston or Winogrand. Here

vidual companies. As Paul Virilio once

room, with details and several deadpan

challenge to photography and its adher­

presents generously sized pictures nearly

said about the nature of knowledge in

photographs of the Niepce monument

ents, a challenge that combines the claus­

as large as exhibition prints. Newspaper

the Internet age, the seeds of the apple

to close the series. Here a quirky red

trophobic and the obvious with a degree

printing is perhaps not the best way to

are now found on its skin. Netizens can

light dominates the portraits, whereas

of aggression, elegance of execution and

reproduce photographic precision but it

use this tightly edited book to explore

the details are shot in hard contrasts

visual intelligence.

here emphasises the ephemeral side of

those seeds and the manifestations and

this artist’s photography.

new topographies of the Web.

with sharp highlights. In the former series a grey monochrome palette is

Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität

used for the interiors and animals. A

Weimar

Rochester Art Center

Böhm/ Kobayashi Publication

parallel is drawn between the darkroom

ISBN 978 38 60 68 35 90

no ISBN

no ISBN

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books

7

10

Stefan Bladh The Family

6

Ata Kando , Photo­grapher

For seven years, the Swedish photogra­ pher Stefan Bladh visited and photo­

Ata Kando is identified with her 1956

graphed a Turkish family living in

portraits of Hungarian refugee children,

destitute circumstances. He has now self-

her photographic novels Droom in het

published a selection of these pictures,

Woud and Kalypso en Nausikaä and – a

some 60 in all, in a book with a foreword 8

short episode in her long life – as being the first wife of Ed van der Elsken. A mono­graph edited by Ad van Denderen

by Anders Petersen. The closeness of the photographer to the parents and their nine children is exceptionally clear in

featuring her fashion work in 1950s

Joel Tettamanti Davos

Paris, her early portraits, her work in

The photographer Joel Tettamanti

phers who place friendship and benevo­

Venezuela and a number of individual

explored the Swiss city of Davos during

lence on equal footing with the interests

photographs that defy easy categoriza­

his stays there between 2006 and 2008.

of photography. This volume includes

tion. That she was the teacher of the

Impersonal and dispassionate, the photo­

pictures of the nine children at work

former and of Koen Wessings and that

graphs lead us down from the roofs of

and play, portraits of the parents, scenes

she worked as an assistant at Magnum

buildings to the middle of a sports field

and as a darkroom printer for Cartier-

in the city and then up slopes into the

9

the pictures are in black and white but

Bresson in Paris in the 1940s is not

mountains, into the front gardens of

Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic

there are also a few in colour. Seldom

widely known. This compilation empha­

houses, through tunnels and back into

Mountain, the tale of a civilization both

have I encountered such a convincing

sises Kando’s creativity by presenting a

monotonous housing estates. What

prosperous and on the verge of destruc­

début in recent experience. Bound in

wide variety of aesthetic, political and

began as an objective study of a medium-

tion. This illustrated volume, whose cover

cloth and with a belly band and a tipped-

personal photographs. While they may

sized European city known for tourism

is adorned with a photograph of a road

in photograph on the cover, this book

not come together to form a unified

and its important international confer­

winding up a mountain, is more than

has a serious design and provides the

whole, they are always able to satisfy the

ences changes into a literary sequence of

simply the diligent work of a student of

pictures with enough space for the

reader.

images of the variation between daytime

the school of photographic objectivity.

reader to become fully engaged in the

and Leo Erken has now been published

this selection. Intimate images such as these can only be made by photogra­

and a few landscapes. The majority of

and night photography, the advance and

story they tell.

Mets & Schilt

the retreat of fog and blue skies. I was

Scheidegger & Spiess

ISBN 905 33 06 12 9

reminded of the wanderings of Hans

ISBN 978 38 58 81 29 88

197

ISBN 978 91 97 82 63 03

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books

14 13 11

12

Zwelethu Mthethwa

Krakow Catalogue

Koen Wessing Chile 1973 Among the new books that Errata has

Poland and other eastern European

published in its second set of lavishly

countries are now increasingly produc­

reproduced study editions of rare photo­

ing interesting books and catalogues.

books, Chile 1973 is a particularly notable

Distribution channels, however, are still

milestone in photobook history. One

in the early stages of development, mak­

reason for this is that the original was

ing it difficult to accurately judge the

simply a staple-bound booklet with 26

state of publishing in those countries. A

photographs. Wessing decided to visit

clear example is the catalogue of last

Chile during the military coup against

year’s Photo month in Krakow; the excel­

the Allende government. Wearing the

lent production, well-translated texts and

inconspicuous grey suit of a bureaucrat,

surprising editing are all immediately

he was able to photograph without

noticeable. The catalogue begins with a

arousing suspicion. The series begins

selection of photographs by Viktor Kolar

with burning books and a funeral pro­

that the Czech made in his home town

cession and then moves to the infamous

over the last thirty years in which, on his

football stadium in which intellectuals

own initiative, he sensitively documented

and supporters of the Allende regime

the city and its inhabitants without con­

are interned after being photographed

cession to social expectations. The team

and having their heads shaved. The con­

of curators in Krakow headed by Tomasz

cluding pictures show masses of soldiers

Born in 1960, Zwelethu Mthethwa stud­

portraits of people from the countryside

Gutkowski and Karol Hordziej have

on the street after the coup; faceless

ied photography in Cape Town only to

living in emergency shelters in the big

made an excellent selection of well-

agents of power ready to use violence.

lay his study aside in favour of painting

city whilst looking for work. The colours

known and less well-known photogra­

The juxtaposition of power and injustice,

because of the impossibility of his find­

of clothing and furniture enhance con­

phers. The catalogue presents series by

violence and oppression is precise in its

ing employment as an art photographer

trasts and precisely balance one another.

Weegee, Odermatt and Tichy, images

accusations. The pictures, which are in

in apartheid South Africa. Supported by

The quiet, peaceful portraits, a far remove

guided by the festival theme of ‘memory

the aesthetic tradition of Cartier-Bresson,

the sales of his drawings and paintings,

from well-known African studio photo­

processed’, and photographs from the

are powerful and masterly. Errata has

he returned to photography, and today

graphy and most press photography,

Archive of Modern Conflict. I recognized

now published books on Goldblatt’s

his pictures are regularly shown at festi­

accrue a certain tension. In an accompa­

many of these pictures, but they are

In Boksburg, Klein’s New York and the

vals and in museums and galleries. He

nying essay, Okwui Enwezor highlights

never­theless edited in an economical

photobook jewel Toshi-e by Yutaka

has made a significant name for himself

differences between Mthethwa’s photo­

and surprising fashion. The catalogue

Takanashi, all beautifully reproduced

among representatives of African and

graphy and that of David Goldblatt,

also presents an overview of interesting

and featuring carefully researched texts

South African photography. His most

which European readers must first learn

exhibitions of Polish and Czech photo­

and illustrated bibliographies. Wessing’s

recent book from Aperture shows series

to spot. Regardless of my classification

graphy and an opportunity to learn

book is most powerful in the original

such as Sugar Cane, Coal, Quartz and

of this book, it has moved me more than

about a wide range of photographers.

edition, but this small volume from

Gold Miners and Brick Workers. Besides

any other portrait photobook I have seen

The organizers are planning to produce

Errata lets us feel his moral indignation

his interiors, Mthethwa’s respectful,

for some time.

further books, which is something

and his shock even after forty years.

friendly and clear portraits of people at

indeed to look forward to.

home and at work are particularly

Aperture

impressive. His series Interiors features

ISBN 978 15 97 11 11 33

198

Errata Editions ISBN 978 83 92 89 67 08

ISBN 978 19 35 00 41 41

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books

17

18

Text by Sebastian Hau 19 15

Kim Bouvy Phantom City

Jürgen Nefzger Fluffy Clouds

Sebastian Hau works in the specialized photography bookshop Schaden.com in Cologne.

This prize-winning series is a documen­

He also writes for the German website

tation of nuclear power plants through­

www.fotokritik.de

Phantom City is a small pocketbook

out Europe. The detailed images are in

managing to be several things at once:

the style of industrial photography and

a documentation of Rotterdam with a

display the power plants in their sur­

Credits: all images are reproductions of

geographical index, a photo novel with

rounding landscapes with humour and

book covers, unless numbered.

chapters and an academic work with a

irony. The foregrounds of the pictures

Credits for the numbered:

two-page bibliography. When we open

include a new housing development,

1, 2, 3 © Laura Bielau / Verlag der

it, a walk begins through a grey and

16

leisure parks, a public beach and tennis

often gloomy city. The book presents us

that is made of stones and concrete and

courts. The humour in this series of

4 © John Gossage / Rochester Art Center

with black-and-white photographs, sev­

memories and history, which the photo­

images lies in the juxtaposition of the

5 © Katja Stuke / Böhm / Kobayashi

eral newspaper and television images of

grapher evokes in text and image. This

near and the far. Nefzeger’s unconven­

streets, towering buildings, narrow pas­

book has a clean and elegant design and

tional editing gives equal weight to land­

6 © Ata Kando / Mets & Schilt

sages and sliproads. Is this a dark version

seduces the reader with an approach that

scape photography and social criticism.

7, 8, 9 © Joel Tettamanti / Scheidegger

of the Japanese cult book Tokyo Nobody?

vacillates between a sober study by a

The photographs of landscapes in all

Not quite, for even on the cover there is

photographer and curator and an almost

seasons and from all parts of Europe are

the spectre of a person walking, and now

paranoid and obsessive trip through the

particularly well printed in precisely

11, 12 © Zwelethu Mthethwa / Aperture

and then we can see people, although

chasms of an unknown city.

reproduced colours.

13 © Collection of Wojciech Nowicki

they appear to be turning away, just like

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Publication

& Spiess 10 © Stefan Bladh

14 © Koen Wessing / Errata Editions

the houses and buildings. After a while,

Pels & Kemper

Hatje Cantz

15, 16 © Kim Bouvy / Pels & Kemper

a peculiar feeling for space sets in, one

ISBN 978 90 79 37 20 72

ISBN 978 37 75 72 59 89

17, 18, 19 © Jürgen Nefzger / Hatje Cantz

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iDubai ˜ g arcades were

oppin If the Paris sh pitalism, sites of early ca e v ti ta n se re p re shopping e postmodern then perhaps th plars of ubai are exem D of s d n ou gr play is in mind, alism. With th it p ca d ce n va ad h the ented them wit um oc d ld fe n Joel Ster oment object of the m sh ti fe er m su con – the iPhone.

Subscribe to Foam Magazine and get a free copy of Joel Sternfeld’s iDubai. * Go to foammagazine.nl/shop, select ‘subscription 1 year + present’ and include the promotion code IDUBAI in the form.

*Published by Steidl. Available while stock lasts. www.steidlville.com.

Michael Wolf, Paris Streetview Triptych, 2009 colour prints, each 40 x 30 cm, €1000 per set, edition of 25

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

Open Wednesdays – Fridays 1.00 pm – 6.00 pm Saturdays & Sundays 11.00 am – 6.00 pm and by appointment Foam Editions Keizersgracht 609 NL -1017 DS Amsterdam T +31 (0)20-5516500 W www.foam.nl E roderick@foam.nl

foam magazine #23 / city life

paper selection

Foam Magazine’s choice of paper from Antalis

Mohamed Bourouissa is printed on tom&otto Silk 130 g/m²

Otto Snoek is printed on tom&otto Gloss 130 g/m² coated fine

coated fine paper and board, PEFC-certified, pages 35 – 50

paper and board, PEFC-certified, pages 115 – 130

Takashi Homma is printed on Romandruk 100g/m2 bulky

Bertrand Fleuret is printed on Cocoon 120g/m2 recycled offset paper

bookpaper, pages 55 – 70

and board, FSC-certified and 100% recycled, pages 135 – 150

Nontsikelelo Veleko is printed on Novatech Matt 135 g/m² coated

Reinier Gerritsen is printed on Novatech Matt 135 g/m² coated fine

fine paper and board, FSC- and EU Flower-certified, pages 75 – 90

paper and board, FSC- and EU Flower-certified, pages 155 – 170

JH Engström is printed on Arctic Volume Highwhite 115 g/m²

Joel Sternfeld is printed on Novatech Gloss 135 g/m² coated fine

uncoated paper and board, FSC-certified, pages 95 – 110

paper and board, FSC- and EU Flower-certified, pages 175 – 190

The paper used in this magazine was supplied by paper merchant Antalis. For more information please call +31 36 5394 444 or email marketing@antalis.nl

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

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

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

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

Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek and the BankGiro Loterij

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately), 1999

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Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin ~ Pretty Much Everything Photographs 1985-2010

~

25 June to 15 September 2010

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin began their work together in 1985 in Amsterdam. Now, 25 years later, with their campaigns for fashion houses such as YSL, Chanel, Balmain, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Chloé, and with regular publications in W Magazine, Vogue and The New York Times, they are amongst the most important photographers in the world today. They are amongst the very few artists who have successfully crossed the line drawn between fashion and art and have managed to simultaneously maintain careers in both fields. The team has lived and worked in New York since 1995.

Inez van Lamsweerde (b. 1963, Amsterdam) and Vinoodh Matadin (b. 1961, Amsterdam) launched their international career with the publication of ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image by use of a computer. The series typified Van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s hyper-realistic style and was made to cele­ brate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.

Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and

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frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images – forming one flowing, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This showing will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh’s world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, and the spiritual and the banal.

Foam will show approximately 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo’s career. Art, fashion and portrait works all exist next to each other. By disregarding any chronological order the combinations of images are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years. +

All images: Courtesy of the artists © Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.

This exhibition was made possible thanks to Audi and Delta Lloyd.

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Gwyneth Paltrow NY Times Magazine , 2004

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Joanna – HervÊ Leger Campaign, 1995

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Kate, 1999

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Anastasia, 1994

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ChloĂŠ Campaign 2004

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Nicole Kidman, W Magazine, 2003

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Me Kissing (Vinoodh Lovingly), 1999

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

25 June – 22 August 2010

Karl Blossfeldt

© Simon Wald-Lasowski

4 June – 25 August 2010

Foam_3h: Simon Wald-Lasowski ~ For your eyes only

Blossfeldt (Germany, 1865) was self-taught and since his youth a great lover of nature. As sculptor and modeller in a foundry for artwork, he used flowers and plants as inspiration for decorations. His participation in a study project in Italy under the guidance of Moritz Meurer in the 1890s became a turning point in his career for it was during this project that Blossfeldt began to systematically collect and photograph plants.

His documentation served an artistic rather than scientific purpose. Blossfeldt wanted to study archetypes of nature through means of photography. Just as his teacher Meurer, he believed that archetypes were a source of inspiration for architecture, drawing and painting.

Blossfeldt photographed flowers and other plants with the aid of handmade large-format cameras. He had a preference for weeds, which he felt illustrated archetypal nature better than cultivated flowers and plants. He also documented flora during various stages of development, pruning away branches and leaves before photographing his specimens against a neutral background in close-up, to effect sleek geometric patterns. Blossfeldt is considered one of the pioneers of New Objectivity. He used his photo archive to serve his art instruction at the Berlin Kunstge­ werbliche Lehranstalt [school of applied art]. Over the course of his life Blossfeldt made about 6,000 exposures.

Starting on 4 June, Foam presents a dynamic exhibition of new work by Simon Wald-Lasowski (Paris, 1980). In this work, Wald-Lasowksi has allowed himself to be inspired by ‘the eye’ and challenged himself to reinterpret this theme, a recurrent subject throughout art history and religion. Wald-Lasowski invites artists, designers and writers to respond to the exhibition while it’s ongoing. The work that arises from this – from installations to text – will be included at various times during the exhibition.

Wald-Lasowski’s images appear simple at first glance. But through his humorous and colourful visual language he places reality in another light. He creates an effect of alienation by adding absurd elements to the image. This is expressed well in his earlier series Beauty is the Beast (2008) and Bags (2007), in which he provided his subjects with an entirely different meaning through simple interventions. The camera lets him share his ironic vision of the world.

Fraxinus Ornus, Blumenesche Mannaesche, Aufbrechende Blütenknospe, © Karl Blossfeldt courtesy by SK Stiftung Cologne

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

27 August – 3 November 2010

Eva Marie Rødbro ~ I Touched Her Legs I Touched Her Legs is the latest work by Eva Marie Rødbro (Denmark, 1980), which plays out in a small town in Texas. Rødbro followed three groups of teens through their daily lives, as they tried to make sense of the transition from child to adult in 21st century America. Rødbro’s work on exhibition in Foam includes a film and photo series.

Endless Night, Polar Night in Murmansk, Russia, 2007 © Alexander Gronsky

Armadillo, 2009 © Eva Maria Rødbro

The Edge, Moscow Boundaries, Russia, 2009 © Alexander Gronsky

Kaybettay, 2009 © Eva Maria Rødbro

27 August – 10 October 2010

Foam_Paul Huf Award: Alexander Gronsky Starting on 27 August, Foam will be showing photos by Alexander Gronsky (Estonia, 1980), winner of the 2010 Foam Paul Huf Award. The award winner receives €20,000 in prize money, an artist-in-residency in Amsterdam and an exhibition at Foam.

Gronsky received the award for work on Russia made between 2007 and 2010. He has been called a ‘new docugraphic’ photographer, renewing the tradition of documentary photography. In his work he uses a narrative with an intimate distance – photographing from far away without being distant – opening up a whole new world with a technique that is seemingly classical.

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

24 September – 21 November 2010

Jim Goldberg ~ Open See In 2004, Jim Goldberg (United States, 1953) began working on New Europeans, commissioned by Magnum in honour of the Olympic Games in Athens, in which he recorded the lives of immigrants in Greece who had been forced by war, illness or poverty to leave their homelands. In search of a better future, these immigrants faced violence and brutality in Europe, but found hope and freedom. Goldberg travelled to the migrants’ countries of origin to record the motivation for their journeys.

Open See, in which he extended his attention to immigration and human trafficking in other European countries, is the result. The title refers to the absence of borders in the open seas, as opposed to the boundaries between the countries which divide up Europe. In the Open See exhibition in Foam, Goldberg portrays the many facets of this complex story through a variety of media including Polaroids, video, diary fragments, objects and medium and large-format photos. The photos are written on, coloured in or scratched by those portrayed in them. The images and words thus become intimate stories, alternated with landscape photos of the migrants’ countries of origin.

Quatorze Juillet Paris, 1958 © Johan van der Keuken

Quatorze Juillet Paris, 1958 © Johan van der Keuken

24 September – 8 December 2010

Johan van der Keuken ~ Quatorze Juillet One of the best-known photos by renowned photographer and film­maker Johan van der Keuken (Amsterdam, 1938-2001) is a dance scene on the Ile St Louis on 14 July 1958, first published in the book Paris Mortel (1964). Van der Keuken’s archives contained another 32 negatives taken on the same day at the same place. These never-before-published photos­have been assembled into a montage and make up the core of the Quatorze Juillet exhibition, on show at Foam from 24 September to 8 December 2010. As an extra touch, Foam’s historic Fodorzaal will be specially adapted to recreate the atmosphere of a dancehall, where Van der Keuken’s images will appear to dance around the visitors. In addition to the photos, two films will be shown.

From the start of his career, Van der Keuken was interested in ­making movement visible in still images. He experimented with series of photos, which he linked together to create a story. He also coupled outof-focus photos of motion with sharply focused stationary images. In this way he discovered how a montage of photos can speed up the movement contained in the images or give them another meaning. We encounter this again and again throughout his entire photographic ­oeuvre: series of still images joined together into a montage that ‘moves’.

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foam magazine #23 / city life webshop

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

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

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

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

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

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

foam magazine #21 / merge Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin / David Claerbout / Andrey Tarkovsky / Penelope Umbrico / Gunnel Wåhlstrand / Freudenthal & Verhagen / Nickel van Duijvenboden / Naoya Hatakeyama

foam magazine #22 / peeping Michael Wolf / Paul Kooiker / Tim Hetherington / Prague's Secret Police / Evan Baden / Trevor Paglen / Chris Jordan / Yasmine Chatila

foam magazine #23 / city life Mohamed Bourouissa / Takashi Homma / Nontsikelelo Veleko / JH Engström / Otto Snoek / Bertrand Fleuret / Reinier Gerritsen / Joel Sternfeld

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colophon

Colophon Foam Magazine International Photography Magazine Issue #23, Summer 2010 June 2010

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

Editorial Adviser Kathy Ryan, photo editor The New York Times Magazine

Paper

Editorial Advisers for issue #23 Adam Broomberg / Jörg Colberg / Aaron Schuman / Sebastian Hau

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

Editor-in-chief Marloes Krijnen Creative Director Pjotr de Jong Editors Marcel Feil / Pjotr de Jong / Marloes Krijnen / Sara Despres Managing Editor Sara Despres Magazine Manager Isabel Butzelaar Communication Intern Marlijn Winterink Concept, Art Direction & Design Vandejong, Amsterdam – Pjotr de Jong / Marcel de Vries Hamid Sallali / Luisa Heinrich Typography Luisa Heinrich Contributing Photographers Mohamed Bourouissa / Takashi Homma / Nontsikelelo Veleko / JH Engström / Otto Snoek / Bertrand Fleuret / Reinier Gerritsen / Joel Sternfeld

Editorial Address Foam Magazine Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 5516500 F +31 20 5516501 editors@foammagazine.nl www.foammagazine.nl Advertising Isabel Butzelaar Foam Magazine Vijzelstraat 72 1017 HL Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 isabel@foammagazine.nl Subscriptions Hexspoor Support Center Ladonkseweg 9 5281 RN Boxtel subscription@foammagazine.nl +31 (0) 411 633471

Cover Photograph Madrid, Puerto del Sol, 050603, 18:01 © Reinier Gerritsen Contributing Writers Marcel Feil / Sebastian Hau / Marc Feustel / Val Williams / Mark Sealy / Nan Goldin / Adam Bell / Aaron Schuman / Jörg Colberg / Chris Wiley Copy Editor Pittwater Literary Services, Amsterdam – Rowan Hewison Translation

Iris Maher / Paul Christensen /

Liz Waters / Anne Hodgkinson

Lithography & Printing Drukkerij Slinger Strooijonkerstraat 7 1812 PJ Alkmaar – NL www.drukkerijslinger.nl

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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.

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