PREVIEW Foam Magazine Issue #13 Searching

winter 2007 / #13

www.foammagazine.nl

Stephen Shore Wolfgang Tillmans Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin Thomas Ruff Philip-Lorca diCorcia Hans Aarsman

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editorial / contents

Editorial

Contents

Marloes Krijnen, director Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

The need and desire to experiment, to head off on a new track time and again, to try things out and interrogate the world as we know it are inherent to artistic practice. By maintaining a critical attitude to their chosen medium, to their work and their position as creative people, artists ensure that both their individual oeuvres and the arts in general are in a perpetual state of flux, never ceasing to develop, sometimes in directions that are hard to predict.

These developments are usually gradual and new work arises fairly naturally out of that which precedes it. But sometimes moments arrive in which a radical shift in direction occurs, moments of schism and sudden, unexpected change, or in which it is less the finished result than the uncertainty itself, the search, that forms the core of the work.

It seems many photographers and artists feel a powerful need to recalibrate. Recent developments surrounding the digitalisation of information, and therefore of images, and their availability on the internet have led many to contemplate the medium afresh. What is the significance of the photo as a physical object in a visual world that is increasingly immaterial, with a growing absence of order and hierarchy? How will the immense number of anonymous images that are now freely accessible to large numbers of people affect the artist’s position? What does authorship mean at this juncture?

In this issue of Foam Magazine we have brought together portfolios by six artists who have already achieved worldwide recognition, six photographers whose work many people can instantly call to mind. We hope their portfolios will nevertheless evoke a sense of surprise, since they capitalize upon a radically new visual culture and convey a strong wish to experiment and break free from standard expectations.

One cannot fail to notice that the role of the artist is ever more comparable to that of an editor and image developer. Take the new series of JPEGs by Thomas Ruff, who collects and adapts existing, often anonymous material that is available digitally. Or the latest project by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, in which a thousand polaroids are arranged in an unexpected and in some respects uncontrolled manner. Or take the iPhoto books compiled by Stephen Shore, who exploits new technology that allows us to turn images into books rapidly and almost without the help of a third party. The work of Wolfgang Tillmans continues to demonstrate a way of thinking in which experimentation and an interrogatory attitude to the essence of photographic representation are central. No less surprising is the portfolio that Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin have put together, combining photos from diverse projects to create new, multilayered images. And finally there is the remarkable portfolio by Hans Aarsman, who stopped producing photographs in 1994 to concentrate on writing. The images reproduced here, accompanied by his own text, show that he did not put his camera away for good. We are very proud that almost all these artists have compiled their contributions specially for Foam Magazine. As ever, all the portfolios are accompanied by inspiring essays and interviews.

At the start of this issue is an extensive interview with Jen Bekman, a New York-based gallery owner who is convinced the art business needs to change. In our regular but always unpredictable feature On my Mind... we invite six people from the cultural world to present the photo that has captured their attention most powerfully of late. We are extremely pleased with the choices made by Gerhard Steidl, Anton Corbijn, Geoff Dyer, Michael G. Wilson, Philippe Garner and agnès b. The magazine concludes as usual with an overview of recently published photobooks and detailed information about forthcoming exhibitions at Foam.

On My Mind...

images selected by Gerhard Steidl ~ Anton Corbijn ~ Geoff Dyer ~ Michael G. Wilson ~ Philippe Garner ~ agnès b.

Pages 016 - 021

Interview with Jen Bekman

Jen Bekman’s Gallery Without Walls

by Eric Miles

photographs by Stefan Ruiz

Pages 022 - 026

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Theme introduction

The Art of Questioning

by Marcel Feil

Pages 027 - 034

portfolio: Stephen Shore ~ 11–9–2006

text by Philip Gefter

Pages 035 - 054

portfolio: Wolfgang Tillmans ~ Lighter / Manual

text by Lisa Le Feuvre

Pages 055 - 074

portfolio: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin ~

Photographs and Collaborative Works

text by Penny Martin

Pages 075 - 094

portfolio: Thomas Ruff ~ New JPEGs

text by Valeria Liebermann

Pages 095 - 114

portfolio: Philip-Lorca diCorcia ~ Thousand

text by Aaron Schuman

Pages 115 - 134

portfolio: Hans Aarsman ~ Photography as Antidote

to Consumerism

text by Hans Aarsman

Pages 135 - 154

Photobooks by Tanja Wallroth

Pages 156 - 159

Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Weegee ~ From the Berinson Collection

Foam Exhibition Programme

Pages 164 - 176

Cover photograph: Clint Eastwood (The New York Times Magazine, 2005) © Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery,

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New York

Stephen Shore ~ 11-9-2006

Wolfgang Tillmans ~ Lighter / Manual

Stephen Shore, known for his iconic photobooks Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, is fascinated by the creative possibilities offered by recent technological developments such as printing-on-demand services. He has produced over sixty iPhoto books so far, all featuring pictures made in a single day. This portfolio is a revised edition of Shore’s iPhoto book 11-9-2006.

The photographs in this portfolio come from the series Lighter, comprising three-dimensional abstract pictures, and from Tillmans’ 2007 publication Manual. As in all of his publications and exhibition installations, different bodies of work fuse together in a new combination, with each image feeding back into a wider network of references both internal and external to his own work.

Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin ~ Photographs and Collaborative Works

Thomas Ruff ~ New JPEGs

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have been innovating fashion photography since the mid-1990s. As in all of Van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s exhibitions and layouts, they create secondary meanings for existing imagery by re-using past work, whether they are originally of commercial origin or as artwork for exhibitions.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia ~ Thousand This portfolio presents a selection of the Polaroids that Philip-Lorca diCorcia published in his latest book Thousand. Four thousand Polaroids from the past 25 years were edited down to a thousand images to be included in the book. Editing such a vast amount of images presented a unique challenge, for which diCorcia intended to use a specially developed computer programme.

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The most recent work by Thomas Ruff consists of digital images from various sources. They are all poor-quality jpeg images, and Ruff further coarsens the images by printing them in an extremely large format. In this way, the pixel structure, which is barely perceptible when looking at these images on the Internet, becomes predominant, dissolving the image in an ordered but empty system of colour codes.

Hans Aarsman ~ Photography as Antidote to Consumerism A personal experience made Hans Aarsman realize how easily he could give things up after he had photographed them. This inspired him to photograph possessions preventively, to curb his compulsive desire to possess things. Aarsman combines photos and text in a personal manifesto for ‘photography against greed’.

foam magazine #13 / searching Six well-known figures from the cultural world selected an image that has recently been on their minds...

Co-editor: Addie Vassie

On My Mind...

Dimitris Yeros, Portrait of Louise Bourgeois, 2007 © Dimitris Yeros

Gerhard Steidl What I love most about this photograph of Louise Bourgeois is that one sees in her face the satisfaction of a rich working life that is still in progress, even as she approaches 100 years of age. At the same time Bourgeois’ portrait reminds me that she enjoyed her first comprehensive retrospective only in 2007 at the Tate Modern – then at the age of 95.

I see this as representative of a deeper problem in the art word, the underrepresentation of women artists in public collections, a dilemma which Lars Nittve, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, brought to public attention in summer 2006. For Nittve this is a grave historical mistake, one which museums should amend now by purchasing the works of pioneering women artists, before they become too expensive.

For me the underrepresentation of women artists, as triggered

by Bourgeois’ portrait, confirms that the art world is dominated by men at every level. From the oil millionaires collecting art, who receive

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their financing from investment bankers, to the gallerists who supply the art and the artists who produce it, the art market is essentially a big boys’ club that is an extension of financial business.

For me Louise Bourgeois and her representation in this portrait are reminders of the values that should shape art’s production, distribution and display. Bourgeois once said, ‘I am my work’, revealing a deep commitment to the artistic process that I see as an archetype for all artists. + Steidl Publishers is one of the few publishing houses that is still independently operated by its founder and owner, and which controls every stage of the bookmaking process. Gerhard Steidl received his training as a printer under Joseph Beuys, and now heads a photobook programme featuring artists such as Robert Frank, Roni Horn and Jim Dine, as well as a literature programme including the Nobel-prize winning authors Günter Grass and Halldór Laxness.

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Kohei Yoshiyuki, from: The Park, © Kohei Yoshiyuki, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Anton Corbijn This photograph by Kohei Yoshiyuki sums up at once what we find attractive in photography: to look at something or someone, to satisfy a curiosity. Usually, if we would at all, ever, be confronted by a comparable situation, these curious people would have a camera with them for these are prime paparazzi positions.

Not in this case as these are not photographers, these are normal folks wanting to see something real, wanting to experience something else. And we are just like those ‘normal’ people for we want to see something too in this photograph, we are like the next person hiding there, right behind the ones we see in the picture. What also makes this photo very special is that it only gives us a hint of what is happening, our own curiosity is woken up, aroused, stirred, but not satisfied.

At least that is what I imagine. This photo is part of a series titled The Park, a reference to the Chuo Park in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area, where

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Yoshiyuki in the early 1970s stumbled by accident upon this kind of scene and he returned soon after with a camera to document this.

He used infra-red flashbulbs to shoot to avoid getting noticed and created thus a series about this phenomenon. Apparently he exhibited this for the first time in 1979 in Tokyo as large scale photographs in a completely dark gallery and the visitors were giving flashlights so as to simulate the events while watching them on the wall. Sounds like a happening to me. + Anton Corbijn is a Dutch photographer based in London, mostly known for his portraits of musicians and other artists. He also directs music videos and shorts, designs stages and is a graphic designer. His first feature film Control, about the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, premiered in 2007 and, amongst other awards, was celebrated twice at the Cannes Film festival.

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Michael Ackerman, from: Fiction, published by Delpire and Keyahoff Verlag (2001), © Michael Ackerman, courtesy Agence VU, Paris

Geoff Dyer I first came across Michael Ackerman’s photographs in 1999 in The New Yorker: black-and-white pictures of a woman in a cramped apartment. In five of the six pictures she is naked or in the process of getting dressed, cleaning her teeth, sitting on the toilet; one shows her dressed and out on the street. A caption explained that these photos comprised a detail from a series called Paris, France, 1999. The pictures were subtly erotic, incredibly intimate and, as can happen when you are exposed to certain works of art, I felt as if something in me had been waiting for them. It was like falling in love.

No, it was more than that: it was like falling in love and moving in with someone, when being able to watch them doing the most ordinary things is touched by rapture, undulled by familiarity. There is what might be called a lavatorial precedent for this kind of thing. In 1920, Jacques Henri Lartigue had photographed his wife Bibi, on their

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honeymoon, sitting on the toilet. The photograph is a frank and lovely record of a moment. Such frankness had, of course, become obtrusively routine by the late twentieth century. Ackerman does something else, regaining the lost delicacy of Lartigue’s image by inflecting it with a tinge of dream, as if what we are seeing is the record not of a moment but the way it lingers in the memory and becomes changed by its association with other moments, other memories. + Geoff Dyer’s first book was a critical study of his mentor John Berger’s Ways of Telling (1986). Since then he wrote three novels, a collection of essays, and four genre-defying titles, including Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award. His most recent book The Ongoing Moment, an idiosyncratic history of photography, won the 2006 ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography.

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Roger Fenton, Hoar Frost, 1859 © Roger Fenton, courtesy Wilson Centre for Photography, London

Michael G. Wilson Roger Fenton is Britain’s greatest 19th-century photographer. He trained as a lawyer but interrupted his education to study painting.

His work encompassed a wide range of subject matter; architecture, landscape, portraiture, and still life. He photographed the Crimean War, was the Photographer Royal, as well as the official photographer for the British Museum. Although he was the most influential and gifted photographer of his day, his career spanned less than ten years.

Throughout the 19th-century critics debated photography’s role in the Arts. Some, such as French critic Charles Baudelaire, argued that while photography was a faithful record of reality, it was not and could never be a medium for artistic expression. There were two main responses to this criticism. Photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson attempted to define the laws of artistic photography so as to create the greatest pictorial effect. The outcome was Pictorialism, which imitated popular art styles such as Symbolism and Tonalism and was characterized by soft focus, exotic processes, and extensive manipulation of negative and print. On the other hand photographers such as Francis Frith and Fenton believed photography had its own aesthetic that could best be expressed with the minimum of manipulation. In the early 20th century this concept of straight photography was bound up with Modernism in a new aesthetic movement led by photographers such as Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz.

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In Hoar Frost we see the antecedents for the modernist movement in the early days of photography. The sudden frost has left a white outline on the top edge of the hedge and curbs which Fenton uses to emphasis their highly geometric shapes. The outline of frost would normally be lost against a white sky, but here Fenton has framed the hedge against an arched mass of dense trees so the effect may be seen. This is a photograph about formal lines and geometric composition in the manner of modernist tradition of the 1920s, though made in 1859. Photography was less than a faithful record. It compressed time and space. Blue-sensitive emulsions of early processes shifted colour density values such that blue became white, while yellow and red became black. The effect was an abstraction of reality, the true photographic aesthetic. + Michael G.Wilson is producer of the James Bond films and a major private collector of photography. He is recognized as a leading expert on 19th-century photography.

In 1998, he founded the Wilson Centre for Photography, aimed at preservation of early photographs and research on the history and aesthetics of photography.

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Stills from Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assasination, 22 November 1963 © The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, www.jfk.org Images from the film were made public for the first time in Life magazine, 29 November 1963. The prints shown here were made for release to the media at the time of publication of this issue. The original film by Abraham Zapruder is in colour, see www.jfk.org for more information.

Philippe Garner This group of six key frames from the Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination of Present Kennedy featured in our Christie’s London Photographs auction in November 2007. Estimated at £5,000-7,000, this lot was far from being the most valuable in the sale. But from the moment I saw the prints in the summer with collector Thomas Walther I just couldn’t stop thinking about them, and my emotional investment in the lot was considerable. I am of the generation that remembers vividly and painfully the moment of hearing the shocking news of JFK’s death.

There had been press interest in the pictures, but as I mounted the rostrum to conduct the sale I was all too aware that I had no indications of potential purchaser interest – no written bids, no phone line booked; indeed there had been not a single condition report request. But, when

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I opened the bidding, two gentlemen in the room – neither known to me – raised their hands and competed swiftly till one dropped out and the other secured the pictures with a winning bid of £11,000. Both then stood up and left. They had come for just the one lot. I was delighted that I was not alone in my response to the power of these pictures – pictures that unwittingly became the defining records of a key moment + in 20th century history.

Philippe Garner is International Specialist Head of Photographs, Christie’s.

He has always been a pioneer in this field, since his first auction in 1971, and his passion for the subject is reflected in his extensive activities as a historian, author and curator.

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Attributed to Giacomo Caneva, Standing Girl with Hands Clasped, 1850s. Collection agnès b.

Denis Dailleux, Jeune de Persan Beaumont (Boy of Persan Beaumont), 1989 © Denis Dailleux, courtesy Agence VU, Paris. Collection agnès b.

agnès b.

When I saw this picture from the 1850s at Paris Photo in November, it connected in my mind to a photograph of Denis Dailleux that I purchased years ago... two children more or less similar in age, a boy and a girl. It seems like the two of them already have an inkling of the treacherous course that life can take. Both are beautiful, stirring, strong and not resigned to their fate. How many children are there like that in the world in this day and age? + agnès b. is a French fashion designer whose label is sold in 198 agnès b. boutiques around the world. She is also an art collector, publisher and film producer, and she runs a succesful gallery in Paris, Galerie du jour agnès b.

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~ The Art of Questioning ~

theme introduction

by Marcel Feil ~ curator Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Hans Aarsman gave up working as a photographer in 1994. A decision that, at the time, was hardly to be expected. After all, since starting out as a photojournalist in 1980 he had developed into an important and highly esteemed photographer, not only in the Netherlands but increasingly on the international scene as well. The publication of Hollandse Taferelen (Dutch Scenes) in 1989 established him as a key representative of a typically Dutch style of photography. There was therefore little reason to take such a drastic decision, or so many people thought. The reality, however, was different. Restlessness, a critical attitude to the essence of photography and a growing dissatisfaction with how photography was being used, by others but especially by Aarsman himself, had already prompted him to change course several times during his career. That is how, after various detours, he started working as a photojournalist for a newspaper, a medium that Aarsman prefers to a book or an exhibition even now. But after a couple of years working as a photographer he started to find the journalistic ideology problematic.

In an interview at the time of the opening of the Vrrooom! Vrrooom! exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in 2003 he explained why: ‘That perpetual thinking in terms of pros and cons, in good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressors, left and right. As you can see, newspaper photos insist on presenting a simplistic dichotomy. The way the form always dictates the content, or should that be the other way round? (...) I was searching for a way to capture the ambiguity of life, to do away with the preconceived little ideas. Long live intuition! Don’t impart meaning, but allow it to surface spontaneously.’1 And Aarsman therefore started to practise photography differently. From then on he hardly ever peered through the viewfinder but held the camera in every imaginable position other than horizontal, shooting photographs from surprising angles, taking shots under the table at press conferences rather than keeping the camera above it. He did anything to prevent the images conveying a superimposed vision, a standpoint. In the long run, of course, even this way of working proved unsatisfactory for Aarsman. ‘After a couple of years, the pictures I was taking – the image and form – started to cloy. They were overly terse. There had to be another way, one that retained the ambiguity but was less intrusive. I went in search of a form you don’t see.’

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Aarsman started taking photographs using a large-format camera and discovered that ambiguity automatically crept into the image, providing the photographer maintained sufficient distance from his subject. Aarsman then threw himself into the unknown. His house had been demolished, so he bought a camper van and set out on a yearlong journey through the Netherlands. ‘I had a whole list of requirements in my head: you shouldn’t be able to detect the photographer and the photos must look formless, as if you were sitting in a train: you look up from your book, glance outside and there lies the world, devoid of allusions to aesthetics, to romanticism. That meant no sunsets, no farmers in overalls, no quaint log fires. I didn’t see a thing for the first two weeks of driving through the Netherlands; it had to look too utterly ordinary. Ten months later I returned to Amsterdam. A photographic travelogue was published with the title Hollandse Taferelen (Dutch Scenes). I was pleased with that book, yet something still rankled me.

I had seen thousands of vistas but hadn’t been able to enjoy a single one. Could that be right? Not for a single instant was my gaze disinterested, always accompanied by questioning oneself: is this worthy of a shot or not? You’re constantly groping around to determine whether there’s something to your liking to be found there. You’re a colonist of the visual world.’ 2

Aarsman had reached a point at which everything that smacked of a theme, a series or a concept met with his disapproval. He would always be standing between the visible reality and the eventual photo; he would always be a contributor to the end result, with his choices, opinions and beliefs. He would never be able to fully dissolve and escape from himself. The inevitable conclusion bore down on him: there was no other way out. If he really wanted to take a step then there was just one possibility: the camera was banished to a cupboard and Aarsman quit being a photographer. >

Hans Aarsman, Anti-racism demonstration on the occasion of the murder of 15-year old Antillian Kerwin Duinmeyer, Amsterdam, 1983, from: Openbare Rituelen (Public Rituals)

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Hans Aarsman, Zuiderkerk, Amsterdam, 1993, from: Aarsman’s Amsterdam

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Cover of Useful Photography #1, photos collected and edited by Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessels and Hans van der Meer

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~ The image is becoming a non-chemical process and it’s losing its physical substance. ~ Though the conclusion that Aarsman drew for himself is the most extreme, self-reflection in the guise of unceasingly exploring the possibilities of the medium employed and a steadfastly critical stance with regard to one’s personal artistry, is intrinsic to artistic practice.

Restlessness, dissatisfaction and curiosity are the drivers of experimentation, innovation and change. Satisfaction soon degenerates into complacency, mere exercises in repetition, superficiality and stasis.

In the inquisitive exploration of reality lies the oft-noted correspondence between science and art. Neither discipline is satisfied with a ‘status quo’, with a straightforward acceptance of things as they are.

Every conclusion, each new fact and each work of art raises a whole plethora of new questions and invites further inquiry and experiment.

Both science and art push back the bounds of our phenomenological horizon, thus expanding the knowledge of the reality surrounding us and inspiring new visions and ideas about ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes this is achieved on the basis of extant and relevant knowledge by carefully formulating objectives and expectations, in order to test these theorems by means of experimentation.

The outcome often matches expectations, but equally intriguing are the occasions when the outcome is unexpected or if coincidence suddenly presents new insights and possibilities.

It is also possible to give chance, or rather the deliberate renunciation of control, a helping hand. The latest book by Philip-Lorca diCorcia is entitled Thousand (see the portfolio the artist compiled from this project elsewhere in this issue) and provides a telling example of this. DiCorcia is renowned for his monumental photos, which could be described as ‘fictionalized documentary’. These works encapsulate the narrative potential within the single image, but for a book this obviously works differently. The importance of the notion that the sequence of images in a book establishes the specific frame of reference that colours the significance of each individual image as well as the presentation as a whole is evident from diCorcia’s earlier book, A Storybook Life (2003), in which each image was painstakingly selected and placed in a carefully considered sequence. In Thousand he turns this principle on its head: the 2,008 pages of this tome present no fewer than 1,000 images, all of them Polaroids snapped by diCorcia over the course of the last 25 years. The sequence in which these 1,000 Polaroids eventually appear in this fist-thick volume was intended not to be the result of meticulous editing, but the work of a specially developed computer programme into which the visual material were entered. The chance order this generated would ultimately determine the book’s layout, though at the last moment diCorcia decided to interfere and play a personal part in the editing process.

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But what is the reason, one might wonder, for his original plan, for this new method of presenting images in a random sequence? Did diCorcia want to surprise himself? To set his own oeuvre, his own artistic past, in a different light? To attain new and unexpected insights into his own work? If that were the case then actually producing and publishing a book was a step that was hardly necessary. Or was the decision to depart from a controlled, more or less linear narrative line inspired by the intuitive and associative way in which our memory works and interlinks images? Perhaps even the assumed expectations of the public played a part, and diCorcia felt the need to do something that did not tally with the image of an artist who controls each and every aspect of the creative process.

Within the creative process, the balance between goal-driven and chance methodologies is definitely as essential as it is precarious.

When interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wolfgang Tillmans, for whom every new constellation of images ranks as an experiment within a broader investigation into the nature of our perceptions and the capabilities of photographic reproduction, said the following: ‘It’s fun to provoke coincidence, to manipulate it, control it. But we should never let the intention become too intentional, otherwise the whole affair becomes rigid. It’s a kind of game that takes place when we photograph people or, really, in all situations where we use a camera. Good things happen when energy is allowed to flow freely; these things happen in the space that lies between acceptance and control. What will I accept? To what extent do I allow life and coincidence into my pictures, and what do I determine and control? I believe that in our times control is valued above passive acceptance. But I happen to regard these two stances as equally powerful. (...) The decisive thing is not to expose the act of manipulating coincidence. But this is a temptation that’s hard to resist because you want to show that you did it yourself – that you were there, that it wasn’t sheer coincidence but, rather, that you willed it. This desire to show authorship in art has a negative effect on very many works.’ 3 Hans Aarsman would wholeheartedly endorse the last of these observations. As far as possible he wanted to eliminate himself as creator, as a photographer. It was all about the image, not its maker. In his opinion there were already too many photographers with egos that exceeded their quality, with no shortage of pretensions and ambitions, a superabundance of views with which they harassed the public. Based on the idea that it is a fine thing to have a personal style and a specific, distinctive signature, they used photography to propagate a personal, subjective perception of reality that by no means did justice to the essence of photography. Aarsman felt there were far too many photographers emulating the art of painting, both in the nature of the image created and the way in which a shot was subsequently given a material form by printing it onto a particular medium in a particular format.

His condemnation of what he terms the ‘artification’ of photography and the ever-higher prices being demanded for photographic prints ties in directly with this. According to Aarsman these developments run completely counter to the essence of photography, which is typified by the ease of reproduction. Too often the photographic image is confused with the material object and the object is often anything but unique, though it does lie at the root of many ideas about signature and authorship. The photograph itself can, in principle, be printed on an unlimited number of media in an infinite number of ways. Besides the fact that, even with the latest printing techniques, such a print comes with no guarantee of everlasting life, Aarsman finds it absurd that a print should be presented as some kind of absolute entity, as an unequivocal truth, and is marketed in an artificially limited edition.

What we are seeing is sooner the rhetoric of pseudo-profundity coupled

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theme introduction

Hans Aarsman in an interview with Hans Arend de Wit, published in the

Dutch magazine Autovisie, no. 1, 2004

with the power of capital and the demands of the market. The crux of photography is in fact the latent immateriality of the image, certainly in a digital world, in tandem with its reproducibility.

When Aarsman was negotiating with the Nederlands Fotomuseum about the acquisition of earlier work by the ex-photographer, he stipulated that private individuals should be able to download his photographs from the museum’s website for free and print these works in A3 format. If they took the trouble to send two prints to the Nederlands Fotomuseum, then in return they would receive one copy signed by Aarsman. The photographer kept the second print for himself in the hope that one day he will be able to stage an exhibition: all the same images on all different kinds of paper printed using all different kinds of printers. This was the ultimate blow to the essence of authorship and the notion of the unique, checked and approved image.

As playful as it is serious, this operation could only be achieved thanks to the radical changes in the media landscape and the inexhaustible opportunities to browse, upload, download, manipulate and print images via the Internet. The profusion of available images is overwhelming and it is almost impossible to gain a handle on this. Instead of a dosed and more or less manageable quantity of visual materials, today we live in the midst of a veritable deluge of images – a cacophony that knows no bounds, order or hierarchy. This has a direct impact on the value and meaning of the individual image in the mediatized visual world of today that should not be underestimated. Perhaps it is here that the fountainhead and rationale of the volume Thousand by Philip-Lorca diCorcia lies. A thousand images in a sequence, whether generated by a computer or not, would simply be too much to take in in one go.

On picking up the book for the second or third time the visual material seen earlier is already floating around in one’s memory, sometimes thrusting itself into our consciousness before being reabsorbed into the amorphous bank of images in our brains.

As a photographer it is well-nigh impossible not to answer for the radical changes that have arisen in the media landscape, and to simply bring forth a new, handsomely printed and autographed work. Even more of that photographic painterliness, Aarsman would say.

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2

Ibid.

3

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Wolfgang Tillmans, The Conversation Series, vol. 6,

Walther Koenig Publishers, Cologne, 2007, pp.103-104 4

Ibid., pp.106-107

In this regard, the portfolios included in this magazine are telling.

Thomas Ruff reflects on the meaning of image and authorship in the digitized world by appropriating, manipulating and transforming images he has found on the Internet and elsewhere, and representing them under his own name. Philip-Lorca diCorcia explores digital techniques to re-order a portion of his visual archives. Stephen Shore enthusiastically exploits the opportunity to produce photographic books at breakneck pace using the iPhoto application, without the intervention of designers, printers or publishers. Besides this providing new impetus to his creative powers, his working under strict conditions regarding the cameras in relation to the format of the photo and the page of the iPhoto book has resulted in him relating to visible reality in new ways. In the early 1990s, although it was no common practice at the time, it seemed like a logical first step for Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin to fully exploit the possibilities of the computer and digital manipulation. They later changed course more than once, shifting their attention from deliberately imperfect images to classical photography and, more recently, trying to escape the idea of a flat surface by collaborating with a sculptor. It demonstrates how these artists are intrigued by adding new and unforeseen layers to their work and working methods. Wolfgang Tillmans continues to be profoundly affected by the conceptual and metaphysical process of creating a meaningful image from a sheet of industrially produced photographic paper, and how meaning becomes attached to it. Or, as he commented in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘In the end, the only option is the hard drive. And because we still experience analog reality, because there is still a correlation between the image and the world as it presents itself – which is really what the word analog means – I can still work with that today without appearing to be nostalgic. (...) On the other hand, I can see how this entire medium – photocopying as well, all this analog-digital material – has reached a point where a lot is disappearing, where the image is becoming a non-chemical process and it’s losing its physical substance.’4

The art of painting has been declared dead and buried on many occasions, but time and again it has risen from the ashes. Now it is said that photography has reached the boundaries of the medium, but this is often the moment when those boundaries are called into question and experimentation becomes a necessity in order to imbue the medium with new sense and significance within a reality that is subject to technological advances at breakneck speed. In that sense it is salutary that, after the tremendous flight that photography has taken within both the artistic discourse and the art market, there should be a moment of reflection and a re-evaluation of the intrinsic quality of photography and its place within the digitized visual world . +

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Jen Bekman’s Gallery Without Walls

by Eric Miles ~ photographs by Stefan Ruiz Jen Bekman’s eponymous gallery, which she opened in 2003, is located in a neighborhood on the edge of what was once New York’s ‘skid row’.

Dubbed NoLita (North of Little Italy) by realtors in the 1990s, and now just a stone’s throw from the recently re-opened New Museum of Contemporary Art (a sleek stainless steel edifice designed by Japanese architects Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA), it is filled with upscale boutiques and restaurants, but is not an area one typically heads to seeking out new photography in galleries. The space the gallery occupies is often described as ‘pocket-sized’, but it belies her outsize, seemingly uncontainable, presence on the web. A first generation Internet pioneer going back to 1994, Bekman’s work as a relentless promoter of emerging photographers and artists is inextricably wed to the online context. In addition to her gallery, she is the founder of a the quarterly online competition Hey, Hot Shot! [www.heyhotshot.com], which has become a vital launch pad for photographers looking to expand their audiences. Equally concerned with new collectors, she is utterly firm in her conviction that buying art should be possible for most anyone. To that end, her most recent initiative, 20x200 [www.20x200.com], makes amazingly high quality ink-jet prints available for prices as low as $20.

Her blog, Personism [www.personism.com], serves as a sort of running commentary on it all. We spoke last fall in a café near her gallery.

Sounds familiar.

I don’t want to go into that conversation [laughs]. When I was working in executive jobs, before the Internet bubble burst, I was making decent money. I wasn’t rich, but I could afford some nice things – furniture, a small collection of pottery. When I was unemployed for 18 months, I started taking inventory, asking myself what had real value for me. And I hadn’t bought any art. I didn’t know that I could. Until I opened the gallery, I didn’t realize that significant pieces of artwork were available for under a thousand dollars. As a professional person in New York City, this is not a huge sum of money. People buy handbags for $1000 all the time!

Your resume is rich with the early history of the Internet – Director of Interactive programming for Disney; executive at Netscape, Chief Creative Officer for an AOL funded streaming video company, Vice President of User Development for Meetup, the list goes on. How did you come to be the proprietor of a gallery?

It was an impulsive decision to open the gallery. I was not involved in the art world at all. I had been incredibly ambitious in my Internet career (I started working in Internet related jobs in 1994, before the Web). I was interested in innovation and the ability to communicate with a lot of people online. In 1996 I started working for a company in San Francisco, Electric Minds, which was the first web-based online community. In 2000, I moved back to New York to be the Chief Creative Officer for a company that allowed users to upload videos onto the Web.

And how did you get collectors to begin to trust you?

Part of my emphasis has been not only emerging artists, but also emerging collectors. I want someone to be able to come into the gallery and respond to work without feeling they need a Masters in Art History to do so. I achieve this in part by what I show and in part by the fact that I encourage interaction – I want people to feel free to ask questions and know that they won’t be seen as being stupid for doing so.

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Departing from the more typical model then – a gallery director or assistant director strikes out on their own with a roster of collectors and a new backer – how did you go about establishing yourself once you opened?

My web presence definitely distinguished me from the start. It wasn’t an afterthought. It was, and remains, an essential component of the gallery’s identity. I don’t think there’s another gallery out there that’s used the web in the same way that I have. Saatchi has an amazing community site for artists, but it isn’t curated [Saatchi Online: www. saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery].

Walk me through a cycle of Hey, Hot Shot! [HHS!]. It has become one of the premier events of its kind for emerging photographers. How would you differentiate it from other juried competitions?

It is a juried competition, but there are several things that differentiate it: It’s connected directly to a New York City gallery and offers an

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~ I want to change the art business!

I think it needs changing. ~

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opportunity not just to show there but also to be represented. The panel is top notch and reviews all the work, not just a pre-screened selection. Also, it is not only the winners who have the opportunity for exposure: In the weeks leading up to the competition deadline, contenders are featured on the HHS! Blog daily. Even being mentioned on the blog can, and does, have an effect on someone’s career. It has also become an incredible resource for emerging photography.

Four times a year, ten winners are chosen who are then included in a group show at the gallery. At the end of the year, four photographers are chosen to be represented by the gallery and participate in a fullscale group show. I may change the format to twice a year instead of four times, though, with shows of five artists instead of ten. My hope is that fewer artists and fewer exhibitions will make it that much more prestigious to be included.

Who is your ideal panelist for Hey Hot Shot! ?

I want a diverse group of people. I have had Lesley Martin, Publisher of Aperture Books; Jörg Colberg, of the photography blog Conscientious; Caterina Fake, Co-Founder of Flickr; Stephen Frailey, the chair of the photo department at the School of Visual Arts Photography; Michael Bierut, one of the principals at Pentagram design; Julia Leach, the former creative director of kate spade [a designer of women’s accessories], who also happens to be a very savvy collector with an interest in emerging artists. I try to change it up. I always have photographers who teach on the panel; I learn a lot from them. Plus I always have past HHS! winners as well. The opportunity to review work with this amazingly engaged bunch of people is constantly energizing.

When you are looking at such an enormous volume of work every few months, how does it affect the way you see current stylistic trends?

We were both at Review Santa Fe last spring [a juried portfolio review event organized annually by Sante Fe Center for Photography], so I’m sure you noticed the ubiquitous presence of ‘sullen adolescents’, to take just one example.

I do get really saturated. I look at more work than just about anyone I know. At times I feel like I’ve seen it all before. Whenever you look at artists’ statements, as well, and people are listing their influences, it always seems as if they are the same: William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, et cetera. The current preoccupation with the vernacular, in a contemporary context is something that I can find to be at turns maddening or incredibly boring.

Can you elaborate on that a bit? How do you see that as a potentially negative tendency?

Well, everyone wants to be Alec Soth [laughs]. Surprise, only Alec is Alec! When you see so much work, it becomes clear that so many people are imitating, even if that imitation isn’t intentional. When dealing with

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vernacular material in particular, what makes a given photo special is such a subtle thing. Think of Eggleston’s tricycle photo [the cover image of William Eggleston’s Guide, his 1976 MoMA exhibition catalogue]. What makes it so great? It is so difficult to put you finger on! This is dangerous territory: to go out and shoot, say, empty swimming pools or gas stations. The optimist in me believes that this might be just young artists going through their paces. Perhaps it’s a rite of passage: you graduate from art school, return to your hometown and photograph empty parking lots and then move on to something else.

Have you tried showing work that departs from the vernacular then?

Is there a counter-tendency you see coming down the road?

I did a show of Nina Berman’s portraits of Iraqi war veterans last summer. Stylistically, she comes from a photojournalism background. It was very interesting for both Nina and I to re-contextualize the work as a fine art project. I’m very interested to see how her work develops now – the experience may well change how she approaches a project.

All of this is to say that a body of work exploring a well-informed idea will ultimately hold up.

The thing that I don’t have the answer to is, ‘what is next’? Though I wavered on doing it, one of the reasons I decided to do Beth Dow’s show [who had a show of platinum palladium prints in November of 2007] is because they reference a classical photographic tradition. Ultimately she is shooting in the present, but in a way that’s different than the prevailing trends. And that is something I’d been looking for: someone using alternative processes – old-fashioned technique – but with a contemporary eye. I find it vexing sometimes that to be contemporary, one has to reject the past.

What are some of your notable Hey Hot Shot! success stories?

Nina Berman, definitely. I was, first of all, amazed and incredibly pleased that she had entered to begin with. She had won the World Press Photo 1st prize for Portraits earlier in the year; she’s a seasoned photographer with an impressive resume. After she participated in the spring group show, there was a hastily planned solo show of the Purple Hearts series that was meant to be quite brief. That exhibition received a prominently placed rave review from The New York Times that literally touched off an amazing array of worldwide coverage. The show was front-page news in prominent newspapers across Europe, in Korea, and Japan. We did TV and radio interviews; we placed work in museum collections. Nina herself said that it was putting the work in a fine art context that did it. She has been showing work from this series, mostly in a non-profit context, for a while. It had received some positive attention, but nothing like what we experienced at the gallery this summer.

Brad Moore, who exhibited in the same season that Nina did, had a solo show open in Chelsea in September. The gallery owner found

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How do you convince an artist that selling their work for as little as $20 will benefit them?

I’ve worked very hard to make 20x200 make sense. The way I explain it to an artist is that we’re dealing with a single image, which is not unlike doing a postcard mailing, only better, because you are getting paid for it.

They are receiving publicity by being featured on the site and getting work into the hands of more than two hundred people who will be talking about it, perhaps buying $200 or $2000 prints. I am not interested in creating a stable of artists who are turning out $20 prints! I am interested in nurturing artists whose work is on a path to selling for much more, or is already there. Taking part in 20x200 is a one-time thing. Again, the spirit of the project is that everybody should be able to buy art.

So as with Hey, Hot Shot! you are selling photographers on exposure, traffic, and the opportunity for publicity? Are you the sole curator?

Yes, it’s exposure and it’s also the prestige of being chosen to take part in the project. Anybody can sell $20 prints. But I’ve had the gallery for five years now, established a reputation: as a gallerist, as a curator and as something of a renegade.

him via Hey, Hot Shot! James Deavin, who showed in the first year of the competition, had one of the photos he showed picked up by Harper’s Magazine. His career has been on the rise ever since: he just finished a big commission for the Tate in London. I’ve sold a great deal of his work, through the gallery and at art fairs.

20x200 is your most recent venture. Editions of two hundred ink jet prints – photographs but also other graphic work – are sold for the incredibly low price of $20. Two smaller editions in larger sizes in editions of twenty and two are sold for $200 and $2000 respectively.

What is the logic behind the project?

In the art world an edition of 200 is big; in the mass market, however, to limit something to 200 – to be able to pay $20 for something that only 199 other people are going to own – is incredibly special. And because the website drives an enormous amount of traffic, I can sell-out an edition of 200. 20x200 was just an idea last January. I knew what I wanted it to look like; I enlisted a bunch of great people; I told the design firm, Little Jacket: I want a logo that is as good as the FedEx logo! That was my standard, and I feel like they met it. 20x200 came to fruition based on my track record. The people who worked with me really believed in the ethos behind it, and knew that I was serious about making it happen.

What allows you to sell work for such a low price?

The entire project is based on a concept I am fascinated with – that technology has created the means for high-quality mass production.

Simple business rules of volume make it possible to minimize costs.

Again, I set a preposterously high standard here – I need the prints to be high quality, and I need them produced quickly for a very low price.

I couldn’t compromise – as a gallerist, it’s important to me that the work is well done.

It took some time, but I was able to find a printer, Eric Recktenwald, who gets it and wants to see the idea work. Eric’s a fine art printer who makes exhibition quality prints. The margins are almost impossibly slim for the editions of 200 – for all of us, not just the printer. But they improve at the larger sizes, which are selling very well since they are still amazingly affordable.

The prints are all worth more than they cost – it’s ridiculous that you can get a print of this quality for so little, but it’s supposed to be like that. Everyone involved in the project believes that more people will buy art once they discover the pleasure of collecting.

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Would you say there is something of an anti-elitist stance implicit in this emphasis on approachability and accessibility? Where do you stand, for instance, in relation to established Chelsea galleries?

If you operate on the assumption that we are a consumer driven culture, buying art from an emerging artist is about the most authentic experience you can have within the realm of consumerism. You have this thing in your home that becomes attached to a certain part of your life, to your personal history. I don’t believe that only very wealthy people should be allowed to have this experience. There are many people making art who want to sell it. And a lot of people making great art don’t have galleries or any other means to find their markets. Why not connect the people who want it with the people who make it? It is so obvious.

Further, I don’t think you have to be mediocre to reach a broad audience. Look at the way that some clothing designers have done lines for the mass-market – Izaac Mizrahi designing for Target. There is a lot more permeability now, in terms of class and taste. I don’t want to merely be the affordable, acceptable art gallery. My program on the whole is rigorous; I take risks. I don’t necessarily think the ideas that I have are particularly innovative; they are simply ones that others have given up on. As I said to Raul Gutierrez, the first person who signed up to help build 20x200, ‘I want to change the art business!’ He was skeptical, but that is what I want to do. I think it needs changing. + Stefan Ruiz (San Francisco, USA, 1964) studied painting and scultpure at UC Santa Cruz and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy. He took up photography while in West Africa, documenting Islam’s influence on traditional West African Art, for which he won a scholarship from the Color Purple Foundation in 1990. He worked at San Quentin State Prison from 1992-1999, teaching art to inmates, including prisoners on death row. Ruiz has worked editorially for magazines including Colors (of which he was Creative Director in 2003-04), The New York Times Magazine, Details, Wallpaper and Rolling Stone. His award winning advertising photography includes campaigns for Caterpillar, Camper, Diesel and Air France. His work has been exhibited at the Havana Biennial (2003), Photo Espana, Madrid (2003) en Les Rencontres d’Arles (2005), among other venues. In 2006 Chris Boot published his first monograph, People. Stefan Ruiz lives in New York.

Eric Miles is a New York based writer and bookseller specializing in photographic literature. He is director of the rare book division for photo–eye Books&Prints (see: www.photoeye.com/auctions).

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Stephen Shore 11-9-2006

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Stephen Shore

This portfolio presents a revised edition of Stephen Shore’s iPhoto book 11-9-2006 that was printed in November 2006.

The photographic career of Stephen Shore (New York, USA, 1947) began when he was fourteen and presented his photos to the curator of photography at the MoMA in New York, Edward Steichen, who bought three of his works. At the age of seventeen Shore met Andy Warhol and started documenting the Factory and surroundings. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore was the second living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1972 he started photographing the American landscape during many cross country road trips. Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited and has influenced generations of photographers, especially because of his pioneering use of colour and vernacular imagery. He has had solo exhibitions at the MoMA in New York; George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; Art Institute, Chicago and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, among other venues. In 2007 his solo exhibition The Biographical Landscape was presented at the International Center of Photography in New York. In 1982 he was appointed Director of the Photography Program at Bard College in New York, where he has been the Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts since 1996. His work is represented in major public

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collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, Whitney Museum and MoMA, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; SF MOMA, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Shore published various groundbreaking photobooks and some of them have been reprinted in revised editions, such as American Surfaces, Uncommon Places and The Nature of Photographs. A comprehensive monograph will be published by Phaidon in February 2008. In 2006 Stephen Shore was the first guest editor of a biannual series called Witness, published in the US by the non-profit organisation Joy of Giving Something and Nazraeli Press. In this issue, Shore talks at length about his fascination for new technological developments such as iPhoto books and printing-on-demand, and the effect these have on his own work. Stephen Shore is represented by 303 Gallery in New York.

Philip Gefter is a Senior Picture Editor and photography reviewer for The New York Times, and the newspaper’s former Page One Picture Editor. Before coming to The New York Times in 1992 he was picture editor at Fortune, Geo, Aperture, the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine and Colors magazine.

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West Ninth Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974 © Stephen Shore, courtesy 303 Gallery, NY

Sometimes One Thing Has Everything To Do With the Other

by Philip Gefter

Stephen Shore, a pioneer of color photography, is perhaps best known for his series of painstakingly refined documentary pictures of the retail architecture, cars, signage, and other spoors of 1970s American vernacular culture. For the last four years, he has been making artists’ books. Sixty-five books, so far, in editions of twenty.

The Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a full set, and expects to continue acquiring each new one he produces.

‘I love books,’ Shore said during a recent visit I made to his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. ‘I love looking at photographs in books.

Until about 20 years ago when people started making very large photographs a book could be a facsimile of the pictures, and the surface of reproduction was not that dissimilar to that of the actual photograph.

There was less translation and distortion that there is now. A large and textured Anselm Kiefer does not translate well in books.’

Stephen Shore makes his artists’ books by utilizing an Apple based software technology, iPhoto, on his computer desktop, with which he is able to edit his own pictures, format the pages, and upload the files directly to Apple. The book arrives at his door by FedEx four or five days later, cloth bound, with the dozen or so images printed in the four-color offset method on acid-free coated paper. ‘The ease with which I can make these books is delightful and thrilling,’ he says.

‘While these print-on-demand services might have been intended to provide snapshooters a digital photo album, they offer artists the means of producing limited edition photographic books.’

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His iPhoto books tend to fall into general groupings that represent an exploration of any number of ideas, some of which have iterations in earlier bodies of his work. Shore’s only overarching organizing principle dictates that each book is comprised of pictures made in a single day.

One such example is his banner headline series. When The New York Times runs a headline across the entire six column front page, it signals news of historic importance. This, in turn, triggers Shore to set aside the day to make a series of photographs. The resulting book includes the front page with the banner headline and presents the pictures he took that day in tandem with, or in counterpoint to, the news.

His book, 11-9-2006, was made on the day The New York Times reported the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense: ‘RUMSFELD RESIGNS, AND BUSH PLEDGES TO WORK WITH A DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY.’ Shore took pictures throughout the day of fauna and flora in his backyard. His pictures may seem, at first, to have nothing to do with the reported news, but he explains the genesis of the idea for his banner headline series by recalling an experience he had while visiting Europe as a young man in 1970. It was during the height of the Vietnam War and he would read reports in the International Herald Tribune about events going on in the United States.

Nixon announced he was sending troops to Cambodia. Anti-war demonstrations erupted throughout the U.S. and The National Guard shot and killed student protesters at Kent State University. It seemed cataclysmic to Shore, and, yet, when he returned home, life as he knew it in the United States had not changed at all.

The International Herald Tribune had reported newsworthy events, he said, but ‘it did not report the small details that, in fact, make up life.

I was seeing the bare skeleton of events without the flesh, without the connective tissue. By this, I don’t simply mean that the paper was not reporting good news. I mean that most of what makes up the continuity of life would fall below any newspaper’s radar screen. The paper was not reporting that the sun rose at 5:52 am as predicted; that Newton’s laws of gravitation were still operable, at least on the scale accessible to my own senses.’

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Amarillo, Texas, August 1973 © Stephen Shore, courtesy 303 Gallery, NY

On the day of the Rumsfeld headline, Shore turned to things close to home. ‘The news tells a certain story, but my meadow is thriving with November colors they won’t report in the Times, nor should they, but it is in fact part of the ongoing nature of life that day and every day.’

On the day following the Rumsfeld news, another banner headline reported that the Democrats won the U.S. Senate. The book Shore made, 11-10-06, is comprised of his scans of clippings from that day’s newspapers: the plays listed on Broadway; an advertisement for Borat, the movie; houses for rent; cars for sale; in effect, examples of what routine life was like on a commonplace level while news of historic significance marked the day.

The images in Shore’s books are usually, but not always, photographs he has taken for the purpose of the book. Sometimes, as in 11-10-06, he appropriates existing material, whether printed matter, surveillance imagery streamed on-line, or his own archival pictures, to address an idea for a book.

Some of Shore’s iPhoto books are given the name of the date on which the pictures inside were made; others are given the name of the place in which Shore took the pictures. Others, still, are given a name and a date, as in this present-day hieroglyphic: AA 105, 2-2-04. This book presents photographs Shore made from his window seat on American Airlines Flight 105 as it began its descent into New York’s Kennedy Airport. The book is a sequence in which the shadow of the plane on the ground, at first barely perceptible, grows bigger in each picture. Here is a unique narrative that describes the landing of a com

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mercial airline flight as perceived from inside the plane. The sequence is as factual as it is metaphysical, at once commonplace and dramatic.

We turn the pages to see whether or not the plane landed safely, but the record itself also exemplifies the nature of time, distance, gravity, and perception – in effect, various laws of physics. The book does all of that with deadpan humor and a very light touch.

To spend time looking through the groupings of Shore’s artists’ books is to begin to understand the large conceptual ideas that underlie the earnest masquerade of simple populism with which the artist is exploring, well, the work of art in the age of mechanical (okay, technological) reproduction. While the iPhoto book is, without question, a contemporary innovation, Shore has taken an ordinary, accessible, utilitarian product and explored its various properties with the intentions of a conceptual artist.

This is not the first time he has utilized populist forms in his work.

In 1971, during a stay with friends in Amarillo, Texas, he assumed the role of a professional photographer who had been commissioned by the city to document the local sites. His collection of picture postcards became the vernacular reference. He photographed the local hospital, a hotel, a courthouse, the Civic Center, and Main Street. He then had the images printed on postcards in an edition of 5,600. On the back of each one, he identified the building, but not the city and state.

Thus, in a gag of high concept, he eliminated the very point of the postcard as proof of having been there.

The generic representation of buildings on the picture postcard was Shore’s exploration of that populist form. He was less interested in representing Amarillo, Texas than in the deliberate and methodical act of documentation itself. ‘Shore makes it clear that the conventions of the profession are as much a part of his process as the technical constraints of production,’ Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen writes about the Amarillo postcard project in an essay in Uncommon Places, a book of Shore’s photographs.

Shore’s 1972 series, American Surfaces, includes thousands of 3x5-inch snapshots of simple things – a radio next to his bed, a toilet,

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a plate of eggs, an open book, a store front. This was an obsessive visual record of his daily experience as he traveled across the country.

Once again, he employed a populist form, the standard Kodak 3x5 inch format film, marketed ostensibly for the amateur, or the tourist, for the family snapshot.

In 1973, on his first trip for Uncommon Places, during which he traveled thousands of miles across the United States, Shore made daily lists of what he ate, how long he drove, what he saw on television or at the movies, how many photographs he took and the number of Amarillo, Texas postcards he surreptitiously distributed in drug stores and truck stops along the way. This meticulous cataloguing derived as much from conceptual art of the 1960s as it did from Shore’s personal artistic concerns.

Asked to consider whether several bodies of his work – the Amarillo, Texas postcard project, American Surfaces, and the recent iPhoto books – fall into a trajectory that has its roots in the Fluxus movement and even Dada before it, Stephen Shore acknowledged that he was looking at conceptual art in the late 1960s. ‘Dennis Oppenheim, Peter Hutchinson, Christo, Richard Long. I was interested in Dada. I was impressed by John Coplans’ book, Serial Imagery. I was blown away by Ed Ruscha’s work when I first saw it in 1968.’

A strain throughout Shore’s work certainly draws on the Fluxus idea of anti-art or the do-it-yourself aesthetic. The playful style of Fluxus artists gave them a reputation early on for being pranksters, and, decidedly, Shore’s Amarillo, Texas postcard project has many of

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the characteristics of Fluxus art: the use of non-aesthetic utilitarian materials; the idea of the performed ‘event,’ in this case the act of distributing the postcards throughout the country; the deadpan presentation of buildings without origin on postcards with no real meaning and purpose. On one level, it was a practical joke on the form, if any local citizen who came across them bothered to take notice.

During my visit to Shore’s studio, he slipped one particular iPhoto book in front of me, entitled The Marula Tree. First, there is a written explanation of the tree, followed by pictures with written descriptions of, respectively, the bark of the tree, the branchings, the fruit it yields, an elephant eating the fruit off the tree, and a bottle of the liqueur made from the fruit of the tree. All the information is presented simply, as if in a textbook made for a grammar school student – or, perhaps, for an alien being oriented to the planet.

Then, with typical understatement, Shore handed me what seemed like a companion book, entitled The Fire Wood Tree. It followed the same format with word and image descriptions of the various components of that tree. Closing the second book, I was aware that there was a catch, some kind of riddle about which I felt utterly clueless. I looked at him and waited for an explanation. ‘The Marula Tree is factual and really exists,’ he said. ‘But The Firewood Tree is a fiction, completely made up.’

Shore’s early diaries, both written and photographic, held for him a fascination with the way ‘certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or an activity,’ he has said. The iPhoto books seem to extend the ideas in American Surfaces, for example, his serialized self-portrait composed of visual facts that, at the time, seemed to emulate the Warholian practise of repetition as a visual monotone, bringing the ‘itness’ of something, its actuality, to the surface. The iPhoto books enable Shore to explore the anatomy of fact and its relationship to immediate experience.

Which brings me back to the playfulness of the Fluxus movement, or the whimsy with which Dada thumbed its nose at convention. There is a strain of humor running through so much of Shore’s work, exemplified in the very fact of The Marula Tree, as compared with the masked fiction of Fire Wood Tree. In terms of the banner headline book, 11-9-06, it is undoubtedly a large conceptual idea to make a personal and intimate photographic chronicle of daily life as a counterpoint to the day’s historic news, but somewhere in Shore’s serious intentions hovers an antic impulse to juxtapose Rumsfeld’s resignation with the tangle of fauna in the artist’s backyard. All of a sudden, one thing has everything to do with the other. +

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Wolfgang Tillmans Lighter / Manual

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Wolfgang Tillmans

List of works (in order of appearance): Page 1: Studio view of Lighter 23, 2007 Page 2-3: truth study center, Hannover, Table 19, 2007 Page 4: Installation view of Lighter 32, 2007, Atair, Andrea Rosen Gallery,

NY, 2007

Page 5: truth study center, Hannover, Table 25, 2007 Page 6-7: Installation view, Atair, Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY, 2007 / truth study center, Hannover, Table 22, 2007 / Studio view of Lighter 26, Lighter 27,

Lighter 24, 2007

Page 8: Studio view of Lighter 31, 2007 Page 9: Lighter 33, 2007 Page 11: Lighter 22, 2007 Page 12: Lighter 30, 2007 Page 13: Installation view, Atair, Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY, 2007 Page 14: Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions, Hirschhorn Museum and

Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, 2007

Page 15: Lighter 9, 2007 Page 16: Studio view of Lighter 27, 2007 All images: © Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne / Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York / Maureen Paley, London

Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, Germany, 1968) began photographing seriously when he lived in Hamburg at the end of the 1980s, exhibiting his work in cafes and bars. He became involved in the local rave scene and started documenting this emerging subculture. His career took off when his pictures, that look like snapshots but are in fact carefully staged interpretations, were published in magazines such as iD in the beginning of the 1990s and brought him international acclaim. He studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in

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Bournemouth from 1990 to 1992, and lived in London, New York and Berlin in the following years. He has been based in London since 1996.

Tillmans had solo shows at the Kunsthalle Zürich; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli; Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Tate Modern in London, among other venues. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 2000, at that time the first photographer and foreign artist to receive this prestigious award. He received widespread acclaim for the way he exhibits his images in carefully constructed wall installations, mixing inkjet prints, photographs and pages from magazines, demonstrating the close relation of art and publishing in his work. A major survey exhibition travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington in 2006 and 2007. Other major solo shows were held at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Kunstverein Munich and Camera Austria in 2007. In 2008 he will have solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others. Well over twenty artist’s books, catalogues and monographs have been published of his work. Walther Koenig published his latest artist’s book Manual in 2007, and an extensive catalogue was published on the occasion of the travelling exhibition in the US earlier this year. See www. tillmans.co.uk for more information. Wolfgang Tillmans is represented by Maureen Paley in London, Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York.

Lisa Le Feuvre is Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Maritime Museum in London and teaches on the postgraduate Curatorial programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has curated exhibitions of Lawrence Weiner and Dan Holdsworth, among others.

She writes regularly on contemporary art.

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Searching for Doubt

by Lisa Le Feuvre

‘I think photography has a lot to do with sculpture – because it is three-dimensional and because it depicts reality’ (Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans) 1 In 1978 the late John Szarkowski curated the exhibition Mirrors and Windows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, proposing that photographs operate as either subjective pictures of the world or descriptive facts about the world. The medium of photography has a very particular critical urgency in its, assumed, ability to directly depict reality. Of course it is not quite that simple. Observation is never neutral; truth is a contested story told by unreliable narrators. Szarkowski claimed that photographs actually explain very little, instead they address a view of the world from a particular vantage point – that is where their power lies. To describe something, as Isa Genzken does above, as both three-dimensional and a depicter of reality is to launch into a host of interesting difficulties. Such questions are entangled in Wolfgang Tillmans’ artistic practice.

Here in the portfolio Lighter / Manual, that was compiled by the artist especially for Foam Magazine, points both to Tillmans’ three-dimensional pictures, known under the title of Lighter, and to his 2007 publication, Manual. Here both bodies of work fuse together in a new combination, presenting concerns that return, collide and reorientate in the past, present and future. On these pages installation images of artworks become artworks themselves, flat representations of object-photographs continue to assert their three-dimensionality, studio views sit beside exhibition views and, most importantly, ideas point both here and elsewhere while, paradoxically, each image (and image within image) operates as something that is singular and part of a continuous whole. As Tillmans’ 2003 solo exhibition at Tate stated in its title: if one thing matters, everything matters.

In Manual, indeed everything matters. Tillmans’ partisan eye calls for the viewer of these pages to tune in their own subjective attention. Like all of his publications and exhibition installations, in Manual the artist carefully works on the design, communicating a movement through his practice as a whole. Photographed moments, found material, installation shots and newspaper clippings reveal a set of observations of the surrounding world. A tear-out from Lorraine Hansberry’s novel A Raisin in the Sun; reports on President Mbeki’s response to HIV/AIDS; photographs of advertisements; planes of colour distorted by photocopied reproduction; an okapi; an empty diary for a Sunday in April; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; stairs of an art school; friends hot and sweaty late at night. Images shift scale, orientation, date of creation and size. Each constellation is an experiment into how images can engage, question and re-propose perception. Tillmans’ artistic practice develops, returns, rebukes and identifies doubts working over time, with each single image feeding back into a wider network of references both internal and external to his own work. Each individual element operates as a pause in a line of

Lutz & Alex, sitting in the trees, 1992 © Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne / Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York / Maureen Paley, London

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vision; Tillmans encourages us to stop and look for a moment, to ‘slowdown’ 2 the act of seeing. An inexhaustible search for the possibilities of interrogating the world fills his wandering vision.

What, though, is this matter of reality that Genzken alludes to at the top of this page? In the 2005 publication that accompanied the exhibition How to Make Things Public at ZKM Karlsruhe, the sociologist of science Bruno Latour suggests a way of rethinking politics as a concern for things in a way that seems pertinent to Tillmans’ complex and erudite artistic practice. Latour begins his text: ‘Some conjunctions of planets are so ominous, astrologers used to say, that it seems safer to stay at home in bed and wait until Heaven sends a more auspicious message. It’s probably the same with political conjunctions. They are presently so hopeless that it seems prudent to stay as far away as possible from anything political and to wait for the passing away of all the present leaders, terrorists, commentators and buffoons who strut about the public stage. Astrology, however, is as precarious an art as political science; behind the nefarious conjunctions of hapless stars, other much dimmer alignments might be worth pondering.’ 3

He goes on to propose that it is ‘matters-of-concern’ that connect individuals, arguing that it is not consensus, or an agreement, of facts that links people, rather it is a shared concern built on disagreement, contradictory passion and speculation. The difference between facts and concerns are crucial here – for Latour, to turn to concern is to engage with possible politics. Concern embraces complicated entanglements with doubt. Latour states that ‘reality is not defined by matters of fact.

Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical,

very political renderings of concern.’ 4 Paying attention to the concerns rather than the facts can move closer to this matter of reality.

Tillmans presents us with matters-of-concern, often paying atten tion to the ‘dimmer alignments’. There is no dogma here, no proposals for truth – his ever-expanding gatherings of ideas present observations, often addressing the details of the politics of conduct. Pages 2, 3 and 5 of Lighter / Manual show table-top displays of images from the project truth study center. This fictitious institution gathers material from a variety of printed sources displayed in a museological format that Tillmans initially used in public in his first institutional exhibition at Portikus in 1995. He has described this display as developing out of the very functional use of tables in his studio to enable the image to move into place within its own terms and to open up into a network of relationships when preparing an exhibition or publication. The presentation recalls Marcel Broodthaers’ gathering of material in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles that interrogated the objectification of reality and the endemic nature of misunderstanding through the figure of the eagle. Tillmans describes how ‘the tables of the truth study center became a way to think about perception and truth. I think people who claim “absolute truth” for themselves are the greatest problem of our time’5. On each table groupings of photographs, clippings, magazines and photocopies propose observations on the world and open them to interpretation. Each time the work is shown it changes according to the context of the location and to shifts in the particularities of the present, slipping between general and specific, objective and abstract modes of address.

The truth study center challenges the possession of truth: rather than proffering a definitive narrative, the work points to claims on truth. It also makes connections between who it is that asserts codes of belief – for example in one presentation of the work links are made within the operations of an advertising company that chooses to work

Arkadia I, 1996 © Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne / Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York / Maureen Paley, London

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for right-wing groups, insurance companies and alcoholic drinks targeted at the youth market. Passing no judgement, the presentation merely observes. The laying bare of choices of conduct is a call to pay attention. ‘Attentiveness’ 6 is a word that Tillmans uses often; in one interview he notes that paying attention can move one from understanding the world in Manichean terms, highlighting ‘the borders between facts and absolute truths’ 7. Tillmans’ practice is entangled in doubt – failures and unknowingness are put to a productive use, capturing this thing called reality.

In the aforementioned conversation extract, Isa Genzken describes her interest in the photograph as also relating to its three-dimensionality. In modernist medium-led terms, this can be read as alluding to sculpture rather than painting. The Lighter series consist of threedimensional photographs, but the allusion here is also to something less literal. The artist Lawrence Weiner, who predominantly uses language traced on to surfaces as his medium, refers to his artworks as sculptures in spite of their flatness. He states that they operate as sculptures at the moment they are received by a viewer as one has a visual and physical relationship to the work – be it on the page, wall, floor or any other surface. Weiner uses language to represent material relationships in the world in as objective a manner as possible, in doing so initiating engagements with the myths of objectivity that we use to understand our place in the world. Weiner describes how: ‘The function of art is to present an empirical reality. Something that one human being has noticed about the relationship between material objects to each other, or the relationship of material objects to human beings, that they present to another person who makes a metaphor.’ 8

Metaphor is not inherent to the artwork: it is the receiver of the work who projects their own subjective, and often metaphorical, readings.

For Weiner, the artwork is a matter-of-concern that he identifies using observation and experiment to interrogate the very subjectivities that create objectivity. He says: ‘For me, [my interest in materials] seems to be now that art essentially is the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings’ 9. In both Tillmans’ and Weiner’s practices, it is not just what one sees but also how one sees and what one understands that is important. A fundamental interest in capturing reality drives human beings to find frameworks for understanding that are then applied to the world – for example map-making or time. Astronomy, an early fascination of the young Tillmans, is another way that we do this. The lack of facts we have about the place of the world itself drives the desire to go beyond our earth-bound limits – be it in science fiction, space travel or belief systems. The ever-elusive concept of reality pushes us to look to the limits of our understanding and to celebrate what is not known.

Tillmans demands attention to be paid: by questioning the details of what surrounds us, be it in the light reflecting from a surface, the transit of Venus, a mediated communication of our place in the world or a personal moment of unselfconsciousness, Tillmans shows us that by searching, possibilities of perception can be expanded. +

Notes: 1

Genzken, Isa, ‘A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans’ in: Isa Genzken,

London, Phaidon (2006), p.131 2

Peitz, D. Wolfgang Tillmans in conversation with Dirk Peitz, Süddeutsche

Zeitung, Munich, February 20, 2007, available in English online at www.signandsight.com.

3

Latour, Bruno, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things

Public’, in B. Latour and Peter Weibel, Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press (2005), p.4 4

Latour, B., ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to

Matters of Concern’, in Critical Inquiry (30, 2004), p.232 5

Peitz, D., see note 2

6

Tillmans, W. & Obrist, H.U., Wolfgang Tillmans Hans Ulrich Obrist,

The Conversation Series vol.6, Cologne, Walther Koenig (2007), p.88 7

see note 6, p.82

8

Weiner, L., ‘The Possibility of Language Functioning as a Representation

of Non Metaphorical Reality, i.e. Art’, in G. Williams, Lawrence Weiner, Phaidon (1997) 9

Weiner, L., Writing and Interviews with Lawrence Weiner 1968 - 2003,

Hatje Cantz (2004), p.123

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Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin Photographs and Collaborative Works

Page One: Lou Doillon, Pirelli Calendar, 2006 Page Two: ME#3, 1998 Page Three: ME#11, 1998 Page Four: Joe, 2006 Page Five: Clint Eastwood - New York Times Magazine, 2005 Page Six-Seven: Raquel Zimmerman – Self Service, 2006 Page Eight-Nine: The Séance, in collaboration with Eugène van

Lamsweerde, 2006 Page Ten: Exclamation Mark, 2005 Page Eleven: Explode, in collaboration with Eugène van

Lamsweerde, 2005 Page Twelve: Christy Turlington – Invitation for Balenciaga,

in collaboration with M/M Paris, 2002 Page Thirteen: Delfine – Ad Campaign for Balenciaga, in

collaboration with M/M Paris, 2001 Page Fourteen: Shalom Harlow, V Magazine, 2007 Page Fifteen: Joan via Inez - Theater Group

Mugmetdegoudentand, 2005 Page Sixteen: Shalom, Self Service, 2006 © Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, NY

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Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin

Inez van Lamsweerde (1963) and Vinoodh Matadin (1961) met each other in 1986. They have been collaborating as a creative duo since the early 1990s and currently live in New York with their son, Charles. They were among the first to experiment with the creative possibilities of digital imaging technology, at a time when grunge was the predominant style in fashion magazines. They have been innovating fashion photography with their signature style of highly seductive images combined with unexpected and provocative narratives. After a groundbreaking series in The Face in 1994, their photographs have been published in a range of magazines including American Vogue, Paris Vogue, W Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Visionaire, Self Service, Vogue Homme and The New York Times Magazine. They have been shooting advertising campaigns for the most prestigious fashion brands including Vivienne Westwood, Calvin Klein, Balenciaga, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Roberto Cavalli, Stella McCartney, Helmut Lang, Yohji Yamamoto and Yves Saint Laurent, and are represented worldwide for their commercial work by Art + Commerce in New York.

Their work has been been exhibited in galleries and museums, amongst them being the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Whitney Museum, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Maison Européenne

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de la Photographie, Paris and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. A major survey exhibition was on view at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands in 2000. In 2006 their work was included in The Kate Show, curated

by Olivier Zahm and Rita Ackermann at Foam, where they exhibited works made in collaboration with Inez’ uncle, the sculptor Eugène van Lamsweerde. This collaboration still continues on to today. For their fine art photography and installations, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin are represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, where they have held various exhibitions, including their widely discussed shows, The Now people Part One: Paradise (2003-04) and Part Two: Life on Earth (2005). A two-volume set of books entitled Pretty Much Everything (Vol. 1 and 2), conceived in close collaboration with their longstanding creative partners, designers M/M (Paris), is expected to be published by Steidl/Editions 7L in the near future.

Penny Martin is Editor-in-Chief of SHOWstudio, the online fashion broadcasting company led by Nick Knight. She is a curator and writer on fashion and photography, and contributes to magazines such as Beaux Arts, Blueprint, Contemporary, Frieze, i-D, Numero and the UK and Japanese Vogue.

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Well Basically... – Zonna & Kim, The Face, 1994, © Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, NY

The Politics of Beauty ~ An interview with Inez van Lamsweerde

by Penny Martin

Over the past fifteen years Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin have achieved what almost no other fashion photographer has: success both in the commercial field and in the art world. Whilst the extreme beauty, stylistic refinement and intellectual curiosity of their virtuoso fashion editorial has consistently positioned the couple among the industry’s most progressive talents – earning them a host of fashion’s most prestigious advertising campaigns – those same creative commitments also characterize a rigorous and respected art practice, represented by the mighty gallerist Matthew Marks. The key to this dual success is in not attempting to separate the two strands – images they create in the commercial context are often carried over into the artwork – but rather through acknowledging this recontextualisation as part of their art. Crucially, van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s explicit methodology provides an overarching, interpretative structure in which to pursue a variety of diverse projects as part of one, overarching aesthetic statement: from their ongoing collaboration with Inez’s uncle, the sculptor Eugène van Lamsweerde to their richly experimental work with the art directors M/M (Paris). In this rare interview, Inez van Lamsweerde sheds light on this process of creating secondary meanings for existing imagery, her antipathy for the exhibition form, the effect of digital image capture on her studio practice and her photographic agenda to reunite the spiritual and political worlds.

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The work in this portfolio is drawn from across the past seven years of your career. What does the selection represent?

The sequence has a darkness in it. For me it has slightly religious or perhaps spiritual connotations. It also shows that horror and beauty are closely connected for us.

There is a strong connection with the work you showed in your two

exhibitions at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, The Now People, Part One: Paradise (2003-04) and Part Two: Life on Earth (2005), especially the latter.

By that show, we were kind of done with photography as a ‘photograph on the wall’. We were also not so excited by what other people were doing. Usually, my work is a reaction to what I see around me, either in the art world or any other cultural world. Usually, I feel there is a dialogue between other artists and myself. But three years ago, I didn’t want to talk to anybody!

So we had to find another idea. Vinoodh and I talked with my uncle, Eugène van Lamsweerde, who is a sculptor living in France. Since he was a young artist, he has been heavily influenced by Joseph Beuys and that more spiritual, spatial approach clicked with us, so we started collaborating. The first thing we did together was The Endless Head, a portrait of Amanda Harlech (muse to Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel) that we later showed in multiple variations as part of The Séance [at Studio

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Final Fantasy – Wendy, 1993 © Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, NY

van Dusseldorp in Tilburg, NL] in 2006. We were all very inspired by that picture’s inward quality, and wanted to visualize the head’s thoughts: the energy lines that connect it to other people. At the show in Holland, there were about 13 or 14 pieces, all with those metal line drawings coming from the photographic surface; even piercing it. The idea of that room was to be like a séance where all the energy, thoughts, and feelings were materialized.

Is the spiritual darkness you mention something internal or social?

The idea of The Now People harked back to the period in the late 1960s when spiritual life was connected to political life and all the young people were involved. Now I don’t know that many young people that are politically involved. Nor do I know that many that are involved in spiritual activity. It seems as if our culture has moved away from those two elements being considered important to the generation below me. What I would love to achieve is for a certain spiritual or political awareness to become cool again, without it requiring an MTV-style aesthetic to appeal.

You don’t deal with politics explicitly in the subject matter of your images, some of which are originally produced in a commercial context and then re-appropriated for exhibitions or published portfolios.

Yes, in my head, this sequence of images ‘reads’ as political. The meaning is achieved when the images are placed together. My experience is that people pick up different things from these combinations. The idea of showing things that are related to death is so attached to imagery from various underground movements, where everyone who wants to rebel uses a skull as a symbol.

As in the portrait of Joe McKenna?

Yes, and in the work titled Exclamation Mark (2005), where the dot is the skull and the stroke above it is a ridiculous portrait of myself, grafted onto a man’s body.

Those images are quite Baroque.

The question was how to combine Punk with Baroque, basically. Since, in my head, Punk was the last political youth movement, I drew a lot of

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inspiration from its imagery. In terms of speaking to young people that street element was important with my uncle, because he uses scrap metal: its roughness and the ‘found’ element of metal piercing and extending from the photograph is key. We also make silkscreen prints onto canvas for a rougher visual quality.

Can you explain the final ‘horror’ image, outside the café?

That was done for Self Service [French style magazine]. It’s someone in complete horror of what’s going on in the world today. It has a feeling of wanting to be heard, as in a strike or a demonstration. In the US, whenever people do take to the streets and start protesting, nobody in the government really listens. It’s so sad because of course I remember in the 1970s, all the anti-nuclear protesters, how they did influence everybody. But now there is a belief that the actions and protests of the people have no influence in the worlds of politics.

The art directors M/M (Paris), with whom you collaborated on the portraits of Christy and Delfine for Balenciaga (2001), are vehement in rejecting the modernist principle that all art work should start from scratch. Does your method of re-using past work in exhibitions and layouts reflect that you share their outlook?

Yes, we do share that approach. Elements keep reoccurring. That’s why it’s hard for me to live in the art world only. The show is such a momentary projection of what’s in your head at that time. I never see it as a final stage.

So what does feel definitive?

The fashion work.

That’s extraordinary! There are so many fashion image-makers striving for affirmation in the opposite direction. At times, fashion seems somehow more honorable about the commerce that underpins it.

It’s so true. We always say that at least in the fashion world we know it’s about money! I get paid to do a job, and I do it as well as I can, within the limitations of the brief or brand’s vision. It’s very clear. But in the art world, it’s even more about money, without anyone saying so. It has changed over the past few years, a lot, in terms of the business that it’s become. The kinds of people that buy art now are very different. >

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Someone who’d witnessed you both shooting on set told me that the way you work is for you to face the model directly, shooting in a very controlled and considered way, and then Vinoodh shoots very fast reportage from round the side of you, so that two types of imagery are captured.

Yes, that’s basically how it is. I’m getting the ‘aware’ images, and Vinoodh finds more of the introverted and unexpected shots. I always feel all the energy lines from everyone in the team going towards the model once we’re on set. There is this complete focus on one thing and everybody is working towards the same idea. I find that really beautiful.

Although you began your career with those landmark stories for The Face in 1994 that featured highly conspicuous digital manipulation, I believe you only began shooting digitally a couple of years ago?

Has it changed how you work?

Totally. It’s changed our lives. We went digital about 4 years ago, and now we edit while we are shooting, usually accompanied by an editor – we have our own computers, with a full-time digital operator – and the client on set. By the end of the day, the pictures are put in a layout; usually the brand logo has been placed on top. All the crops have been made and the client has approved it; we give them a small printout of what’s been agreed upon and they go home with a disc or we email it to them. There’s no waiting for contact sheets, and no fear that the shoot

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didn’t work. The whole thing is done and it gets sent straight to the retoucher: either Pascal (Dangin at Box) or Stella Digital in New York.

That’s clever. It frees you up from the excruciating, time-wasting ‘approval by invisible committee’ process.

Exactly, it’ so much better. Everyone sees the process; everyone can see that one shot is better than the other, and why.

Has digital changed the way you interact with the model?

Yes. We find we usually have it in the first few shots: there’s a freshness when you first start shooting. After ten clicks or so, I can say ‘I’m just going to have a look to see it it’s there’ and it usually is. Then we can move on to the next stage or outfit. So it’s much freer now. Then, when you end up making a mistake and it looks amazing, or strange, you see it before it disappears. Also, the model or person whose portrait we are taking can see themselves on the screen and get excited about how it all looks and they will have a better idea of what to give us for the next shot.

Do you mourn anything about the loss of film?

Sometimes. I have to say that digital makes you feel you are moving away from ‘real’ photography. The craftsmanship. The grain; even though you can bring that in with digital, there’s something more studious and slow about film. Especially when I used to shoot 4x5, which I loved. It has such a stillness. I sometimes miss that. When we go to these events at the International Center of Photography, for instance, and they’re showing the work of old-school photographers or photojournalists, it feels like that’s photography and what we do is image-making, really.

In the end, it’s just a picture. I’m not saving the world or lives with it.

To me, it should all be a great experience because it’s how I spend every day of my life. The main thing for me is the exchange with people that I love, whose taste and ideas I appreciate and a model that is super inspiring. The cool thing is that at first you judge people from the outside: you book a model on how she looks. Then this person turns out to be so wonderful and there’s a real exchange. It has so much to do with her trusting us enough to give everything to the camera. That is a very delicate and beautiful thing. I always try to stay conscious and fully respectful of that. +

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Thomas Ruff New JPEGs

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Thomas Ruff

List of works (in order of appearance): jpeg icbm01, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 246 x 188 cm jpeg se01, 2006 — C-Print with Diasec, 246 x 188 cm jpeg se03, 2006 — C-Print with Diasec, 246 x 188 cm Jpeg ea01, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 253 x 188 cm jpeg ri02, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 188 x 322 cm Jpeg ib02, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 259 x 188 cm Jpeg bi01, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 238 x 320 cm Jpeg lir01, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 254 x 188 cm Jpeg bl01, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 174 x 308 cm Jpeg tr02, 2007 — C-Print with Diasec, 255 x 188 cm All images © Thomas Ruff, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

Thomas Ruff (Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, 1958) studied photography from 1977 to 1985 at the famous Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Bernd and Hilla Becher; fellow students included Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth. During his studies he developed his method of conceptual serial photography. Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while still at art school he changed to interiors and portraits of friends and students. He made his name internationally with monumental, immaculate portraits, devoid of any expression, which strongly suggest that it is impossible to represent a subject’s inner life in a photograph. At the end of the 1980s

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Ruff moved beyond portrait photography and produced series of building exteriors, starry skies and news photographs subsequently.

At the end of the 1990s he started presenting digitally altered images from the Internet, beginning with the series Nudes (1999-2000) and later Substrat (2002-03). Ruff has exhibited widely since 1981, with solo shows at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1989, Centre National de la Photographie, Paris in 1997, Museum Folkwang, Essen and Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo in 2002, Tate Liverpool in 2003 and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2007, among others. He participated in major group shows, including the International FotoTriennale, Esslingen in 1989; New Work: A New Generation at SF MoMA, San Francisco in 1990; Documenta IX, Kassel in 1992; Biennale of Sydney in 1996; Picturing Media: Modern Photographs from the Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2001 and the São Paulo Biennale in 2002. In 2005 he was featured in the Venice Biennale and in 2006 he won the ICP Infitinity Award for Art photography. Thomas Ruff lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is represented by David Zwirner in New York, where an exhibition of new JPEGs was presented in November-December 2007.

Valeria Liebermann works as a freelance curator in Düsseldorf. Her latest projects include the exhibition Juan Munoz – Rooms of My Mind at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the publication Sammlung 2005, edited by Julian Heynen and Valeria Liebermann for the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

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Dissolving the Image

by Valeria Liebermann

The oeuvre of the Düsseldorf-based artist Thomas Ruff is remarkable for its exceptional reflection on the means and potential of photography with respect to the informational content of photographic images. Since 1979 he has been analyzing the visual expressiveness of various photographic genres, from portraiture, to architectural and press photography through depictions of nudes. The wide range of Ruff’s subjects is also revealed by the techniques he employs: in addition to digital images and analog photographs he has produced himself, he has employed photographs that he found in scientific archives, newspapers, magazines and on the Internet.

In the 1980s he worked almost exclusively with an analog camera.

Though as the new technology became more readily available, in the mid1990s he became increasingly involved in different fields of the digital

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visual world. This offered Ruff tremendous advantage in two respects: on the one hand, in manipulating images presented by the editing software, he put himself in a position to generate pictures that became ‘image prototypes’ that remained consistent with his own visual conceptions and visual phenomena of today’s world. On the other hand, there is a sheer abundance of images available on the web, frequently from anonymous sources and often lacking any artistic impetus, though they are always of a high degree of informative aesthetic character. The Internet simplified Ruff’s research to the visual phenomena of contemporary everyday life as represented in the media.

His earlier work had been primarily oriented toward the types of images published in print media, and now he has updated the work to focus on the types of images of the digital world. Ruff has always been certain of one thing: ‘Our image models are the images in the media.

For that reason my images are not depictions of reality, but show a kind of second reality, the image of the image.’ 1

The point of departure of his work is not the direct mirroring of reality, but rather the image-generating, manipulative character of the medium of photography. This extremely critical and at the same time reflective use of photography runs through his oeuvre, now a body of work in seventeen series.

The visual starting points of his most recent series, jpegs, begun in 2004, are digital images from various sources. Some are images that have been disseminated globally on the Internet. For others, the artist took his own photographs of architecture and landscapes; he

Portrait (A. Ruff), 2000, C-Print, 210 x 165 cm

Portrait (A. Kachold), 1987, C-Print, 210 x 165 cm

© Thomas Ruff, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

© Thomas Ruff, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

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has also scanned postcards or pictures taken from newspapers and coffee-table books. What they all have in common is a basic digital image structure: no matter their original source, they have all been made equal by compression into small-format, poor-quality jpeg images, the standard digital compression format necessary to ensure rapid and widespread electronic circulation as well as to take up the least computer memory space. The images consequently have a relatively poor resolution as well as a pronounced pixel structure. Ruff turns this apparent shortcoming to his advantage by increasing the compression rate of the images he has acquired, and printing them in an extremely large format, thus coarsening the image. In this way the pixel structure, which is barely perceptible when viewing these images on the Internet, now becomes an obvious geometric colour pattern.

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Viewed up close, abstract structures consisting of coloured squares dominate the image. As soon as one steps away, these coloured segments appear to merge into a photographic image. In his editing style, Ruff appears to adopt techniques of 19th-century painting by Impressionists and Pointillists. The overall image does not become apparent to the viewer until he or she has moved away from the photograph. The various perspectives from distant to close up are essential to understanding the images. The more one wants to learn about the perceptible photographic image, the further one has to move away. However, the structure and the image framework – one could also call it the visualization of the consequences of a digitalized visual world – are only revealed by close scrutiny. ‘Seeing’ or ‘recognizing’ the image cannot occur in a single gaze. A variety of image information is required, which does not become available until one has viewed the image from various perspectives.

The subject matter of the jpegs displays an analytical approach towards the media world that is similar to that used by the artist in the choice of technique and the organization of the photograph. Ruff’s images take up motifs that show global events that have defined the visual media world of recent decades. These include the familiar, almost iconic pictures of human catastrophes, atomic bomb tests, 9/11, scenes of warfare in Baghdad, Beirut, and Grozny. One also experiences images by now unexpected, of the graves of children shot in Afghanistan, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the ravaged Asian coasts after the 2004 tsunami. >

Portrait (R. Mueller), August 1986, C-print, 23 x 18 cm

Portrait (P. Stadtbaeumer), 1990, C-Print, 210 x 165 cm

© Thomas Ruff, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

© Thomas Ruff, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

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Ruff also presents idyllic landscapes, snow-covered forests, a vast prairie, and palm-lined beaches. The series also includes what seems to be historical motifs such as the Berlin Wall or architectural photographs of famous buildings that have appeared in newspapers, magazines, or on the Internet in recent years. If one reviews the motifs in the jpegs series, one realizes that they include the entire spectrum of contemporary images that have been published and talked about in the past decades, circulated through mass media. It is as if the series is an encyclopedia of the visual media world that shows everything from the ‘A’ of architecture and ‘I’ of iceberg to ‘Z’ as in Ground Zero. The exception in these images are human beings. There are no people at all in these photographs. Perhaps because they cannot be broken down into pixels, as Ruff once mentioned, or because they cause the

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catastrophes, both endowing the image with meaning and receiving its meaning. This implied presence means they do not have to occupy a literal place in the pictures.

In both the selection of subject matter and the application of digital technology, the jpegs comment on today’s mediated visual world in a manner both elegant and alarming. They show us what we surround ourselves with and what kind of auditory and visual information we take in daily. While we forget some of the information, the images become etched in our collective memory, in fragments, or as a vivid picture.

Responding to human visual memory, Ruff appears to have employed the possibilities of dissolving the image through the pixel structure. His photographs present a vast amount of information – aesthetic, political, and media-related – but upon closer inspection they dissolve into an + ordered but empty system of colour codes.

Note: 1

‘Reality so Real It’s Unrecognizable’, an interview with Thomas Ruff by

Thomas Wulffen, Flash Art International, no. 168, January/February 1993

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia Thousand

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia

All images: © Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy David Zwirner and Steidldangin, NY

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (Hartford, USA, 1951) studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1979. His international breakthrough came with the series Hustlers (1990-92), followed by, among others, Streetworks (1998), Heads (2001), A Storybook Life (2003) and Lucky Thirteen (2004).

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris and the Art Space Ginza in Tokyo. In 2006 a solo exhibition was held at Foam in Amsterdam, and in 2007 a comprehensive survey exhibition was on view at the ICA, Boston, with a catalogue published by Steidl. Philip-Lorca diCorcia has participated in many major group exhibitions, including the 1997 Whitney Biennial in New York, Cruel and Tender at Tate Modern, London/Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 at the MoMA in New York. His work is included in the collections of major institutions

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such as the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the SF MOMA in San Francisco. In 2001 he won the Infinity Award for Applied Photography of the International Center of Photogaphy in New York. Several catalogues and artist’s books of his work have been published, including the 1995 exhibition catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art, Streetworks 19931997 (1997), Heads (Steidldangin, 2001) and A Storybook Life (Twin Palms Publishers, 2003). His most recent artist’s book Thousand was published

by Steidldangin in December 2007. Philip-Lorca diCorcia lives and works in New York. He is represented by David Zwirner, New York.

Aaron Schuman is an American photographer, editor, lecturer and critic, based in the UK. He is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth and Lecturer at the University of Brighton. He is also the director and editor of the online photography journal, SeeSaw Magazine (www.seesawmagazine.com).

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Not Any More

by Aaron Schuman

By the mid-1970s, the suggestion that photography lent itself more to fiction than to fact was by no means a new one. In fact, the adoptive godfather of American documentary photography, Walker Evans, regularly railed against the naïve notion that the art of photography lay in its ability to document, noting that, ‘A document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.’

Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century the vast majority of photographers have founded their work upon such a style, and have relied on the collective understanding that, if a photograph is not the objective recording of reality, it is at least a representation of truth, however subjective that representation may be. It was only when conceptual artists began to use photographs to record, represent and reinterpret staged events and invented scenarios in the 1970s that photographers themselves began to abandon the frontlines of reality for the medium’s storytelling capabilities. Finally, they grasped the idea that to consciously make images, rather than to take them, could be a compelling and arguably a more honest approach to photography.

Steeped in the art-school culture of the era, and having pursued a Masters degree in photography at Yale in the years directly following the death of Walker Evans – the department’s founding chair – Philip-Lorca diCorcia was one of the first photographers to turn Evans’s strategy on its head. Rather than adopting a ‘documentary style’, diCorcia chose to style documentary, explicitly appropriating the fictive techniques of fashion, advertising and commercial photography to construct narratives, or to imbue reality with a heightened sense of otherworldliness.

For many, the application of a polished and rather glossy aesthetic to what was meant to be serious, critical art-photography was a profound betrayal of established traditions. But diCorcia wholeheartedly rejects the notion that a medium as diverse and accessible as photography must submit to such single-minded conventions. ‘More so than a lot of people, I think that I’m concerned with how an image looks – the production values, or whatever you want to call it,’ he explains. ‘It’s always seemed rather shameful to me how easy photography is. So I’m not someone who makes a virtue of spontaneity, or willfully disobeying the ‘rules’. But then, how can you disobey the rules of something that had no rules to begin with? It’s ridiculous.’

Today, diCorcia is generally celebrated for his meticulously produced series, in which he creates a tightly controlled scenario or setup, and then explores variations on a theme within its rather strict limitations. Looking at the totality of diCorcia’s serial work, it becomes very clear that his output is remarkably diverse. Yet, perhaps because of their seductively polished appearance, the substance of diCorcia’s imagery is often overshadowed by its accomplished technical prowess. His oeuvre has occasionally been falsely regarded as uniform simply because of its distinctive appearance, and its variety in both content and methodology has often gone ignored. One might assume that such misreadings would frustrate diCorcia, but having gained a mature understanding of how practical trends are eventually sub-

Ralph Smith, 21 years old; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, $25, 1990-92, from: Hustlers © Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

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sumed by more important concerns, diCorcia remains both confident and firmly optimistic about the future of the medium. ‘Since the advent of digital, the idea of how an image is made has almost superceded what it is. People who cobble together dozens of images in a computer, or spend thousands of dollars to produce a single image, are a novelty at the moment. But they’re a quickly disappearing novelty, and sooner or later, it’s going to come down to what they do, rather than how they do it.’

Paradoxically, when the content of a diCorcia’s work is taken into consideration, it is generally interpreted based on the preferred genre or critical disposition of the individual viewer, rather than on the artist’s overall intentions. ‘People tend to think of me according to which body of work they like best,’ he says. For those inclined towards diaristic developments within art photography, his Family and Friends series serves as the ideal alternative to the grainy confessionals of others.

(The simple fact that diCorcia attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston – alongside the likes of Nan Goldin and David Armstrong – often serves as the crucial supporting evidence for this association). For those invested in traditions of street photography, diCorcia’s Streetwork introduces an intriguing spin on the assumed realism and spontaneity involved in photographing a kinetic, urban public. Likewise, his Heads series could fall into the same camp, or could alternatively be interpreted as a novel approach to photographic portraiture, in which the implicit relationship between photographer and subject is all but dismantled. And for those who acknowledge the propensity of ‘concerned’ documentary photography to focus on outcasts, the downtrodden and the sordid underbelly of society, diCorcia’s Hustlers cleverly mimics and simultaneously critiques the stereotypi-

cally romantic depictions of such social extremes. Despite the occasional accusations aimed at diCorcia of gimmickry, uniformity, superficiality and frivolity in relation to his style, the content of his serial work appears to be both diverse and remarkably flexible, repeatedly offering valuable insight into the most integral concerns within photography today.

In his essay, ‘Ways of Remembering’, John Berger remarks, ‘Before the invention of photography what served in its place? The obvious answer would be engravings, drawings, paintings, graphic works of one kind or another. Yet, if one doesn’t look at it from a purely technical point of view, what served the function that photography now serves...was the faculty of memory.’ Several years ago, diCorcia momentarily abandoned his serialistic approach in order to develop a more personal book project, challenging preconceptions of both his technique and methodology. A Storybook Life consists of seventy-six pictures, taken over the course of twenty years, which bear little obvious relationship to one another. Consciously avoiding his inclination to produce subtle variations on a controlled theme, diCorcia intentionally edited the project in a disparate manner, exploring the narrative possibilities of a seemingly ambiguous but in fact carefully considered sequence. Bookended by images of diCorcia’s father – the first taken when he’s alive, the last when he’s dead – A Storybook Life certainly touches on themes of personal experience and memory, but the intimacy of such meanings remains veiled behind the vagaries of diCorcia’s photographic eye. As Andy Grunberg has noted, ‘Despite his ongoing interest in unpredictable, psychologically charged subject matter, diCorcia does not wear his heart on his sleeve.’ Instead, as Berger intimated, through photography itself the book simulates the general experience of memory.

Seemingly insignificant moments, turning points in one’s life, and even convincingly realistic fantasies intermingle to create a complex but thoroughly confusing representation of a life as it might be remembered. Interviewed in 2003, diCorcia reflected, ‘My ten-year-old son

Ike Cole, 38 years old, Los Angeles, California, $25, 1990-92, from: Hustlers © Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

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recently asked me: “Dad, do you think that people really remember everything that happened in their life before they die? ” And I said, “I don’t think they remember everything, but yeah, I’m sure that your life flashes before you. And I’m also sure that it doesn’t happen in the right order, and things that didn’t seem important probably get priority over one’s benchmarks.” ’

DiCorcia latest book, Thousand, takes the experimental promise of A Storybook Life to a new and challenging extreme. Having accumulated nearly four-thousand Polaroids over the course of the last twenty-five years – both in the production of his serial works, and through the making photographs outside of set projects – diCorcia edited his collection down to a thousand images that, for one reason or another, felt strong enough to be included in the book. Originally, the idea was to assign each Polaroid a number, and then to allow a computer-generated sequence to randomly determine the order of the work. But as diCorcia gradually fed groups of images to his producer for scanning, he noticed unexpected relationships developing between entirely unrelated images.

‘It both encouraged me and discouraged me to edit,’ he explains, ‘and it was a struggle to let circumstance dictate the order. That was the original intention, but I figured that we’d eventually fool with it later anyway, and the whole thing would be a lie. So in the end, I spent a week editing them.’

That said, a thousand photographs is more than anyone can digest or organize in any realistic amount of time – whether they are deeply familiar with images or not – and the resulting tome is vast, unpredictable, incredibly frustrating and addictively engaging. There are elements of formal, emotional and subjective repetition throughout – circles factor highly, there’s an uncharacteristically large selection of self-portraits, fire appears to play an important role within the work, and clock-faces

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seem to carry an integral significance. As these rather mysterious themes rise to the surface, along with many others, they tempt the viewer into a false sense of insight and perception. But as quickly as they emerge, they suddenly disappear, driving one to obsessively dig further into the book’s pages in search of the slightest suggestion of purpose or meaning.

Although A Storybook Life hinted at the diversity of human experience seen through the filter of memory, it still represented a distilled and relatively concise interpretation of this concept. Alternatively, Thousand both encapsulates and reenacts the barrage of information that one encounters over the course of a lifetime, relentlessly overwhelming the viewer, and denying them the comfort of reflection or understanding. ‘The nature of experience is similar to the book,’ observes diCorcia. ‘In life, people have a very hard time seeing the overall picture; it’s too complex, and it’d probably kill them if they did see it.

Yet, every once and a while one catches a glimpse – you see that we’re on a planet, in a solar system, in a universe that is ever-expanding, and you can actually imagine that. But you have to force yourself to think about it, and a lot of other little things that get in the way. There’s just too much information, and it’s hard to know whether one thing is more important than the other.’

Again, considering that the only obvious aspect which draws this work together is the fact that they are all Polaroids, it is tempting to be seduced by diCorcia’s technical choices rather than by his overarching concept. Of course, diCorcia bluntly rejects this interpretation, remarking, ‘To use a toy camera is about as much of a statement as to not clean your underwear.’ Nevertheless, in relation to his previous work, there is something telling about diCorcia’s use of a volatile and unpredictable format; it conveys a newfound pleasure in uncertainty and loss of control, and provides a refreshing contradiction to his more famous bodies of work. ‘I think that every photographer has, at some point, complained that the final product didn’t looks as good as the Polaroid,’ diCorcia says. ‘One of the things about Polaroid is that it’s not like a print – they don’t make it perfect. Sometimes you find yourself saying, “That’s close enough,” or “Oh no, it came out all purple... but I like that.” I would never do that myself.’ In a sense, Thousand represents a deliberate liberation on diCorcia’s part, in which the tightly woven constraints of his serial work are forsaken, and his practice is allowed to flourish in an entirely new, spontaneous and immensely rewarding way. “For someone who has to go through a lot of arranging of both equipment and situations, Polaroids are very gratifying. I think that’s what people like about photography compared to most other mediums – it’s quick. I’ve always considered that as one of the things which I’ve been missing out on.’ Not any more. +

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Hans Aarsman Photography as Antidote to Consumerism

Witch received from my ex, thrown away on 24 February 2004

MacbookPro, desired various times since July 2007

1,236 sheets of negatives from the 1980s, thrown away on 19 August 2004

House in the Van Eeghenstraat, briefly desired on 8 November 2007

Miller desk chair, wanted to buy on 6 November 2007

Golf Diesel Mark II, sold on 1 January 1995

Working television set, put out with the rubbish on 12 July 2005

Ascaso Espresso machine, briefly desired on 26 October 2007

Dinky Toy with name, thrown away on 24 February 2004

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Hans Aarsman

When the apartment of Dutch photojornalist Hans Aarsman (Amsterdam, NL, 1951) was torn down in 1988, he bought a camper and travelled through the Netherlands for a year. Each week one of his photos was published in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, along with a diary-style text. This mixture of distant photos and personal reflections on both photo-graphy and his own personal life were made into the now-legendary book Hollandse Taferelen (Dutch Scenes, Fragment Publishers, 1989). In 1993 Aarsman’s Amsterdam was published, again a combination of personal notes and images, photographed in a similar detached style but now only in his city of birth.

In 1994 he gave up photography. He sold his cameras and turned his attention solely to writing. He wrote a novel and various stage plays, among them a monologue based on the life of Garry Winogrand.

A number of photo books have also since been published, mostly with collected pictures sometimes in combination with his own photographs, such as Aarsman’s auto-biographical book Vrrooom! Vrrooom!

(2003). The book combines a selection of Aarsman’s own car photographs with images from a variety of other sources and material from traffic analyses and market research on cars.

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Aarsman is the co-founder of Useful Photography (along with Erik Kessels, Julian Germain, Hans van der Meer and Claudie de Cleen), a magazine on photography without pretensions. Anonymous photographs from sales catalogues, instruction manuals, packaging and textbooks; images that we are confronted with daily, often without being aware of it. Taken out of their original context and published together in a ‘magazine’ they can produce interesting results. In 2005 his lecture on Useful Photography caused a stir at the annual Rencontres d’Arles Photographie festival.

Aarsman, who is based in Amsterdam, now writes a weekly column in the Dutch daily de Volkskrant. In it, he selects one photo from the multitude that arrives at the newspaper every day, and provides his own personal commentary. These pieces, full of insight into viewing and ‘reading’ photographs, were published last year as De Aarsman Collectie by Nai Publishers. Aarsman also writes an online column on photography entitled Koekerd on the Dutch photo website www.photoq.nl.

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Hans Aarsman, My mother’s figurines, thrown away on 17 May 2001

Photography as Antidote to Consumerism

by Hans Aarsman

Just some figurines on a table. Maybe the light has a certain something, for the rest they’re just snapshots. Figurines my mother made years ago as occupational therapy. ‘Nice figurine’, I would say, when she showed me her latest creation. ‘Would you like it?’, she’d then ask.

I’d nod yes. I was glad she had found something she liked to do.

She passed away in 2000. She had made a total of six figurines, and given all six to me. They found a place in the kitchen, among the spice jars. Then I moved to a smaller house. Packing up the boxes, I was shocked at how much I had accumulated over the years. That would never all fit into the new house. When I picked up my mother’s figurines to put them into a moving box, I hesitated. Did they have to come along? I held them over the bin, but I couldn’t let go. Throwing out her handicrafts felt like a betrayal of my mother’s memory. So I took photos of them first. That helped: with no more remorse, out they went with the rubbish.

How often does it happen, that you leave the shop without making that purchase after all? That’s a nice thing, you think, handy, I’d like to

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have that. Can I afford it? Maybe leave it for now, sleep on it. But when you get home you regret not having bought it on the spot. Yes, it really would have been very handy, or attractive, or amusing. You soon start thinking, I’ve got to have it! And then anxiety sets in. Will it still be there?

It’s not too late, is it, it’s not sold out? The next day you hurry back to the shop. Yes, it’s still there. Relieved, you take out your wallet. At home you unwrap it, admire it, listen to it, read it. Nice, you think, beautiful.

You show your purchase to your partner, to friends. It’s a great thing, isn’t it? Yes, lovely. Then a place is found for it, on a piece of furniture, on the window sill, a table, a shelf. Where it assumes the same role as most other possessions: passing the time until it gets dusted.

In 1982 I bought a new Golf Diesel, my first car. It was the most expensive thing I’d ever bought. And the only thing I didn’t keep inside my house. Strange, that is: you even keep your bike inside. But that costly symbol of your aspirations and financial assets remains outdoors.

A car is convenient, that’s what everyone says. With a car you can go wherever you want, whenever you please. But you have to pay for that freedom. You have to work for a car, at least a few days a month.

Is it worth it? Depends on what kind of work it is. In the mid-1990s, when my earnings were lower because I wanted to write more and photograph less, I sold my little Golf.

Sometimes I think back on that car. I can see myself driving along in it again. There are still some good specimens for sale. Look at that design, it’s a box basically, yet still curvy all over. So simple, so elegant. Those two little round headlights. Have you ever really listened

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Mercedes, briefly desired on 2 November 2007

Alexander Boersstraat no. 60, briefly desired on 8 November 2007

to the motor? Those were the first small diesels: they made such a great rumbling sound. Nothing electronic, windows that rolled up and down by hand. Nothing to break either.

That longing to own something, how do you keep that in check?

The experience with my mother’s figurines showed me how easily I could give things up after I had photographed them. Suppose, then, that I could photograph possessions preventively, even before I bought them? Would that curb my compulsive desire to possess them? You see something in a shop window that you want, you point your camera, snap the shutter and walk on by. Of course, first you have to buy a camera. But after that you restrict yourself to photos.

Albums full of photos of unacted-upon desires. A couple of CDs would also do. Or a DVD, even better. How many photos that would hold! A 500K jpeg would take the place of buying something. Nearly 10,000 of those would fit on a 4.7-gig DVD. Now that would really be something worth possessing!

You could show the photos to your friends. Look at all the things I would have liked to buy.

No, really, you don’t mean you actually like that little Golf?

What, you don’t?! Look at that design - it’s a box basically, yet still curvy all over. And have you ever listened to that diesel run?

The same conversations as if you had actually bought that car.

How would the world look if we were able to control our compulsion to possess things? There’d be plenty of parking spaces on the street, wouldn’t there? Under the lace curtains, the window sills would be left empty.

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Except for a stack of photo albums in the corner. Photo albums, instead of all those possessions. Millions, billions of photo albums worldwide.

If you think this is just a foolish fantasy, you have plenty of company these days. All over the world people are buying more and more all the time. On television and in magazines, shopping is advocated as the way to happiness. When you ask children what they like to do, they say: shopping. It’s unbelievable. Celebrities are photographed while shopping, they are interviewed about what they spend money on and where they spend it. The feeling of boredom and melancholy is blatant and still the world feels called upon to go out and buy too, to spend money.

Would we fall into a black hole if we stopped shopping? Or have we already fallen into that hole? Shopping, in any case, will not fill that bottomless pit. Maybe for a little while, but before you even leave the shop the emptiness starts to gnaw. Then you have to start shopping again – a vicious circle of consumer spending. Collecting junk becomes life’s purpose.

What else is culture besides a shared belief in what makes life

worth living? What else is art besides a pointer to show us where the main undercurrents are flowing in an ever-changing world? Most of the world’s misery can be traced back to the misconception that money can buy happiness. All oppression and exploitation can be traced back to this. Let art provide some resistance. Let art stop acting as a vehicle for commercial interests. And if art is incapable of doing so, because its interests are too closely tied to those of commerce, then we’ll do it ourselves. After all, everybody has a camera in their phone these days. +

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Hans Aarsman, Signed copy of Hollandse Taferelen in shop window of antiquarian bookshop De Slegte in Amsterdam, November 2007

Hans Aarsman, Vijfhuizen, 1988

Hans Aarsman’s Images Free of Charge Hans Aarsman caused quite a commotion in the Dutch photography world in 2006, when he offered his photos free of charge on the website of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. Ninety-nine photos were made available, nearly all those in his books Hollandse Taferelen and Aarsman’s Amsterdam, as well as photos from other projects.

With the acquisition of these photos, the Fotomuseum had launched a new purchasing policy, focusing on buying complete, influential Dutch photo projects, rather than single images. In negotiations with the museum, Aarsman stipulated that his photos be made available to individuals at no charge. Thus, since May 2006 private persons have been able to download his images via the museum’s website and print them themselves, up to A3 size.

On the site, Aarsman attached a special offer to his Waterhuizen photograph, one of the most well-known from Hollandse Taferelen:

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any individual who sent two prints of this image to the museum would receive one of them in return, signed by the artist. The other print will be included in an exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum at a later date, along with all the other submissions, which will of course vary widely in printing quality, format and colour.

Hans Aarsman’s intention was to start a serious discussion on what he calls the ‘artification of photography’. It is the nature of photography to be extremely easy to reproduce, and Aarsman has always had great difficulty with the concept of selling his photos in artificially limited editions. ‘That shouldn’t be done with a medium which can be distributed so easily – that’s like walking a bike instead of riding it,’ states Aarsman.

Hans Aarsman’s images can still be downloaded free of charge at www.nederlandsfotomuseum.nl. Enter ‘Hans Aarsman’ in the search option and then click ‘Aarsman, Hans’. +

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paper selection

Foam Magazine’s choice of paper from ModoVanGelder Amsterdam

Stephen Shore is printed on Eurobulk 135 g/m2

Wolfgang Tillmans is printed on tom&otto Gloss 150 g/m2

matt coated paper and board with 1.1 bulk, PEFC-certified

coated fine paper and board

Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin are printed on tom&otto Silk 135 g/m2

Thomas Ruff is printed on PhoeniXmotion Xenon 135 g/m2

coated fine paper and board

premium coated paper and board, FSC-certified

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is printed on Pioneer 80 g/m2

Hans Aarsman is printed on tom&otto Gloss 150 g/m2

premium offset

coated fine paper and board

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

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books

3

Stephen Gill: Hackney Flowers / Archaeology in Reverse Few

contemporary

photographers

seem so perfectly suited for the medium of the photobook as the British artist Stephen Gill. Since Field Studies (Chris Boot, 2004), he has published no fewer than seven books, mainly through his own publishing house, Nobody. Two of them are once again the product of Gill’s love for Hackney Wick. Much in that East London district, home to many immigrants, is being demolished and rebuilt in pre-

John Gossage: Putting Back the Wall

For the series Hackney Flowers, which

This book is obviously a successor to

Gill combined photos made on some

Gossage’s 464-page magnum opus from

of his many rambles through Hackney

Annaleen Louwes: Minor Details

2004, Berlin in the Time of the Wall: the

Wick, with seeds, flowers, leaves and

Annaleen Louwes’ subdued, monu-

numbering of its pages begins with 465.

pieces of rubbish he found in the area.

mental portrait photographs are imme-

This book seemed to be the conclusion

Back in his studio, he arranged these

diately recognizable by their introspect-

of Gossage’s lengthy preoccupation with

paraphernalia on the prints – which

ive quality and specific poses. Each of

Berlin in the time of the Wall. But Gos-

he had sometimes buried in the

the series in Minor Details concerns

sage could not yet manage to free

ground first – and photographed them

men – Ko Moreau, Rob K. and Jaap S. –

himself from the Berlin he had expe-

once again. These wonderful collages

all of whom happened to live in Lou-

rienced so intensely in the 1980s. His

are combined with portraits of pas-

wes’ neighbourhood and are at first

photos are in no way literal, recogniza-

sers-by printed in smaller format,

glance rather unremarkable in ap-

ble descriptions of the Wall, but highly

which are ingeniously bound in

pearance. Louwes eliminates as many

subjective, poetical reflections on the

amongst the floral still lifes. Archaeo-

potentially distracting elements as pos-

meaning of this dramatic historical

logy in Reverse, again the result of Gill’s

sible and concentrates fully on her sub-

period. Gossage designed this book

fruitful collaboration with designer

ject and his posture. Like a sculptor

himself in a way that does complete just-

Melanie Mues, shows the transition of

carving a figure from a block of stone,

or pretence, appears in front of her lens.

ice to the photos and incorporates the

the area: everything in anticipation of

Louwes explores their bodies in the

Austerely and carefully designed by

texts by Gerry Badger, Thomas Weski

the new city that has yet to be built.

surrounding space with her camera.

Willem van Zoetendaal, the book is

and himself in a resourceful way.

www.stephengill.co.uk

They are careful studies of a person,

published with four different covers.

but without any form of psychologi-

www.vanzoetendaal.nl

paration for the 2012 Olympic Games. was presented in Foam Magazine #9,

www.loosestrifebooks.com

Nobody,

zing. Louwes seems to wait with bound-

Loosestrife Editions,

ISBN 978-0-9549405-3-9, 114 pp.

less patience until man in his existential

Van Zoetendaal Publishers,

ISBN: 978-09753120-3-2, 132 pp.

ISBN 978-0-9549405-5-3, 114 pp.

loneliness, stripped of every adornment

ISBN 978-90-802132-7-2, 76 pp.

156

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books

Olaf Otto Becker: Broken Line.

Greenland 2003-2006 This stunning edition, with the coastline

1

of Greenland embossed in linen on the cover, presents landscape photographs that Olaf Otto Becker made in the summers between 2003-2006. In a small but had specially shipped to Greenland,

Lars Tunbjörk: Vinter

Becker searched Greenland’s coast,

Snow and ice also figure prominently

looking for places he wanted to photo-

Lars Tunbjörk’s Vinter, but here they

graph with his large-format camera. In

call up completely different feelings.

total he travelled some 4000 km. With

Tunbjörk’s photos have nothing in common with the awe-inspiring un-

Jacqueline Hassink: The Power Book

she photographed both their board-

a GPS tracking device he recorded the exact location in which he took each

spoilt landscapes that we find in

This is the first survey of the photo-

the series Car Girls, she demonstrates

photo, to make it possible to return to

Becker’s work. He shows us snow in

graphic oeuvre of the Dutch artist

the absurdity of the fact that the entire

the exact same spot later to record

the city, coated with a black layer of

Jacqueline Hassink and wonderfully

automobile business – the world’s largest

changes in the landscape. And things

soot from exhaust fumes. Tunbjörk

shows how well thought-out and con-

industry in terms of annual turnover –

are changing there at a rapid pace. In

manages to capture a harsh sense of

sistently executed her projects are. The

still considers it necessary to pose sexy

Greenland, which these days is consid-

disillusionment and discomfort in his

book was published to coincide with

women with their products. Hassink

ered earth’s barometer of the effects of

photos – albeit with a healthy dose of

two simultaneous exhibits in Dutch

photographed the girls at car shows like

global warming, some 225 km3 of the

humour. For this series, Tunbjörk travel-

photography museums: the Nederlands

so many soulless dolls.

ice cap melts each year.

led through Sweden in search of the spe-

Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and Huis

It is indeed striking how much

cific mindset that goes with Scandinavian

Marseille in Amsterdam, travelling to

esting dialogue between the two cur-

bare rock is visible in these photo-

winters. Vinter is a deliberate attempt to

New York and other cities later.

ators, Frits Gierstberg and Els Barents,

graphs. Becker’s images, mostly of pris-

do something creative with the inevita-

For some fifteen years, Hassink

about Hassink’s work, and shows all 17

tine nature, have an unworldly beauty

ble winter depression that overcomes

has been intrigued by the increasing

projects in chronological order, augmen-

and grandeur. The preternatural silen-

the photographer every year. He photo-

importance of multinational companies

ted with extensive project descriptions

ce – not even seagulls live out here – and

graphed snowed-in houses, play grounds

in our society, and especially by the role

by Hassink herself. What makes the

the heightened state of awareness that

and cars and people trudging forward

of their CEOs – the ‘superstars of the

publication especially remarkable are

Becker experienced when travelling

on impassable roads. We see many inte-

corporate world’. But instead of making

the 144 pages taken from her personal

completely alone in this environment

riors of homes, cafes and restaurants

portraits of them, or visualizing the cha-

notebooks, printed on thinner paper.

are fully tangible in his photos. Not

where people come together in feeble

racter of their particular line of busi-

The notes offer insight into Hassink’s

only in their excessive sharpness, but

attempts to create a bit of warmth and

ness, Hassink chose – entirely in line

day-to-day artistic practice, how her

also in the extraordinary light, their

cheer. In his inimitable way, Tunbjörk

with the invisibility of these power

ideas come about and are developed,

measured composition and their con-

presents the ‘glamorouslessness’ of life

structures – to photograph the board-

but also how things can sometimes go

templative character. Two interesting

in these severe winters in a book that

rooms, the places where, behind closed

wrong during the shoots. A perfect

texts by Gerry Badger and Christoph

is disheartening, heart-warming and

doors, decisions are made that so

combination of exhibition catalogue

Schaden offer much information on

hilarious, all at the same time.

strongly influence the world economy

and artist’s book.

Becker’s project.

www.steidlville.com

and, ultimately, our personal lives.

www.chrisboot.com

sturdy inflatable rubber dinghy that he

rooms and home environment. And in

The Power Book contains an inter-

Her outspoken engagement is es-

Hatje Cantz,

Steidl Publishers,

pecially evident in her series on high-

Chris Boot,

ISBN 978-3-7757-1972-8, 152 pp.

ISBN 978-3-86521-497-3, 192 pp.

profile Arabic businesswomen, of whom

ISBN 978-1-905712-07-6, 192 pp.

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books

2

5

Max Kozloff: The Theatre of the Face. Portrait Photography since 1900 In The Theatre of the Face, a remarkably

Anthony Hernandez: Waiting, Sitting, Fishing, and Some Automobiles

large amount of attention is given to socalled vernacular portraiture, to commercial photo studios from the 1920s and 1930s and also to the consequences of the invention of the automatic photo

A characteristic of the photobooks pub-

booth in 1925. Kozloff seems more

lished by Loosestrife Editions is the

interested in the average man before

exceptional attention given to their

the camera than in the portraying of

concept, production and design, for

celebrities. What interests him in

which founders Michael Abrams and

particular is the interaction between

John Gossage are responsible. One of

photographer and sitter.

their latest books presents black-and-

white photos that Anthony Hernandez

August Sander formed an important

shot in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1982,

turning point in the history of portrait

of people hanging around on the

photography. Sander’s scientific object-

street, waiting at bus stops or in front

ivity, which forms the strength of his

of the anonymous office buildings

voluminous People of the 20th Century,

they have fled from on their lunch breaks. In Los Angeles, the city that is

3

In Kozloff’s view, the work of

opened the door to a ‘creative misread-

Alec Soth: Dog Days Bogotá

images are mixed in among Soth’s ob-

ing’ of his detached attitude in the work

Although Alec Soth had already made

servations of people, empty interiors,

essentially nonviable for those without

of photographers such as Irving Penn,

the photos for Dog Days, Bogotá in

or simple still lifes taken on random

a car, these people must resort to

Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus. In

2002, he waited several years before

streets but also an extremely violent

public transport. The mercilessly hard

the meantime, in Kozloff’s opinion, this

publishing this book. This was no

image of an old woman lying lifeless

Californian light, inescapable in the

attitude has degenerated into ‘psycholo-

doubt due to the extremely personal

on the street, covered in blood.

middle of the day, seems to emphasize

gical anaemia’ in portraiture as the

character of the work. The photos

their resignation. Made with a 5x7

frontal bust-format portrait, with the

were made during a stay in Bogotá

to Soth’s earlier work, are remarkably

view camera, the photos themselves

person being portrayed staring with an

when Soth and his wife had to wait

muted and subdued. This was a delibe-

possess an incredible sharpness and

empty gaze directly into the lens, has

for two months before they were of-

rate choice, as Soth describes in an illu-

clarity, both in their use of light and in

become a cliché of contemporary por-

ficially allowed to take home their

minating interview with Carrie Thomp-

their compositions. The strong spatial

trait practice. Although quite critical of

adopted daughter Carmen Laura. In

son posted recently on Magnum’s

effect of their rigorous diagonal lines is

certain developments, Kozloff’s tone is

his introduction, Soth tells of the mo-

website: it was due to the atmosphere he

reinforced by the fact that you first

definitely not merely negative. The way

ving message that Carmen’s birth-

found in Bogotá itself, but also because

have to open the pages to see some-

in which he manages to combine ana-

mother gave to her daughter in part-

this corresponded more with the way

thing; all the photos are ‘hidden’ in

lyses of the work of so many well-

ing, and how this inspired him to

colours work in our memory. And Dog

foldout pages. With an interesting es-

known and lesser-known photograph-

photograph the city where she was

Days, Bogotá is, first of all, ‘a memory

say by Gerry Badger, who expounds

ers with the cultural, technological

born, trying to capture ‘some of the

book’. All in all, the book is a beautiful

on Hernandez’ way of working and his

and social developments of specific

beauty in this hard place’.

and moving document, dedicated to the

specific position in the tradition of

periods is achievement of unprece-

unknown birthmother of his beloved

street photography.

dented quality.

well with the intimately personal

daughter.

www.loosestrifebooks.com

www.phaidon.com

character of the story. Stray dogs are a

www.steidlville.com

The relatively small format fits

The colours, certainly compared

recurring theme among the fifty-odd

Loosestrife Editions,

Phaidon,

photos and inevitably call up associ-

Steidl,

ISBN 978-0-9753120-2-5, 264 pp.

ISBN 978-07148-4372-8, 416 pp.

ations with homeless children. These

ISBN 978-3-86521-451-5, 60 pp.

158

Michael Abrams: Strange and Singular

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Thousand

The Park by Kohei Yoshiyuki must be

This impressive, austerely designed

one of the most bizarre photobooks

book presents Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s

ever published. On the occasion of an

personal selection of all the Polaroids

exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New

he made during the past 25 years. The

York, a reprint of the by now extremely

Polaroids were reproduced in the exact

rare book from 1980 was published. In

same size as the originals, one on each

an animated interview with Araki (ori-

page and printed on extremely thin

ginally published in a Japanese magazi-

paper. There’s also a special edition

ne in 1979) the photographer explains

available, which includes a unique Po-

in detail how he went about his work.

laroid.

Strolling through the park one night in the early 1970s, Yoshiyuki happened upon couples who were making love in the open air, while other people were

Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fund: Rijksmuseum Studies in Photography

Steidldangin, ISBN 978-3-86521-406-5, 2008 pp.

The large number of books that have

watching and sometimes even touching

appeared in recent years presenting

them. The photographer became so fas-

anonymous family photos have led to

cinated by these voyeurs that he visited

The Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fund

an almost inevitable fatigue, but this

various parks for half a year and joined

was established to promote research

edition is such a gem that it makes you

this crowd of peepers. He managed to

by young photo historians and to

wonder again how it is possible that

photograph them, unnoticed, by means

contribute to their career develop-

so much beauty was simply captured,

of an infrared flash. Part 1 of the book

ment. Each year two postgraduates

unintentionally, without any artistic

contains images of heterosexual couples,

are selected to carry out research

pretensions. Strange and Singular com-

while Part 2 shows male homosexuals,

within the extensive collections and

prises a selection of Michael Abrams’s

cruising amongst the trees or engaged in

archives of the Rijksmuseum in Am-

collection of found family photos.

sexual activities.

sterdam. The results are published in

Each one different in terms of format,

In fact there is not much to see:

the series Rijksmuseum Studies in Photo-

colour and atmosphere, the photos are

genitals remain covered, there is little

graphy by the Rijksmuseum in collab-

presented as a continuous film, some-

more than a hand disappearing into pan-

oration with Nieuw Amsterdam Publis-

times unsparingly cut right in the mid-

ties, but this only enhances the power of

hers. Christiane Kuhlmann’s study

dle of the image. Amongst the photos

suggestion and makes the images more

Richard Tepe: Photography of Nature in

are assorted quotes from Michel Fou-

fascinating. The behaviour of the onlook-

the Netherlands 1900-1940 and Laetitia

cault, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston

ers who edge their way closer on their

Dujardin’s Ethnics and Trade: Photo-

and Roland Barthes, among others,

hands and feet is truly astonishing. In a

graphy and the Colonial Exhibitions in

presented in alternating typography.

fascinating essay, Vince Aletti compares

Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels are

Credits:

Each book comes with a number of

them to ‘true believers crawling toward

the first two results of this wonderful

All images are reprodutions of book

discarded snapshots, which makes

a shrine [...] reaching out to touch the

and praiseworthy initiative.

covers, unless numbered. Credits for

each copy a unique edition.

object of their adoration’.

www.loosestrifebooks.com

www.hatjecantz.de

Text by Tanja Wallroth

the numbered photos: Rijksmuseum / Nieuw

1 © Jacqueline Hassink / Chris Boot

Amsterdam Publishers,

2-3 © Alec Soth, Magnum Photos /

Loosestrife Editions,

Yossi Milo/Hatje Cantz,

ISBN 978-90-868-9019-4

Hollandse Hoogte, courtesy Steidl

ISBN 978-0-9753120-1-8, 144 pp.

ISBN 978-3-7757-2085-4, 128 pp.

ISBN 978-90-868-9020-0, 62 pp.

Publishers

159

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back issues

Missed an issue?

You can still order back issues of Foam Magazine.

The first two editions of Foam Magazine doubled as exhibition catalogues, to be enjoyed by those who had missed the exhibitions or who wanted to savour the images again in a different context. 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. Each edition features a specific theme, which unites six diverse portfolios of 16 pages each.

Curious about a back issue?

Order at www.foammagazine.nl

Foam Magazine #3 / access Jean-Christian Bourcart Peter Granser Philippine Hoegen Atiq Rahimi Chris Shaw Mario Testino

Foam Magazine #4 / set up Hou Bo Thomas Demand Joan Fontcuberta Hans van der Meer Daniela Rossell Maurice Scheltens

Foam Magazine #5 / near Bernard F. Eilers Peter Fraser Stanley Greene Annaleen Louwes Ellen Mandemaker Ken Schles

Foam Magazine #6 / sport Giasco Bertoli Robert Davies Gustavo Di Mario Charles Fréger Claudio Hils Bill Peronneau

Foam Magazine #7 / self Machiel Botman Sophie Calle Marnix Goossens Dag Nordbrenden Jan Rothuizen Jan Smaga & Aneta Grzeszykowska

Foam Magazine #8 / sidewalk Tom Wood Morad Bouchakour Raymond Depardon Trent Parke Gus Powell Nobuyoshi Araki & Daido Moriyama

foam magazine #9 / eden Joel Sternfeld Kai Wiedenhöfer Michael Reisch Stephen Gill Jessica Dimmock Ata Kando

foam magazine #10 / stories Larry Burrows Alessandra Sanguinetti Suky Best Raphaël Dallaporta Hunter S. Thompson Wendy McMurdo

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

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

0160 148

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161

Photograph ~ © Jaap Scheeren

49.

50

METAFICTION

BY ANNE DE VRIES LIMITED SIGNED EDITION WITH 10 PRINTS • 290MM X 230MM • HARDCOVER BOX

• PREFACE BY MARIA BARNAS • TO ORDER: FIEKE@VANDEJONG.NL

• INFO: WWW.VANDEJONG.COM

Vandejong Amsterdam

foam magazine #13 / searching

Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Foam exhibits all genres of photography: fine art, documentary, applied, historical and contemporary. Alongside large exhibitions of established (world) famous photographers, Foam also exhibits emerging young talent in smaller short-term shows.

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

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

Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation and Stichting DOEN

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Harry Maxwell Shot in Car, 1941 Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Weegee

~ From the Berinson Collection ~

14 December 2007 – 5 March 2008

This winter Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam presents an exhibition of work by the legendary photographer Weegee, regarded as the prototypical modern photojournalist and one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. His uncompromising and unprettified photographs have an immediate, almost violent impact. They show crimes and accidents in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s, but also document life and events on the streets of the city. All 231 black-and-white photographs, many of which have never been reproduced, are vintage prints from the collection of Hendrik A. Berinson, compiled over a period of more than 20 years. This is the single most important and extensive collection of Weegee’s work made up exclusively of original prints, comprising many of Weegee’s most famous images .

Weegee was born Usher Fellig in Zloczew, near Lemberg, in 1899. Lemberg was at the time capital of Galicia, but is now no more than a Ukrainian provincial town. In 1906 his parents decided to emigrate to the United States. His father left first, and sent for his family in 1910. At immigration, Usher’s first name was changed to Arthur, which was to remain his official name until 1938, when he himself adopted the nickname Weegee.

Weegee’s famous and unmistakable photograps were created between 1935 and 1947. He was often the first to take the pictures of a

165

crime scene, a catastrophe, an arrest or a suicide. But he also photographed couples at the cinema, bathers at Coney Island beach and masked dancers at charity balls – a panorama of a society characterized by social opposites.

It is almost impossible to view Weegee’s work without being emotionally affected by them. His photographs are as unique as they are precise and highly direct, always enticing the viewer to become involved.

The photos are so accessible and straightforward – characterized by the immediate proximity in which they are taken, the head-on angle and the aggressive flash – that captions are hardly needed to understand their meaning. Weegee’s intention is to freeze a precise moment on film, capturing the story as spontaneously as it happens.

Weegee produced all his photographs to sell to the daily papers.

The art market and museums only came to recognize the artistic value of his images in the 1970s. He set new standards for photo reporting and created his own visual language and artistic style. This and his working methods, the composition and the reflection on the press of the day influenced such later photographers as Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston. + Courtesy Hendrik A. Berinson.

All images: courtesy International Center of Photography, New York.

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Coney Island, July 22, 1940 Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Self-portrait, working at the trunk of his Chevrolet, 1942 Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

The Critic I, November 22, 1943 Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Their first murder, October 9, 1941 Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Easter Sunday in Harlem, 1940s Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Children on the Fire-escape, May 23, 1941 Š Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

2 November 2007 – 6 January 2008

Ryan McGinley ~ Celebrating Life

Mesopotamian Marshes, 2007 © Stijn Verhoeff

23 November 2007 – 16 January 2008

Foam_3h: Stijn Verhoeff ~ Mesopotamian Marshes

Ryan McGinley has been hailed as one of today’s most promising international photographers. Following exhibitions at the MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris, his work can now be seen for the first time in the Netherlands. The show features a selection of warm and endearing images full of youthful élan from his recent work.

For Celebrating Life McGinley photographed a group of friends on a road trip across America, in homage to American predecessors such as Robert Frank and Richard Avedon. In this series he celebrates freedom and escape from the daily grind against the backdrop of the magnificent American landscape.

In March 2007 Stijn Verhoeff travelled to Khuzestan in Iran, to the frontier region with Iraq, site of the sole surviving remnant of the ancient Mesopotamian Marshes. His original purpose in making the journey was to create a more positive image of the Middle East. It became a search for beauty and simplicity in a tumultuous and tragic world. In addition to the photo series, Verhoeff also made a film about the region together with Pieter Paul Pothoven. The Mesopotamian Marshes film can be viewed at the exhibition in Foam.

Untitled (Hot Springs), 2005 © Ryan McGinley, collection agnès b., Paris

174

Dakota (Hair), 2004 © Ryan McGinley, collection agnès b., Paris

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

18 January – 6 April 2008

KLM Paul Huf Award ~ Taryn Simon – An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar In March 2007 an international jury named Taryn Simon as one of two winners of the annual KLM Paul Huf Award. Part of this prize for young international photographers is an exhibition in Foam. For An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access. Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot with a large-format view camera whenever conditions allowed, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation. Offering visions of the unseen, the photographs of An American Index capture the strange magic at the foundation of a national identity.

Harry Maxwell shot in car, 1941 © Weegee (Arthur Fellig) / International Center of Photography / Getty Images

14 December 2007 – 5 March 2008

Weegee ~ From the Berinson Collection This winter Foam presents an exhibition of work by the legendary photographer Weegee. In this overview of Weegee’s work, Foam presents 231 black-and-white photographs. All the exhibits are vintage prints from the collection of Hendrik A. Berinson, compiled over a period of more than 20 years. This is the single most important and extensive collection of Weegee’s work made up exclusively of original prints. The exhibition features many of Weegee’s most famous images.

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Cryopreservation Unit, Cryonics Institut, Clinton Township, Michigan © Taryn Simon, courtesy Gagosian Gallery / Steidl Publishers

foam magazine #13 / searching

Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

10 April – 22 June 2008

Virtual Museum Zuidas ~ ZOOM Collection From its inception, the development of Zuidas, Amsterdam’s top international corporate location, reserved space for art. Creativity and commerce are bound inextricably together, especially in Amsterdam. To ensure the durability and quality of this art, Amsterdam appointed a supervisor of visual art in 2001, assisted by a programme committee chosen by the supervisor. This resulted in 2003 in the establishment of a Virtual Museum Zuidas.

Zuidas has expanded in both area and time, and has undergone so many changes that the Virtual Museum decided to commission artists to document these transformations. Since 2001 two to four photographers and artists have been invited each year to offer their vision of the district and the ongoing changes. The result is a record of the genesis of an area and a growing collection that reflects current trends and developments in photography. In 2006 it was decided to transfer the entire collection – photos already taken and all future photos – to Foam. + The transfer of the collection is marked by this exhibition.

Chris on Couch © Joost Vandebrug

17 January – 27 February 2008

Foam_3h: ~ Joost Vandebrug For the Amsterdam Fashion Week, which starts on 19 January 2008, Joost Vandebrug presents a series entitled New Faces. The project features photos of five young men aged between 13 and 17 from various parts of Europe, recently scouted by modelling agencies. Vandebrug visited each of them in their native city, capturing their personality and the character of the place in which they live. Joost Vandebrug (25) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and trained with photographer and filmmaker Erwin Olaf. In February 2006 he moved to Melbourne where he worked as a freelance photographer for a year, mainly in the fashion world. Recently returned to Amsterdam, his fashion photos currently appear in monthly series in Blend magazine.

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Amsterdam Zuidas 2007 © Marijn de Jong

Foam Editions is a new space within Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam where a well-balanced selection of signed prints by talented young international photographers is available for purchase.

At the moment we offer work by Daniëlle van Ark, Fleur Boonman, Marcus Koppen, Marrigje de Maar, Daido Moriyama, James Nachtwey, Sanne Peper, Bart Julius Peters, Yeb Wiersma, Raimond Wouda and Vincent Zedelius.

Open Wednesdays – Fridays: 1.00 pm – 6.00 pm Saturdays: 11.00 am – 6.00 pm and by appointment All profits from Foam Editions will go towards supporting Foam’s programme, with an emphasis on the educational projects.

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

3

Publisher Foam Magazine BV Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam - NL T +31 20 5516500 F +31 20 5516501 info@foammagazine.nl www.foammagazine.nl

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colophon

Colophon Foam Magazine International Photography Magazine Issue #13, Winter 2007-2008 December 2007

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

Editorial Advisers Christian Caujolle, art director VU, Paris / Kathy Ryan, photo editor The New York Times Magazine, New York

Paper

Editor-in-chief

Marloes Krijnen Editors Marcel Feil / Pjotr de Jong / Marloes Krijnen / Markus Schaden / Tanja Wallroth Managing Editor Tanja Wallroth Editorial assistant Mirjam Grothusen Concept, Art Direction & Design Vandejong, Amsterdam – Pjotr de Jong / Marcel de Vries / Hamid Sallali Typography Marcel de Vries & Hamid Sallali Contributing Photographers Hans Aarsman / Philip-Lorca diCorcia / Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin / Thomas Ruff / Stefan Ruiz / Stephen Shore / Wolfgang Tillmans Cover photograph Clint Eastwood (for: The New York Times Magazine, 2005), © Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, NY Special thanks to Jaap Scheeren Contributing Writers Hans Aarsman / Marcel Feil / Philip Gefter / Lisa Le Feuvre / Valeria Liebermann / Penny Martin / Eric Miles / Aaron Schuman / Tanja Wallroth Copy editing Pittwater Literary Services, Amsterdam – Rowan Hewison Translation Liz Waters (Pittwater Literary Services) / Tom Johnston / Iris Maher / Andrew May / Sam Herman / Rebecca van Dijck Lithography & Printing Drukkerij Slinger Strooijonkerstraat 7 1812 PJ Alkmaar – NL www.drukkerijslinger.nl

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ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam For this edition the following paper has been selected: Pioneer offset 300 g/m2 Romandruk blauwwit 80 g/m2 Eurobulk 135 g/m2 tom&otto Gloss 150 g/m2 tom&otto Silk 135 g/m2 PhoeniXmotion Xenon 135 g/m2 Pioneer offset 80 g/m2 tom&otto Gloss 150 g/m2 The production of Foam Magazine has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Drukkerij Slinger, Binderij Hexspoor and ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam.

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 Eric-Jan de Graaff Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam - NL T +31 20 5516500 F +31 20 5516501 advertise@foammagazine.nl Subscriptions Bruil & van de Staaij P.O. Box 75 7940 AB Meppel - NL T +31 522 261 303 F +31 522 257 827 info@bruil.info www.foammagazine.nl Start your subscription to Foam Magazine (4 issues per year / incl. airmail) The Netherlands e 50 Rest of World e 55 Club_Foam members / students The Netherlands e 40 Rest of World e 44 Order single issues at www.foammagazine.nl The Netherlands: e 13,50 Rest of World: e 15 (incl. airmail) Foam Magazine #1 is out of print

ISSN 1570-4874 ISBN: 978-90-70516-06-2 © photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2007.

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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